Next Level Soul Podcast Episode 138
Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul, joins Alex to talk about going from bankruptcy to bestsellers, the two parts of asking and receiving, bypass marketing, 25-year plans and the roadblocks that keep people stuck.
Key Takeaways
- Mark says his book Ask has two parts, asking and receiving, and that most people only get to the first.
- He says to live in the assumption of the wish fulfilled, which he calls the soul-level way to be rejection proof.
- He shares “bypass marketing” examples where every side wins, from blood drives to Diet Coke cases.
- He recommends 25-year plans aimed at a heartfelt, dreamy destination.
- He walks through roadblocks like unworthiness, excuses, fear and disconnection, and suggests working through them with a partner.
- He says to balance meditation with the activity of serving the universe.
From Bankruptcy to Chicken Soup for the Soul
Mark Victor Hansen opens with where his spiritual path began. He grew up going to two churches, a Lutheran church and a Baptist church, because his Danish parents attended both. By 1974 he was in graduate school with Buckminster Fuller, and he says he spent seven years around “Bucky.”
Then came the crash. Mark says he was building in New York City when the oil embargo hit, and he went bankrupt for about $2 million. He describes feeling poor, upside down, and close to despair. During that stretch, two friends took him to hear Norman Vincent Peale on a Sunday morning, then to Harlem to hear Reverend Ike that afternoon.
Reverend Ike is the one who “blew his sockets out.” Mark says Ike grew up poor, taught that you change your money set by changing your mindset, and showed up in Harlem with a thriving ministry. Mark is now writing Ike’s biography, which he says comes out in January. That day, he says, started him on a spiritual journey.
From there Mark became a speaker and wrote a book called Stand Up, Speak Up, which he says sold about 20,000 copies from the platform. He was driving a beat-up Volkswagen to bankruptcy court at one point and was soon earning real money on stage again. Then he met Jack Canfield at the Mandala Foundation in San Diego. Jack asked to take him to dinner, and Mark calls what followed a “Vulcan mind meld,” a mastermind of one plus one equals eleven. Together they set a goal to sell a million and a half copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul in a year and a half.
144 Rejections and the Assumption of the Wish Fulfilled
Alex asks the question many listeners carry: when you hit obstacle after obstacle, how do you know whether the universe is saying “wrong path” or whether you are just meeting struggle? Alex shares his own barometer. If the work still fills you with energy and soul, keep going. If you despise it, that is the signal to change course.
Mark agrees, then moves the question to a bigger level. He describes a body level, a brain level that the school system plugs into, a mind level of imagination and intuition, and a soul level. His view is that at the soul level you are “rejection proof.” He points to Neville and the idea of living in the assumption of the wish fulfilled, which he links to the teaching to pray as though what you ask for has already been received.
He jokes that 144 publishers told them to hit the road, Jack. He says he did not expect a path without detours or stop signs. What he did was keep believing the book would sell. One practical move he shares: he and Jack spoke at churches, held up the unpublished book, and invited people to fill out an application form, with no cash or card taken until the book was printed. He says that built a base of pre-orders before a publisher ever said yes.
Ask Has Two Parts: Asking and Receiving
The book Mark came to talk about is Ask, which he calls the bridge from your dream to your destiny. He says it has two parts, but most people only get to part one. Part two is to receive, and for that you have to put yourself in the receptive mode, as if the answer has already arrived. If you want a grounded set of practices to go with this idea, our guide to manifestation techniques is a good companion.
He tells a story from age nine. His parents could not afford the bicycle he wanted, so he hung a picture of it on his wall and looked at it every night. He calls that visualization. Then he saw an ad in a magazine for selling greeting cards on consignment. He sold more than anyone else, bought his own bicycle, and his father put half the money into a college fund, which made little sense to a nine-year-old whose father never finished elementary school.
Bypass Marketing and the Power of Win-Win-Win
Alex asks about the marketing behind the books. Mark calls his approach “bypass marketing.” He says everyone has a unique talent, and his is that he can write, speak and promote, but he also sees markets other people miss. With 8 billion people alive, he says, the question is how to reach them.
His first example involves the American Red Cross. Mark says the Red Cross was out of blood, and Liddy Dole asked him for help. Doctors would not take part, so he turned to chiropractors, whom he trained to build large practices. He asked them to write to past patients who had not been in for months or years, inviting them to give a pint of blood and receive a copy of a Chicken Soup book. He says the campaign brought in a huge number of donors, brought lapsed patients back through chiropractic doors, and helped keep the book at number one for 58 weeks. Alex calls it a win, win, win, win, and Mark says he is repeating the idea for his book Relentless.
His second example is the Boys and Girls Clubs. Mark says his staff wanted scholarships for their kids, so he visited the club’s headquarters and asked about their cause-related partner. The answer was Coca-Cola, which he says gave little money. He tested the idea first, noticed that Diet Coke drinkers read a lot of books, and arranged to put book promotions on the side of cases. He says ten percent of sales went to the charity and funded scholarships for about 15,000 children. Alex adds why it works for everyone: Coca-Cola helps a charity without writing a check, the printing was happening anyway, and the book gets enormous visibility.
Letting Kids Decide Which Stories Work
Mark explains how the Chicken Soup niche books grew, including Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul and Chicken Soup for the College Soul. He says he and Jack tested stories with 12,000 kids at Nickelodeon, and the kids were blunt. They told the authors to stop spelling out the moral of each story, because they could figure it out themselves. He says the best stories were the ones a reader could retell without reading them again.
He also recalls a university president telling him that only about one in ten students graduates in four years. Mark paid his own way and finished early, so he inspired students to start and finish, and he says the college book sold roughly 16 million copies. Alex notes how unusual those numbers are in publishing, and Mark names Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as the one book he knows of that has gone further.
Handling Big Success With a 25-Year Plan
Alex asks how Mark and Jack handled sudden success, since fame and attention can crush people who are not ready. Mark’s serious answer is to have 25-year plans. He says he is turning 75 and has a plan to reach 100 and beyond. If you go from $1,000 a month to $100,000 a month, he says, you need plans that outsize what is happening, or you get “sucked up in it.” He also warns about what he calls sycophants, and about old classmates and relatives who suddenly appear.
He then makes a case against scarcity thinking. He tells a story about a Danish immigrant hot dog stand owner whose son came home from Harvard with an economics degree in 1929 and urged him to stop expanding. The old man went bankrupt, which Mark presents as scarcity mindedness winning when it should not have. He quotes the teaching that the kingdom of heaven is within, and says what is within shows up without. If you program yourself to see the fundamental abundance of the universe, he says, there is no shortage of anything.
Breaking Old Stories With a Partner and a Book
Alex describes growing up with the belief that money is hard and requires hustle, and how that gave him a strong work ethic but later stopped serving him. He says the shift came when he moved from trading hours for dollars to creating products, books and a podcast that generate income while he spends time with his family. He asks Mark how people can break through stories like “I am not good enough” or “I have to work hard.”
Mark’s first answer is to go through the process with another person. He says Ask is built to be read with a spouse, a mastermind partner or a friend, and he talks about lighting your candle from someone else’s. He shares a story from when he and his wife were falling in love: a minister at a restaurant told them that after seven years with Billy Graham Ministries, the one thing he found that works for a happy marriage is praying out loud together every morning and every night. Mark says they still do that.
He also draws on Genesis, saying that if you are made in the image and likeness of a rich creator, you are not meant to be poor. He mentions Dr. Joe Dispenza as a friend and uses him as an example of getting out of a “human sense of self” and into a “divine sense of self.” He says the book has a free wealth chart of affirmations on its website, where you say lines like “I am prosperity.” If you want more ways to work with this, see our law of attraction tips.
The Seven Roadblocks and the Mud Over the Light
Alex asks a question many people ask on this show. After years of stories and layers, it is hard to see the sun above the mud. How do you get through enough of it to see a crack of light? Mark loves the question and offers his own line: crap turns into compost, compost into fertilizer, and fertilizer into love. He says he is working on a new alliterative saying about turning crap into treasure.
In Ask, he says, the first thing the book covers after the fable is seven roadblocks. In the episode he walks through several of them with stories:
- Unworthiness. He points to a story in the book about Bob Proctor.
- Naivete. If you do not know what a mango is, you cannot find one at the store, so you have to seek.
- Excuse-ology. His older brother insisted he did not need help at the airport and ended up stranded for hours.
- Fear. Mark calls it false evidence appearing real, and says fear is faith pointed in the wrong direction. He says faith is the substance of things hoped for.
- Disconnectedness. At family gatherings of about 50 people, he says nobody is allowed to have a phone out at meals.
His method is to read each roadblock with a partner, notice which ones are yours, and visualize the fear getting smaller. He also repeats that a goal should be a heartfelt, dreamy destination, not what is happening after lunch. He mentions Yogananda saying to set goals for a thousand years, and Alex agrees that people once set huge goals, like going to the moon.
When the People Around You Resist Your Growth
Alex raises the crab-in-the-bucket problem. When you grow, friends and family can feel threatened and try to pull you back, and a spouse may not want to come along. Mark says it is a great question that pushes the edge of his thinking. He suggests inviting them to read Ask with you, which can reveal a self-limiting belief or a negative self-fulfilling prophecy.
Alex says many spiritual teachers are free of the good opinion of others. Mark agrees and says Reverend Ike taught that only two opinions matter, yours and God’s. In his own words, what you think of me is none of my business. He ends this thread with the thought that when you learn to ask, you become the emperor of your own soul.
Mission, Meditation and Service
Alex asks his usual closing questions. Mark says his main mission now is to get everyone to tell their story in a book. He tells of buying lockers for his children’s elementary school, then testing a program that taught kids to write before they read. He says the students began earning straight A’s. He believes writing helps people find their soul wisdom and soul purpose.
Mark also says you have to do your meditations and then go out into the activity of sourcing and serving the universe. Alex agrees that you cannot sit in a cave for 50 years if you want to benefit humanity. Mark’s stated goal is to help make humanity physically, economically, socially, spiritually and relationally successful.
For the good life, he says it is fulfillment every day, even every nanosecond, and that if you have a happy minute you can have happy hours and days. He mentions near-death experiences he has watched on YouTube, and says those who return are told their life is not done. He describes life as a university for soul development and says we see only a small part of reality. Listeners can look up his YouTube videos, his book Relentless, Ask, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and he suggests teenagers read Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul aloud to their parents.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Ask is part one. Receive is part two.
- Rejection loses its grip when you live in the assumption of the wish fulfilled.
- Look for a win for everyone involved, as in bypass marketing.
- Write 25-year plans and aim for a heartfelt destination.
- Read, discuss and work through the seven roadblocks with a partner.
- Limit negative media and notice your self-limiting beliefs.
- Balance stillness and service.
- Tell your story, because someone needs to hear it.
Please enjoy my conversation with Mark Victor Hansen.
Guest Links: Connect With Mark Victor Hansen
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Mark Victor Hansen?
He is the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul book series with Jack Canfield, and the author of Ask, Relentless and other books. In this episode he shares his story, his marketing ideas and his spiritual outlook with Alex.
How did Mark Victor Hansen go from bankruptcy to publishing success?
He says he went bankrupt for about $2 million in the 1970s, then rebuilt as a speaker and author. A meeting with Jack Canfield led to Chicken Soup for the Soul, and he credits belief, preparation and persistence for the result.
What are the two parts of Ask?
He says Ask has two parts: asking and receiving. Most people only get to the first part, he says. Receiving means putting yourself in the receptive mode, as if what you asked for has already come.
What is bypass marketing?
It is Mark’s term for reaching a market that others overlook. He gives examples such as pairing blood donation with chiropractors and book promotions with Coca-Cola and the Boys and Girls Clubs, where each side gains.
What does he mean by the assumption of the wish fulfilled?
He borrows the phrase from Neville. He links it to the idea of praying as though what you ask for has already been received. He says this gives you a soul-level sense of being rejection proof, even when publishers say no.
How did the book get past 144 rejections?
Mark says he and Jack kept believing it would sell. They also invited audiences at churches to sign up for the book before it was printed, and Health Communications eventually agreed to publish it.
What are the seven roadblocks he mentions?
In the episode he describes several of them: unworthiness, naivete, excuse-ology, fear and disconnectedness. He suggests reading each one with a partner and noticing which ones apply to you.
Why does Mark recommend a 25-year plan?
He says success can arrive fast and swallow you if your plans are small. He recommends goals that are a heartfelt, dreamy destination, with plans big enough to outsize what is happening right now.
How can I handle people who do not support my growth?
Mark suggests inviting them to read Ask with you, since it can surface self-limiting beliefs. He also says that what others think of you is none of your business, citing Reverend Ike. Alex adds that we have to be free of the good opinion of others.
Where can I find more from Mark Victor Hansen?
Mark points to his YouTube videos, his book Relentless, Ask, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. You can also use the guest links above to visit his official site and social channels.
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Follow Along with the Transcript
Mark Victor Hansen 0:00
For everybody watching and listening has a unique talent. And it uniques up on him. They've got to find it. Now my unique talent is I can write, obviously I can speak, I can promote but I also see markets that nobody else sees there's 8 billion people alive so there's a lot of markets but how do you get to them?
Alex Ferrari 0:16
I've been able to partner with Mindvalley. To present you guys FREE Masterclass is between 60 and 90 minutes, covering Mind Body Soul Relationships, and Conscious Entrepreneurship, taught by spiritual masters, yogi's spiritual thought leaders and best selling authors. Just head over to max level soul.com forward slash free
I'd like to welcome to the show. Mark. Victor Hansen. How are you doing Mark
Mark Victor Hansen 1:05
Better than good? How's that? I think everybody ought to boy themselves up at a soul yeller level every day to become bigger, better, stronger, smarter, and most importantly, Wise.
Alex Ferrari 1:15
How's that? Absolutely without question, my friend. So you you obviously are one of the CO creators of one of the most popular books book series ever. Yeah, they chicken soup something or other?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:30
For the soul? I think it's a metabolic that can get getting bigger if you work on it. Right.
Alex Ferrari 1:36
So let me ask you that. Because I've always wanted when when people have great success, I'd love to hear what happened or where you were prior to getting, you know, went before chicken soup to the soul came to your life. Where was your life? Where was your spiritual journey on on the path prior to having, you know, given birth, co birth to chicken soup of the soul?
Mark Victor Hansen 2:00
Well, it was a little kid we went to two churches. My father and mother were Danish but went to Lutheran Church Baptist Church. So that's that part. I've always been sort of interested in spiritual stuff. But by 1974 I've been in graduate school with Buckminster Fuller. Dr. Fuller was Einsteins best student arguably built the geodesic domes and that Maxine cars all that cool stuff, and I hung with Bucky seven years but I'm in New York City Building Wall Street Racquet Club, Botanical Gardens, aviaries and oil embargo hits, and I crashed and burned. Now. I was struggling and for a while I was selling a Dale Carnegie Institute and two guys said let's go to church on a Sunday morning and we went to the Norman Vincent Peale, who just I really loved Dr. Peale the power of positive thinking. But then they said after lunch let's go up to Harlem. To see Reverend Ike and Reverend I just blew my sockets out because here I am going bankrupt for $2 million. Feeling poor feeling like I should kill myself. Feelings tragic, really upside down. And here's a black guy with 26 Rolls Royces, eight mansions, you know, say and the biggest church bigger than Billy Graham's but to a black audience, 20 million in America and 20 million in Africa, saying, The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He said when he was a poor kid in 1935 is belly button stuck to his ribs because live breathing heart liberals would not feed him seven cents a day. And so he said, I'm gonna get out of poverty and get everybody else out of poverty by changing your mindset to change your money set, basically. And I'm now written a biography item that comes out in January, called from wishes to riches, the illumination to revenue. The point is, he wound my clock got me to get on a spiritual journey. But I was starting to speak at the time. And I was a speaker that wrote and the first book I wrote was called stand up, speak up when and I sold like 20,000 copies from the platform, a $200,000. And I'm going from bankrupt where I'm driving around to beat up Volkswagen in bankruptcy courts back in the old prehistoric days. I had took everything away from you, and maybe that was right. Maybe it was wrong, but New York's a little wacko. Anyhow, it's it's back to wacko again. Are you in New York? Where are you?
Alex Ferrari 4:04
I'm in Austin right now. I just left la so.
Mark Victor Hansen 4:07
Okay. But both places are a little wacko. So you know, in Austin, I love I've worked there a lot of times and love talks. Anyhow, then yeah. So I'm out selling books and doing pretty well and doing seminars and getting like five grand to talk and thinking oh, man, I've arrived. And then Dr. Canfield and I meet, we're doing 6000 People at the mandala foundation in San Diego and he was the morning speaker and I'm the last high up speaker late at night and he comes up to me afterwards while I'm shuffling everything after I'd signed everything I'd written. And he said Do you know me? I said yeah, you're Dr. Jack Canfield wrote 100 ways to build self esteem in classroom graduate third new class at Harvard. You're a superstar. He said, I've never seen one like you talk to you the best storyteller I've ever heard, would you? Can we kind of take you to dinner and I said, Yeah, of course. And we befriended each other had a Vulcan mind meld if you know what that Of course, you call the mastermind to the power of 11. To together as part of limits. Long story short, we did Chicken Soup for the Soul said we'd sell a million and a half in a year and a half, we tested all the right stuff, all of which I talked about in length if you want. But we did that, then sell 5 million in next year, 10 million and 50 million a year. Because I figured out how to market at levels. Nobody else ever marketed books into human history. And I did which book called bypass marketing. I can talk to that if you want. But that's where we were. And then where I am now is we've started a publishing company, because I think people are trying to diminish reading. And I think we got to expand reading because you're either depressive, you're reading the wrong stuff, or watching the wrong media or You're impressive and expressive. And you know, my job Solomon said your job and Psalm 72 is to be an influencer of influencers. And I'm 74 years young and going live 127 of options for renewal. I'm in extraordinary health, I was exercising our this morning at five o'clock. So I believe in high discipline and dedication towards a destination which I teach and live. And so I'm probably way over answer your question. And I vote
Alex Ferrari 6:12
Not, not at all, not at all. So there's a couple of things I want to kind of unpack there. You know, when you started Chicken Soup for the Soul, though, you were turned down by publishers, right? Nobody really got what you guys were trying to do, right?
Mark Victor Hansen 6:24
My joke is 144 People said hit the road Jack, because they didn't like Jack. I'm a nice guy. Jack's a wonderful guy. I just can't resist that joke. Because guys like you think it's funny. And I think it's funny. I don't know if Jack thinks it's funny which talk. I'm on the show. Today. When he comes on, he can do more jokes. Is that fair enough.
Alex Ferrari 6:44
Fair enough. But so you were turned down by so many so. So this is another thing that so many people listening have obstacles that are thrown in front of them. And there's this whole this whole thing about, and this is something I've struggled with throughout my life, and I kind of in my own world figured out what works for me. But any dream that we have, there's going to be struggle. But the point is, at what point do you say maybe this is not the right path? Because that's happened to me, you know, you go down a path and you're like, I made him I made a wrong turn somewhere. But when do you know when you know what this? Is the universe telling me this is not my path? Or is it just struggle? And the answer I came up with was, what does it make you feel like if you still are enjoying the process, it's it's still filling your life up with energy with soul that you feel good about what you're doing, then you just keep going until that energy stops. And that bullet and when I went down the wrong path. It was because I was I was hating it. I despised it. I wanted to change. So that was that's how my barometer work. But I'd love to hear how you guys kept going after 144 People said hit the road jack.
Mark Victor Hansen 7:56
So first of all, you hit it exactly right. But I want to take it from the micro level to the macro level of the macro, spiritual soul level of you because there's a body level of you there's a physicality, then there's the brain part which the school system plugs in, right and says regurgitate this, and you'll graduate, then there's the mind part which can think which is what I really am about is imagination, intuition. But then there's the bigger part of you that the unlimited part of you the soul part of you. And at the soul level, your rejection proof at the soul level. You're feeling nature. Neville says it best you got to live in the assumption of the wish fulfilled. And what he's talking about is what Christ said is it pray as though the thing for which you're praying for has been received, I didn't say wouldn't have any obstacles, you wouldn't have any withhold. You wouldn't have any detours, you wouldn't have any stop signs. You know, there stop signs all the way through light. They're red lights, yellow lights, and green light. But the point is, is it what would happen is that we were walking around with this little book, ask and I would talk at a church service with like 5000 and in Kansas City. And I'd say nobody has taken a book, the books off publisher seeing it in paperback copy. And as service has been great. And thank you for doing it. And do not take this out any tie their love offering the church, but I want you to fill out that little application form and see that when it's now illegal to do it, I did that, but we fill it out. We won't Pat Cash or credit card until the book is published. That's why and they all filled it out. And so we entered. We had pre dissents but the point is, stories are what are the making of life. Now you and I can discuss anything you want. I said I'm totally an open book for you. But human life has been around 2 million years. And I really believe we're in the South Sea Islands rather than Africa. But that's sort of irrelevant cosmogony in cosmology. And I can talk about the history of that but the more important thing is what's what did we live by this story? Eat this don't eat that don't go next to that thing that snake will bite you that little rattle your mother or father or grandfather in the old days. 2 million years ago I'd say. Right, we language only started written language 5000 years ago. It's called the evolution of biology and one of my daughters has a degree in evolutionary biology, which just means change, which is always happening because Einstein said the only constant is change. So, what happens is at a meta level, your inner being has to have that feeling nature, the feeling nature was, you know, I knew this would be a best seller, I knew I was gonna be World's Best Selling Author, it didn't matter. All the people that doubted me and said, Now I don't like your writing. And you know, you guys are nutcases and and looking back on why we got rejected, I'll take all the hit. I wrote that we're gonna sell a billion books now pretend your random house or Simon and Schuster or Morrow
Alex Ferrari 10:41
you're crazy crazy yeah
Mark Victor Hansen 10:45
you know handsome thinks he's got a good education but he's not that smart. We're a Random House and by the way, random has been really good to me they've done One Minute Millionaire with me and you know a lot of books and paid me a million dollars a book so he learned a lesson. They just turned me down for some but the point is, because they're having their own little stretches right this week, right laying off people. So because of bookstores have collapsed and that that breaks my heart because I love books. I love the people and I love everything but everything. Everybody needs to write a book. I think I've over answered your question. But the point is that my feeling was Dr. Canfield feeling was we were going in and this was going to work and and our agent even fired us our agent wrote us a letter and said, Look, you guys, I'm tired of working for free for you guys.
Alex Ferrari 11:31
So did you guys so did you guys public? Please forgive me? I didn't know did you guys publish it yourself at this point? Oh, no. No, you did. Finally,
Mark Victor Hansen 11:39
Health communications at John Deerfield Beach, Florida. Lovely guy. Very Seidler. You know, Gary luckily took the book. We went to the book fair that turned out it's called the BDA, ABA, American booksellers of America. And it was like such a magnificent experience. We walk in there. And like we've gotten great stories from everybody in this old guy with white beard that looks sort of if you do it in secular, it'd be crazy. It'd be Santa Claus. If you do it non secular. It'd be like a spiritual figure. This guy with a long white beard and very robust body comes up and kiss both cheeks and said, kid, you're really going to make it I love the stories that you sent me because he endorsed the book. I can't I've never seen you guys pictures. I have no idea who I'm talking to. I said, Who are you? Bob Folger sounds you're Dr. Robert folgen. The guy, everything you do, I got goosebumps telling you that I read that and you learn that and get go. I said, Bob, it Dr. Fulton, nobody else publish us. We are. We're persona non grata. He's it, don't worry, it's going to happen here somehow. And we just went booth booth and got turned on. And finally HCI said, well, we'll take it if you sell 20,000 copies at $6 each. Now today, I own a publisher like that called an equity publisher Mark Victor Hansen library.com, which just did curiously enough, I own biography call relentless, which I think I sent you a copy. The point is, if you hang in touch if you live in as Neville says in the assumption of the wish fulfilled, because what we try to teach in our book, ask, right the bridge from your dreams, your destiny is ask has two parts, but most people only get to part one, which is asked. Part two is to receive but you've got to put yourself in the receptive mode. That's why crisis asked is oh, it's been received. Meaning when I was a little nine year old kid, and I couldn't my parents couldn't afford the bicycle I want and I didn't get it. I said, Dad, can I have an urn on myself and I had a picture on the wall. That's visualization. Right, right, a wheel in Sheffield steel. I looked at that every night I saw myself right. Well, then I'm reading Boyce Codd Life magazine. And I'm asking myself, How am I going to do this? And just said you can tell greeting cards on consignment I said, What a cool idea. That is, I looked it up little dictionary. I sell it, they send it I get the dollar, they get $1 I sold more than anyone else. I bought my own bicycle and my dad took half the money and put it in college fund, which to a nine year old doesn't make any sense. He never went to college. He didn't graduate elementary school would tell you that who going to college. Right? And it'd be a blue collar work. I'm going to blue collar city, which is not true. I'm not well educated.
Alex Ferrari 14:14
So let me ask you this. Alright, so the books are going off. But you mentioned something about a different kind of marketing. Can you kind of dive in a little bit about what kind of marketing you did to have the success you had with this book?
Mark Victor Hansen 14:26
Yeah. I call it bypass marketing. And that's why so many companies asked put me in consultancy and retainer and, you know, because I see stuff nobody else seems. Everybody. Everybody watching and listening has a unique talent. And it uniques up on him. They've got to find it. Now my unique talent is I can write obviously, I can speak I can promote but I also see markets that nobody else sees there's 8 billion people alive. So there's a lot of markets, but how do you get to them? And so the American Red Cross is out of blood and chiropractic which is one of the places I was training doctors to have a million dollar practice. We had just lost all their insurance. So medicine wasn't paying for insurance. So the only way to make this cash practice so, you know in math and negative times a negative equals a positive, right? So Red Cross has no blood, Liddy dole comes to me and said, Look, Mark, you got all these crazy ideas? We're not a blood. People die.
There's no fake blood.
Can you get me blood? I said, When do you need it? She said yesterday, I said the thing you needed when you're near right to dead? Yeah. I said, Let's go to medical doctors. I'll do a little video seminar. They won't do it. I've already tried that. I said, Okay, well, I'm gonna go to the next field, which is alternative medicine, which is, chiropractors is 77,000 Doctors seeing 25 million patients a month. Some people hate him, I happen to love them. I believe everyone's got a spine and it gets out of line by all kinds of stuff. So and, you know, I train these guys how to be in line with the divine that make your spine revine. Anyhow, do alright. So I write all these like cliches for these people. I loved it. Anyhow. So I said, Okay, Doc's, here's what I want you to do. You got past patients that haven't been in for six months or six years, you got them in your thing, send them a little note and say, Look, we're gonna have a bloodmobile we call 800. Give life which if you haven't given blood, give it again, if you want your kids or somebody everybody to love, because you've got to, this is what you said a minute ago, pay it forward, you got to pay it forward. If you want you and your kids and your wife and in your case and mine to be alive, you got to give blood and I give it regularly I'm a 10 gallon giver. And all that means I've saved 10,000 lives because every pint is three people's lives saved. The point is, I said, Look, give a pint of blood, we'll give a copy of a book, we gave a chicken soup the third helping a way to get to a million and a half people that they brought in that bind it and they got adjusted. Chiropractic just went straight out because people have forgotten to go see their doctor cause DC doctor will call a doctor chiropractor. And that cool. That's very cool. The million that books in the next two years, 58 weeks in a row. We're number one, because every chiropractic office was talking about it every day. Because they said oh my god, there's no you don't have any lack of patience. Just do it. You know, Dr. Hansen said go send up this little note and today we're we have to be doing it again on relentless everybody that goes recover actually gets a copy of this. So it's, it's amazing how the same idea we're doing for a second time. And I got a lot of them though. If you want another I'll do another.
Alex Ferrari 17:23
Yeah, please do another because that's a pretty fascinating way of doing it. So you're driving, you're driving traffic to the chiropractor to give blood. And then they're also getting the chiropractic service as well as the books so you'd like triple selling or triple.
Mark Victor Hansen 17:39
Yeah, it's
Alex Ferrari 17:41
Yeah, it's a win win win win. Which is,
Mark Victor Hansen 17:44
By the way, it makes everybody better often known worse off. And that's that's why I said you got to go from your little brain to your imagination, because I imagine what the market could do to your soul your stuff because everybody's connected a cellular level. Now. Let's see the Boys and Girls Clubs are in trouble. And I have a an office we're doing $100 million a year and enlightenment in our institute on my book, One Minute Millionaire, but but my staff all has mostly single women working for us, and they're sending their kids, boys and girls clubs, and they're a little expensive. So I said, Well, wouldn't it be cool if we could get scholarships? So I go over to the Boys and Girls Clubs. My staff had asked me to go talk to the head of it in Orange County where I live now I live in Scottsdale, but I said, well, we'd love you to help. So we get to the headquarters. I said, Who's your charity? Because cause related charity is one of the ways to get in anything if you want to do it. And they said, well, it's Coca Cola, but they never give us any money. They just do cause related charity and aside of their books as I went, Oh my God, but another negative times a negative eat so positive. We were on the side of 50 million. Oh, and we did a quick test first because I believe feedbacks Brexit champion, Coca Cola drinkers, weed, no books, Diet Coke. We people read lots of books, a book a week average. I said, Oh my god, this is heaven. This is a market nobody's ever seen before. Right? So we went on the side of 50 million cases a month for six months of Diet Coke. Riley,
Alex Ferrari 19:20
You had an ad you had like a
Mark Victor Hansen 19:22
Chicken soup for the romantic soul. And then they said, Well, we got to have a fiction book too. Now I'm in the fiction business. But back then it wasn't yet. And a fiction book was by a dear friend Nora Roberts called hidden riches. And the two of us sold so many books on that, that we got enough money to get 15,000 That's one five common three zeros, kids into Boys and Girls Clubs on a full scholarship.
Alex Ferrari 19:45
So was it a percentage of sales would go to the kids it was
Mark Victor Hansen 19:50
10 percentage of all sales went to the charity which is what every spiritual system is based on a percentage. So it's honest, ethical, moral, just like our tax system should be a percentage not The garbage that we're doing,
Alex Ferrari 20:02
Don't get me started. There's a reason there's a reason why I moved to Texas, sir.
Mark Victor Hansen 20:10
So I'm going through that
Alex Ferrari 20:11
Exact so then when you so when you approach a company like Coca Cola, they were just like, it's a win for them because they are helping a charity without actually having to put any cash out. But then they're just printing something that they had to print anyway, they just changed the mod that changed the file a little bit. And now all of a sudden, you guys are getting 50 million, or whatever it is 300 million free boxes of advertising with your brand out there. And you're also helping the Boys and Girls Club.
Mark Victor Hansen 20:43
Yeah, plus, we did a little insert called a mini book with three stories out of the big book. And it just, it just went nuts for hours. And for Nora, great writer.
Alex Ferrari 20:54
So you've been so this is kind of how you guys have been marketing Chicken Soup for the Soul over the years, you always are kind of figuring out I mean, obviously traditional ways. But you're always trying to figure out bypass marketing as well, to try to find new markets because it's very interesting because your book is for any soul. So it's a very large market, you don't have a niche. You started to niche down like for the romantic soul and the teenage soul and all that kind of stuff. So you started to niche but the general chicken soup of the soul is a very broad, so it's hard to market that to everybody but you just started to find segments of people that would enjoy this product
Mark Victor Hansen 21:31
And help them Yeah, and buggery. Today, the it's easier to market segment than it's ever been. I mean, when I did it, I had a guest guesstimate. And most of the time it worked like with when we did Chicken Soup for the teenage so it sold 19 million the first year or publisher after HCI said, Look, I got teenagers and they buy CDs, concert tickets and clothes. They buy in your damn book, because when I give them $50 They go to the mall like they come home and I say well give me the money. They said no, the mall aidid bad. And I said that may be but I said watch this. So we were trying to sell chicken soup that time we later sold it but we were trying to sell it the Time Warner and ahead of time one or two lovely, lovely guy named at the time. Larry Kirschbaum. I saved his life once. Later on when New York was blowing up during 911, I called his office I said, Larry, my I just watched on TV, you gotta get your butt off. Go back to Greenwich. Anyhow, his daughter was the head of Nickelodeon. And I said, you know, would you introduce me? So he introduced me and my kids were little at the time. So we went. You remember what being slimed is?
Alex Ferrari 22:39
Oh, of course. Yeah. Double Dare. Double Dare. Yeah,
Mark Victor Hansen 22:43
Yeah. So my littlest daughter at the time, Melanie was probably six or seven. And she'd sit on my lap, and I do interviews like this. And she'd tell the story. And before they got slimed, were they run by Universal? No. So I gotta be careful because Viacom, Viacom owns it. No. Yeah. Okay. So you know that stuff. I don't know that I don't. I used to follow, but I can't follow everything. Because mergers and acquisitions are too many. So we go there, and we go on a radio show first for an hour to 2 million kids. And Melanie, they look the guy so excited. And a little radio station. It's three of us, my daughter, myself, and host like you, Alex. And the guys asking her all these questions. She's doing great stories. And she really is nailing it because she sat on my lap. So anytime she understands the intonation that telling the Bobbsey story, she got it down at six and this guy can't believe his six year old can tell really stories not know exactly what they mean. But know they're powerful. And get it and he finally says almost to the end of the show. Melanie Did you know you're talking to 2 million people and she's ever to live but right after that we go and she said dad cuz you may be talking to too many people like i Radio goes millions and millions all over America. And I did that. But she never I never bothered to tell her how many people are listening. Right? So we're gonna, you're getting slimed first as she walks up to the guy running the show. I don't watch that show. And of course, I got slimed in a suit which is not like exactly what I wanted to have happen with Buffy. So anyhow, it the point is Nickelodeon. We did a test with 12,000 kids with and we sent out Jack, I went through all these stories, we got 250 stories, we thought well attend at least great stories. And we said you guys tell us unequivocal the feedback. What's a 10 and then if there's something that's a 10 plus plus that you read it once it touches your heart, your soul, your mind, and you could go tell it to somebody without reading it ever again. Well, these kids went through it and they're merciless. They said, Look, you guys, you guys aren't that smart? You don't have to tell us what it means we'll figure it out ourselves. Because we were writing the moral of the story. We didn't know any better. Right? This story means blah, blah. It did to somebody that was 50 in their 50s at the time, but you know, I just had Ah And so Jack and I pulled all that and we got those stories and stories were so compelling that it worked and then we did because of that I was doing all those universities with 10s of 1000s of kids that are timing, president of the universities at Ball State says to me, he says, hey, the kids all loved you. And three of them drug Iran said that you kept them in school because he didn't have to cry and go home and see mom and dad. But did you know that only one in 10 kid that matriculates graduates in four years, I said, My God, I paid my own way through school in the first I did four years in three years, because I was in a hurry to get through because I wanted to go do business but, and I got good grades, because I was willing to work at it. Paying for myself, so I thought this must matter. Anyhow, and I still had a ball. The point is, I said, we'll do Chicken Soup for the college soul. And we sold like 16 million of them. It just went nuts. Because I We inspired the kids to start and finish, which we got to do again, because this thing of free lunches.
Alex Ferrari 25:52
But you know what, it's really fascinating to me that the numbers that you're tossing out are astronomical numbers in the publishing world. I mean, you're talking about 19 million copies sold 16 million copies sold 100 million copies. So this is unheard of, I mean, a best seller. What is like a I mean, we're talking about like, you know, the Davinci Code and those kinds of or Stephen King books are like, these are the kind of, you know, 1020 30 million copies. I mean, you're telling stories that touch the soul, and you're selling these and then you've been doing it for how many years now? Are we at the point when you started
Mark Victor Hansen 26:26
47 years 1974 I started so but there is one guy who sold 150 million books one book, which was and that's that's the alchemist which I'm convinced you.
Alex Ferrari 26:37
Oh, my God, it's on my bookshelf over there. It's
Mark Victor Hansen 26:39
Amazing, right? And now his book is becoming a movie. They're making it in Marathi
Alex Ferrari 26:44
Speak. And they are they are they are they shooting it? Are they shooting it?
Mark Victor Hansen 26:48
Yeah, there's no, it'll be done in a couple days.
Alex Ferrari 26:49
Because I've been trying to make that movie for 25 years.
Mark Victor Hansen 26:54
I know. And so his book will go to a half billion as one book. Now I believe that's the foreword. And it's like I was on the biggest show with Amazon. Mark. Oh, gosh, I can't remember his name is Mark also, but I can't remember his last name right now. But anyhow, it was on twice and he said, you mark the grandson or the Roger Bannister books. Do you remember who Roger was Alex? I don't I don't he ran the first four minute mile. Yes, of course. Once he ran a four minute mile, what happened in the next week? 119. People ran it. Now physiologically, economically, we're no different. What changed was mindset. Right. And what's happened is now we've had one company become a trillion dollar company. Now Apple. And now two years later, we have five companies that are. So what I'm saying is I'm setting a new benchmark and a lot of people, all you got to do is go online and look at my YouTube stuff. And you'll see I'll go dog sell you Mark, I want that. Look, I every generation if you're honest, and teach abundance, right, not a limited pie, but an unlimited pie. So the size of the pie is how big we're going to make five, there's enough for everybody. There's 8 billion people, but we need 8 billion people using their full soul potential 100%. And everybody gets dented, everybody gets hurt, everybody gets abused, everybody gets shut down one way or another. And what happens is you need to have shows like yours, that wake people up expand people that how, wait a second, there's extraordinary opportunity more now than ever before in human history. Because for the first time, thanks to geniuses like Elon Musk, we've got to Starlink we got you know, cheap cell phones at $15. In Africa and India. Everybody's connected. And you know, you're selling like crazy and all those places.
Alex Ferrari 28:40
So Mark, you know, the one thing that I've talked to so many different people over the years about success, and you've arguably had, you know, some of the most been one of the most successful publishers of all time, in regards of books. When it started to hit when you first started to get the success for the first book, you and Jack, how did you guys handle that kind of success because that kind of success crushes people who aren't ready for it. I've spoken to those people. I know those kinds of people. I know those kinds of stories coming from the world of Hollywood where I come from success and attention and ego and all of this stuff gets thrown on you and when fame gets thrown on you it is not easy. And not everyone can handle it. But it seems like you and Jack both had How did you deal with this? This apple I mean it's it's a it's literally a tsunami of success at the beginning and continued to be so how did you handle it? Do you have any advice for people who are if they're lucky enough to have success in their life? To deal with it?
Mark Victor Hansen 29:44
First of all, there's a level of meaning in me that's silly that says one of our objectives. That's just being silly. In answer your question, I believe. Now I'm going to be very serious. The serious part is you got to have 25 year plans. So, like right now, next year, my next birthday is 75. And I gotta plan to go to 100. And I got another plan, but I net 227. So the question is, do you have plans big enough that remember, Ask and you will receive, but most people long term planning is running into after lunch. Do all of a sudden, you know, you've been making $1,000 a month and now you're making $100,000 a month, you better have some plans that supersede and superset everything you're going to do, or you'll get sucked up in it. And when you succeed, things happen so fast, you can't believe it. I mean, you go from a few staff to a lot of staff, but you also get the big word. The nice word is called sycophants, and most people out there are gonna go I don't know that word. What it means is you got a lot of suckers on your, you know, because success has a lot of parents, a lot of relatives show up that you didn't know you had. And friends show up that you didn't hail. I've known you since eighth grade, aren't you gonna hire me? And you go from I never saw people in eighth grade. And if I did, I didn't know you. You weren't on any sports team.
Because I wasn't on any sports team. Nobody had had me I was uncoordinated because I grew too fast. A six foot 413 years old. Anyhow, the point is I said I'm gonna grow up be an intellectual thought. That'd be fun. So the point is, you take it with assuage now, if you watch all my YouTube videos, or if you read this book, two things I show the 10 macro goals I've got during my lifetime, like one is I'm working on after this, we're doing a big podcast with I said, we got to take all waste resources called garbage dumps, and everybody creates five ponds a garbage day, whether they want to or not. And that's what kills every civilization, there's been 1000 civilizations on planet Earth, and 1000 killed themselves, because it didn't take care of their pollution and pollution goes in the water, and water has germs and parasites and viruses, you drink it, eat it and kill yourself. And I open up the pyramids in Guatemala. So I'm real clear that they had a civilization at 10 million people, six lane highways, pyramids, bigger than Egypt. I was with the head of anthropology and archaeology when we opened all that stuff. And it's magnificent. The point is America now has 10,000 garbage dumps filled in this one guy who you ought to have on your show after me is Dean rose, spent $300 million, the last 20 years figured out how to take all garbage dumps. And first of all, get 60% water then get glass to glass, plastic to plastic, metal to metal. So we get plenty of resources. Because if you watch all the idiots that are teaching scarcity, which is everything all economics is based on scarcity, which is limitation and not enough for everybody, and we're going to starve a billion people not because you got idiots in leadership that are bureaucrats that only went to law school don't know scrap, about what the real world is doing and have never listened to. People like Mitzi Mitzi Perdue, who wrote my biography, relentless. Mitzi runs 40,000 Egg women, but she also does 22 million chickens a week at Purdue chicken, right? You ever bought a chicken at Costco for $4.99? That's their chicken. They're organic. They're out in the sunshine, they're doing the right thing. She'll say, Look, we can feed everybody just in America. But you got you got idiot media saying there's not enough food to feed Americans and you see shelves empty. Because people have got a wrong mindset. The wrong mindset gets the wrong thing. Let me go one step further. When I grew up, my parents were immigrant Danes, as I've told you, and the story in Denmark is our Dane comes over starts a little hotdog stand sells like crazy. Also, it makes so much money kids really smart. send a kid to Harvard kick him back from Harvard economics degree. It's a dead Don't you know it's 1929 We're in the Depression. You should stop advertising you should stop buying more hotdog stands. And sure enough, the old man goes bankrupt because the stupid, ignorant scarcity mindedness that was totally wrong. If you're in your soul, What did Christ say the kingdom of heaven is within and it shows up without within shows up without right if the kingdom of heaven is within, if you program to see the fundamental abundance, a universe which universe has been around 15 billion years Earth has been around 5 billion years. There's no shortage of anything here. But some we've got to have intellectual people with enough technological wisdom to just convert liabilities into assets like I did for the chiropractor's like I did for the blood, like like my friend Dean Rose is doing. And hopefully you understand this is a magnificent cycle of life. But what happens is the people are now saying, well, we cut off the cycle here and we'll cut off trade. They're like hell yeah. If I put a tourniquet on your arm, Alex, your arms gonna turn blue and black, it's gonna fall off. Your arm doesn't care. But you put on it stupid tourniquet, right and I'm saying we got a tourniquet on American business right now we need and that's why all my YouTube videos are on right now on entrepreneurship where you take a problem solve it, make a profit scale. Make Up ash profits.
Alex Ferrari 35:04
You are a force of nature mark, there's no question about it, you are
Mark Victor Hansen 35:07
Forced to do that. Do that online and send that into to Amazon, that'd be good.
Alex Ferrari 35:14
You are a force of nature without question. It is fascinating though the mindset, and just talk a little bit about mindset, because it is something that stops most people because of the stories we tell ourselves. And those stories could have been stories that we learned when we were kids, you know, mommy, and daddy doesn't love me, I have to do this or, or, you know, money started, like I was growing up with, like, making money is hard. You've got to work really hard. And I heard, yeah, I'm sure and a lot of people do. And it was that kind of mindset, that, in a good way forced me to incredible work ethic that I had when I was younger. And to this day, I have an amazing work ethic, because I'm always trying to figure things out. And but at a certain point, that lack mentality doesn't benefit you doesn't serve you anymore, because you're trying to hustle. You know, you're spending an hour to make $1 where if you're smarter, you can go listen, let me sit back for a second. And that same hour, I can make make $10,000. And that is the difference. Where that I have to work physically work hard for my money, where I've made that switch over the last decade where know I can create products, I can write books, I can create a podcast, great things that generate revenue for me, while I'm helping people that and I spend more time with my family and spend more time on other things that want to do. These are mindset shifts. So what can you say to people who have told themselves these kinds of stories, that they're not good enough? They're not smart enough that they have to work hard? How can you break through these kinds of stories?
Mark Victor Hansen 36:57
First of all, I love the question and no, because this is up leveling your soul, my wife and I, and I want everyone to get two copies of the book asked the bridge from your dream majestic. And the reason is, you need just to go over what you said is you need to have two people together, one on one as part of a lover, or my favorite president. Jefferson said, Look at my candles lit Alex and yours isn't layers of my baby, that they anything from mine. But then he went to the second level, that same thing, and I'm abstracting is edification. But if I can put it in a book, which he wrote a lot of books, he was the smartest President seventh language Don't let a one of the smartest presidents he said, Read the dang book. And if you get it for me, the idea may work better for you than me. And by the way, I've sold more books than anybody who trained me to sell books so that obviously, it worked better than me because what you do is you go to that soil level and and one of the things we teach in there we teach first of all, you got to ask yourself, ask others ask God. But my wife and I were when we're falling in love long ago, we're sitting at mother's market eating and green Miller's A man of the cloth was a little white cloth and all black outfit. And he's senior and leans in and says I see you guys are indefatigably in love. Do you want to know how to stay married and happily for all your life? Hell, I don't want to talk to you. What do you we interrupted by meal for which? No, I didn't do that. i You said, I said yeah. Okay, because he led with a question. He said, Well, I'm here to Billy Graham Ministries for last seven years and we find only one thing works I said great. I need know that he said every morning and every night before we go to sleep and but when you wake up you got to pray out loud with your beloved. We pray that funerals we pray their holy man jams we print it at political events, sometimes school events but never all love each other. So we started doing it in like this morning before we got on we you know, because I see you got enchanted creatures and having been in Asia so many times. I clearly know who is in mitigation boys anyhow. But when you really get into this, you understand that Be still and know a goddess is a truism. Right? You start to expand your auric energy today we can take pictures of the Kirlian and the guy who is doing the best that probably is Dr. Joe Dispenza, who's a friend. And yeah, Joe's genius. But the point is, and he's healing people because of getting out of their human sense of self into their Divine Sense of Self which has never been sick in their designs and stuff you can't be poor because universe if you're made the image and likeness of God Genesis 128 You and your mate who God stuff God's rich, therefore you got to be rich. Now if you're not rich, it's because you did what you and I just heard. We got too long affirmations coming through life and that's why when you go online to the the book, The ask book.com The ask book.com We give you a free a wealth chart so you go over little simple lines like I am prosperity and you say it 100 times a day and you become prosperous now it's got a lot more lines because I teach you how to make sure you are debt free stuff. is free set free and all that stuff. But no, it's free. You can't beat the price by going to that and get a book, get a copy of the book, read it, go over it with your business partner, your spouse, your sweetie can
Church make your mastermind partner whoever it is you get to go through? If you go through 178 questions they ask like, the sides of your thinking determines the sides you result? Well in 1974 I was making 400 a day 250 work days. That's 100 grand a year. Well, I get with the world's best salesman because I'm training life insurance. And this guy's been on the cover of Time and fortune and everything. Ben Feldman and Feldman, I said lunch he said you love your kids. I said, Yes, sir. Ben, you said if your kid's life depended on it, could you earn 4000 a day? That's 101010? I said, Yeah, I'd do that. He said, Well, 4000 day instead of 400 a day times two and 50 workdays a million a year. I said, Holy cow, it's that easy to make a million and he was making like 4 million a year. And I said, I'll do it. I did it. And then I've gone way beyond that. But the point is, everybody can do it. That's why it's light your candle. Some of you out there going already are going like this god. Yeah, God because more for Johansens rich, he could say that. No, no, I came out and no money, no money. My parents didn't give me any money. They didn't have it to give. But they gave us love. They gave us work ethic they gave us the ability to and the freedom to go out and learn. And the triangle is obviously aren't earning in return. And I'm in the business of returning but I want to return for 8 billion people because a question we asked him to book which are inspired by Dr. Peter Diamandis, who I love a lot. Peter says, What are you going to do you are going to do during this 10 years this decade to help 1 billion people. Now, if you have a billion people make $1 he just became a billionaire. And somebody who I couldn't be a billionaire, there you go shutting yourself down again, no, no, there's no limit to it. It's the circulation of money that makes more money. It's like your blood circulates in your body. It stopped circulating, you're called d a d light and you are very alive. You're enthusiastic. You're tuned in, you're turned on. And what I'm saying is everybody that watches this that catches that may say wait a second. If March, right, all I got to do is solve a problem. Fix it, scale it. And I get to be a billionaire if I want. Why not? Right. I mean, we're building a billion dollar company right now. And yesterday, I was talking to the world's greatest artists, my best friend Weiland, who I've done three books with like Chicken Soup for the ocean lovers. Oh, and he'll be a billionaire in the next couple years. But he's helping a lot other people because artists are waking up to Hey, wait a second, artists can become billionaires. Right? And one of the guys we're doing a book with and Mark Victor Hansen library is Jeff Hoffman, who created Priceline and invisible patents, which is like he's got 100 of them. But he just took Priceline from 1 billion a year to 90 billion a year with one question. He went to all the hotels, and said, Do you ever have any empty rooms? Do you want to film, give them to Priceline? And boom, he went to 90,000,000,001 question. Some of you say, Well, I'm not reading your damn book, you're the one making all the money. Now look, you go to private, you go to Amazon to buy this little baby, it costs you $13 It is a screaming as value of a good if it makes you a billion dollars, you paid 13 The return on investment, the ROI, there's no better return. Another way to sell your books cost too much. By the way, the paper costs when you are buying a book, you're buying information about the book, not the paper, not the meaning you're buying how you abstract it and use it to have your candle lit because you're not supposed to hide your light under a bushel.
Alex Ferrari 43:35
There is no better medium in the world that has more information in it bang for your buck than a book. There's no question that it carries so much information more than a movie more than a documentary. More than just one story. It's you're talking about hundreds, if not 1000s of hours of work that you've done and condensed it for us to read in three or four hours. And you're just like, oh, so the return on time and an investment is is insane. Is is I mean that's what I found with books I read. I read a book a week at least. And constantly in putting books and books and information in and you're reading from masters, people who've walked the path before, why wouldn't you buy a book like yours? Where you obviously have had success in your life, obviously, you know, a couple of things. So then you just win the lottery. I mean, this has all been worked over these last few years. And you know, for a price of 13 dama coffee some places in this country cost $13.
Mark Victor Hansen 44:42
Exactly. So But back to the first question you asked about overcoming adversity. So we interviewed 26 math rascals, and I meet this guy inadvertently. I'm selling 15 million books a year and I'm rocking and Charlie tremendous Jones, who's a great friend and a speaker and an ongoing publishing helped me and took all this stuff public domain books and made $100 million by just writing a foreword to books that are out of print and brought back like, you know, Jamestown and all that. And he calls me up and he says, hey, look, you've got to write the foreword to this guy's book. This is the most important book you ever wrote, read, and I go, I'm really busy. You don't understand what it's like sell 50 million books and do media and do 20 shows a month and stuff. It just really I have hard time to breathe. He said, Look, you and I are best friends. I helped you when you began, you're gonna help this guy. I said, Okay, he sent me this book, a guy never heard of Jim Scoble. I don't know if you know the film, you will know it in the same name, the name of the book called The Ultimate Gift. Well, I read it and it was a while I needed to wrote the foreword. And I wrote the afterword. And I wrote the back cover and I said, this book is so clear, it has to be a movie. And now let me go into his story. So and then I'll tell you why that's so important. So STOVL is big, strong, bigger than I am stronger, amazingly strong and he's trained his whole life to be an NFL guy gets recruited the NFL goes and take some medical tests. The doctor convinced a kid does worst news I've ever given anyone six months, right? You're gonna be permanently in forever blind, irreversible? Well, sure enough, he goes blind. He lives a little nine by 12 room. He's got his radio, his TV and his telephone, and he's bitching moaning and complaining which, you know, he just got on a Jag, his mother said, Jimmy, you're gonna go down to the blind meeting, see if they can get you out of it was an echo chamber and negativity, but he sits next to this woman who ended up becoming his partner, Kathy, and he says, You know, I used to love to watch TV and I suddenly want to narrate when somebody throws a white book or screeching tires. What's happening is a blind guy can't see it right. Now. Mine's 87%. Visual. She hits him in the ribs. She's a court stenographer. Katherine says, Jimmy, you and I are somebody we can do some Well, long story short, they start with narrative TV. 14 million viewers pay $10 a month to have TV narrated around the world, which because your site Did you wouldn't buy it, right. I mean, you don't need it. But it just it exploded. It made his life. Then he writes his book, The Ultimate Gift. So then I interviewed him for our book, and he says, Look, you wrote the foreword, and you wrote that it should be a movie and you're like EF Hutton, when Mark Victor Hansen talks to the world, listen, he said, now I've made $100 million on movies that I can see. And I'm making money on 50 books that I write that I can't read. I mean, he's a colossal mind. Don't Miss He, when I called Jimmy's pure wisdom. And I only met him like a couple months ago, he invited us out to his house in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we went, we it was a Vulcan mind meld bonding. I mean, not that I'm working with him. It just we're friends. And I've read all of his books, he reads all of ours, and we endorse each other and do anything for each other. I mean, he just is a genius. But the point is, you can't have a bigger diversity than going absolutely slammed on blind. And why did God make them blind? So he could create narrative TV? Why did God make them blind? So he found out that his unique talent back to what I said in the beginning, is unique talent was he has the ability to write he has ability to make movies, and then it will my wife is ready to make this movie on the fable of Mikayla, which is a classic story sort of like everything that we don't have any fables in American, my wife is a fabless and the first 40 pages on that now we've expanded it to the movie called the fable of Makayla which, as I said, will make it in Malta with Pure Flix, which had the number to one to the top 10 movies a God's Not Dead and and others do which are magnificent, magnificent movies anyhow and clean and no profanity, nothing stupid. And it just it's amazing but we call up Jim and he you know, he has the narrow listen to everything and five times the speed reads a book a day just giant of a spirit and says, okay, he says crystal what you got to do to finish this quickly. It's just that the spirit of Mikayla back the soul the soul of Mikayla exists the fabric of soul back to what I said is bigger than you are. It didn't matter whether it's Carly Dr. Carl Jung, Synchronicity or anything there's a new sphere there's an extra metabolic it has all information of all time and all of us can tap it but you got to get out of your little you into the big spiritual you the divine you the bigger soul you that's why this is so you're up leveling. And Mikayla story has been poring through my wife and obviously I read them and you know people say well you're just quoting her because she's your wife now she happens to be a genius at that she's found her unique talent her and everyone got one somebody unique garbage creator of yours. Go ahead.
Alex Ferrari 49:36
So let me let me ask you this because you've said this a few times in our conversation of connecting to our soul self are to get to get into the infinite of our soul which is is is is a wealthy it is it's healthy. It's all these things. But I know a lot of people myself included at a certain point in my life where there's so much for lack of a better word crap mud, layers of stuff that we have built up over the course of our life. It's hard to like if you have a layer of mud, it's hard to see the sun above the layer and you can't even see the light. So a lot of times when you're saying like, Oh, you have to connect to your higher so there's so much crap that we have to get through to get to that level. What advice do you have for people who have all these layers, these thoughts, these stories that they told themselves to get through that so they can see a crack of light and then start to touch? What you and I have touched in our lives?
Mark Victor Hansen 50:36
I love that question. Well, first of all, let's just go to the crowd, and then I'll show you the seven ways the crap it turns out crap turns into compost, compost turns in fertilizer, fertilizer turns into love that right? And that's what we said in the social your, your, I gotta come I'm gonna come up with a new cliche as you know, I write an affirmation a day. But I want to turn crap into treasure, but I want to make it alliterative in mining and Trinity. I'll do it. Maybe before the end of the show. I don't have it plugged in yet. But in our book, asked the bridge and redeems Jesse. After the fable, the first thing we talked about is seven roadblocks of fear next, with the crappy verge. And all of us have some of them some of the time almost some of us have all of them all the time. But if you really get seven out of seven, it's suicidal. And right now we have 300 suicides a day in America that are on necessary, and it's just negligent care of the mind. I'm not mismatching. Anyone. I'm just saying, hey, wait a second. If you'll read our book and go through the seven roadblocks, starting with a sense of worthiness, and you read the Bob Proctor story and said he felt disingenuous, Bob and I own two companies together. If you'll read the naivete story, which is I'm going to abbreviate it down to a sentence if that's possible, but my wife had a housekeeper who brought a fruit in the house, and she'd never had it and wow, this is amazing. And I've been around the world I never saw this fruit and where the fruit from it and it's said it's an a mango, and said, Oh my gosh, that's my new favorite fruit. I mean, we just had mango melons, which I didn't know existed that I bought the other day at the grocery store anyhow. She said where do you get that at the grocery store? Well, if you don't know what you're looking at, or looking for you can't see it because you got to seek and find that's part of souls work, right? Because a s k to g e t well ask seek and no knock. But then my wife came up with this affirmation get every treasure because all the treasures are there. If you get through the seven roadblocks and you read somebody else's roadblock. You go oh, that's mine. So we said already one worthiness. We said naivete excuse ology. Now my older brother had excuses for everything I'm taking to the airport here. And in Phoenix, he'd been playing around and he is a lot older than me. And I said, Do you need any help going through the airport? Because I've traveled a quarter million miles a year for the last 20 or 30 years. Travel 7 million air miles got every card from everybody? And he said, No, no, no, I know it. But his wife had just died. And I didn't understand what had happened. That he didn't know airport protocol. And he ended up in the airport 13 hours because he wasn't His excuse was I'm smart. I'm really wise. I don't need to ask anyone how to get to a gate didn't dawn on me the other night to get to a dang airline gate. And later that day, his daughter calls him says Didn't you hear hear what the dead still in the airport. I said hell if he's in the airport I only live 10 minutes away I go pick them up taking back the house we get another plane. Next time I'll hold his little hand and walk I mean he was a big adult man but you know any wasted part of his life got in it two three in the morning, because any got sick with pneumonia, which is tragic. All because he had excuses. I know enough to get around the airport. I don't have to tell my little brother who I've always coached him. I'm not getting cooked. And you got excuses. I wrote down three reasons in the book. Well, how to get over that. Okay. Next one is fear. All of us get crippled by different kinds of fear until you overcome them. And fear is False Evidence Appearing is real, right? And the trouble is, you're here to overcome your fears. But we all got to work on our fears. Because if you're full of fear is faith in a wrong direction. It's a one way elevator going down. Whereas faith, the apostle Paul said, is substance of things hoped for. And things not seen substance. This book was substance I knew that we were going to sell a million and a half before we sold one. Right? That substance that's mental stuff. That's imagination. That's intuition. That is soul work. I said, you know, God helped me do this. And every night we pray, I'm thankful. I am thankful and grateful that I'm selling a million and a half on a year and a half and by December 25 1994. We came up with the June In 28th 1993, Jack sided I decided we're going to publisher assign our publisher when
This kid is so nuts that he thinks his little three by five cards that he reads four times a day like Andrew Carnegie read become the richest man in the world is going to change the world. Well, you know, suddenly he's got 168 People working three shifts a day to live up to what I had expected because I wrote 25 year goals. Most people like I said, to have what's after lunch is my biggest goal. That's not a good goal. Your goal is a dreamy destination. That's heartfelt back to feeling nature, the first thing you asked about with a destination but I'm saying you got to have a multiplicity of destination multiple sources. So you got to unworthiness, you got naivete, you got excuse ology that fear. You got disconnectedness? If you ask any kid, and you know, we are teenagers, grandkids, even this is unconnected, I am on Instagram. No, you ain't. Like, in a couple of days, we got our whole family meeting, and nobody gets to have their phones out during a telephone by any of the meals that we're having. We'll have 50 family members to get in Sedona, you know, just three generations of family. And the rule is no phones, right? Because it interrupts it disconnects, it doesn't connect. Now, there's a level that it connects. But and we talked about that. So you got all these seven things that are either working for you or against you. And what we're teaching is if you read that second chapter over one at a time with somebody else, you take it and you visualize it from being big, the fear that it's going to get Alex to the fear. That's nothing that you make it miniscule, and you just go like this and quantum physics. And you blow it away. You say, Well, I could do that. That's what that's why people listen to me and read my books. Make it? I make the complex, simple, or at least I think that's simple. You crunch it but you're crunching in visualization, which is your inner eye. And the people you got behind you with teacher to your third eye, which it doesn't matter. All spiritual systems come up with the same stuff. But like the book you've got right there says you've got to be awake. I don't know. I don't know what to do with that guy. But
Alex Ferrari 57:04
That's Yogananda.
Mark Victor Hansen 57:07
What when? Jack and I got an award from at the Maharishi University, and we were told not to talk about Yogananda and I lived in India. I just didn't see that picture of him never anyhow. And he said Yogananda said, you just set your goals for 1000 years, how many you have known that raise their hand? You said, Mark, and I do you know, because why not set 1000 year goals?
Alex Ferrari 57:28
Why not? Absolutely. Now, what are the
Mark Victor Hansen 57:31
NASM but Americans, dumbass Americans, and by the way, I love and I'm very patriotic from, but we got to get bigger goals, better goals, goals with ISIS,
Alex Ferrari 57:39
We used to have, we used to have big goals we used to have, at the beginning of the century of the 18th century, we had huge monster schools and you know, go to the man to the moon, and all these kinds of things. I agree with you. Now, everything that you just said in regards to breaking through all those seven barriers and getting through that mud. Many of us do start to better ourselves. And many of us do start to see differences in our lives. But the people around us have a lot. It's a lot of times it's the crab in the bucket mentality, where they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're not the person I married, you're not the person who I grew up with, you're not the friend I had, you're not the co worker at like, you're changing and you're change. I feel very insecure about your change. Because if you're changing, maybe I should be changing. So I'm going to try to bring you down, because I'm scared of it all goes back down to fear. How do you deal with people around you not supporting your growth, your expansion into into spirit into soul into a greater awareness and consciousness?
Mark Victor Hansen 58:44
Great question. I'll just two things I'm flashing on? I've never been asked that question before. So it's a great question for me, because it pushes the edge of my mental envelope like a lot of what you've done today. I love the solo trucks. Number one is get them to read ask with you and go over. What happens is you're gonna find out what's their self limiting belief. What is our negative self fulfilling prophecy? Now you've either got you've only got two choices, right? The law of polarity says you're either positive or negative. And both are so negative. They don't know they're negative. And so what I'm teaching people because I went bankrupt, because I was reading all the bad news fit to print the New York Times I was living in New York, and I'm smart. I gotta read The New York Times. Well, it only feels bad news 90% of what it does, according to every research is negative. Why would you pull that in your mind? Right? Maybe review it once a week or some but not every day for an hour. This is like, you want to destroy yourself. You only got one mind one brain, one one soul in this incarnation. Now I don't know. I believe that there are multiple levels and all that, too. So let's not you know Christ said My house has many real word and Aramaic has dimensions and I studied Aramaic with the world's greatest Aramaic scholar, Rocco Erica so but my house has many dimensions, right? We call it rooms in America because people don't Know what dimensionality is. And that's too bad it limits but on your show that people aren't limited. So if your soul has many dimensions, we got to make sure that we don't get locked into a dimension that that is self defeating. And that's what I'm saying is let's come over overcome those seven levels of self defeat. And let's go into going into the higher, better, more extraordinary self, because that's where I am right now. And I'm telling you that opportunity is infinite. You said an infinite a minute ago, soul is infinite. Now, if you're made in the image of the infinite, then guess what leads to doubling your infinite, you ponder that. And that's why I said go to the book ask.com And we give you free and there's got to get the change that take off the secret affirmations that will make you rich, it's just one of the coolest pictures we've ever done on that but those affirmations are that you are infinite once you start to breathe in and I have infinite money available infinite resource below infinite talent available infinite skills available. Infinite abilities and I don't even know I bet infinitely the number two the white people you change some of the people that you hang with it are the right people that can get the right results right here right now. But it all comes down to one simple thing. You know how to AFK most people have never gotten their ask in gear. Well, I got a new car, Alex. I got a car like all the best neighbors. Now it's leased. And it's leased on a loan that they're gonna call it back. But I don't pay any month. And if I lose my job, I'm gonna lose my ass and my assets. No, no. And learn how to ask because you'll learn how to ask you become the emperor of your soul. You are here to take dominion over your soul, not let the world take it and crush you. Because the world what you said is those guys that are pulling you down, right? They're pulling you down because they want everyone to be equal. There's no equality, there's one level of equality, equality, equal opportunity comes out an equal opportunity of one thing that no one mentioned, is good as Jefferson and Franklin work. They didn't say eat quality, a competent. I've made myself exceedingly competent in books. But it took a lot of work. I mean, myself exceedingly competent at marketing, but it's a renewable path. It's something all of us can learn because it's abstract. Marketing is an abstract, it's imaginal. And everybody's got an imagination and you got it pushed out of you. And in fourth grade, fifth grade, landscape, college, military or business that said, you just do your work and get your nose clean and keep your nose to the grindstone. You don't have any nose in the grindstone, you're here thinking, I can see the your your mental wheels going at full tilt Boogie, and I hope the people are watching it or going, oh my god, I gotta lose this dang hands, I gotta listen to it twice. I'm not sure what he's available.
Alex Ferrari 1:02:50
So after, after the studies that I've done over the years, I've, you know, from spiritual masters who have walked the earth, many of them are, you know, are free of the good opinion of others. Because they have a truth inside them, they have they understand something at a level within themselves, that nothing outside of them is going to deter them differently. And that's, I think, the place where we all have to get to in our own lives. And it's, you know, when it's friends is one thing, but when it's family members, when it's a spouse, I've seen that happen so many times when the spouse is just not on board with you. Like, if you're if let's say you both go into the relationship heavy, overweight, and one of you loses a whole lot of weight. That's a tough scenario to be in, because you're like, No, I'm bettering myself, but she doesn't, or he doesn't want to go along for that ride against that one and one, meet the power of 11 as your spin saying. So I think that's something that we need to kind of really understand about ourselves. Like when we understand where we're going, and what we're doing. We have to be free of the good opinions of others. Would you agree?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:03:58
Right? Because what you think of me is none of my business. The book we did on Reverend Ike, he said two things. There's only two opinions of matter yours. God's That's it. That's it. So the spouse decides not to lose weight, which, by the way, I mean, she or he In either case, there's going to self disintegrate this spoon. My wife owns a company called Skinny life and did a book called Skinny life. And we even want to and it was paid for by Nestle's because they wanted to use it. We wrote down every bad because if you're going to take something like in the books, when somebody does a book with us, we said take out a trademark pick on registration, and we teach the whole IP intellectual property and like I told the 150 I'm the biggest licensed guy in books ever. I did a billion dollars with licensing like last year, we sold $157 million with the dog food. And we have 15
Alex Ferrari 1:04:48
Is the Chicken Soup for the Soul? Dog food and Catherine
Mark Victor Hansen 1:04:52
Cuban's old dog. I've seen it I've
Alex Ferrari 1:04:54
Purchased it.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:04:56
Yeah. And there's a little books in there and all that every time So the point is, it's a great business, and nobody saw it like, one weekend, I'd read Steven Spielberg's book, because I want to make movies of course, and George Lucas's, and it made an old movie that you'll remember when you're a kid at call home, right? And they made 800,000,080. But they made a billion and a half of licensing, and I went into jack, and I said, Whoa, brother, Billy and a half, we're gonna be licensing. He said, What do you know, I said, nothing. But I said, one year, I'm gonna master it. But nobody's ever tried it in books. And we got 100 licenses, like greeting cards, and cash, all kinds of cool stuff that I did. But you know, the 15% It's a key to killer clean business. And back to what you said early, just, you know, I'm listening to you at intense levels. You're either in $1 ability economy where you're getting paid $1 for your service, not uncover, you're gonna be $20 or $20,000 an hour times, you're owned by the man, so to speak, or the woman or the company of the corporation, right? Or you're in a results oriented economy, which is a think economy that's trying to pull in the world Think Grow Rich and wrote us out of the depression. You wrote all the fireside chats for FDR, right, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that in 1937, published thinking grow rich and immediately saw like, No, it's all hundreds of millions and like, because he didn't lock in and his intellectual property very well, I'm sorry to say.
Alex Ferrari 1:06:21
Exactly. And it's again, so fascinating. Just so you know, about licensing. I had a friend of mine who's an animator at Disney. And one day, this is story you're really gonna love. He came in and he they said, We want you guys to see where we're making our money with the animated films. So they took every animated film from Snow White, all the way to current day, and they broke down where they're making the money with it with with it.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:06:46
Well, if you've got a copy, I don't know. It was
Alex Ferrari 1:06:49
Just it was a personal thing inside. But he did tell me. He was like, Yeah, you know, there's a lot and it was three quadrants. It was a theatrical, he was Home Box Office, and there was merchandising. And, and it was always generally third, third, a third, a third kind of thing. Then they got to frozen. And frozen. It was like 10%, theatrical 10%, a home video, and 80% merchandising. And he goes, Alex, do you know how much we made with the dresses, Elsa and Elsa and Anna dresses that my little girls bought like two or three of them alone, when they because I was when they were coming up. And it goes, the first year we made a billion on the dresses alone. Dow and I was like, and that's when I wrote my book, The Rise of the film to printer and how do we create money with outside of the studio system outside of the general way. Because I was like, this is the model that independent filmmakers need to use. Because you can't play the game as these big giant conglomerates you in and out of all the studios in Hollywood, the only one that's got to really figure it out is Disney because that's why they're the biggest because they bought IP. They have licensing. They have Marvel, they have Star Wars they own the Muppets they frickin everything. And it's all about licensing and this and that. So it's just a fascinating story of how business works and how to think about it. But they just license away and George Lucas made billions of dollars by licensing, not even creating products, licensing products. So it's something to really think about. If you're into the business side of this conversation, it's a way to generate tremendous amount of revenue cleanly, evenly, ethically, and honestly, easily much easier than having to go out and work for you know, time for money. Who would you agree sir? I think you
Mark Victor Hansen 1:08:47
Were trading time for money is like a lose lose. You got to start there. But you got to get past that. I just because you hit frozen. As I got grande twins, we have six grandkids and we'll probably have trouble before it's over. But our little grand twins, when frozen was on, they both went up the little boy a little girl and they held they held the screen. And I thought now when my little daughter was little you know before that et was into it at 200 times and of course we bought all that paraphernalia because I had money and now I see the same thing I didn't know they did a billion dollars and dresses but these are what I've been telling people is look when you write a book with Mark for transfer library.com You know you own the stuff but we own the licensing with you because we're going to try to take it to the moon because if you're my estate attorney is the same one who did l Frank Baum, right the Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz. He's been dead 150 years and he still is spayed and his heirs make 150 million a year selling costumes for Halloween and stuff for Halloween.
Alex Ferrari 1:09:47
But isn't that public domain at this point?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:09:49
No. No, because they were smart. Remember what I said? thing grow rich Napoleon Hill he didn't understand some of the law. The law is you can we do it every 17 years. The way you do it is you change some of the words and we do it, rewrite it. So every 17 years, wizard oz has just got these little modifications, really,
Alex Ferrari 1:10:10
And that and that's and then just a little, like, you know, others change a couple of words here and there and then just republish the book. And then all of a sudden,
Mark Victor Hansen 1:10:20
That's why, you know, a lot of people say, Well, look, you're trying to sell me this expensive seminar where you charge $1,000.03 days. I don't need that I can just watch it. No, no, no, no, if you come, you're gonna hear a little thing like that. That one thing will make you a millionaire, a millionaire or a billionaire. Right? Because if you don't know you don't know. And you, you and everyone says, Well, I listen to my lawyer. Well, how rich is your damn liar? And is your lawyer, an estate lawyer? Is he an IP lawyer? I got six lawyers. How many lawyers have you got? You may not have the right. And by the way, we're doing books with a we just did a book, the richest lawyer in America has 6500 lawyers working for him. If you look at our finance and library, the books called the goose because when he flew in at his golf stream, and took us to dinner, and I said, Fred, Penny is his name. And I said, You are the golden goose Brother, you are the king have it. And so the books got a giant gold, they got it on the cover, because I said, You're the king of rainmakers. I never heard of anyone like you. And he said, Well, you know, he showed me how he started. And I said, love that guy. And I were best friends. I mean, I worked for him a ton of times, Paul J. Meyer. And he said, Well, Paul J. Meyer had a formula, but it made the formula better. That's that whole thing of a candle lit better light in the second book, it his book is called the goose that Fred Penny's book is called The goose, because he is the goose that's made more attorneys rich than anyone so 6500 work with him. And when he picks up an attorney and wants a new attorney, he has on fly, interject wherever they want to go. And by the time that it's over, they all go, God, I'm making 200,000 alone. If I work with him, I make a million years, this would be nuts, not to work with Fred Penny.
Alex Ferrari 1:12:03
Wow, that's fascinating.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:12:05
Why wait? What does he do? He's dealing in intellectual property. And, look, there's four basic kinds of capital, there's financial capital, and that's nice. There's relationship capital, which is what he's dealing with. There's passionate personal capitals, which is what he really has, which controls the relationship because he knows where he wants to go. So somebody that has a lesser dream, has to go to his dream. That's why I'm saying, You got to spend more time on your goals. You got to spend more time writing your own 25 year plans, you got to understand because the freedoms are you want to have time freedom, which comes down to having money freedom, which comes out of having a relationship freedom, which comes out of having passionate, purposeful freedom that's going to make you happy. Let me talk about that one. Because that's what this whole books about. If you are not in your right livelihood, you're in a lose lose. And you got out of a lose lose. I got out of a couple lose lose. Right? I I hope everybody listening can see that I love this. I'm smiling. I'm enjoy. I wrote down 267 things I needed my dear wife because I kept saying Haskell Well, what do I need, and I wrote them all down, and they were impossible to give. But then I saw this vision of loveliness. And I call her the goddess of exquisiteness because I wrote down, she had to have a great personality, she had to be slender. She had a want to exercise everyday she wanted to have a travel with me, she had to have her own money because I was rich and I had a bunch of women want to marry my wallet. While no one's marrying my wallet. They assumed that rich guys are stupid. Some guys are just stupid. But, you know, stupid is as stupid does for us. Well, you're the opposite of that, then smart is smart does Right?
Alex Ferrari 1:13:48
Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, my friend. I'm gonna ask you a few questions. Ask all of my guests. What what is your mission in this life?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:13:59
Well, the main mission now is to get everyone to tell their story and put it in a book and publish it with my publishing house. So we get literature to go crazy because when my kids were in elementary school, at Kaiser elementary back in Newport Beach, California, the principal who became our good friend said, hey, look, we can't afford lockers. Can you help us? So I bought $35,000 worth of lockers for all the kids. I thought government law was a stupid and they are inane and don't make the right decision. So I said, Well, now I can do that. But we talked and she said, What do you think? And I said, let's just do a test. We tested every kid and the kids were broad spectrum. We had Vietnamese, we had Hispanic we had Arabic, but we taught them to write before they read and they would read more. If you just teach them to read, then they'll read whatever they're forced to read. But once they write and sight decide to find their soul, wisdom and their sole purpose, it'll make them happy. Every one of those kids started getting straight A's at Kaiser. So I'm saying look, everybody's got a story to tell and remember my airline So our brand asset is we bring people steroid life, meaning most 90% of people are scared to write because somebody has given them a red mark and English, right? So we rewrite it for them. We're ghost editors, ghost writers. And we predominantly will do either fiction or nonfiction with your book, if you can afford it, we charge 29,900. But we say look, fiction sells 10,000 to one. When we need more books, we don't need less. And we need better books, we don't need less. And everybody that writes a book gets to people that nobody else will get to. And right now since January, when we started this, somebody, we're going to be watching this way in the future, so it won't make any sense. But in the first nine months, we've already finished ADA books, because I've got a team, because the book industry is being compressed thanks to COVID confinement. Gov rune. And you know that I said you're either depressed or expressed, I want to help everybody Xpress so they can afford to work with us, right? We're an equity publisher, but then you get 5050. And a book, nobody pays as high as we do. So what chronic book sells for $10, they get five, we get five, it's a real simple thing. So you do five into 30. You know, you sell 6000 books, you're paid off. And we teach how to do that. Because everybody can I don't care if you are inept and inarticulate, we can teach you enough to get over your shyness and go out and do it because I want everyone to wake up to the divinity within them back to what we talked about your unique skill, your unique ability. And the only way you can do it is by expressing you can't by way, I gotta be careful here with all the guys you got around you. They're monks and all that they'd stay in silence their whole life. Well, I think there's the cycle, I believe is you got to do your meditations, why time, but you also got to go. activity of sourcing and serving the universe?
Alex Ferrari 1:16:43
No, there's no question you get, you can't just sit in a cave for 50 years that's not benefiting the world and benefit benefiting humanity, you have to do a balance of both. There's no question. You got to be out there.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:16:54
And right now, humanity. So what happens is, back to your biggest question, my goal is to help make 100% of humanity physically and economically, socially, spiritually and relationally successful? Well to do that. I'm in the impact book business. Like we're doing books, like I told you with everybody. That's anybody I mean, if a blind guy can write and get in, see stuff, nobody will see because many have eyes and cannot see many of yours again. And here. We have a little kid who did a book with us, Devin, who we did the books called the Garage. When you're looking at our website, Mark Victor Hansen. library.com. He comes up to Crystal and I bought four months ago and he's shaking. And he's I said, What are you shaking about? He said, I just heard you and your world's best selling author you intimidate? I couldn't intimidate somebody like you. I couldn't do that. So he stopped shaking. And I said, What's your story? Good. He says eight I passed a real estate test. I bought my first house for $10,000 down owner Quebec for $1,000 A snow shoveling money I had. And he said now I own 60 houses. I'm 14, I'm worth $843,000. I said your watch with his books, the number one the last six weeks. That's a book. Because as a kid, I didn't know I could buy real estate my own name. But there's no law against it. So it's amazing. So everyone's reading his book and go out and doing it and you're making more money than yesterday, we dealt with a kid that is 23 That was supposed to be in jail for 20 years. His lawyer turned them around, got him to read myself out of action stuff. So we met two weeks ago when we're in Vegas at my wife's birthday party. And and I said so how are you doing it? 23. So that make 80,000 a week. I'm doing roofs and he says what I've done is we fly a drone fly drones. If I said it right drones over the house, we see the roofs are bad. We go to the NOC, and we send them the Joma picture, say here's your house, your rose caving in, we got a government program that will pay for your roof, if you'll let us do it. And this kid's making 80,000 a week with 20 kids working for him. And he's 23. And you're supposed to be in jail for the next 20 years. And somehow they lost the evidence because God needs his kid door. So we're doing his book and he said, did you have the title for me? Because you I got a couple of Guinness Book Awards. I've sold more books, anybody better titles? They get a sec. So I said, Yeah, God gave me your title last night. He said, What is desire on fire? He said, That's a great title. I said that to you, our man, your desire on fire, and you're gonna go help a lot more people. And you've told me you want to speak like I do. And, you know, he's showing me all the tapes. He's bought of mine and listened to my 38 sets of tapes. You said, you turn me around school was useless. But you got me to figure out I could open up my mind and my heart and life. So I said, school is useful, but you're going to have to education and academic education. And then everyone's got to spend I believe one hour a day and self help action books, tapes, videos, movies, and YouTubes I don't care what your poison is, but taking whatever works for you.
Alex Ferrari 1:19:47
Now what is what is your definition of a good life?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:19:52
The Good Life is where you're having fulfillment and fulfillment every day, every nanosecond because if you had a happy minute you have happy hours. Happy days. Happy weeks, months, years and life I have the most fulfilled life in the world and you say well, all you do is sit in a little cubby hole and write no have won the biggest awards in America like Nobel. The equivalent Nobel Prizes the ratio Alger award, I got it in Supreme Court. I know most of the movie maker, money makers in a world I've been at dinner privately with James Cameron, who did Titanic and Avatar. I've climbed all the highest mountains in America. You know, our highest mountain is Whitney and climb that to the top and Kilimanjaro and Fuji. And, you know, Machu Picchu, which I totally love, right? Very high spiritual people in the head of high shaman, you know, saying you are going to integrate the Condor and the eagle which is our country in Latin America, I said, I'm going to do that. That's way cool. Anyhow, you got me believer. So So what happened is I got lots of assignments, but everybody has lots of assignments. If you're alive, your assignments aren't done yet. Go watch any of the any deeds and near death experiences and show 20,000 of them on YouTube now, every one of them they died some of them are died long hours and came back because they were with whoever their spiritual guy was, in most cases, because I'm Judeo Christian. Right? It was Jesus or Moses and the big guy or God said, Baba, your life's not done you going back to No, no, I like it here because you get out of the electromagnetic spectrum ours is we see 1% of reality 99% of reality that we can't see. Right you go to the other side, you could see it all the pictures or the colors are brighter, the songs and music better. Butterflies are everywhere rainbows. The point is, we are in a university called life here on Earth. And it's it's for our SOL Sol development, not our SOL development. We're not trying to be a soul under your foot. You're trying to be a full functioning soul. That's a no limit soul which is what you and I are talking about. You're throughout and had fun doing it.
Alex Ferrari 1:21:52
And where can people find out more about you and the work that you're doing, sir?
Mark Victor Hansen 1:21:57
Have a great secret.
Alex Ferrari 1:22:00
Nobody can nobody knows anything about what you're doing. I want everyone to shy sir. You can open up you need to open up Mark seriously, you're you're very introverted. You need to open up stuff to talk about.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:22:14
I just have to die. I'm shy. I'm highly extrovert. Just think what I can do with my life. Exactly. I would love everyone to look at all my YouTube videos because I'm just breaking some records there. I love them all to read my book called relentless. Obviously, the book we're talking about today predominantly is asked, and you know, if you read any of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, it'll warm your heart and soul. And if you got teenagers, make sure you let the teenager read chicken soup as a teenager, out loud to you and it'll open up your heart energy. What were you and I would call your heart chakra. And there's and you'll get along because teenagers at 13 or 14 Suddenly, if you're going to have kids, Alex?
Alex Ferrari 1:22:53
Oh, yes. I mean, it's twins. Old. They're they're they're getting about 10 or 20 years old now.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:23:01
Okay, well, pretty soon you're going to need teenage so they think you've lost it. And the truth is they're losing it as you go. As my friend Steve Covey said you go from totally dependent on mom and dad to independent. I did I know mold and mold and dad. An extraterrestrial takes them away. So they don't come back until they're 20. And you and I've been through that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but they think mom and dad are such adults. They just ain't got it anymore.
Alex Ferrari 1:23:30
I always tell them I'm like, do you think we got here by accident? Guys? Do you think that we, we've survived to this age by not knowing anything. Understand, we know more than you. We've been down the road before you and you're gonna think we thought we've been prepping this for years. You're gonna think you know more than us. And that's fine. We did the same thing. But then life's gonna come around and slap you across the face. And then you're gonna come back to us go, why did life slap across the face and we're gonna go because we told you life is gonna slap you across the face because you didn't listen to us. Now come back home. And then we'll push you out into the world. And you do what you're supposed to do here. Mark, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, my friend. You are welcome back anytime to the show. Because you are a wealth of information and a absolutely relentless force of nature without question, my friend. I appreciate you my friend. Thank you for all the amazing work you've done for humanity over the years with the work that you've been doing. So thank you again, my friend for being on the show.
Mark Victor Hansen 1:24:31
Thank you, my friend.
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