Licensing Thought Leadership | Mark Victor Hansen

Peter Winick

Expanding your thought leadership through licensing.

An interview with Mark Victor Hansen about authoring and licensing.

Today’s guest is Mark Victor Hansen, the co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise and best-selling author of The Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, and Dare to Win.

Mark discusses how he shifted from a business going bankrupt to a best-selling author! He shares his years of experience about how the book business has changed from selling books at the back of the room to online. Then, he explains how things are changing again due to COVID-19.

In addition, Mark gives incredible insights into how he makes a licensed the Chicken Soup for the Soul books when no one had ever thought it was possible to license a book.

We wrap up by discussing how you can keep your name relevant while travel restrictions remain in place. Mark gives advice on how you can take advantage of being a podcast guest. He explains how you can learn to speak without an audience in front of you.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

Thought leaders need to keep up with the changing environment of sales for books.
Licensing your thought leadership might be the method you have not thought of to reach a huge audience.
Thought Leaders should be seeking podcasts to appear on to spread the word about their content while our movement is restricted.

New books should be strategically planned to generate leads, showcase your content, and promote your reputation. Thought Leadership Leverage can help you use publication of the book as a springboard to launch an entire leadership platform. Contact Thought Leadership Leverage to learn now. We can help devise a book campaign strategy and assist you with other aspects of writing or marketing your book.

Transcript

Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is leveraging thought leadership. So today is one of those rare days I get to interview a legend. So where do I start with Mark Victor Hansen? He is probably best known as the coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul, which is a book series. It’s a brand. He has sold over 500 million books. So I think on most week you probably beat the Bible. Not that it’s a competition, but that’s a lot of books. You built an empire in this space. Some of your popular books have been the Power Focus, The Latin Factor, Dare to Win. The list goes on and on and on. So I don’t want to waste time talking about your accolades because we only have 20 minutes and that would take hours. So let’s just dive in. So first, thank you so much for joining us today. Why?

Mark Victor Hansen I love talking to thought leaders and everybody needs to get leverage this time because there are 8 billion people in lockdown. And it’s only those that think they could get it unlocked, open it up, have us read, pivot, rethink and re innovate. Reinvent, howzat.

Peter Winick Yeah, that’s exactly true. So let me ask you this. So in my work, in my world of authors, thought leaders and speakers, one of the things I find really interesting is sort of the back story. So if you and I were to ask our dentist, Mark, Hey, how did you become a dentist? You know, it’d be a pretty boring story, blah, blah, blah, like teeth, blah, blah, blah. I went to dental school, blah, blah, blah. I’m a dentist. Right? When you asked thought leaders how they got here, I literally heard everything from, well, I was homeless to I was the CEO of Fortune 500 to someone threw up and therefore they threw me on stage. And I never spoke before and I fell. I mean, you hear everything. So I haven’t heard your back story. So how did you how did you get here?

Mark Victor Hansen I’ll do it in an abbreviated but come composed paragraph 19. Luckily I’d been in graduate school and I got to be with Buckminster Fuller, who’s Einsteins best genius of geniuses. Spent seven years with Bucky. I tried to be Bucky, though, and I built Geodesic Dome as a New York City racket Club Botanical gardens out of plastic PVC at the wrong time. Oil embargo hit 1974. I went bankrupt so fast, Peter. I had to check a book for a library. I go bankrupt by yourself. So my best works experience. Six months of sleeping in front of another guy’s bedroom in a sleeping bag. And then I go wake up one day and I asked myself, What do I want to really want to be a philosopher speaker? And I want to talk to people who care about things that matter, that make a life changing difference. So I said to my roommates in Hicksville, Long Island, New York.

Peter Winick I’m in plain view. I’m five minutes from Hicksville.

Mark Victor Hansen Good. What’s in.

Peter Winick Plain view? I’m right up there.

Mark Victor Hansen I don’t blame you. Really? Well, yeah. So I said, Any of you guys know somebody that’s not a celebrity, not famous, not a medical doctor, not a lawyer. And 30 young. And they said, Yeah, this guy, Chip Collins, who you may know was a tough guy training real estate. And I go hear him. And he mesmerized the audience for three hours. And to which I said, Hey, Chip, can I buy you lunch? I want to learn how to do this. He said, Since you make it, a boy is 1 in 1000. It’s going to happen. But stay out of real estate. I own the five boroughs. You do life insurance. Long story short, I did 1000 talks here. The first three years, people kept saying, Do you have that story in a book? Because my mother was a great storyteller, taught me how to do it and that and I was earning about 70 grand a year, wrote a book called Stand Up Speak Out. When I said, This isn’t a New York Times bestseller. It is a national bestseller. It is my bestseller. I sold 20,000 copies for the platform. I make $200,000, mostly cash. I thought, Man, I have died and gone to heaven. This is the best deal ever in history. And everybody wants my autograph. I am a famous stud. I have a ride theater. So the good bad news is I kept writing and I did a lot of books. Finally meet Jack Canfield. I’m talking to six people out in that the Manila conference. He comes up at the end of the seminar, says, I’m good. I can’t tell. I said, I know who you are, Dr. Canfield, I’m a fan of yours. You wrote 100 always Bill Self esteem in class. Yes. Or you really do know me? I said, you sold room 70,000 books. I’ve sold 60,000. So we’re pretty close. He said, You taught me how to do those stories. And I taught him how to do heart touching, soul penetrating stories because I learned from Cavett. Robert, who taught myself Cavett was the dean of speakers, created this. I’m told the speaking business worldwide is 30 billion. It may be 3 billion. I don’t know, whatever it is, it is. But, you know, Cavett taught me how to sell from the platform. I started cleaning up. I never really knew how to make money and sell, but I did it with heart touching, soul penetrating stories. Abbreviated Jack and I get together, 144 publishers say, Hit the road, Jack. I said, Look, he started this class at Harvard. It’s okay if you don’t like him, but I’m a nice guy. Wonderful. We’ve been best friends forever. The point is, is you know, I taught him, I did stories. We finally got a little publisher health communication. Take us. They said, if you will sell the books at $6 each and pre-sell 20,000 copies, we’ll take your little book. And a year and a half from now. Well, holy cow. A year and a half. And then, you know, so I had to learn how to do interviews quick. So I interviewed I’ve done chiropractic, I interviewed all the docs or make it over a million a year with what are called cash practice. And I sold $3 million worth of that product so I could float us until we got going to get to him. That’s the very over generalized, abbreviated story.

Peter Winick That’s fantastic. So I so take us down the path of back in the ancient days of the 70s and 80s and maybe a little bit into the 90s, there was literally this whole massive industry of selling from the stage, selling from the platform, and the model.

Mark Victor Hansen Would be.

Peter Winick Come to some arena here. The Speaker You know, maybe you paid a couple of bucks and then literally in the back of the room with the knuckle buster credit card machines, there was an army of folks that would be happy to suck the dollars out of your pocket, selling you all kinds of cool stuff that doesn’t happen anymore. Or it happens very little. But talk about, you know, the fact that you’re still here winning in this market, right? Which is a totally different market. How have you seen the business evolve from old school back of the room to online to now Covid’s thrown a wrinkle into the world. But tell us what you’ve seen and what’s been working for you as of late.

Mark Victor Hansen Well, first of all, back to the 70s, Zig Ziglar had a book out called Biscuits, Pump Handles and Fleas, which changed into See You at the Top, because that title didn’t work for him, refused to hold the book for one hour on the platform. And he said, This is my new book and you got to have it. And everyone thought he’d forgotten his book. No, Zig is that he was a number one salesman. An organization with 7000 big and I did a lot of seminars together, like we did 10% of the audience in Boise one time together, 10% of the population of Boise, 10,000 people.

Peter Winick Like 10% of the audience or 10% of the whole city.

Mark Victor Hansen Population. 10,000 people came out of Boise, Idaho, just to hear Mark, Victor Hanson and Zig Ziglar. And well.

Peter Winick Now and this is before Netflix. There wasn’t much else to do in Boise then, right?

Mark Victor Hansen So between you and I, there’s still not what you do. I got like I’ve got I’ve got relatives there. But the fact is that Zyxel I just remember his number that day, 58 boxes of books because you know, and I sold a gazillion dollars worth of this stuff. I think I walked away with $180,000. So I was happy. And then we go to dinner and Zig says, Well, you’re going to buy dinner. And I go, I help sell your stuff, you know? Anyhow, he thought he was more celebrity than I am, and God bless the right.

Peter Winick And I love that that two rock stories each sell like a couple hundred grand worth of books. And only in the speaking world would they be fighting over who’s buying dinner that night. Because I’ve seen that.

Mark Victor Hansen No, no, no. He wasn’t fighting. He was making sure I was going to pay.

Peter Winick That’s what I’m saying. Right.

Mark Victor Hansen Because I’m 30 years younger than him. So he was sure that I should pay and he sure I should apprentice. And I was look, I’m rich. I was happy to pray. I was so, so know where we are today. We got three books out at the same time. Ask the bridge from Your Dreams, Your Destiny. We’ve got a new book out called You Have a Book In You, and we’ve got a whole virtual seminar on it, because I think that’s where all of us got to go. Share with Mitsy Perdue. I did a book called How to Be Up and Down Times, because we are in this thing. You and I can discuss how long we’re in it for. Peter I’d like to hear it, but I don’t think we’re going to get out of Covid until spring or summer next year with people flying and everything. So the point is, our publisher calls up. When we did ask and said, Hey, look, you come on April 28th, which is just a few days ago, and said, Covid’s got it. So the bookstores are all closed, what are you going to do it? I said, Look, my whole life I’ve taught take adversity, turn into advantage, take trials and turn them into to trial.

Peter Winick Time to eat your own dog food, Yeah.

Mark Victor Hansen Yeah. But, hey, by the way, I just see, you know, I’m the only guy that ever license books. As far as I know, somebody may follow the path that I created that we. The chicken soup for the soul dog food. We sold $157 million with the dog for you or chicken soup for the soul dog food. We got 50% because of me. So I am the marketing guy of the marketing team. So. Yeah, Yeah. I just want you to understand, I’m very proud of what I pulled off because everyone said you can’t license books, you can license anything. Sure. But back to this report. This column said there’s only one place to sell at Amazon. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? And I thought, wait a second. You’re asking me to keep your publishing house alive because the big house just so right. This is bad times. 8000 people got fired at Random House. This isn’t like.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, this is not good.

Mark Victor Hansen And this is what And by the way, I have to love books like you do. And both of us are a constant in lots and lots of books. I’ll never stop loving them. I’m an addict. And I my parents were illiterate Danish people in English. And so I’m really sensitive that everybody’s got to get literate. Everyone needs to read. All leaders are reader good, all readers or leaders. That’s the old cliche by our friend Jim one or JFK. One of those two guys said it. So the point is, we started doing podcasts and we started, you know, 1 or 2 a day and we asked everybody podcasting like we’re doing with you, Can you give me 2 or 3 other people? And then, you know, now we do 4 or 5 podcasts a day and our book sales, we’re one of the top four, an all categories, three books at once. Nobody’s done that before.

Peter Winick So, so let’s, let’s push on that a little bit. So one is the beauty about being a guest on a podcast is it’s not hard for you to be a guest, right? I mean, there’s not a lot of prep, not a lot of work. You hit record and we have a nice little conversation. The exchange here is I’d love to have you on a guest because you’re an interesting person, right? I bring the audience. You talk to that. Right. And you can do that 4 or 5, six times a day from the comfort of your home like that.

Mark Victor Hansen Because a lot of.

Peter Winick You’re not miss in airports.

Mark Victor Hansen I don’t miss airports. And right now I don’t want to get on airplanes because they’re petri dish. Yeah. Luckily, I know my wife. She’s got lots of degrees. One is nutrition. And if you’re taking your metabolic like zinc and magnesium, you’re not going to get this, which is corruptness of the. I’ve got to be careful. Your wife may be a medical doctor. You may be. I don’t.

Peter Winick Know.

Mark Victor Hansen No community is not telling the truth as far as I’m concerned. So because we should be all over this thing and we got to open it up and I’m a flaming free enterprise. Or if you hadn’t got it and I believe you’re going to be productive, you got to be massively productive.

Peter Winick I mean, I got a good 309 bestsellers.

Mark Victor Hansen I mean, let’s just say most guys who I wrote one book 26 years to, what were you doing the rest of the time?

Peter Winick Yeah, right. What were you doing the other 99% of your days? So I want to go. There’s so many ways we can go, but I want to go back to licensing, right? So, yeah, so my world with my client base is. Traditionally be to be so authors, thought leaders, academics selling business content into businesses. So totally different business model. You’re more in the B to see where it’s selling valuable. You’re providing value in exchange to individuals paying with their own dollars. So very different cadence, very different sort of rhythms and things in that business. But licensing is licensing. So I push a lot of my clients to consider licensing from the perspective of, Hey, you know, you’re given a you wrote a book, you’re giving a keynote, you’re doing some advisory work with big Company X, they would love the rights to a sliver of your content to be used in a well-defined way internally in their organization. Right? And people. Yeah. So people don’t realize that they get so enamored with the book. Very, very few people you’re one of them actually make money on books, right? The book is the entree into other things like licensing. Give me how did you first discover or what was your first sort of foray into licensing Good, bad or ugly? Because you’ve obviously figured out how to do it properly. I’m going to.

Mark Victor Hansen You’ve asked two questions at the same time. So let me go to that second and the first. All of us are in B2B, which I’m in a lot of B to B, I consult to a lot of big companies or consulting, and I’m not allowed to use the name because we’re about to come out with a commercial. They want it to be a surprise. But one of the three biggest companies in America agree with that, that. Okay. And they’re a, B to B company. And their market is going to help because the supply chains in America are dead. Now, I’ve heard that some two of the mastermind podcast and what they did is they came to Chris Clark and said, look, you guys are some of the best thinkers. You’re leading Edge, you’ve done the best selling capes ever. Told how to think bigger, never thought you could think. Do you see a way out of this? I said, Yeah, yeah, we got to go B2C and here’s the products. We can go key because Amazon is killing your business in case you guys don’t have it. Yeah. Shipping 50% of everything sold in America to go, What are we going to do? And I said, You’re going to license my thinking. We own the trademarks. We own the P. By the way, I did that seminar is, you know, I wrote a book, A11 minute Millionaire with Bob Dylan. And we get ways of IP that you ought to be making money. In other words, B2B is one way you’re exactly correct. But there are 38 ways. There’s a lot to this thing, and most people don’t study the full market. And I’m back to how I got into licensing one weekend, because as you and I have talked, we’re both omnivorous readers. I’m reading Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s book at the time. We got five kids and six grandkids. But at the time, my little girl was watching E.T. call home. So you see how all this is. And when I came in, the licensing is probably 1999. Anyhow, I read it and they made $800 million with it. But the two boys made it. Their partners, as you know, made a billion and a half for licensing. And I went into Jack’s office on Monday and I said, Jack, we’re going to go licensing. He said, what they’ll do, you know, I said, Nothing. I stick a buck. He taught me everything’s a system and it’s a circle. So you’re either inside or outside. We’re outside. But in a year I will know everything there is about lighting. I go to the natural lighting, so I will master this thing. I’ll find out who the 3 or 4 best people are and we’re going to partner with them. And, you know, two of them turned me down and one took us in. And we just did we did keep licensing. The fun one for me was when I’m nine years old, I sold greeting cards for American Greeting Card Company. I sold 376 boxes in one month because I wanted to buy a bicycle and we sold on consignment. It was a Boy Scout Life magazine. 40 years later, they come to my office, they come in their little Gulfstream and say, Hey, we want you guys to write greeting cards. Jack said, What do you know? I said, Nothing. But it’s another part of the license, right? We sold 897,000 boxes of Christmas cards. The first year that I wrote, Jack okayed them because he said there’s no better editor in the world than Jack. I mean, sure, he knows Latin, he knows English. He knows Chinese is Chinese. All right. You didn’t know it. And he’s brilliant. You know, I’m teasing with you in the audience because everyone knows Dr. Campbell. So the point is, we got into licensing and it just went crazy because nobody had ever licensed books. And I guess why? I mean, that’s where we are today. If you got to being in the crisis equals opportunity with the biggest crisis. Peter So we got the biggest opportunity. And ladies and gentlemen, I’m telling you, I really want you to catch the first thing I said in answer to Peter’s two questions was be to be you’ve got to be awake to be to see. And you take a piece of whatever the company doesn’t be to see for like in cash and in stock is it I’m now going into company after company all by Zoom and are having the same problem because they can’t think you know Earl might go talk to all of us and lead the field. If you ask most people what they think, it would be speechless.

Peter Winick And that the truth. Right.

Mark Victor Hansen Because the first words the first thing I said to you, you’ve got a great library behind you. I mean. Yeah, well, I don’t know how many you poured through and read, even if you have them. Jim Roland used to say, I feel smarter walking into the room.

Peter Winick Right. I’ve actually read him. Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe.

Mark Victor Hansen So I’ve read both some parts of 50,000 books because you’ve got to read fast to do as much as I try. And then God gave me a great memory. And the more you use your mind, you know, the more you get to use it.

Peter Winick Yeah, Yeah. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.

Peter Winick So what are the So we talk about platform. We talk about licensing what are the other opportunities that you’re involved in or taking advantage of now that maybe surprised you right Like you know, so the stage is closed, the platform closed. We’re all living in a digital only world by, you know, by new. Choice of words, Right? We’re all literally under lockdown, but where do you see it going? Where do you see the next five years of content and thought leadership and monetization in such?

Mark Victor Hansen I love your question. I hope I’m big enough to answer it and do it linearly enough. First of all, I think every company is going to need products that are going to have to have. And remember, I said Chicken Soup is a brand with Jack and I sold it for $63 million. What we sold was the trademark. We didn’t sell my buildings. We didn’t sell.

Peter Winick No hard assets, no real.

Mark Victor Hansen Hard assets. The point is, my wife and I have created everything like she owns Skinny Life, which she not only got skinny life as a as a trademark. Nestle came back to us and said, look, if you’re just stay out of milk products, we’ll pay for all the rest of the licenses. Because we did clothes, we did every other aspect of it. And now suddenly we’ve got a major company come to us and say, Well, what else would you like to do? And I can’t take you to the products. They’re brilliant. They could. They could make so much money. You can’t even start to believe it because these guys literally don’t know how to think in these big companies.

Peter Winick It’s amazing.

Mark Victor Hansen My heart. But at one level. But at another level, they say, what would you do? And I go, I will tell you, but here’s what it costs. Here’s how.

Peter Winick Exactly.

Mark Victor Hansen And we write. Luckily, we can write. We write a 3 or 4 page letter and say, here’s all the ways to delineate it.

Peter Winick Sure.

Mark Victor Hansen Let me just break that down for everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, when you want a license, go online and type in licensing. When you want to do a beat, a big company or big, that’s going to take a B to B company to a, B, to B, B or C, which we’ve done again and just last week. Go online and it’ll blow your socks off how many ways to do it? And then if you want to be a celebrity endorser, you’ve actually been on tour, all this stuff. So I typed in Celebrity Endorser and you start to look at stuff and at the very high level, the most ever paid for a book was Obama. He got $65 million from to do his book. Then he got $200 million from Netflix, which is Holy Roman.

Peter Winick Yeah, right.

Mark Victor Hansen Yeah. What does that mean and how do you unwrap that? But the point is, edit a celebrity endorser. You look at a guy like Rock or you look at Dwayne Johnson and start to read it, and then I’m working on guys like Michael Jordan, like because basketball and all that. But the point is, here’s all the things that Michael Jordan did and you start to look at him or the big guy, Shaq, who ship, you could check the text at Lakers and brought all the handicapped kids when I did Chicken soup for the handicapped and check is just grape Shaq makes 700 million a year and there’s zones and zones of that. And most of us you don’t think of yourself as a celebrity endorse. But most companies need thought leadership and they need somebody to articulate and be the spokesperson and take them through all the podcasting stuff. Because most chairmen I got to be careful with this because I love a lot of CEOs and CFO, all the C-suite that Jeffrey Hazlitt talks about, so articulate it. It’s probably those guys. Most of them don’t feel comfortable doing an interview with somebody like you. And I’m not saying that you are not intimidating me, but.

Peter Winick Right. Well, they’re afraid of a faux pas. They’re afraid of saying something stupid. They’re afraid of, they violated an SEC regs. It’s just about training. You got to. You got to just spell out for them what the parameters are. Getting a little bit of training. I think one of the things and I’d love to get your take on this as well is there’s this whole, you know, so the speaking business got blown up in March. We don’t know when and if it’s coming back. It’s not coming back quickly and it’s not coming back. Right. So there are a lot of folks that are really wonderful on the stage and they’ve mastered that craft. I mean, they are just masters and then they’re struggling to move online and digital and all that. And there’s two problems that I’m seeing. One is some of them just aren’t any good online. Like they didn’t come out with a beginner mindset. Yeah, they’re not good in a digital format. You know, give them a stage in a ballroom in Vegas and a thousand people in the music and the theatrics and all that. Bang, they kill it. You put them on a zoom call, you’re like, was kind of no good, right? So you have to come at this with a beginner’s mindset and say. Am I delivering at the level that I need to be delivering in the constraints of the modality of digital? Right. So you seeing things there?

Mark Victor Hansen Perfect. Two things. Number one is I am getting paid to do these podcasts. Australia called me the day Australia is not allowing any flights to actually in or out until January 2nd.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Mark Victor Hansen I’m a flaming free enterprise or I hate socialism and I’ve worked in China for 22 years, four times a year for three years ago, and I’m against communism 100%. I teach free enterprise there, but in Australia they hired me because all those people in the airlines are kaput. They paid me $10,000 for two hours last Saturday. So people will pay to do very specific things. And what I taught in this little book, I said, Hey, look, we’re going to do $50 trillion worth. Everyone go to my website, market dance. I come get a free copy of up ought to be up and down times by myself. Commit to produce, produce chicken. The point is, I teach business like how we’re going to track your cash. Right now in America, they need 22 million people. What I’m training for safety. I told you in Australia they need 2.2 million right now just to take care of business. Do we do all the garbage, turn metal? The metal blasted apart and now there’s all these companies that don’t know how to keep their staff encouraged. And I’m getting paid to do podcasts with them because I’m asking for a salary. Sure. And I’ve done really well in four marketplaces, one of which is chiropractic. And we’re doing a lot of that and we’re doing a lot of network marketing culture, but the willing to pay. And so it’s amazing. And then the guy we all have to look at as speakers is in some people may or may not like them and that’s there. I love this guy and I’m a friend. So is Joel Osteen. Every Sunday he comes out and remember, he had 40,000 people every Sunday, every Friday night, every Saturday night week. And then he did one major seminar on world, you know, once a month. And. And he had the biggest following ever, but now he is talking to nobody. And you train himself to be eloquent. Excellent, funny. And yeah, somebody out there laughing because the government came in the first Sunday. I watched them when we closed down in March. I don’t know if you’re a fan of Joel like I am, but he had like 40 or 50 people there. And I said, No, no, no, you’re not allowed to have any. Yeah, yeah. You came in that Sunday and closed them and used them as a gigantic mark. I mean, so forth.

Peter Winick Well, and it’s and it’s interesting because you’re seeing, you know, baseball being played without fans and someone like old Stanton who thrives on the energy. It’s a different game. I mean, coming on like nobody likes to speak in front of an empty arena, and that’s no fun, right? So you’ve got to recreate that energy and that effort and all that.

Mark Victor Hansen So cool. It’s back to, you know, I did a whole set tapes on this called Visualizing is realizing that they’re selling stuff, but you got to be able to see the audience it’s there That’s not. And let me just give the example. Back in 1974, I started killing it with Mike Farrell and a few guys you may or may not know. I can go through their names, but Century 21 creates this thing called a franchise. You know, the first real estate franchise on Remax XP. I just did the.re XP event, which is not the fastball, but it’s fast and they are an electronic real estate company and open up the whole world, which is really smart. That is a really smart company. Yep. The mind blower is first time I’ve got 5000 people in front of me and there it’s dark. I can’t see one person and I order enough get to say turn up the house like, you know, keep the green is big. And my I live in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s the biggest guy on TV here so many people. And but Keith, I did a book together and he told me a joke right before I go onstage. And I repeated the joke. I am laughing my butt off and upset. We bought all your books and tapes only because you couldn’t control your own laughter. But that was the first time I had learned to talk to an audience you can’t see, right? Right. Everybody that’s speaking has to learn to talk to an audience that they can’t see.

Peter Winick Or which is a different skill. And you have to work on that skill. You have to totally work.

Mark Victor Hansen Exactly. Or pretend you’re like our dear friend Jim Scoble, who is literally blind and yet he’s one of the more articulate speakers that emanates out pure wisdom. We got him in our book Ask the Bridge Where Dreams Your Destiny. Because you said, you know, he wrote a book called The Ultimate Gift. If you haven’t read it, you all, you want to read it. But I wrote The Ultimate gift. I wrote the foreword to it, and he talks and I said, This is so clear. It’s got to be a movie. Well, he made a 100 million on movie. The last line in an interview I did with Jim was you said, I now write books that I can’t read, that I can’t watch. And he said, If I live 100 years, Mark, I’ll never stop thanking you for sourcing and serving me to believe that I could do that as a blind guy.

Peter Winick That’s fantastic.

Mark Victor Hansen What That’s what makes each of us have we feel we’ve got to go help somebody else who can’t. I mean, yeah, I didn’t know I was going to help him and get that kind of accolade. And I wasn’t looking for the accolade because I didn’t know it was coming.

Peter Winick That’s amazing. That’s amazing. When he was on that note, we’re running out of time here, so I just want to take a moment to thank you. The energy is contagious. You know, the name is very well known and the accomplishments are amazing. So thank you so much for joining and sharing and let us into your world today. Thanks so much, Martin.

Mark Victor Hansen Can I offer two things?

Peter Winick Sure.

Mark Victor Hansen I’d like everyone to go to Mark Victor hanson.com and get a free how to be up and down times and share it with all your clients and friends, if you would. And then number two, is that because we did this book ask we’re creating remember we got to innovate new stuff. So we innovate and my wife and I ask the book club.com and it’s free. And once a month starting the next one will be in August. You know, you get to go to our book club ask the book club.com and we want everyone to become a master and ask for because you’re saying that some of the people out there say well I’m an introvert, I’m shy. I don’t have the company, I don’t know how to handle whatever their excuse ology is. You may remember Zig Ziglar was a total introvert. I mean, he claimed all the time on stage and he was flamboyant and flaming. And you came off stage and, you know, he’d go down. I go, it’s not the same guy or not.

Peter Winick But it wouldn’t happen then. Right, Right, right, right. Great stuff. Well, anyway, thank you so much for joining. I appreciate it. Thanks for your time.

Mark Victor Hansen Love to do it again. Thanks, Peter.

Peter Winick Thanks. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. To reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.