You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. I know that there's, you know, there's a lot of people probably listening to the story with besides the fact that it's completely entertaining and they're going okay, George like what's the point here? And here's the point and the reason. I want you guys to start listening more is that success leaves clues. Look, I could go on and on about Shaahin, how like you had nothing, you know you hustled, you did whatever you had to do. I mean we're obviously, we're not promoting drugs and things. But that's not the point here. You guys got to listen to the fact that he was determined. He was recognizing certain things. He was persistent. But one of the questions I was going to ask you is what gave you this sense of, you know, from moving to the United States, right? And everything this constant sense of what looking for success and why that didn't appeal to you being a doctor, but why doing this did or being on your own, like, what were you when you grew up? Were your parents instilling in you this idea that you wanted to be successful or do you think you just because I mean, I'm not a big believer that people are just born wanting to be successful? It's usually a product of their environment. What is it that gave you that drive? What do you think?

You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, but again, you know, that's another quality of successful guys. I'm sure you are too, Rob, is you know that we're all fiercely competitive, right? So it's kind of one of the marks of being, you know, and alpha and being successful in business, you know, all the guys, I know who are successful in business are incredibly competitive human beings.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Ultimately I think you know, the beautiful thing that the beauty is when somebody can develop a small enough device that's a true vaporizer, a true digital vaporizer where you don't have to buy the liquids and you can just use plant, real green herb or real tobacco and that's when something nice is going to happen. I've seen devices that are the size of like a small cigarette pack that does that but, I'm yet to see what we were in the end phases of building, which is something that's the size of like an actual cigarette where you could put a small amount of plant matter and that's another great advantage of vaporization over smoking. When you smoke you burn it and you're done with vaporization that same tiny amount of plant matter can last you weeks and weeks and weeks so it's much more efficient on your materials as well it feels cleaner.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. And the first portable digital vaporizer. What year are we talking about? This one was probably late 90s early 2000, I think maybe 2000. I came out with this maybe somewhere around there and you'll notice that our patent is this drawer that pulls out and you would put your herbs in a disc. The disc goes in there, that was another one of my patents was herbs on disk and then you put it in here. And I mean this one, yeah, clearly it doesn't work. This is, you know, 20 years old or something but yeah, and then there's a digital readout. The first of its kind and you would inhale through here or through a tube that you put in there and then I remember, yeah, I mean we used all kinds of fancy things like LEDs were not a thing. We used them. There are cobwebs in here. How funny. When I was very big on building this and this feels like, it feels like a nice device. But the point is that we had two parts to our patents, one was being able to remove the plant matter from the heat source to prevent it from getting burned manually and the second was a digital temperature readout that allowed us to control the temperature with a thermoregulator so that the plants it was all around. You don't want to burn these plants. So you want to do it at a low temperature.

So I'll tell you one of the first things that I did. So once I made the pills and we got it into the hands of a few of these dealers. I decided that I was going to become a multi-million dollar company. I never thought we would break a billion dollars, but I thought hey, you know what, we're going to become huge and I thought one of the ways to do that was to license a picture of a famous person. So I walked in, I made a phone call. They said, what's the name of your company? I said, I just made it up on the spot. I said Global something or other and loved it. I got an appointment and I walked into this big Beverly Hills office. And it was a fancy office in those days and beginning of the 90s and it was, you know, the attorney that was representing this state of so-and-so. And the receptionist was this cute little Japanese girl in her cute little outfit. She brought me this little espresso with a little twist of something. Never had those before and put them on and I was like, this is amazing. And then the guy makes me wait about an hour right he calls me in and he's you know, the old school like, you know the agent guy. Yeah. Tell him it's what I could do for less than entire thousands.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Positive momentum and negative momentum. When things happen that are crappy, they seem to happen one after another. It affects your attitude, your mindset, everything. And when good things happen, the key is always to keep your foot on the gas and get back to basics. Always grind. Put people in your corner who support encourage you. And what you did, which I love is you were taking every situation in life, you even when you had the chip going back to what you said at the beginning of this interview, when you had the chip on your shoulder, you didn't say, what was it you said, you know what? I'm going to take what I don't have. And I'm going to make something of that. Everything you did was in your favor. Using it in your favor to drive you to do the things that would drive your success and I think that's a phenomenal lesson that everything is good and bad.

The greatest human disease, the greatest thing I think that can hold you back not only in life but particularly in business is seriousness. Seriousness is a disease. You gotta relax. You got to be able to enjoy things and not take things so seriously, not lean into things so much. Let things come to you. It's what professor Caldini talks about in his book Persuasion. Caldini being the great professor that wrote the Canon on Influence also talks about pre-suede, talks about the greatest sales are made before the guy before the prospect ever comes to you and it's all part of this process.

Sure, I talk about one in my book, where uh mysterious man shows up at my office mind you. I was in the maybe early 20s, maybe late teens. He's got an uh a duffel bag with a million dollars in cash and an invitation to go to Japan, to Tokyo on a private plane. What do you do? I went turns out that the mob was interested in taking over my company, maybe not the best move. Maybe maybe it was an okay movie. And there were several moments of self-doubt. I mean I could have potentially been killed. So there was a lot of that.

When you are in a flow state like Stephen Cutler talks about in his book The Art of the Impossible or The Rise of Superman. If you can get yourself into this optimal performance state, into this optimal state where you are in the flow, opportunities start coming to you. You find yourself becoming more in sync with things that are going on around you and that's called synchronicity. You want something and the person who can provide that thing to you appears sitting next to you on a park bench or he's the guy at a restaurant that you don't drop something and you pick it up and you're there. It's the way the world works. I don't know why it works that way. Some people say oh the art of it the law of attraction, the art of manifestation all that is. I'll tell you what it is. It's hard work. No substitute for it. No hack for hard work.

We talk about in my book Billion, how I became king of the throw pill cult - a three-step plan, which feeds in nicely to this and it's something a friend of mine Wayne Boss taught us, which is knowledge, courage, and action. When you are faced with a problem, a challenge, a project that needs to be undertaken, you need to know. Knowledge can be bought, knowledge can be borrowed, knowledge can be stolen, knowledge can be rented. Okay, in my case, I went out there, I rented it, I talked to people. I didn't have money, but I convinced them to give me that knowledge.

So now you're going to go buy $1,000 worth of product from distributor A This MLM. And for those of you guys who don't know, it's multi-level marketing effectively. And I hope I'm not offending anybody involved in multi-level marketing, but many people do believe that it is very similar to a Ponzi scheme. Because the people at the top of the pyramid, make money, every time product is sold down the line.

We talk about how to think not just outside the box but how to crush the box and create a lifestyle that you can be happy with by having more money, having more time, and knowing it's funny because I often tell people time is a new luxury. It doesn't matter if you have all the money in the world and you don't own your time, if you can't travel where you want, with who you want, doing what you want. If you can't stop what you're doing right now and go play football with your kid, hang out with your wife or your husband, or do whatever you want, you don't have freedom.

I always tell people to look, if you can take cash off the table as much cash as you can get, my recommendation for amazon sellers is, if you get aggregators or if you get into a position where you can create a bidding war bidding frenzy like happens with a lot of our companies and brands that we sell.

They could fail because they get pulled off the platform for violating service. There's a lot of great stories of 10-20000 a day and they just get canceled, just like what happened 15 years ago with the search engines. I knew people getting checks for five and ten thousand dollars from AdSense and all of a sudden they changed the algorithms panda slap in SEO terms and those checks stopped. So so I mean one small change or one small violation could end the business. That's probably how most of them lose because it doesn't cost anything to stay there. You just may not be number one and your sales will decrease.

And that's the mindset you want to be in. You want to be like you know what I'm I don't know what it's going to take but I'm adaptable. I know that the world is changing and I know that everything changes. Combat is a changeable environment. As Bruce Lee said, be like water. Why did he say be like water? Well, because water takes the shape of whatever it's in. It's unclear what water is going to be poured in, but if it gets poured in a vase then it takes the shape of the vase. If it gets spilled on the rock it goes around the rock. If it hits the soil, it gets absorbed in the soil, and if you can master that the world's your oyster.

People who do impossible things, people that are leaders are generally broad-stroke guys and what I mean by that part is that they don't tend to get overwhelmed by the details. The people who are generally not hugely successful are far more concerned about the specialization and the this and the that and the little details of things which is the reason why rocket scientists aren't the wealthiest people in the world.

But as a personality type, wealth comes in all ways. Um, there's a great great guy named Roger Hamilton. We need to have him on the show. He has a wealth dynamics test and he uses some of these archetypes to explain the wealth and what's interesting about studying Edison or Oprah or Branson is they have different personality types and me being an expert on personality mostly through handwriting and NLP is that you know I originally thought oh personality type is how I get wealthy but when you meet people that are complete introverts and they're still wealthy it makes you think oh maybe it's the strategy, not another personality type.

Is don't be an idiot. Don't go jump out of a window and be like I see I'm ben. Because gravity will win. There are certain natural laws that you can never go against and come out better for but intelligently there are little things that you can do.

Don’t lean in you know when you go into the world being like dude I’m gonna make a million dollars and I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna get the most beautiful girl. The guys that talk like that think like that guys and girls that talk like that think like that they never get it. It’s pushed further and further away from them.

Is that you always need people to captain the trains and to ride the boats and someone’s always got to drive the train and what that means is that the people that really want to build their lifestyle of freedom and with recurring revenue and using these algorithms and finding good mentorship and mentorship programs that they can be involved in to invest in their well-being but also invest in their personal development.