You're now listening to Hack and Grow Rich with Shahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Is it true that you cut the cards in your living room for the first thousand games? Is that a true story? Yes close. So we did a thousand games was our test market and we had some assembled them by hand. Well, the one problem we had was just before our launch, the printer screwed up and sent us the wrong cards. And they were 500 cards per game at a thousand games. With 500000 cards when they were supposed to come sorted game a game of 500 cards, they came completely wrong. So we had to hand sort.... you're laughing man. It was like oh! I thought it was I have admitted. It's the only tantrum I ever threw. I mean, the printer calls me up. Can't get it done. I launched the phone but we had to figure it out and it would be like and the math is 9580 playing card decks of playing cards.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, one of the interesting things that I think most people don't understand is that you don't have to be a graphic designer to have great art. Similarly, with technology, you just need to be able to hire specialized knowledge. There are lots of people smarter than me who know how to do engineering, who know how to build the parts of the device, and one of the things now I'm looking at this, which is super interesting, which I don't know if they're doing now is that I made sure that none of the parts of this device that we built came in touch with the plastic components of it because I didn't believe in heating the plastic. So if you look inside the device this is all-ceramic. So we built ceramic. There's glass, there's steel inside here. I'm going through this, so I'm looking at this. I'm like dude, I did a great job building this thing. It was a nice device to build but you can hire people, so anytime you want to build anything there are people out there nerds who live on that technology kind of thing and they'd love to do that without burning yet.

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.

started as an adolescent in Iran at five. I was born in Iran. We moved to Los Angeles eventually as refugees. We were political refugees when we moved here and solidly poor here. In Iran, we were well to do. Here, we were poor and we managed somehow to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood an Enclave of Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, which at the time was more hippie than up-and-coming. And my folks managed to buy a house that was an absolute disaster of a house in those days. And pretty soon around us, I saw huge houses going up. I saw great wealth coming in. It was the Reaganomics era trickle-down economics wall street wealth. Hollywood was at an all-time high. All this money was coming in but I was still the poor son of a dry cleaner. The kids growing up around me their folks had Mercedes Benzes. They would go out to restaurants.

At that time, Richard, there was a drug called Ecstasy or MDMA, one of the most popular drugs. It was outlawed in the United States. It was scheduled, I believe sometime in 1983- 1985, sometime in the 80s. Ecstasy was banned. It went underground, was made illegal and what happened was that this particular drug was very difficult to synthesize. So the supply mostly came from outside the US, Europe and because of the whole Reagan say no to drugs era, you know, the Nancy Reagan say no to drugs period. They were cracking down and the supply had dried up. They had put a stop to drugs coming into the United States. The drug dealers were out of drugs and the people who wanted them couldn't get them. So there was a huge demand but very little supply.

Great question! I think one of the best ones is trust but verify. I had another teacher of mine. This writer named Stuart Wilde, who became a mentor of mine for some time always said don't play your hunch. It'll have your lunch. I'm not sure if that was his quote but it made sense. He taught us a lot of the fundamental principles of money through playing blackjack. Believe it or not, he felt that life and business were very much like a casino and if you could learn how to master that type of interaction you'd be able to handle business. So we did a lot of work inside casinos where we went to casinos and learned how to gamble and play blackjack and I have a friend, who's still an instructor under he was understeer wild he learned how to play blackjack and poker and all those games.

You've gotta have swiftness. You have to have efficiency. You have to be able to be okay with confrontation. You have to be okay having thick skin. You have to be okay in your case having trolls. Some people are going to hate you. Some people are not going to like you. It doesn't matter. You have to be on rails moving towards the destination and the best way to do that is as you've very well discovered my friend is by not taking it seriously.

But if you go to a restaurant and you're not happy, ask for the manager. You will be amazed at how far they will go out of their way to help you out. Smile. Always smile. Don't be aggressive. People are uncomfortable with tension. So it's not going to be to your advantage in these situations to create tension most of the time. So don't have tension. Just smile. Maybe start with a compliment. You know what, I know that the waiter is working their butt off tonight, I can see how busy you guys are and I just got to tell you those bread rolls that you brought us were spectacular, but we've been waiting 45 minutes for our food and I just wanted to know if there's anything you might be able to do for us.

Buddy look, you can take your shots, call yourself a victim and fall into that victim mentality or you can reach down, grab your balls, get up and fight. You can do that. You can do that. You have a set of balls for a reason, so you can get up and you can fight. You can swing. You might get knocked down again and I did over and over again until one day I didn't anymore but you learn. You become tougher. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger and it's that grit, that resilience, that ability to create this thick skin that makes you invincible. It's what made our ancestors invincible.

The problem is a lot of the stuff has become highly marketed by a lot of the self-help gurus that are out now. So they want you to think that having a passion drive and mindset is what you need. No, that's not what you need. You need to do the work, you need to roll up your sleeves, and do the work. That's what you do. That's what works, what works is doing the work getting out there. And you know, if you're a real estate agent, knocking on doors, and you know, meeting people in your neighborhood, and building your network, and calling the banks and doing whatever those things are that agents and brokers do, but it's just doing the work. There's nothing more effective than doing that.

I don't think electric cars should be categorized in the same category as cars. I think they are an appliance. When you drive a Tesla, that thing is so scary fast and so perfect and so smooth you go into the compartment but what it lacks in my opinion I'm probably gonna get hate mail. A lot of people hate me for this. But it lacks soul, it lacks the soul of having that clutch, it lacks that imperfection that comes from years of like up engineering from like Italian guys and Germany that are like you know they're greasing the things. These are appliances made by tech companies that are perfect at doing what they do. They are surgical. Their speed is you know uncomparable. So what you're facing now is an industry that is facing a crisis and being disrupted by an appliance and I think that's

Think what's exciting about this conversation of aggregators is before this became a thing where the stock market was pushing money saying go buy companies and roll them up, you had to go find a suitor. You had to go find a similar company, a bigger company in your niche and say hey, look I got a soap your biggest soap seller. Let's buy my company.

I was strategic if I was Procter & Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. I'd be like hey, why do I want to wait for these aggregators to pick up these companies. For me to just come in and either A has another big behemoth come and compete with me that's got more brands and more successful than us. Why don't we go in and instead of offering them 10, I know the aggregators are offering a 10 time earning multiple why don't we just offer 15 and take any significant brands off the table now. What if that were to happen, wouldn't that be interesting? Where would that take the market?

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.

So whatever service business you're in or product business those reviews show up and they're probably not on your platform. I have hundreds of reviews on Shaheen, on my computer but they're not necessarily on amazon, on google maps, or each website because I don't own all those platforms. I have to go dig them up, put them in a graphic, put a photograph on them, put them in an email like we're talking about 20 years worth of reviews.

So learning the subtleties and nuances and the cultural differences wherever you're at is super important. Similarly, you know if you're going to be negotiating with gangbangers there's a culture there. If you're going to be negotiating with corporate business people, there's a culture there.

Everything is possible. I truly believe that not just as a meme but somebody said if you believe you can or if you believe you can't you're right and so a lot of that comes down to mindset and the better question maybe is the mindset still possible and the answer is of course yes. Things change with time.

Are you planning on going out there and making it be like a casino like hey, I'm gonna throw you know chips on these numbers, and if it hits my number's great, if not then I guess this wasn't meant for me, or are you gonna go out there and no matter what it takes, get that win? You're going to make that nail go through that piece of wood. If you're going to use a hammer, a sledgehammer, a shotgun, your wrist whatever it is, don't use your wrist but a rock whatever it is that nail is going to go through.

There are two major themes that I picked up. There is the adaptability theme and I love this. This is so key for negotiation as well. Um, it's really important to plan and prepare and have everything done and build your fundamental skill set and all that kind of stuff. But if you're not adaptable, it's the way that the negotiation moves and shapes, then you'll lose out on a lot of value.

Like there is a risk. There's risk involved in each person has a different scale of the risk that they're willing to take and whether it's fighting, whether it's Covid, whether it's business, life, whatever risk is inherent and as a former fighter I went into it knowing I'm risking my health. Okay, I could have brain damage, I could get knocked out, could break a limb, could get stitches, could fracture my eye socket.