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.

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We fled Iran in fear of persecution and came to the United States, eventually landed in the U.S. I was about five and King of the Heap in Iran. Like you know, had my little gang, very safe place, you know. I would leave during the days. I would come back as a five-year-old. No problem. Dinner was when I came home. It was great, but coming to this country I realized it was during Iran-contra and I was no longer top of the heap. I was a second-class citizen, wow and that gave me a chip on my shoulder, gave me a lot of grit, you know, getting the crap kicked out of me every day at school built character, but I decided that, hey, you know, this is one of the greatest countries in the world from an economic standpoint. There is opportunity there. I see people with wealth.

When the decision is made, the doing becomes effortless. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that once you become resigned to achieving the results that you want to achieve and you decide that you are willing, you don't might not have to do it but that you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, very little can stop you. Sure, if you die, get hit by a truck or something, maybe. Outside of that, I wasn't willing to take no for an answer and there was zero indication if you saw it in my face that I wasn't willing able or interested in doing the impossible.

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.

The world is predatory. All you got to do is look at nature. Things don't work the way that we always want them to. So making money and I make a lot more now that I get to keep than I did back then because I was burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, is mainly because I don't publicize everything that I do. That I'm quieter about the things that I do and the real people the guys that are making the billions and billions of dollars don't always end up on the Forbes top 10 top 100 list.

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.

Look, all this stuff that we're talking about is formulaic. There's a formula to persuasion, there's a formula to influence there's a formula to sales, but there's no formula for being a real person, there's no formula for authenticity. And at the end of the day, nothing sells better. I don't care what it is pills, houses, cars, than just being an authentic person.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. So if you're more experienced at selling on Amazon, you're going to spend some time helping the guy that's just coming on to the course, if you're just coming onto the course, you're going to learn. And then once you've learned a little bit, you're going to help the other guys, but you start building a network.

I think one of the things that we teach that's so important is that you have to have four pillars, four legs to any table and one of those legs has to be something that brings you stability. You have to have stability. Eventually, you want to get out of selling your hours, but it's okay to sell your hours for some time until you can get the other three pillars situated. So one thing's going to be your career, your job, whatever you're doing it doesn't matter.

Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business. To launch your business on amazon we teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product rank, how to find a product. The number one problem that people have on amazon, they're like dude I want to sell on amazon. I see everyone's making money. I hear the stories. I watch the videos but I just don't have a product and I tell people that's the best place to be. Just so you guys know you don't have to spend any money to start an Amazon business, to launch your business on Amazon. We teach you how to get reviews, how to get your product ranked how to.

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

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.

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?

So the people who are seeking to start a business to sell it, generally don't succeed. The people who never think about selling a business will have a rude awakening when it comes time to sell their business and what they can get for it. With that said, you want to be somewhere in the middle.

The only reason why those dudes are interesting is that they're defying death by being around these killing machines. Those animals are killers and the reason why it's interesting, why there is a purity to that interaction is because it's dangerous.

But rather that they've known themselves they understand themselves that they understand their strengths and they understand their weaknesses and they've come to a place of reconciliation with who they are no. They know that purity rubs off on a person. Yeah, people like if you meet somebody like that you just can't help but want to help.

I think in general I’ll tell you the number one problem that most entrepreneurs have and that’s that they have the old way of thinking. Most entrepreneurs think to themselves dude I’m gonna Randy, I’m gonna go out there and create a better mousetrap and the world that’s going to beat its way to my door and quickly they learn that in this world of social media and all these types of things that nobody gives a that you have a better mousetrap.