Welcome to Hack and Grow Rich’s another episode. I am here with my co-host today Bart Baggett, who's a success and motivational coach. He handles masterminds for groups of high-achieving individuals and is just an all-around interesting guy, but very well versed in what we're going to be talking about today, which is the language of wealth. And Bart, I remember you actually authored a book about wealth. What was the title of that?

Bart Baggett 00:41

This is actually the 20th anniversary this year, Shaheen, of the “Success Secrets of the Rich and Happy.” And again, if you're just tuning in, Shaahin, who is the host and brainchild of this, is one of the most successful people in so many different businesses from when he was 19 years old to sell pills, and you got a book on it to now hacking Amazon. So you're in really good company if you want to learn some tips on how to get wealthy. So Shaahin, the book, was about a combination of all the research I had done at that time in my life. We talked about all the different books on thinking and building businesses and changing your language and changing your emotional state from Robert Kiyosaki to Tony Robbins to NLP, like go find them all. But one of my favorite chapters was about language, it was about how to control that internal voice. And I think today's topic we're going to show and talk about some like five key ideas and concepts, and language words that you need to know if you want to have an intelligent conversation. Well, the people, but more importantly, how do you train your brain? How do you train your brain in the language of making money and not losing money?

Shaahin Cheyene  01:43

I love it. I love it. So, child of the 80s, and I know you live through the 80s, it's obvious. Do you remember? For all of you guys listening in or watching, there was this whole decade called the 80s where I'm gonna lean in like my mom does when she's about to tell me something. We did not have the internet. We did not have cell phones. And how did we follow? Do you remember who the guy was who led us all into the lives of the big ballers in that era? Who was the one guy that we all watched? That we were like, dude, wow, I'm gonna go to the show. Do you remember the show?

Bart Baggett 02:34

I'm gonna go with MTV Cribs.

Shaahin Cheyene  02:37

Okay, before MTV Cribs, that was the 90s.

Bart Baggett 02:39

I think I'm gonna miss this one, dude. I don't know. I can't wait to hear.

Shaahin Cheyene  02:43

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

Bart Baggett 02:45

Oh! that guy. Yes, it was like golden ever, the boats and the yachts, and he's always got this English accent: “We're on an island in St. Kitts, and today we're going to meet the great actor.” And that was him, right?

Shaahin Cheyene  02:58

Robin Leach, that's right. I mean, I remember being a pre-teen Iranian boy new to this country, and that would be on, I think, once a week. We would be glued to the TV watching that guy. His thing was champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Bart Baggett 03:29

That's so perfect. Well, it's funny, because when I was a kid, I never thought I would ever live that lifestyle because it was so out of reach to where I came from. I mean, a middle class from Dallas, Texas. A funny story, I was sitting in this gym with my dad, I was like 15 years old. I said, Dad, wouldn't it be great if we were millionaires? And he looked at me, he goes, we are. And I said we're not. We use coupons to buy pizza. We're sitting in a $ 10-month Elk Club. And he goes, no, we live like we're poor because we have assets. And I was like, I don't understand. But on the TV show, they have caviar and they have boats and helicopters. And it blew my mind because in that time even now you think a millionaire's a lot of money. But now the millionaire’s the new billionaire, the billionaire is the millionaire, but you can have a million-dollar asset. The book called “The Millionaire Next Door” really outlines a case that most of the millionaires in America are the guys that are driving 7-year-old cars, paid off houses, and they're never the guys flashing the bling. And all that opened my eyes about the language of wealth and how to think about that because it's not about the crib.

Shaahin Cheyene  04:39

Yeah, dude. It's like my circle of friends. I know lots of guys that I run with that are millionaires. And a handful of guys are, I would say, actual billionaires like real-world billionaires. And I don't mean like we always talk about the LA or Miami millionaires, right? With rented Lambos and the rented houses, and you know, like the one guy we were talking about. He's not from this country, but he's like an online guy. And what he does is, he rents a private airplane for five minutes or seven minutes where you can pay $500. You're in there for five or seven minutes, and you take all your Instagram photos in the private plane. And then you get off, of course, and the next rapper guy goes on. So this guy, he does that and then he flexes with all those pictures. So the people I know, interestingly enough, very few millionaires, I'm the only guy I know that rolls in Porsches. And I'll tell you something, the cars that I buy, and the cars that I take pictures with and whatnot, those cars make me money. I've never spent money on a car. A buddy of mine is like, dude, I just got this great deal on a lease on a Honda. You know, it's only like 380 bucks a month, and I only had to put $2,000 down. And I was like, dude, that's too expensive for me, right? I buy high-end cars that have cash flow. I buy high-end supercars. I buy them at a discounted rate because I know-how. And I drive them for a couple of years and then I always sell them for more than what I buy them for. So for me, driving my cars, I have to say cars are a symbol of coming up. And in my mind, growing up as a child, I had all those posters behind me of the Lamborghini, Khun Tosh, and of the Porsche. And, you know, as you said, it was so out of reach for me, right? coming to this country from Iran. I didn't really eat at a restaurant until I was in my teens. I didn't understand what that level of wealth was even like, but I aspired to it. So when I get into my Porsche and I smell the leather of the seats, and I turn it on and make the sound, and I take it out, and I feel like it hugs the road, that's a reaffirmation of the language of wealth for me. But with that said, knowing that I don't get attached to the cars, in two years when I'm ready or when somebody makes me an offer that I think is great on the car, I end up reselling it and then I'll buy another one. But my cars actually end up being an asset because they bring me profit. And even before that, I was buying cars here and there and renting them out and I'd had my pick, I could drive any car that I wanted. I could rent them out on one of the services like Toro when it was first starting. Now it's become a little bit of a pain, so I don't really do it because there are too many moving parts.

Bart Baggett 08:07

You value your time and know how much it'd be worth renting it out. But the fact is, for somebody listening, including me, I always had been told a new car is a liability. Payment is a liability and I want to collect assets and cash flows. One of the new wealth movements, especially among the 20 somethings, is just getting high cash flow properties in bad parts of the country so that they can immediately quit their jobs. So their goal is to quit their job, have assets, and have positive cash flow, which may not necessarily be the fastest way to the most wealth. In the end, as you know, real estate's gone up to 20% as we're recording this, so if you had a $2 million house in LA, it's worth 2.7 now. It's really gone up tremendously compared to a bunch of apartments in Iowa. So there's a lot of negotiation on that. But let me ask you about the car thing because we're talking about language. I don't think you could negotiate or know if you got a good deal if you didn't speak the language of exotic cars.

Shaahin Cheyene  09:05

Sure. I think you have to have that knowledge, but you can split up language in a couple of different ways. I think, Barton, and you might agree with this, that there is self-talk, how we talk to ourselves, how we talk to others, and how we hear what's spoken to us. So, I'm happily married, a beautiful wife, a beautiful boy and I know that oftentimes when I talk to my wife, despite the clarity of my language, what she is hearing is something very different than what I am saying. For our viewers and listeners to this podcast, we got to be clear about being able to first and foremost, as we enter this conversation about the language of wealth, understand that there are at least three parts. If you want to add to this, by all means, I'm making this up as I go along. But there is the language that we speak to others, the language that we speak to ourselves, and the language that we process and take in. Would you agree?

Bart Baggett 10:20

I've never heard of that model, but I think it's brilliant. So there's what’s said, there's what's heard, and then I would add even an umbrella, which is, if you don't have a clear understanding of any of the physical vocabulary words, you're going to be left behind. So, even if you're in a relationship, and you all speak the same language, your meaning of being loyal, and her meaning of being loyal may be different. And that becomes a valuable conversation, and then you can have a huge fight. Let's use the word respect, it's probably the most common one. Your definition of respect and mine are probably a little bit different. And more importantly, Shaheen, what makes you feel disrespected? Like that's a deeper conversation you had with your business partners, and your spouse's, because even though we think we know what the word means when we get to interpret it ourselves... So if I say, Shaahin, you really disrespected me on the show when you said this. And you're like, dude, I didn't, what do you mean? I said you're dead. And then you have this friendship, conversation, or relationship and you work it out. But that kind of disrespect or conflict is what causes wars, lawsuits, and partners to break up out of really good businesses even though I speak the same language. When I refer to vocabulary, I was literally saying that you. I can't go buy cars like you because I don't know the exotic and fast car business. I couldn't speak the language, they would see me coming to this because that’s the sucker, that's a newbie, that's a rookie. But you know, what I can speak is the language of Bitcoin, and real estate, and book publishing and all the other things that I'm an expert at. And 10 years ago, we weren't. So one of the lessons I want to convey is that, if you're new to any industry, real estate, or investing, or book publishing, or Amazon, you got to do a deep dive into the business. If you're in college, if you're studying golf, or podiatry, or anything, you're gonna acquire a big set of words. And when other people know those words, they immediately resonate with you. Just to give an example, I stopped by the Comedy Store recently, one of the comedy clubs, and immediately they knew I was professional because I spoke the language. I knew the inside language, five-minute set, seven-minute set, what's your hook, what’s your callback, I knew the language and they were like, Oh, this guy's probably pretty good. Otherwise, you're on the outside looking in hoping for acceptance. Now, obviously, no one here necessarily wants to be an actor, comedian, but whatever industry, I know you've made films, we can talk about budgets, films, sets, DPs, and art directors with confidence because I know the language. Without the language, I couldn't have the conversation. So given what you said, I would have that the language matches each one of those three categories that you mentioned.

Shaahin Cheyene  13:04

Interesting. So I think you're just talking about physical syntax, which could likely be learned. I would add to that and say how you carry yourself also is very important. In martial arts, you always know the newbies coming in because of how they carry themselves, how they breathe, how they perceive the people around them. When you walk into a studio if you've never sparred before and you walk into a new studio and you see a dude having his face punch and see his face, and they're like, holy shit, what the fuck am I just gotten myself into. And you look at everybody else and they're like, Oh, yeah, that's Joey. He gets punched every two seconds. You know what the difference is. You know that the guys that walk in the higher ranking always carry themselves differently. So they speak that language even though there's very little language spoken during sparring, but you're right, you need to know what a jab is, across, and an uppercut and you need to know what it takes.

Bart Baggett 14:14

So taking the jujitsu, or in my case, Shaolin Kung Fu, when we walk into that studio, we know what those terms mean. So there's no confusion and no hesitation, do a jab, do a block, do a sweep kick, because we know the vocabulary. Now we have the internal sense of Yeah, got that, uh, see what's coming. Yes, Master. So then, you've got all this conditioning of walking and having some kind of self-confidence, which you missed in the last episode. What we talked about was how to build competence and competence, so it's a combination of those. But if I'm fighting a double-degree blackbelt, I'm gonna have a little doubt. My internal voice would be like, Okay, what I get myself into. Compared to a green belt or white belt who just showed up now, I’d feel like I'm the teacher. I don't want to hurt him and it makes sense. My internal dialogue is different from defense to offense, depending on the context. But generally, the internal dialogue would be understanding what's going on in that space, which is a great analogy. The dojo is a great space because you take that in the real world, in real estate, in Bitcoin, in Amazon marketing, and you need to compete with all these different tools. I mean, think about all the words that you teach your students. And let's say they study, but then they don't actually implement it. Like they have doubt.

Shaahin Cheyene  15:29

Bart's talking about Amazon mastery, which is our amazon seller course, where we teach people how to succeed and create recurring revenue streams that are predictable that never fail, time after time. So we have a course and a mastermind, if you're new to this podcast, we're not advertising yet. In this podcast, we'll talk about a little bit at the end, if anybody's interested. But what we do is we teach people how to succeed using Amazon's platforms and how to hack that whole ecosystem of e-commerce starting with Amazon. And actually, what's interesting there, Bart is that selling on Amazon, especially for new sellers, and this applies across the board to people who have experience selling on other platforms, this is to your point that there's a whole different language of selling on Amazon that allows people like yourself or myself, who don't have the millions and millions of the big fortune 50 corporations that are my clients, the fortune 500 companies that hire me and they pay my rate, and I do the work for them. We can compete with those companies now because of that language. But I will challenge you here that language is not just words. Copy is very important when you're selling on Amazon and in your world of marketing online. You know how important copywriters are and in writing those words, but it also extends out to the images, how you display those images as a whole language on Amazon, how you take the photographs, pricing’s super important. What is the language of pricing for selling on Amazon? So I think this is a very powerful topic, Bart, that you've actually chosen because can language extend out beyond all these other things? We can even go into neuro-linguistic programming, the map is not the territory. How do we create maps where people are influenced? And is that a language?

Bart Baggett 17:50

Well, it is definitely a version of sorting and cutting language and analyzing the internal voice. If someone's not familiar with it, it's definitely not an easy thing to define, because now that it's been around for 35 years, it's in every communications book. And in every college in the country, you still hear elements from a premier like Tony Robbins and those people but the language of English can be directed like copywriting to end up for people taking action. And that, of course, is a whole copywriting conversation to how do you elicit emotions and curiosity to take action. Read that Amazon and go, Whoa, this must be the best because there are five testimonials because they're doing all the strategy that you teach. But here's my point, let's say that someone goes to college for being an architect, and they all pass. So they all have the vocabulary words of an architect, but why is one of them really successful? And why most of them can't get a job? That's what I'm talking about. So yes, you have the language to get in the room. If you're going to get into a new industry, you got to take the seminars in real estate, you got to take the seminars in Bitcoin, you got to do the work to be able to be conversationally fluent in a new business, but I think what you're talking about is how do you control your internal voices? How do you control your external state of mind? And how do you make sure that you're having full comprehension of these ideas? So when in your case we’ll go back to the car analogy, you know what a good deal is. And then you know how to negotiate it. I know one of your close friends is the master negotiator, right? How do you negotiate on a $200,000 car that you know is usually worth 280? How do you go about that, and that's an interesting conversation.

Shaahin Cheyene  19:32

Yeah, for those of you guys who don't know my book, which hasn't been released yet, but will be released, Billion How I Became King of the Thrill Pill Cult, I just got the hardcover copy. It has a foreword by Chris Voss, the FBI negotiator, who wrote Never Split the Difference. And I talk to Chris often about negotiation and those topics. It's interesting, and you're right, you do have to know the language. You do also have to have the three pillars that we talked about. Wayne has taught us, my friend and mentor Wayne Boss, who talks about knowledge, courage, action, gotta have the knowledge where to buy the cars. We know that exotic sports cars sell for up to 40% and less in other states. For example, a red Porsche in LA might not be a big deal, because everyone's got a red Porsche. Seemingly, it's not out of the norm where we're at. But in a small town, like one of the small towns in Florida, somebody might have traded in a red Porsche, and in the south in one of those states where nobody wants to red Porsche, nobody wants to stick out. And a lot of places like the Bible Belt, any of these places, you may be able to walk in and purchase one of these cars for 20 to 40% less in one of these states. And just by bringing it to California, after you pay the taxes and whatnot, you still have a great margin for profit and what you could do. And there are people who teach these types of car hacks and exotic car hacks, and there are all types of classes for the stuff which I don't espouse, I don't think you need it. I think most of the time these things are really just arbitrage just buying in a market that's cheaper and selling in a market where cars go for more. You can buy an exotic car. You have to be careful. You have to make sure it's okay and not damaged and all the stuff. That requires knowledge. But again, this is a life hack. You can drive a super rare exotic car without it costing you anything. And in fact, having it makes you money.

Bart Baggett 21:51

At the end of the day makes you money, but what about someone who doesn't have $200,000 to give that guy in Florida or that used car when you're in Florida. What's the way to get someone to loan you that money until you flip it and pocket those $40,000.

Shaahin Cheyene  22:07

There's financing. There's special exotic car financing. A guy named Ed Bolian has a site called Vin Wiki and he has a great YouTube channel that I watch regularly and he's awesome. He's like the car guy. So if you want to check out the Vin Wiki channel, that's VIN WIKI, I've got no affiliation with him.

Bart Baggett 22:30

I want to do that. I love it. Yeah,

Shaahin Cheyene  22:32

He shows you how to do that. And yet, you might be able to pick up cars that go for less than Texas. California is one of the worst places. There are some states where you would expect it to be bad. But in other states like Texas, Florida, you can actually get them for significantly less. If you also know how to shop, if you know how to negotiate, all these things kind of come into play where you can do that. But here you go. So now you're driving an exotic car, but it's actually making you money, right? You've learned how to hack the car that you drive for your transportation. You do the same with your house. I have a beautiful house near Abbot Kinney, which is a really fancy street in Venice. And when I buy my properties, what I do is I always make sure that there are either two buildings on there, or that I can build what's known as an ad, you are an additional attached unit. That's what I'm talking about, that I can rent and 100% of the time renting out and you pay the mortgage. So owning that house is free, someone's paying for it. I live on one side for free. And I rent out the other side. And so my house makes me money. Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I think as Robert Kiyosaki talks about this. He talks about how your house is not an asset. And I remember looking at this and going, dude, my house is totally an asset, my car, everything I do is an asset. And on top of that, you can apply that to every aspect of your life when you're shopping. I mean, we can do a whole podcast. I teach it in my course how to shop with little or no money and actually make money when you shop. It's completely possible. We do it all the time. There are all types of examples like selling on Amazon, there are all types of websites that will give you free or near-free product in hopes that you will buy it and drive the ranking up, and also for hopes that you will buy it and out of the principle of reciprocity. We talk about Cialdini’s influence and persuasion that you will feel obligated to leave them a positive review. Because of Amazon's Terms of Service, they cannot ask you publicly for a review. Although the Chinese-Russian hacking community tends to do that. Now they have no fear. But if Amazon catches on to that, they shut them down. So now what they do is that they just go based on reciprocity. So there are ways there are websites like Brad's deals, which free plug for the amazing site, which this guy has a whole team of people that go all over the internet finding these ridiculous deals and posting them on a newsletter. I've got a lot of students that just use that site to buy these deals as they'll buy from Walmart and they'll sell on Amazon. And they'll buy from Macy's if they're still in business. 

Bart Baggett 25:29

They'll buy hundreds or just buy single units. 

Shaahin Cheyene  25:32

Oh no, they buy by the hundreds, as many as the light on some products, they put limits on them. But you can do that and it'll pay for itself. Like when Facebook came out with the Oculus, the new Oculus headset, they were going on Amazon for 200 bucks more than what you could get them from Best Buy. So all my people were just buying them from Best Buy, and Best Buy put a limit because they realize that we're buying them all out. So they put a limit on them and then the people in our course figured out a workaround. So we have this mastermind within the course, which is awesome because all the people are active Amazon sellers. So it's like all of a sudden you have close to 100 people that are doing the same business as you are. And everybody puts their mind together to solve these tricky problems of e-commerce: selling on Amazon, selling on eBay, selling on Walmart, selling on Etsy, and all these different marketplaces. So it's like you've got a piece of a puzzle missing. Instead of working in a vacuum, I always tell entrepreneurs to not work in a vacuum, you all of a sudden have this what some people call a hive mind of nearly 100 people that chime in are like, Oh yeah, no, I figured out how to get in for Best Buy, you can actually go pick them up from this store or that store and every everybody in my course has the Oculus headset now because everybody kept one because it is a seriously awesome piece of equipment. But they didn't pay for it. They got it for free. How did they get it for free? Well, they just bought a few extra and I paid for it. And for the ones that were super crafty, they managed to make some money from it. So your house is paid for. You don't pay for your house, and people are like, Oh my God, look at the rich. Look at these rich people. I'm like, Yeah, because we think smart. We work smart. So we don't pay for our house. Someone else pays for the house. Whoever's Airbnb being. My house by Abbott Kinney is paying for the mortgage and whoever ends up buying whichever car I'm driving at the moment ends up paying for the car. They pay for my transportation. Okay, I might have some minor repairs or stuff like that, but I know how to check out the cars to make sure that the repairs are minimal. And I don't drive that much even though I'm in LA.

Bart Baggett 27:50

So let me address the mentality of that just real quick because I have many friends on both sides and the ones that I hired to rehab my houses are poor. And they say things like, that guy is so selfish. And that guy's so tightwad. He doesn't spend any money. He's always looking for a discount. And their perception is because we drive nice cars or have a bunch of houses, we're really rich, and we should be throwing our money around. And I know this recently because during the COVID I was working side by side with some students. Wow, their language is food stamps, the cheapest place to eat, or cigarettes. Their language and their conversation were about the government's bad, rich people are bad. This is all they talked about. And you and I have conversations about the next business plan and what houses we bought this week. It's a different conversation contextually, but not because of the quote, money. But because of the interest level, what drives us. What's interesting is what's the core beliefs about it. My core belief is that the world is abundant and that we can take our place in it. And we can be part of this whole community of exchange of goods. And I love the fact that you're like, hey, it's not selfish to have someone else pay your mortgage, you have to be smart about it. But I know you've got money, so you might just pay rent. Why do you have to bother with all this, and your brain goes, because that's stupid.

Shaahin Cheyene  29:18

Let me tell you this. So a few years back, and I'm not gonna mention any names because I don't want to embarrass anybody, but we met a couple, and this couple was super sweet people, salt of the earth people, but they were in some financial trouble. So they invited us over to their house. We went over to their house and mind you, to this very day, I rent out half of my house Airbnb. It's not an attached house on the side. You don't see them. You don't have to deal with them occasionally, but I've got it systemized. As I said, my cars all make me money, everything I do, every component of everything I do is hacked in a certain way. If I travel, we use airline miles. We travel first class everywhere. Business Class doesn’t have so much first-class, but you can go business class everywhere we stay in great hotels, we eat amazing meals, and everything somehow comes back to being net positive for us. And people talk to me about this, and I'm gonna tell you the story about this couple, so we sat down with them and I looked at the stuff they bought, and the wife, she's buying designer clothes for there at that time, she's buying $90 shoes for a 5-year old boy when they are broke. She was buying grass-fed organic, Philemon young, at Whole Foods. And I remember telling them. They're like, Well, do you buy that? You know, it's like 40 bucks for two pieces. I'm like, No. I could eat that all day long. Money doesn't matter, but what I do is I have a subscription service. That is one of those services where it's fantastic. It's called a crowded cow. Another great one, also not affiliated with them, but I strongly recommend them, where they take the whole cow and you kind of CO OPT it between a bunch of people. It's a monthly fee and you get an amazing amount of food for a very low price much less than you would buy at Whole Foods and much higher quality. Mind you as well because you know exactly where the sources are then relationships with the farmers. It's fantastic, but I don't pay much for it. And there are all kinds of coupons and monthly promotions and all that stuff involved, but I'm like, we do that like once a month. We spend 150 bucks a month maybe for us and all our guests and family on meat that's grass-fed, that's organic, that's all that stuff. We won't go to Whole Foods and buy two pieces of meat for 100 bucks because everything that we do in our life is systemized and in a way gamified. And people are like, Oh well, don't you ever just want to let your hair down? Sure we do, and at times, we go out to eat. But if we go out to eat often, we meet people there, we can talk about the business that becomes a company expense. So there's very little in life where we're just constantly paying these premiums. And believe it or not, we actually live pretty leanly. I mean, we shop mostly from Costco. We cook most of our meals, and we live a pretty reasonable life. We're not spending money like crazy. And I'll tell you, the millionaires I know, and a couple of the billionaires I know, similarly, I run into them at Costco. It's a game to be mindful about money, they gamified that it's not like coupon closing. Here's what I've heard in the New Age community and as well as other my friends, oh, they have a poverty mentality. That's why they use coupons where they can't go on either on a coupon like I get if somebody grew up poor, and they still have trauma about being poor. I get why they would be compelled to like a deal, but at some point in your life, if you've got $10 million, do you need to shop at the retail shop? I say no, but you also don't need to shop at Neiman Marcus. That's also unnecessary as well, especially if you are a 5-year old kid. At what point is it selfish? Or is it hacking money? So to wrap it up about this couple is that they drove themselves to financial ruin, not because they couldn't, but because the husband couldn't go drive Uber and the wife couldn't go work at a restaurant. They felt it beneath them. So they continued to be poor until it drove them bankrupt. And now, I hear from them every once in a while, and they're always in the same kind of financial turmoil. And I'll tell you a funny story about me and my wife before we got married. We, of course, would date and my wife likes to go out to dinner. And, dude, I'm the kind of guy that I don't mind if I'm going out on a date, I will pull out a coupon. What do you care about, right? If you are not cool with that, then whatever. And I had just gotten a brand new Porsche Turbo S $145,000 sports car. I didn't pay that much. But I got a beautiful car. It was in the Porsche silver love. This car picked her up in the Porsche she'd come to like, oh, I've scored this guy is going to be loaded Whoo.

Shaahin Cheyene  34:57

Yeah, yeah. My wife always liked that, so that's what I love too. One of the few women in my life that were not like that. She had her own money, she had her own success before me. With that said, we went out to this restaurant and I have this coupon, which was like 20% off or something, but I had printed it out. And I remember the waiter seeing that I was on a date not counting the coupon. Oh, and just bring the check thinking that I wasn't going to bring it up because I was embarrassed. The check arrived and we had a nice dinner. I've had a few glasses of wine and then a beautiful steak, and we've had this great time. And I look at the check, which I always do, yet another thing. And he didn't include the 20%. So I look at him and I go, did you forget something? And he goes, Oh, no, sir, what would that be? And I said, my coupon? And I said pretty loud to where people turn their heads and I said, Yeah, you know, the coupon. And he goes, Oh! he was playing dumb. It was like, what is coupon, sir. And she's just looking at me. And I said the 20% off coupon that I got on Yelp for your restaurant that I just put right there. And I was so brazen about it. I was not shy or coy or anything. And she was laughing, she was laughing her ass off. She was not, in any way, offended. But you know what, that's 20% money that I could leave towards an extra tip or I would have should have not been a dick about it. You know, another thing that I firmly believe in is rewarding excellent service with excellent tips. And I do that often. Sometimes I've been known to leave more than the check-in a tip if the person really does take care of me. But I also don't feel that I should leave excellent service, I will leave some for the other people working there. But I don't feel that you should reward them if they mistreat you or if they are not treating you well and not really being of service. But you know, at the end of the day, I have no shame about that. And similarly, my wife knew I was like that. If you're going to hang with me, we're going to make a lot of money, but we're also going to save a lot of money. So this is how I roll and then you know, and it's fine. Because imagine if every meal you have you save 20%. That's a lot of money. At the end of the time, all that stuff adds up. Moreover, there's a principle to that. There's the principle of not just being frugal, but being efficient, and efficiency and movement, like in Shaolin and in Kung Fu. It's all about the efficiency of movement, how you move in dancing, it's about the efficiency of movement in business, it's about how you can be efficient in business, right? How you can use the minimum amount of pressure to achieve the maximum amount of effect. And it's like that with life. So the caveat with that is, you don't always want to be penny-pinching and watching every cent and being a cheapskate. Spending more time-saving money, that money affects or impacts your rent, 

Bart Baggett 38:36

Right across town for three hours to save $5 on tires. That didn't make any sense. But it would make sense to spend 10 minutes searching for coupons for tires, instead of just rushing out and buying new tires. Why would you not do that?.

Shaahin Cheyene  38:51

Absolutely. Yeah, you know what one of the hacks that people don't know is a very practical hack that I learned some years ago. It is that you can punch in coupon code, discount code, gift code, after anything that you're buying online and see what they have. Best Buy coupon codes, and the sites come up that are aggravators, and scrapers on the internet, have coupon codes that these companies put up. And you can save anywhere from 10 to 50% on things just by searching for a coupon code.

Bart Baggett 39:16

One that is called h o n e y, which is a plugin for Chrome, and every time I renew my domains, which have got like 200 domains, right, I run honey. And guess what? They give me another discount, and I'm a returning customer. They should not give me discounts. And I hope they don't hear this. But it's I love it because this software automatically does everything and says hey, do you want to try this code? Try this code. And I'm like, why not? It's $1.50. Why would I pay more? So I love that tip. It's good. So I didn't know this was going to save money.

Shaahin Cheyene  39:48

Saving money is cool. You do want to be careful with that app. By the way, just so you know, it's an add-on to Chrome and it does trace your purchases and it may, I'm not saying that it does, but it may track what you're doing and that data may or may not be sold. 

Bart Baggett 40:07

Sold or stolen by the Russians?

Shaahin Cheyene  40:09

What’s that?

Bart Baggett 40:10

Stole by the Russians or by someone else?

Shaahin Cheyene  40:13

Look, I know, I'm sure they're a great site. I'm sure everything about honey is fantastic. All I'm saying is, and I don't want to be liable because I don't know what their business model is, but you gotta be careful with those Chrome plugins,

40:28

I am taking down notes on everything you say. I did see a crew, a Chrome plugin for some kind of cryptocurrency has like, this feels really bad. This feels really, really suspicious. I'm definitely not putting a Google Chrome. Let me ask you a question, just to put it in perspective because we're both over 40. At least I am, I finally sort of understood the concept of compound interest. But even though I read about it, and understood it conceptually in my 20s, I didn't see it. And I surely didn't see until I looked at my dad's real estate portfolio who's been doing this for 50 years, what compound interest is. So if he saves $5 a day, and then he put it in the stock market, since he's 20, explain how you see that by saving that five and $10 doesn't seem like much, just like it doesn't seem that much to spend $5 on a cup of coffee every day, but you're going in the wrong direction. If you're spending $5 and $6 on coffee, but you're not investing $5 or $6 into compound interest. Talk about that because if anybody’s listening and is under 30, I know you think you know about it, but it doesn't really hit you until you see our portfolio of 7 or 8 million dollars. Right? It didn't hit you.

Shaahin Cheyene  41:38

It's funny that you say that because I just bought a $10,000 coffee machine and I will probably be selling the $10,000 coffee machine at some point for more than what I paid for.

Bart Baggett 41:52

That's what I want to hear.

Shaahin Cheyene  41:55

So it's very much so the Ferrari of coffee machines, and it only took me six months to learn how to make a cup of coffee on the damn thing. 

Bart Baggett 42:04

So, did you check yourself or...

Shaahin Cheyene  42:07

I had to tell people over to tutor me, I had to have like doing a video chat with the factory in Italy. Like it's a whole world. But now, I think I'm qualified to work at a Starbucks just in case. Starbucks corporation is watching. But I save a lot of money. Because I've got a slight addiction to really high-quality third wave coffee. And now I buy it. I make it at home for myself. 

Bart Baggett 42:37

You're not paying $7 a cup, you're paying $10,000 you'll resell the machine later, and you're paying 40 cents a cup.

Shaahin Cheyene  42:43

Probably it will make me money by the time I sell the machine. Although, now I'm really loving this machine now that I know how to use it. 

Bart Baggett 42:49

You may not give it up. It’s like the girlfriend you like, then you married her. You just like I can't give this one. 

Shaahin Cheyene  42:56

We'll see. If I do the math, if I keep this thing for 20 years, the amount of coffee I'm going to make on it it’s actually going to be net positive, and then I sell it in 20 years, but you can keep it for a lifetime, you know. A great machine. So, I think and you know, we got to wrap up in a couple of minutes. So, where were we?

Bart Baggett 43:18

 I wanted to ask you how you explain and are gonna explain to your kid compound interest, saving $5 or $10 a day doesn't seem like much, but if we stuck it in Bitcoin 10 years ago, Shaahin, which I know both of us were playing in that field. But what would have happened? How do you explain that to someone under 30 years old listening?

Shaahin Cheyene  43:41

So there's a fantastic book called “ The psychology of money” and I think it is a cannon on financial wellbeing. If I had that book when I was in my teens if I had read it, it wasn't written then, but if I had read it in my teens, I would have been infinitely wealthy by now.

Bart Baggett 44:03

And if you'd applied it and read it.

Shaahin Cheyene  44:04

Right, if I read it and applied it, but I'm pretty good at applying the stuff that I read. So, I think that book alone is going to be one of the top life hacks and maybe we'll get him on the show. He's a journalist and we can ask to interview him so I can reach out and see if he wants to be on the show. But I think his blog, the guy that wrote that his name escapes me now but we can add it to the show notes. The Psychology of Money, fantastic way, he talks about Warren Buffett called the oracle of Omaha and why he's one of the top 10 wealthiest guys in the world. And there are other guys that make way more than him, but are not as wealthy as him just because of compound interest is just because the guy has been saving for so long. And by the way, a guy that lives pretty frugally. You see this house right? Yes, it's a nice house but it's not like MTV Cribs worthy. Right? You see his office. He's got a file cabinet and Doreen, the Secretary, brings him a coke.

Bart Baggett 44:14

What were his two rules, do you remember? 1. don't lose money? 2. Well, see number one. And I'll kind of wrap the show on this note. You get to play the game monopoly. We all have as a kid, right? Maybe you've played the game of cash flow by Robert Kiyosaki, and what happens is one divorce, one bankruptcy, one bad partnership, you have to start over from zero. And so not losing money compared to losing half, it's a real uphill battle and monopoly when someone takes your hotel like you can't win. How do you address that concern as we wrap it up today?

Shaahin Cheyene  45:50

Yeah, and you and I have talked about this before. We can totally wrap it on this. Is that one of the things I learned, and it seems so simplistic now that I'm selling on Amazon, we're talking about foundational thinking, how you build the foundation for making money when you're a new seller on Amazon when you're building eCommerce Empire and having that be one leg of the foundation, having another leg be real estate, having another leg be some money in the stock market and then having another leg be your job or your career. When we talk about that, one of the things that I always like to remember is something that I think is probably one of the most pivotal things for me, realizing that I'm really really good at making money. I haven't been very good at keeping it. And the point that I'm making is that there are two parts to making money, part one making it, Part Two keeping it. And each part is equally as important. So with that said, Bart, if people want to get a hold of you or find you or to read your book, How can they do that?

Bart Baggett 47:09

Yeah, just jump up on Twitter or Instagram, Bart Baggett that’s B-A-R-T B-A-G-G-E-T-T. I answer all the Twitter messages as well as Facebook and stuff by bartbaggett.com. You know all the books are there, you can obviously get some on Amazon, but just like you know, if you do Amazon, I don't get your email address. And then you are not getting my newsletters, you can't come to the webinars, I won't tell you about the new episodes. We love to have relationships with our fan base, so stop by bartbaggett.com and check out some of my books. Shaahin, if they want to learn more about your coaching and Amazon course leave us with how they get a hold of that.

Shaahin Cheyene  47:39

Yeah, so there's an Amazon mastery course I actually have for listeners of hack and grow rich. Absolutely free. One-hour course, which is everything you need to know about getting started on Amazon. It'll take you all the way through how to incorporate, how to get reviews, how to pick your product, everything you need to know in a one-hour Crash Course. And that's absolutely free. You can reach out to us on fbasellercourse.com or just email me at the link on my website shaahincheyene.com. That's s-h-a-a-h-i-n-c-h-e-y-e-n-e.com. Also, I'd like to remind our guests to make sure to like and subscribe if they're listening to us on whatever podcast platform they're listening to. If you feel like we brought value to you, please do us a favor and leave us a like, leave us a review as detailed as you can to help other people understand what this podcast is about. If you're watching this on YouTube or any of the other video platforms, make sure to SUBSCRIBE and LIKE, and subscribe also to the billion podcasts, Billion How I Became King of Thrill Pill Cult, the first episode is out now. And likely depending on when you listen to this podcast or watch it, there will be additional episodes up on there. So please take a look at that and the book will be coming out in the latter part of this year. And I want to thank you guys all for taking a part in this. Bart, I want to thank you for being a part of and co-hosting the show with me and excited to see what we talked about next week.

Bart Baggett 49:15

Alright, thanks for listening. I'll see you guys next week. Tune in. Bye.