Improving Ourselves by Chasing Excellence, Not Money

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Shaahin Cheyene  0:00  

Well, I think we cover that to a great degree. I think one of them is just being authentic. Always be authentic, be a real person. I think the other one is to become a student of influence. Learn the pillars of influence: social proof, authority, likability, scarcity, reciprocity. Learn about those and try to go out there into the world and seek excellence, not money. We don’t chase money, we chase excellence. We try to get better. We try to improve ourselves, we try to develop ourselves, and those really have always been my guiding principles.

 

Richard Matthews  0:43  

Heroes are an inspiring group of people, every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell, the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers, and the firefighters who risked their safety to ensure ours every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what, I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference. And they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service. Some go on to change the world, others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to the Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence. So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

 

Richard Matthews  1:38  

Hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having Shaahin Cheyene on the line. Are you there, Shaahin?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:46  

I am here, happy to be on. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:48  

Awesome, so glad to have you here. And we were talking just before we got in, you’re in Venice Beach, California is that where you are? 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:55  

That’s right. Sunny Venice Beach, a glorious place to be.

 

Richard Matthews  1:58  

Oh, man. I am a Southern California native and we travel full time. So for audiences who are following us around we’re still in Kissimmee and in Florida, but my heart is in California probably always will be, because the weather is amazing and there’s no mosquitoes. You’ve ever been to Florida, I assume you have with all your properties you have out here. It’s like a state bird.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  2:23  

Yeah, there are some really great parts of Florida. I mean, it’s such an amazing state. And it’s got such diversity. And more importantly, for me, it’s a great place to pick up cash flow positive real estate to create recurring revenue. I’m not a real estate guru at all. I teach it as one of the pillars of my foundation’s course, in which I teach people to create recurring revenue by starting e-commerce businesses. I think Florida is one of the best places to buy real estate in the next 20 years.

 

Richard Matthews  3:00  

Yeah, my wife and I are looking at doing that in this area, we got stuck here for the COVID pandemic for eight months and fell in love with the state. For a lot of reasons, but we were talking before we got on. The difference between the price of properties versus rental, it looks really good out here.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  3:23  

Yeah, totally the case. There’s some really cool stuff that happens there, stuff you don’t see. I mean, Florida it’s like a rainforest, it’s like wildlife. There’s a lot of stuff that you’re like, oh, wow. Like people who live there every day, it’s kind of cool.

 

Richard Matthews  3:42  

Yeah. And being a California native myself, if you took some of these houses out here or you just picked them up and move in their property and dropped them in California, where you are, the price would go up six to 10 times.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  3:55  

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, anywhere in the country. I mean, California is one of the most desirable places to live, despite all the haters and all the people that are like, oh, everyone’s moving out of California, California sucks. No, California doesn’t suck. We’ve had some difficulties, the taxation isn’t great, they’ve got to figure that out to improve that part. But it’s an amazing place to live. And still, the place where a lot of deals are happening. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you want to be in one of these centers. And it’s not the only center there are other places, but California and New York, and even Florida if you’re in Miami and some of those places are great places to be but I tell entrepreneurs this all the time that you need proximity to deal flow, you have to be in the thick of things if you want deals to happen if you want to be in the film industry. And you want to direct, you want to write, you want to act whatever that is. There’s only one place you need to be in Hollywood, there’s no other place to be because you need proximity by doing that you have a higher likelihood of meeting people. If you want to be in tech, well, you can either be Silicon Valley or Silicon Beach, but you need to have access to that you’re not going to do it from the middle of the Midwest, it’s going to be less likely for you to succeed.

 

Richard Matthews  5:15  

Yeah, but if you wanted to be in manufacturing, you’d want to be in the Midwest.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  5:19  

There you go. If you’d want to be in US manufacturing, although I’ve got a good friend who set up one of the best manufacturing plants in the United States, and believe it or not, it’s in Silicon Valley.

 

Richard Matthews  5:31  

Really? What are they manufacturing out there?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  5:34  

Well, for the entire time of COVID, they’ve pivoted their manufacturing to producing masks, some of the best  N95’s. They’re one of the few new N95 manufacturers and many years here in the United States. And they started making PPE’s and those kinds of things. But they do all types of products, they have literally unlimited capabilities of what they can produce.

 

Richard Matthews  5:58  

That’s really cool. Well, before we get too far into this, I want to do a brief introduction for our audience who may not know who you are. So I’m going to go through your bio real quick because you got an interesting story that we could dive into. So during the Iranian Revolution 1978, your family had to escape to survive and ended up migrating to Los Angeles. At 15 years old, you left home with nothing but the clothes on your back. And then you created over a billion dollars in revenue by inventing the legendary smart drug known as herbal ecstasy, which I believe is the topic of your book. But you got sitting there is that right?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  6:31  

Yeah, that’s right. So my book just dropped. It’s called Billion: How I Became King of the Thrill Pill Cult. And it talks about that whole time, that wild ride from basically sleeping on the beach in abandoned buildings to creating a company that was worth over a billion dollars and created over a billion dollars in revenue, and all as a teenager before the internet.

 

Richard Matthews  6:53  

That’s insane. And then you’ve gone on you are the founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence, which is the major Amazon FBA seller and you run an Amazon mastery course. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  6:53  

Yeah, that’s right.

 

Richard Matthews  6:55  

 And you’re the host of a podcast called Hacking Grow Rich.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  7:12  

Yeah, we’ve got a podcast now, I think we’re on 128 episodes, we’ve got about 65,000, listeners, subscribers, I don’t know how it’s measured in podcasts. And we talk about the tips and tricks and hacks around life and business and entrepreneurship and how  you think outside the box.

 

Richard Matthews  7:33  

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to get into the origin story of how you got to where you are today. We talk on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story, it’s the thing that made you into the hero you are, were you born a hero, or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into selling thrill pills as a teenager? Or did you start in a job and eventually move to become an entrepreneur, basically, how did you become an entrepreneur?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  7:58  

Let’s do it. I love comic book heroes, but I’m not wearing tight pants, Richard, I’m telling you that right now. Okay, you got to draw the line somewhere.

 

Richard Matthews  8:05  

You have to have space for the goods.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  8:07  

Space for the goods, there you go. Alright, so we left my family and I migrated. And I will turn that tone off. I apologize for that. So my family and I migrated to the United States during the Iranian Revolution. I was five years old, just basically uprooted and moved. We had to go through Germany to the United States because we couldn’t move directly to the United States, we were refugees. My dad took up some shitty jobs working at a pizza place. He worked at dry cleaners, which he ended up working out for close to 30 years. And we had a pretty lower middle-class poor existence in an upcoming suburb in Los Angeles called Pacific Palisades, which was, like, hippy. There weren’t really very many people there, nobody really wanted to live there. And my folks managed to get a house there. One day the broker called them and said, hey, there’s this house and nobody wants it, it’s the only one within your budget anywhere in LA. And if you want it, you can have it. And my parents said, okay, well, what’s the problem with it? Sure, if we can get a loan on it, and if it meets our budget, we’ll get it. And he goes, Well, the problem is that the people in there won’t move out. And it’s not just one person, it’s an entire tribe of Hari Krishna hippies. There’s a Hells Angel thing going on there. So we went to see the house and the house was a beautiful, big house and in a great neighborhood that was up and coming at the time. And the people that were living there were these crazy hippies and apparently one of the guys who was leading this commune was somehow related to somebody in the police department. The other guy was somehow related to someone in Hell’s Angels. Nobody wanted anything to do with these people. So they were selling this house for cheap to anybody who would take it the guy just wanted out. And so my folks said, okay, it’s what we can afford, let’s give it a shot. And we moved in, in the meanwhile, these folks were living in the backyard come in and go in, bringing their stuff, basically camped out. This was a glorious property back in the day, this beautiful huge swimming pool. They were using it as a koi pond, and they were in the backyard, doing Krishna things and whatever it was the things that they were doing, they were doing, they were like weird, communist culty kind of people. And I remember growing up, my folks would just bring them food, my mom would bring them food, my dad would bring them tea, and I’d be like, hey, Dad, why are you doing this? Mom, why are you guys doing this? We gotta get rid of these people. It’d be like, just patients coming from an Eastern philosophy Eastern society. We believe in hospitality, we believe in those kinds of things. And rudeness really isn’t in our cultural makeup. So we were doing that. And my dad kept doing this until one day one of the leaders came and said, hey, Mr. Shaahin, you’re been so nice to us, everybody has tried everything to get us out. They called the fire department, they called Exterminators, they tried to force us out, they tried to evict us and you guys have just been kind to us? What can we do for you? And my dad looked at them and said, hey, we’re starting a family here. We moved from Iran, we don’t speak very good English. But it would be great if we could have our property and have you guys move along. And he said, you got it, give us a week, and we’re out. They basically killed them with kindness. They were so kind to us and nobody had ever tried that before with them. Everybody saw them as a nuisance and just wanted to get rid of them. And they just kindly moved on. We’re Drummond down the street and moved on to wherever else they moved on. And so now we’re living in this community. But the community started coming up around us. Wealthy people started moving into these houses and started gaining double, triple, quadruple value. And all of a sudden, there are multi million dollar houses around us people moving in with their Ferraris and Porsches and fancy cars. And here we are this poor family. My dad’s working at a dry cleaner. We never had new clothes, the way we got clothes, where we waited for some cool looking person to come into the dry cleaners and hoped and prayed that they didn’t pay their bill and abandon their clothes, didn’t eat out at restaurants. Almost every meal was home cooked at home. And a funny story I tell it often is that I didn’t realize what a restaurant was until I was 15. I had some friends around me who were wealthy. And I remember one kid who was like, my dad’s out of town, he gave me his credit card, we can get whatever we want. Let’s go and we went to a restaurant. I was like, whoa, wait a second. So you’re telling me this menu thing, I can order anything. I can order a hamburger and fries. And someone’s gonna bring it for me? He’s like, yeah, get whatever you want. I was like, no, and I can get pizza too? Well, yeah, whatever you want. And it was like, holy smokes, there’s all this wealth around me, all the stuff that I didn’t have access to. I got to ride in a Mercedes. I’ve never done that before. I got to experience all these things, people who had maids and house cleaners and we didn’t have any of that stuff. And I was like, whoa, they’re going out and buying things whenever they want to. And I was like, man, I want to live that life. That’s fun going out on boats doing cool things going to Chucky Cheese. Like, all that stuff’s amazing. We didn’t have any of that. So how do you get that I want that? And one day I woke up. And I was 15 years old. And I realized that I needed to do something to get there. Like it was bullshit. I was beaten up all the time when we came here, and got my ass kicked every day. And treated like second third class citizens because it was during the Iran contract. And I now wanted my up in cummings, I wanted to do well in life. And I was like, Okay, what’s the path to that? And I asked my folks, and they were like, well, you know, son, you got to become a doctor or a lawyer. I said, okay, cool, let me do that. They’re like, yeah, look at Mr. Rotafar down the street. Look at all the wealth he has. He’s got a beautiful Benz and a house. I’m like, Yeah, but that dude’s fucking fat and old and I don’t want to be that guy. He doesn’t have any time. He doesn’t have two seconds. He leaves early in the morning and comes back late at night. I don’t want to be that guy. I’m like, how long does that take? They’re like, well, eight years of school, four years of specialty. Then four years to pay off your loans. And by the time you’re 50, you can have a wife and a family. You’ll all be fat because you don’t have time to exercise and then you can have all this wealth isn’t that great. And I said, fuck this, I’m out. And I belt. I left, I burned my ships and went off to seek my fame and fortune. I had no friends, I had no money. My English was good at this time, which was a big plus. And I went off, I slept on the beach, I slept in a bed of buildings, I hung out at the local community college, which was glorious, there were all kinds of beautiful females walking around, none of which I had access to, education was going on, also, I didn’t have access to I would sneak into the occasional class because I didn’t have money to pay. I would hang out at a hotdog stand next door, I was vegetarian or I became vegetarian in those days. So I would eat just buns with ketchup and relish because I somehow would manage to get those for free. And it was easy to survive like that. And I found a mentor. I know we’re talking about superheroes, but I don’t really see myself as a superhero. I really see my mentors as a superhero. And this guy was a superhero. He was a pretty interesting character in those days who had long dreadlocks, African American gentlemen, super amazing guy. And I managed to get him to mentor me. And with his mentorship, I started in the electronic music scene, which was blown up at that time, the rave scene. And I started realizing that I could sneak my way or talk my way and influence my way into these raves into these parties. And I could get in there, the parties would start at midnight and they would go to like six, seven in the morning the next day. I could go hang out, have a good time, meet people and then fall asleep behind the speakers in front of the speakers very loud. Behind the speakers, it’s just a hum, and it’s warm, and I could just fall asleep. And I would do that.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  17:01  

And one day I woke up behind the speakers. I walked out. And I was like, man, there’s money being made here. How do I make money in the electronic music scene? Well, okay, obviously, it’s people who are throwing the parties, the promoters, they’ve got 1000s of people here, they must be making a lot of money. Nope, those guys always broke, running around trying to figure out how to get away from paying people. Then I thought, well, maybe it’s the DJs, the DJs music, nobody respected people who were playing other people’s music in those days. And those dudes were always hanging outside, with their hands out not getting paid, okay, so it’s not the DJs. Who could it be? Ah, okay. It’s the property owners, nope, most of those warehouses were broken into in those days, they were break-ins, people somehow figured out how to get into a warehouse owned by some big corporation. One guy would climb the power lines and steal the electricity and another guy would figure out how to get the plumbing to work. And somehow, the parties would happen and they would go on until the police busted them. Well, who do you think Richard were the people who were making the money in those days?

 

Richard Matthews  18:10  

So the first thought that comes to my mind is the drug dealers. The people who are selling the feel goods.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  18:20  

That’s right, the feel goods you are right, my friend. So I was hanging out by the door and I noticed there were always these guys. They were dressed very nicely, and always had a beautiful female with them. There are several that had very expensive cars, nice jewelry, they were doing well in life in pantsy apartments. And I thought, wow, what are those guys doing? Obviously, they’re dealing with the one drug that was highest in demand at the time, a drug called ecstasy, methyl Doxy, methamphetamine, not really anything to do with amphetamine, but it’s just part of the molecular composition of it. what’s now known as Molly or whatever they want to call it so these people selling ecstasy in those days, were making a lot of money. One problem, it’s a very complex drug to manufacture and synthesize. And most of it was being produced in the UK and Holland. The supply of it had completely dried up in the US, it was near impossible to get it. There were a few suppliers producing it in the US, but it was few and far between. And they were usually like chemistry nerds, the worm really Breaking Bad. They were just making enough for their friends. So the drug dealers were in a pinch. And I thought to myself at first, well, I should do this, this would be great. I should just deal drugs, I’ll make tons of money. And then I harken back to my life as an adolescent and my life of crime and my endeavors in crime from the ages of five to 13. And I had a little crew that I built. It was every kid that had something major wrong with them in school. It was the kid that had the one arm that was like this and the kid who like had all the learning disabilities, me included always had learning disabilities. It was the kid that nobody wanted to talk to you, the one that smelled too much. The one that was short, we had a little Greek kid named Cow with us. And he was a little person. I don’t know what you call them. Maybe that’s belittling. Can we say, midget? We can’t say midget, but we call them midget

 

Richard Matthews  20:28  

I don’t know what the word is? 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  20:29  

Okay. I don’t know what the politically correct word is. But I hope I did not offend anybody, or I hope I only offend the right people. I say it all with love, love that guy. And he was so cute, even though he was, 10, 11, 12, he looked like a six year old kid. So nobody would question him, he would wear baggy clothes, we would walk into the liquor stores, he would rush to the liquor area, the nudie magazine area where you pick up the hustlers, the penthouses, all the contraband stuff. And this is really good superhero stuff. By the way, this is like Evil Nemesis stuff. And we would create a distraction in the front doing whatever wacky thing we would do. Create an argument,  spill something, do whatever. And he would stuff his clothes with all this contraband and run out the back. And we would sell it at school. It was a great business, Richard, it was lots of learnings in entrepreneurship, how to provide excellent customer service, yada, yada, yada. But the problem with it was, as I looked back, was that we were fucking horrible at crime. We were really bad criminals because we would always get caught, detention was a second home for us. The principal’s office, I think we had chairs with our names on them. We would constantly be getting caught, constantly being put in detention, we live there. And of course, in detention, who do you meet in detention is other. 

 

Richard Matthews  21:55  

The other bad kids.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  21:57  

The other bad kids and they became even better customers. So our business flourished even more, but then we got caught even more. So now 15, taking into consideration a life of crime. I thought, dude, you’re an idiot. If you do that, you’re really fucking bad a crime. And you should not be involved in crime, you should not do it, you will end up on one of those TV shows where they’ll be like, oh, you had everything going for him. But he took up a life of crime, which he was very bad at. I’m sure there are people who are great at crime, but I was not. So I had enough fortitude, enough self-reflection to understand that crime was not going to work for me. And I needed to figure out a way around and it was boom, at that moment, that it struck me. If I could come up with a legal natural, all organic version of this ecstasy, and sell it using just herbs and stuff. I figured out, I can make a lot of money.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  22:55  

I thought, hey, that’s a great idea. So what did I do? I managed to get myself a girlfriend at the time. I don’t know how I did it, considering I was broke ass motherfucker. I mean, I had less than I didn’t have enough money to eat. And then I managed to get her to allow me to cook it up in her kitchen and prototype the product while her dad was away at work. I did not have enough money to buy a capsulated machine to make them into pills. So we would just roll them up by hand and the balls as close to pills as we could get them. I put them in little baggies. And everybody who we met we would convince to try and I would get them to try some of this, try some of that. Until one day, it happened. We had a formula that worked really frickin well, you felt good for hours and it was really nice. And now I had never tried ecstasy in those days. But I was told it was very similar. So I put my big boy pants on and I decided this is it. Let’s do it. We’re gonna go into the club. I walked into the club by myself. And I walked up to one of the biggest drug dealers at the time and I tell the story because now you look at guys like Post Malone and tattoos on the face, fine tattoos on the neck, people have them all the time now, not a big deal doesn’t make you unique. Back in the 90s. If you had tattoos at all, it was a big deal. And if you had tattoos anywhere near your face, it was a sign of clinical insanity. And so this guy had tattoos on his neck, going up to his face. He had the tear things. This guy was a straight killer. He was the biggest drug dealer in the club. He was dressed nicely. He had some beautiful women with him. He had all the wealthy signs of stuff. And he was out of pills. I was at the right place at the right time. Ecstasy, remember had dried up, very low supply walked up to him. He’s like, hey, kid, I got nothing, get the fuck out of here. And I said, no, I don’t want to buy anything. I want to sell you stuff. He’s like, well, you got e’s? If you’re a fuckin cop what are you said? No, not a cop, do I look like a cop? I’m not a cop, I’m not even 18 yet, like, not a kid, not a cop, what can we do here? So well, what do you want? I said, well, I got these pills that you can sell, they are all natural. The guys like I’m not someone fucking vitamins get out of here. And I said no, no. And it was at that moment where I realized that I had to burn my ships that this was it, I had to lay all my chips on the table and make this guy sell my product in the club that night, the club was poppin lots of people there. And just at that moment, when I made that resolution, Richard, when I made that decision, that I was not going to back down, that I was going to do whatever it took, I was ready to die that night, if that’s what it took. A couple of partygoers walked up to him. And he grumbled to them, talking to them. And then he looked at me and you see the sweat dripping from my forehead. This guy had one emotion and it was this, that was it. And he looks over to me, he waves at me. I handed him one baggie. He reaches over, grabs the entire backpack, takes it, takes the bag, he hands it to the party goers, takes the cash, puts it in his pocket and tells me to come back in a couple of hours. Now at this point, this could go one of two ways. Way number one, he loves it and will agree to sell it way number two, I could end up dying in a club that night. Obviously, I’m here so you know which way happened. I came back in a couple of hours. He was still there stone face. I couldn’t tell that the bag had been empty. But everybody was having a good time and the party was going off. He was happy, the girls that were with him were happy. So I was like, alright, well, maybe this is going to be okay. And he motioned to me. His little body guard moved aside and motioned to me to come there. And he was quiet. A good part of a minute just looking at me, sizing me up.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  26:58  

And I was like, okay, this is it, I’m gonna die. Every negative thought in my mind went through my head like this guy’s gonna fucking kill me. This is the end of my days as a drug dealer. And he looked at me. And he said, kid, when can you get me more? And that was it. It was on, we went from one guy to 100 Guys, and I remember that night too. He was like, what do you call this stuff? And I was like, oh shit, what do I call this stuff? It’s herbal ecstasy. And we went from one guy to 100 guys to 1000 guys to 10,000 Guys, to selling and 30,000 plus retail stores to being in over 32 countries around the world. And I had over 200 employees. I was hiring everybody that could fog up a mirror in Venice Beach. I was hiring them to sell the pills to manage my offices. I was renting every building in all of the Venice boardwalk areas in the Venice circle area all around Venice. People were working for me. And I was working 22 hour days. And I got a call and I came in and my secretary was there with a pale face. The news had broke that we had surpassed a billion dollars in revenue. 

 

Richard Matthews  27:21  

Wow.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  27:49  

I want you to imagine Richard, I was still a teenager. I had no formal education. In fact, I dropped out before high school. I was a pre high school dropout. I think I had like a couple of weeks in high school and I was out. I had no internet. There was no internet in the 90s and no functional internet. We had no mobile phones as far as Smartphones are concerned. There was no social media, there was no Silicon Valley boom, none of that stuff. And we had broken a billion dollars in revenue. And I was in a panic, not because I didn’t know what was going on. It was because I didn’t know how much exactly a billion dollars was. And I remember having this panic about them going to ask me that on TV. Sam Donaldson was on his way with Nightline. They want to have me on that day. He was in a limo outside. They had Montel Williams going to find me out to his talk show. All the talk show hosts wanted me to Newsweek covers. We had a piece with a cover mentioned in Details Magazine, photographical by David LaChapelle the covers on my book, New York Times LA Times, London observer called me the Willy Wonka of Generation X. It was an insane time. And there were a lot of crazy things that happened in those days. Being a teenager making close to billions, billions of dollars in revenue. The government came after us we had the mob tried to get involved with the company, the Japanese mob, the Yakuza tried to take us over, we had crazy events like Lollapalooza, which we were a major attraction at, where we were selling more pills than people were selling beer. People were like, fuck this, I don’t want a beer, give me that herbal ecstasy stuff. People were partying, we were partying with the Beastie Boys, and with all the great bands of the time, and it was a wild ride.

 

Richard Matthews  30:32  

So here’s my first question about all of that. Do you guys still sell herbal ecstasy today?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  30:39  

I own the brand. But the saga that has changed, the story of it has changed. And we will probably relaunch it in the coming years after the book and the film gets out, there’s going to be a major motion picture based on the book. So at that point, we will probably relaunch it. I mean, you could probably still get it on the market. We do sell it on Amazon, but it’s a different formula. It’s changed into being a male performance product mainly suited for athletes now, but what it was is no longer on the market. No.

 

Richard Matthews  31:13  

Is that because what it was is no longer illegal or what happens to sort of change the market?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  31:20  

Right, they banned it. So there was this incredible ingredient. And again, for all your listeners, I am not a doctor, I have the medical sophistication of a chimpanzee a little bit less than a chimpanzee, I would say because they’re pretty intuitive about that stuff. So please ask your doctor, I don’t espouse the use of anything, any kind of drugs, anything like that. But it had a great herb called ephedra, which was a beautiful Chinese herb. And it had these amazing qualities. And we mixed it with several other herbal ingredients, giving it a little bit of a feeling like an ecstasy in those days. And that was the ingredient that the government really didn’t want out. So they restricted it. And with that, the formula for the product was gone.

 

Richard Matthews  32:08  

That’s crazy. So how did you transition as a billion dollar company running these things to essentially have your product banned into continuing to grow businesses and doing what you do now?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  32:22  

Great question. So that became a game of cat and mouse, I would go and I would travel and I’d go to the Amazon or I’d go to Fiji and I’d find these incredible new herbs and I’d be like, we’re changing the formula. And they’d be like, great, we’re banning that stuff, too. And so that happened for a while until I got tired of it. And then I moved on to solving a bigger problem. I thought, hey, people have been smoking for 1000s of years since the dawn of time. And they’ve been creating smoke tar and carbon monoxide as a result of it. The carcinogenic elements are carcinogenic meaning cancer causing smoking, what if there was a way you could smoke, you’d get your nicotine, you could get your cannabinoids were legal. And not have smoke torn carbon monoxide, because those two things don’t necessarily have to go with each other. 

 

Richard Matthews  33:08  

Yeah.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  33:09  

So I went through this journey of inventing and designing and patenting what now is known as the vape, the digital vaporization. And I did that early in the 90s and launched that company somewhere in the early 2000s, when we had a really viable prototype and digital vaporization product, and that company went public. That was amazing. I exited that company just before but that company went public, became the first vape company to go public, and that technology is the forerunner for what you see today in vapes and vaporization. And from there, Richard, I moved on to the Amazon platform. I moved on by creating another supplement called Excelerol, which is great brain pellets still on the market, Excelerol or focus plus both are fantastic. And I remember this was back in the day where you could get Jeff Bezos on the phone if you needed to. He would respond to emails, he was not the world’s richest man yet. And we heard through the grapevine that Bezos was opening up his platform, his glorious Amazon platform to third party sellers. And that means that people like me and you, Richard could start selling things on the Amazon platform. I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. Let me try selling 

Excelerol there. So I listed the product I went to sleep all took me about 15 minutes. I didn’t think much of the expensive product at that time was about 120 bucks for a box. Woke up in the morning, I had 1000s of orders. And I thought to myself, holy shit, there’s something to this Amazon thing. I’m going to devote a lot of time to it and I started researching, I researched about Jeff Bezos, his journey to entrepreneurship, how he went from DH Hutton, a big Wall Street company taking cheap money from Wall Street and multiplying it in Silicon Valley, creating value being a customer centric company. And I thought this dude is one of the smartest guys in the room and everybody is underestimating him. I’m putting all my eggs in the Jeff Bezos basket. And that’s what we did. We started learning about Amazon, we started learning about selling on Amazon, we started to master it. And pretty soon we became the top Amazon firm in the country doing this for other people, fortune 50, fortune 500 startups alike. And the problem became that a lot of single players, individuals like me, and you wanted to do it and to create Amazon companies, but they couldn’t afford me, my fees were too much at this point. So I decided to create a course where anybody could use an online course with a mentorship program, a coaching program, and a mastermind with a lot of sellers. And we’re now close to 100 Different students at small, and they’re from all over the world. And we get them on the platform, creating these businesses and finding great products, we teach them how to do that. And then we teach them how to create foundational wealth by creating predictable recurring revenue. So they can take back more of their time and create more wealth, legacy wealth for themselves and their families. And that’s what I do now, by the way, for anybody listening to your podcast, I’ve got a one hour course that teaches you how to do everything from A to Z on Amazon. And I’ll offer that to anybody listening to use the Code Hero. It’s a $200 course. I’ll offer it for free, at zero cost just if I can help any of your viewers and listeners create a business stop selling their hours to make an impact in the world while living a better life having more free time. Go to FBASellerCourse.com or email me and reach out to me. I’m sure Richard will include in the show links too if you ask for the one hour course I’ll offer that to you absolutely free of charge to see if I can help you on your journey.

 

Richard Matthews  36:58  

Yeah, absolutely. That’s an incredible offer, we run an ecom business on Amazon, we sell a couple of million dollars a year of candles and fuels and whatnot. I mean, it’s a huge platform and there’s so much that goes on there. And we’re working on diversifying into other platforms as well with our company but there is the 800-pound gorilla for driving revenue online if you have products to sell that are good that the market wants.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  37:33  

Wow, I love that. Can you say what your brands are? If people want to look them up?

 

Richard Matthews  37:37  

Yeah, our brand is called Firefly fuel. And we sell refillable glass oil candles and tiki torches and the fuels that go in them. We have a manufacturing facility in Sarasota, Florida, and some other stuff, but yeah, it’s started as an Amazon business. And several years ago, a couple $1,000 a month and now we sell a couple of million dollars a year.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  38:02  

Wow. I love them. And we get to have you on our show too. I didn’t realize you were an FBA seller as well.

 

Richard Matthews  38:08  

Yeah, I’m a partial owner in that business. And been working with them since they started essentially. And there’s a lot of good stuff that happens on Amazon. And I know we got started with Amazon, I think it was 2014 maybe a little earlier than that. I had a supplement company that I started for a while. I still have some of the products. We brought that from zero to $60,000 a month in sales in like four months. And then I had no clue how to do inventory management at all and destroyed that business by accident and never really put the effort into rebuilding it but we didn’t have good inventory planning. So whilst our product is running out and the new product was getting shipped in on the UPS lost like $30,000 worth of product. And then it took a good four months to get it all replaced as lead times back then. And by the time it was all replaced, the business was essentially gone.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  39:13  

Hmm, yeah, that happens. But it sounds like your Firefly fuel is succeeding. And that’s the interesting thing. Here’s the thing. There’s so much noise out there you go to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, there’s all these people, you’re gonna get rich, you can do this, you can do that. And there’s so much noise like Lamborghinis, boats, yachts, people are like, whoa, fucking second, I got to get out of my mom’s basement first. That when a real seller like you tells the story, people are numb to it. They’re like, yeah, he’s just talking. But you created a business from nothing to $2 million gross revenue on Amazon. I mean, it happens all the time. And if you fall, I mean, like you said, it’s not easy. You had some failures. You had some successes, but your successes far outweighed your failures. And you’ll try some things that you’ll fail with. And you’ll do some other things that you succeed with. But ultimately, these are real things. And I know that you live a great life with your family, you travel as I do. And while you’re sleeping, there’s somebody buying firefly fuel, and making you money. And that’s what we teach.

 

Richard Matthews  40:22  

Yeah, it’s magic. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  40:23  

Yeah, I want that to become a reality for people. And one of my challenges now that maybe you can give me some insight into how we can get more people on board with this is I want to empower people to see this more as a reality, to see that, hey, you can really do this on Amazon and create a practice, it’s not going to happen overnight, you’re not going to be sitting in a Lamborghini, like one of these guys. And living the high lifestyle with caviar and private jets by next month. But you can do that in two years, you can build a seven figure business on Amazon from almost nothing, the cheapest access, the lowest barrier to entry in any marketplace. And in a couple of years, be ready to sell that company for a ten time multiple. There are Amazon companies now, I don’t know if you’ve known about this. But there are aggregators now pumping millions of dollars from Wall Street over actually, I should say billions of dollars of money from Wall Street. If we look at the aggregate of all the aggregators, billions of dollars from Wall Street is now being pushed to all these companies to roll up Amazon brands. So as before, where the value of these companies was maybe three times four times their earnings. Now their net earnings, their EBITA. Now the value of these companies is double digits, we’re seeing Amazon companies go for double-digit multiples 10 times what they’re earning. So if you create a company let’s say you’re earning 2 million in EBITDA every year, you could be selling that company for 20 million 30 million or more now, to one of these roll-up companies who’s going to take it and add it to their portfolio and sell it to a big fortune 50, fortune 500 company for 30 times, or they’re going to take the company public, and it’s going to get 30, 40, 50 times value in the public marketplace. So there has never been a better time to be an Amazon seller. And I can talk to you a little bit more about your brands offline as well.

 

Richard Matthews  42:29  

Yeah, it’s insane, what’s happening with that space. And the funny thing to me is, I remember in 2014, we were talking about it being in its infancy. But now in 2021. I’m like looking back on it. That was like not infancy, that was like pre-birth. It’s still in its infancy. Like we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s going to happen with the technologies. And with things like the base finance level change on how e-commerce is being done, there’s going to be some major shifts that I think crypto is going to have an impact on, and the changeover in fiat currency is all going to have an impact on how shopping is done and how consumption is done. And Amazon is going to be at the forefront of a lot of that. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  43:21  

That’s right.

 

Richard Matthews  43:21  

So it’s almost like a requirement. Amazon is like one of the worst companies ever to try and get stuff done with, we have so many problems with them. But you can’t ignore them. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  43:46  

That’s right.

 

Richard Matthews  43:47  

Yeah, you have to deal with it.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  43:49  

Yeah, they have no problem letting you know what your place is, you’re playing in their sandbox, not the other way around. And they will let you know, they will arbitrarily let you know that you’re playing in their sandbox and you are irrelevant. You are a small part of a long tail. Now they make the consumer feel relevant, even though they’re not all that’s relevant is the bottom line for them. And there’s a lot of practices there at Amazon that need to be improved, I agree. They need to be giving more attention to their sellers. They need to respect the sellers. They’re the backbone of the FBA platform. But that’s not how Amazon works. You got to remember, this is the thing. People don’t understand. Much like Elon, much like Zuckerberg, Bezos is a fucking hacker. That’s who he is. That’s his DNA. He built that platform. He built everything that he’s built, and I’ll say allegedly so I don’t get sued. But he built all that stuff with hacker’s bones. And what I mean by that, is that he thought outside of the box he broke all rules. And he did crazy things like when he couldn’t get a hold of the JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books. And this is all allegedly. So I’m going to put the word allegedly in there to prevent liability if this. So we don’t get sued, but he went out and he bought those books at retail from all the other avenues that could get them because they weren’t given to Amazon and then sold them for less than his cost. Why would he do that smartest guy in the room buddy, customer acquisition cuz he knows that that guy who just bought that Harry Potter book had to start an Amazon account to buy it from him for five bucks less than the other platforms. And now that that guy has the Amazon account, he’s gonna get his diapers, he’s gonna get his kids diapers, say unless he’s old, he might be getting his own diapers.

 

Richard Matthews  45:55  

And it’s so easy now to just push a button and have stuff show up the next day, push your button.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  45:58  

To push your button, it was master planned and he is a hacker. So what does that bring about on the Amazon platform? Well, it brings about a culture of hacking. That’s why people have first hacked the reviews. And now it’s getting harder and harder to do that. But in the early days, people were getting 1000s of reviews, you would wake up in the morning and you’d have 10,000 reviews, there were Bangladeshi guys writing reviews left and right review farms, all that kind of stuff. And then they realized that it eroded the trust of the platform. The second they realized that they were like, oh shit, we got to crack down on this and they cracked down, it became harder to get reviews. And it increasingly is becoming harder and harder to get reviews on the Amazon platform. Because they are realizing that people don’t fucking believe them anymore. Although there is still some merit to it, because myself included. I think I know better than everybody else. I am an Amazon expert. But everybody thinks they know better than everybody else. When you ask people we’ve done focus groups and focus rooms where we have people there. And we’re like, Do you believe reviews? Oh, no, those are all fake. I don’t believe them, they’re paid for. Okay, well, when you bought a product, what was the last thing you looked at? Well, the first thing I looked at was the reviews. Well, but you said those were fake. Yeah. But I can tell which ones are and which ones aren’t. We all have this cognitive bias, we feel like we know which ones are real and which ones are not. And it’s that kind of thinking that allows this platform. So I think it’s rather ironic that a platform started by a genius, brilliant mastermind, who really is and was a hacker gave birth to this generation of sellers that are all hackers you cannot play and you know this there isn’t a seller I’ve talked to you cannot win the Amazon game without doing something outside their terms of service. It doesn’t happen. Unless you’re a big fortune 50, fortune 500 brands. And you’re doing tons of TV advertising, you’ve got many, many distributors selling your product on the platform. And you just pump it in, and it just becomes another channel. And it sells and all the millions and billions of dollars you put out marketing causes people to buy your product, for example, I’m not going to give out any specific names. Some of them might be clients of our company. But any of these mega companies.

 

Richard Matthews  48:24  

like Nalgene or Yeti, or some of those big companies that their brand is bigger than Amazon.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  48:29  

I would say even bigger than that. But yeah, so any of those, those companies, if you’re not one of those companies, you’re not going to win. And I’ll tell you what, all of those big companies, the big corporate companies are the first to want to go against Terms of Service. And it’s just the way it is. And Amazon knows this. They’ve made rules that you have to break, if you want to when you watch their videos, their videos are silly. They’re like, okay if you want to win on the Amazon platform, you start an Amazon account, and you list your product, and people will buy it because you’re so great. Bullshit, you got to do 50,000 kinds of things against Terms of Service to win and everybody does it, you got to figure out how to get reviews, you got to figure out how to get ranking. You got to do promotions, you got to do giveaways, you got to do all this stuff. And all that stuff goes against their terms of service now, do they enforce it? No of course they don’t they would be out of business. And do they enforce it equally? Similarly? No. Because if they enforced a company that’s making them $10 million a month, and there are lots of companies that are making them $10 million a month, as a company that’s not making any money, the guy that’s making 100 grand a month, and the guy that’s making $10 million a month aren’t going to get the same treatment, the guy who’s making them 10 million is going to get a call from their account rep and maybe a slap on the wrist. The guy whose only selling 100,000 They’re gonna cut that account because they can do away with that small piece of a long tail and they’ll let you know it. So Amazon has become this like living, breathing organism where they’re constantly changing, they’re trying to stay 100 steps ahead of everybody else. And when they can’t do that, they change things erratically, unpredictably, in a way where just the chaos throws everybody off the train, and then people claim their way back on. But you can’t win by playing 100% by the rules. I’ve never met a seller who’s been able to do that.

 

Richard Matthews  50:31  

Yeah. And that’s it’s interesting, too, because it goes along with almost your entire origin story, which we’ve been talking about for a while now of playing against the rules. And I want to shift into the next question I have, which is about your superpowers in all of this, going from creating a supplement company to basically inventing E-cigarettes to getting into the Amazon space. We say every iconic hero has a superpower whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder or super strength, in the real world heroes have what I call either a zone of genius, which is a skill that you were born with, you developed over time that really allows you to do what you do. And to slay the villain, so to speak, in your client’s lives. And the way I like to frame it is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed over your life, there’s a common thread that ties all those skills together. And that common thread is where your superpower is, and in all of your experience building these businesses, what do you think your superpower is?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  51:40  

Yeah, look, Richard. I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I’m not the most creative guy in the room. And looking back over time, I’m really fucking bad at most things. I’ve got no illusions about that. I can look back at most of the things I do. I’m fucking lousy at it. Like anything that has to do with fixing shit around the house, terrible at that. Anything having to do with day to day management and operation of people fucking horrible. I could do it, but I’m really fucking bad at it. Anything that involves being on a computer for a lot of time, graphic design, all that shit, the worst ever. So I look at the list of shit that I’m actually fucking bad at. And it’s long, dude. It’s like going to the store and getting one of those receipts that they give you. That’s like miles long, there’s no end to the things I’m bad at. But there are a couple of things that I’m good at. And the main thing is what Professor Cialdini talks about in his book Influence. Its influence, I’m a good storyteller. And by the stories I tell, I have the ability to impact and influence people to empower themselves. And that’s really my superpower that I’m learning more and more about in these last few years. I’m great at creating an impact and getting people to do things that will empower them. I did it with Herbal Ecstacy. I created more millionaires in those days than I think were created ever in that time, by creating distributorships different people had businesses and empowering people to do that. And now I’m capitalizing on that same superpower by empowering people to build these Amazon FBA businesses, guys, when you hear us talking about this stuff, it’s real. And it’s there right now like Richard was saying, there isn’t a better time we are at the ground floor of this Amazon is not going anywhere. If you look at Walmart or Walgreens, that was started, long, long time ago. And those guys started that. And there was I’m sure some asshole sitting around saying, yeah, this isn’t gonna work. Because before those days, you’d walk into a general store, you would tell the guy what you needed, that guy would go out into the store, he would pick the items, you didn’t have a choice of brands, you could only get one thing. So if you wanted bread, you would get the bread that they had, if you want a baking soda, you would take whatever brand of baking they had, you put it in a bag and he would hand it to you. The revolution that happened with these retailers like Walmart and Piggly Wiggly and all these different types of businesses that started was that they allowed people to walk in, you had a cart, you could pick whatever you want. It allowed for multiple brands to come into a marketplace. And that was a game changer, it changed the game. And there were some assholes in there going, yeah, the shit will never work, it’s a bubble. And that’s where we’re fucking out with Amazon. That’s what I want people to realize that we are there on the ground floor. People are there now in the store where they weren’t able to before and they can pick it out of the aisle and get whatever they want and you can be at that forefront by starting an Amazon FBA business. And again, for any of your listeners who want to learn how to do it learn to do what Richard and I have done creating these multimillion-dollar recurring revenue businesses that you’ll be able to sell in a few years for a nice amount of money and retire somewhere nice, like Richard has, check out my course, offered to for free, that’s zero cost it will cost you $0 to take the course and learn how to start an FBA business and launch it.

 

Richard Matthews  55:34  

Yeah, so the influence as a superpower is actually really interesting because it’s part of the reason why I started this podcast. We started this conversation, talking about mentors. One of my early mentors said something to me that eventually became the genesis of the name for the show. And he said, someday, you’re gonna have kids, and those kids are gonna have a hero. And if you’re not worthy, it won’t be you. And he said because they’re gonna pick the people who influenced them. And if you’re not worthy of the influence, they won’t pick you as the heroes. And I remember that stuck with me, and I’ve got four kids now. And so it’s pretty insane. But one of the things that I learned over the course of time is that influence or persuasion. It’s a neutral tool. meaning, it’s like a hammer, you can use a hammer to bang nails and build a house, or you can use it to bash someone’s head in and go to jail for the rest of your life. That kind of thing. It’s a neutral tool we use for good or evil. And I always tell people that persuasion used for the benefit of the one being persuaded, or for the mutual benefit of either person, is what we call that leadership. And persuasion is used only for the benefit of the one doing the persuading, we call that manipulation. And so when you’re looking at the superpower, your ability to tell stories and use language to make an impact in other people’s lives. It’s one of those things you learn. When you have that skill, you’re like, oh, it can be dangerous. Because if you string the right words together in the right way, for the right person at the right time, they’ll change their life based on those words. And they’ll take different actions and do different things. And it’s crazy to me that you can have that kind of power over someone else. And that’s where influence lives. So I think it’s one of those superpowers, that is maybe a cut above the rest if that makes sense.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  57:54  

Yeah, that’s true. And sometimes, I would push back a little bit and say, how do you know if something is good for the other person we can never know. So at the end of the day, you just have to be a good person. And I was talking to somebody about this the other day, about the subject of authenticity, is that the greatest tactic of influence, I think, beyond any of the pillars, any of Cialdini’s pillars, and Cialdini is a God when it comes to influence, his authenticity, just be a real fucking person. It’s amazing. You don’t need to learn any special tactics. You don’t need to know any special scripts. The greatest tool for anybody who wants to influence other people is just to be a real fucking person, be authentic. I was using the example of we went to some place and somehow got suckered into going to some presentation to buy a unit or something and I was like, sure, let’s go see the place looks nice. And the lady just came up to us. And the poor thing, she just rolled right into the script. And I was like, okay, so stop the script, just be a real person, just talk to us. I’ll probably buy what you’re selling. Just talk to me, and she couldn’t do it. She was just going through the script and asking the scripted questions. And it just totally turned us off from whatever it was, even if we were willing to buy it at that time. She talked herself out of a sale because she didn’t have authenticity. She couldn’t be authentic, she had the script, she had all the stuff they told her, she had the answers to all the objections. She had all that stuff, but she just wasn’t a real person. And the scary thing about that was a nobody can teach you to become an authentic person. You can’t fucking decide that you’re going to get a book and become an authentic person. A lot of the people that we love that we watch on TV, that we watch on the internet, the reason we like them, we can’t explain. And a lot of the time you realize that the reason is because they’re just who they are. They’re an authentic person, they don’t give a fuck, they don’t care about all the scripts and the stuff they’ve been told to say they’re just being themselves. And that, in and of itself, is super important. The key becomes how do you begin to discover who you are. And you do that through self-reflection. You do that by looking back and constantly improving yourself, constantly upping your game, to becoming a better person. And if you do that, the sky’s the limit for you.

 

Richard Matthews  1:00:36  

Yeah, and it’s an interesting process, you have to go through and you have to choose to just be who you are. And I think a lot of people are afraid of how the world will respond if they just let themselves be. So we put on masks and wear these costumes, so to speak, of who we think the world wants us to be. And the problem with that is that everyone can see it. And we’ll put your finger on and be like, I don’t know why I don’t like that guy, or girl. Or why I don’t connect with them. They can’t articulate it. But it’s that there’s a magic to authenticity.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:01:19  

Yeah. And you know what the reason is, some people are actually assholes. There are assholes in the world. And if you discover that you are an asshole, the first thing you gotta do is deal with your ass wholeness. You got to figure out why you’re an asshole. And then start working on yourself to fix that. And then you become more authentic by that but in the meanwhile own it like own your ass wholeness the fact that you’re an asshole you start owning it, then you start working on it and you start fixing it and people even respect even if you’re an asshole if you’re authentic people respect that look at the like that Chef who throws eggs on people’s heads or the TV show guy who does the people that are singing whatever they are, tell them you’re singing is awful. Those guys are assholes, but they own it. There are no illusions, there’s no like you’re saying masks, that’s who they are. And that’s okay. Because if that’s who you are, you can work on yourself, you can become self-reflective, you can become a part asshole, part authentic, you can do all that. But it’s really about building that internal fortitude, that internal strength, and becoming reflective reflecting back on things, which leads to this growth mindset. I mean, we could go on about this forever. But that’s really at the end of the day, what it’s about. That’s the ultimate superpower.

 

Richard Matthews  1:02:47  

So if your superpower is influence, and the authenticity that goes with it, the flip side of your superpower is always the fatal flaw. Just like Superman has his kryptonite, or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad, you probably had a flaw you’ve struggled within your business, something that kept you from growing the way you wanted to. For me, I struggled with a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time where I would not ship products because I can always do a little bit more things to it and make it a little bit better. Very low standards to hold yourself to, I also struggled with the lack of self-care. So I didn’t have good boundaries with my time. I didn’t have good boundaries with my clients, let them walk all over me that kind of stuff. And it wasn’t till I started fixing those things that I really started to grow. In that same vein, I think more important than what the flaw is how you have worked to overcome it so that you could continue to grow your brands and grow your businesses.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:03:41  

Yeah, I mean, look, I think, over time, my biggest flaw has been that I was too trusting of people who didn’t deserve it. And that I let people walk all over me when I was younger, mind you, I did not have any kind of business background, I didn’t have any understanding of business and how business works. So people stole from me, and people stole a lot of people stole millions and millions and millions of dollars from me. And I just kind of took it, because that’s who I was back in those days. And that was my greatest weakness. I was young, I was inexperienced, I didn’t have a lot of great people around me who were looking out for me. And people took advantage of me when I was young. And they saw all this wealth that I had created and people wanted a piece of it. They didn’t feel that I was deserving of it. They felt that they were deserving of it. So I learned over time that you need to verify things. You need to have great people around you that prove themselves. You need to have people around you that prove their trust, prove their loyalty, not through their words, but through their actions, and that it makes sense to create tests and to test people around you and overtime to build up a core circle that has your back. And that comes down to building long-term friendships, building loyalty, and really creating a life for yourself, where it’s very difficult for anybody to take advantage of you because you have great people always looking out for you.

 

Richard Matthews  1:05:26  

So I have a couple of questions that sort of come up from that story. And those are two things. One of them is what’s your advice to young entrepreneurs who are running into that? Because I was a young entrepreneur, I started my first business at 13. And for a lot of times all the way up into my early 30s, you run into a lot of that, you don’t really get a lot of the respect that comes with age when young, even if you’re successful. So what’s your advice for entrepreneurs who are dealing with that? And then the second part is, for someone who created as much success as you did in a short amount of time that you did? How do you judge relationships in a way that you can find out the people who are interested in having a relationship with you because of your success? Versus because they actually care about you? How do you learn that discernment?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:06:22  

Yeah, lool, so the first part, I’m gonna tell you, the first part of that is, you need to have people looking out for you. And you need to have experts that you pay, and you have to trust enough in them, that they’ve got your best interest in mind. And once you start to get successful, you need to get a good accountant, somebody to handle the money part of it, you need to have a good lawyer, somebody who you trust if you don’t trust them, you need to get somebody else who can handle that part of it, you need to have other people around you. So you need to find mentors, people who have done what you want to do and to be able to influence them to support you to be able to influence them to have your back. So that’s the first part of the equation. Remind me of the second part again.

 

Richard Matthews  1:07:10  

So you created a lot of success at a very young age, which people become attracted to the success and not necessarily to like you. So you’re talking about building relationships? How do you learn that discernment of people who are actually interested in having a relationship with you, versus I just want a piece of whatever pie he’s creating?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:07:30  

So the first part of it is you have to be intuitive. You have to develop a gut sense about people. You have to study people, you have to understand people, and there are certain telltale signs, where you can tell those things like I’m a student of a guy called Paul Ekman and his work I should say, of his work, I wish I was a student of Paul Ekman. And he studies micro-expressions, micro expressions are these little gestures that happen in a fraction of a second, where people can’t deny it, and they’ll give up exactly what they’re feeling. It’s great for lie detection and those kinds of things. There are people who study body language, there are people who study tonality, but at the end of the day, you have to, through dealing with a lot of people, create a sense of who’s really out there for you, and who’s really out there to profit from you. And it’s okay if people want to profit from you, as long as it’s a win-win, and you’re both doing well. But at the end of the day, it comes down to having a mentor, having other people around you that have your back that can guide you until your own inner compass comes strong enough where you just say no, yes, no, yes, no. Like right now, when people come around, I know if the deal is right, or if it’s not, I don’t know how I know all the time. And I run all the normal due diligence on stuff on deals. And I’m not always right. Sometimes I’m wrong, sometimes great deals get away and sometimes terrible deals get through, it happens. And it’s okay. But if you do enough of those, you’ll be in a place where you’ll know. And then there’s just common sense. You have to always examine the motives of the people who you’re choosing to believe and choose to work with and you have to be super smart. I mean, again, it comes down to there’s no hack to hard work. A lot of this is work. A lot of it is, you know, it’s interesting because it reminds me of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve been a student of Brazilian jiu jitsu for some years now and am still a beginner still learning a lot. But invariably, when somebody who’s heavier than you gets on top of you, and there’s no way to avoid that. Eventually, somebody will get on top of you in a dominant position. When you’re grappling. You’re underneath them and now you have to get out. There’s just no other way. You have to figure out a way inch by inch to get out from that position and it and it happens but the more you get into that position, the more you learn how to cope with it, the more you learn how to calm yourself, the more you learn how to escape little by little, and to get to a slightly better position each time. And similarly, I think with life and with people, it’s the same way, eventually, somebody is going to come around, that’s going to take advantage of your good nature, it’s just going to happen, it happens to everybody. And you just have to be aware, and you have to learn from those types of things. And then you can be in a position to decide, hey, I know I’m being taken advantage of in the steel, but in the bigger picture of things, it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna let it go. Or I’m not gonna let that happen.

 

Richard Matthews  1:10:46  

Yeah, absolutely. So it comes with experience and learning those things. And you said, there’s no substitute for hard work. And I do the same kind of thing, there’s no substitute for the experience. The hard work creates the experience. And that experience is what sort of gives you the wisdom to make those decisions and grow. Which is lucky to start early in an entrepreneur career. But you have a lot of time to go for it. But I do want to talk a little bit about Amazon mastery, specifically, and talk about what I call your common enemy. So every superhero has their arch-nemesis, it’s the thing they have to fight against in their world. In the world, business takes a lot of forms. But generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients. And it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re running into regularly, that you have to fight against. So you can actually help them get the result they came to you for in the first place. And if you had your magic wand, and every person who signed up for amazon mastery, or took the free course that you’ve offered to my audience, if you just bop them on the head and help them overcome that mindset, what is the common enemy that you have to fight with helping people start an Amazon business?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:11:54  

Well, it’s exactly what you just said, it’s the mindset. But mainly, the struggle that people have is perfection paralysis and that’s a form of insecurity. People are like, well, I’m going to do the thing that I’m going to do and that is to be better than everybody else’s. So it’s mine is going to take longer, and I’m going to just make it so perfect and whatever. But like you astutely observed, that’s a flaw because nobody gives a fuck if your thing is like this much better than the other. In fact, on Amazon, you could sell an inferior product and still do better if you tell a better story. There are lots of inferior products that get more money on Amazon, just because they know how to tell a better story. They know how to take better pictures, write better copy, make a better video, describe the thing, do ranking reviews, all that stuff. So the fact is, for most people, they get in their own way, because they don’t just fucking start the people who win understand that this is going to be a fucking process, you’re going to have to go out there, you’re gonna have to try something, you have to burn a little bit of money, you’re gonna have to fail. And then you’re going to have some learnings that you’re going to come back with, and you’re going to succeed. But nothing happens without these three elements. And my friend and mentor Wayne Boss teaches us knowledge, courage in action. When you come up across a problem, the first thing you need to have is knowledge. You can buy knowledge, borrow knowledge, rent knowledge, but if we know-how, the how-to solve whatever it is, make an extra 50,000 a month, do whatever it is the problem that you want to solve. That gives you courage because you know how to do it. If you’ve been doing this for 50 years making 50,000 a month every day for 50 years, you’re 51 you’re going to have courage, you’re going to have courage after year one. Courage gives us the ability to take action, the thing which all other things are impossible. So knowledge, courage, action, when you have those three things, nothing is impossible. And again, I write about that in my book Billion, which has just dropped to anybody that’s interested check out Billion: How I became king of the thrill pill cult. Not to be confused with the awesome TV show Billions, but equally as a good story.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:09  

My first question is, do you have the audiobook that is available yet?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:14:12  

The audiobook will drop in the next 10 days, and there will be an audible book that is right.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:18  

That’s awesome because I’m an audiobook user. Because it’s the way that I can get books in my head while I’m getting stuff done. So I’m always a fan of that.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:14:30  

Yeah, you can go. I think you can go on to Audible or Amazon, add it to your wish list, and once it’s released. They will notify you so that’s a great way to go.

 

Richard Matthews  1:14:41  

Who did the narration for it? Did you do your own narration?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:14:44  

I did the narration myself. Everybody asks that. So I did the narration myself. It’s got an intro by Chris Voss, the FBI hostage negotiator who’s super awesome. He’s a friend of mine, he wrote never split the difference. And he did high-level FBI negotiations for years. is one of the best-selling business authors. Jay Samet wrote a little blurb for Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari Keith Ferrazzi. Never split the difference. Dr. Michael Bruce, America’s sleep doctor. So we’ve got a lot of good people involved in the promotion of the book. And I’m super excited. And these are the kinds of people that we also have on our podcast, Hack and Grow Rich and I love to have you on at some point too, Richard.

 

Richard Matthews  1:15:24  

So I actually think talking about your book is a good transition for one of my next questions, which is about your driving force. So the flip side, the common enemy is what you fight against your driving force is what you fight for in your business. So just like Spider Man fights Save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham, or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, what is it that you guys are fighting for with your businesses today?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:15:46  

Yeah, we’re fighting for the individual to impact as many people as we can to create recurring revenue to get people to stop fucking selling their hours because they understand that that’s a pit. If you’re listening to this right now, and you’ve got to go to some job that you fucking hate. If you’ve got to do something where you don’t own your time. It’s a fucking travesty, there will always be people who do that and who don’t know better, and that’s fine. But if you’re listening to this podcast right now, if you’re hearing my voice coming through these airwaves right now, you’re looking for something better, you are somewhat a self-realized person, you realize that you can improve yourself personal fucking development. So that is what we are fighting for. We are fighting to give you back your life, give you back your hours, and allow you to create a foundational wealth, where you can have all those fucking things that you want, without having to sell your hours.

 

Richard Matthews  1:16:45  

Yeah, and it’s crazy how achievable that is today. I tell people, we’re in the golden age of business, you go back to what you were doing in the 90s. And what you can accomplish with your cell phone today would have cost you 10s of 1000s of dollars a month. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:17:07  

It’s true.

 

Richard Matthews  1:17:08  

For free on your phone today. So it’s amazing what you can do. And we were talking earlier about how Amazon is shifting the economy. And I think one of the things that people don’t talk about is, there is going to be a huge shift, I think towards entrepreneurship over the next decade, where there will be more and more people. And I think the pandemic also pushed more this way, where you’re going to see more and more independent contractors and more and more work from home and more and more entrepreneurship as the primary means of earning income rather than double you two if that makes sense. And I think if you’re hearing this message now, there’s no better time to start working on the skills and making the shift. And especially with something like an Amazon business, it doesn’t have to be something where you’re like, I quit my job today and start an Amazon business tomorrow. It’s the kind of thing that you could literally build as a side hustle. And there’s a lot of power in that. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:18:18  

Agreed. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:18:19  

And now a quick word from our show sponsor. Hey, there fellow podcaster. Having a weekly audio and video show on all the major online networks that builds your brand creates fame and drive sales for your business doesn’t have to be hard. I know it feels that way. Because you’ve tried managing your show internally and realize how resource intensive it can be. You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways because you know how powerful it is heck you’ve probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap. That’s not helping grow your business. Don’t give up though. The struggle ends now introducing, Push Button Podcasts a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you’ve pushed that stop record button. We handle everything else uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research graphics, publication, and promotion, all done by real humans who know understand, and care about your brand, almost as much as you do. Empowered by our own proprietary technology, our team will let you get back to doing what you love. While we handle the rest. Check us out at pushbuttonpodcasts.com forward slash hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro-celebrity status and business in your niche without you having to lift more than a finger to push that stop record button. Again, that’s pushbuttonpodcasts.com forward slash hero. See you there. Now, back to the hero show. 

 

 

Richard Matthews  1:19:50  

So I have a couple more questions for you. We’ve been going for a while. I’m going to skip a couple of and go to one of my favorite questions which is about your guiding principles. So one of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we sort of wrap up this interview, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you live your life by now, maybe something you wish you knew when you started your own hero’s journey as a teenager selling thrill pills.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:20:21  

I think we cover that to a great degree. I think one of them is just being authentic, always be authentic, be a real person. The other one is becoming a student of influence. Learn the pillars of influence, social proof, authority, likability, scarcity, reciprocity, learn about those, and try to go out there into the world and seek excellence, not money. We don’t chase money, we chase excellence, we try to get better, we try to improve ourselves, we try to develop ourselves. And those really have always been my guiding principles.

 

Richard Matthews  1:21:02  

Absolutely. I really like the idea of chasing excellence. That’s a great way to put that I’ve never really thought about it that way. But it’s a good way to think about how you grow your business, in terms of what you were talking about. How can I improve my scarcity, my copywriting, my storytelling? How can I prove all those things really what you’re doing is you’re chasing excellence. That’s a great way to put that, I might stick it up on my wall over here. But when you’re talking about the first principle of influence, and he talks about the pillars, one of the ones I don’t know if Robert Cialdini talks about this or not is the storytelling aspect. And I tell people all the time that we’re a story-born people. And if I was going to practice anything to become a better entrepreneur, it would be learning how to tell, and how to listen to how to exchange stories with other people, because that’s one of the foundational skills of anything if you’ll do storytelling.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:22:12  

look, I feel like in general, we talk too fucking much and don’t listen enough. I feel most people love talking about themselves, but they really don’t like listening. But any salesperson will tell you a great sales pitch is no sales pitch at all. It’s not you talking to someone telling them all the benefits of your product, it’s you listening to them, and trying to understand what it is that you need. Oftentimes a sale can be made, just by asking the right questions and leading the prospect to the determination that they really want to buy what it is that you’re selling, that’s the greatest sales pitch at all, is that you just qualify and you don’t sell. So at the end of the day, I really think that really is the best way to go.

 

Richard Matthews  1:23:04  

Yeah, absolutely. So I think that’s a great place to wrap up our interview. But I do finish all of my interviews with a simple challenge. And I do this to help get access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own because not everyone’s doing the podcast rounds like you and I are. The question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine and why do you think they should come to share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:23:34  

I think it’s probably gonna be my co-host Bart Baggett, my co-host on Hack and Grow Rich. Bart has an amazing story. He’s world-famous. He’s written a book called Success Secrets of the Rich and happy and I think he’d be a great person for your podcast.

 

Richard Matthews  1:23:49  

Awesome. I’ll see if we can reach out later and maybe schedule him to come on this show. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are clapping and cheering for the acts of heroism. So are analogous to that is where can people find you if they want your help? If they want to learn how to build an Amazon business or pick up your book and read the Billion. Where can they light up the best signal so to speak? I think more importantly, who are the right types of people to do that?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:24:18  

If you are at a place in your life, where you want to get to the next level, create predictable recurring revenue, reach out and you can email me directly I’m Dark Zess and I’m going to spell that for you, DarkZess@gmail.com. That is my direct email. I respond to all emails directly. It might take me a couple of days but I’ll get to you. So if you email me I do get two emails zero every day and every email will get a response from me or occasionally from somebody on my staff but you will get a response from us. So reach out to me if you want the one-hour course Check out FBASellerCourse.com, that’s or go to ShaahinCheyenne.com. Make sure to go to Hack and Grow and subscribe and if you have comments on this, please make sure to leave them below. And the book Billion: How I Became King Of The Thrill Pill Cult, which tells that whole story of that wild ecstasy ride that we were talking about is available now on Amazon, probably will be available on Audible. You can get the first chapter, by the way, we should check out the first chapter. It’s free on Spotify, Stitcher, Apple podcast, Google podcasts, anywhere podcasts are found, you can get the first chapter of the book for free. And that is a really well-produced narrated first episode that I think you’ll like.

 

Richard Matthews  1:25:50  

Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today Shaahin and sharing your story with us. It’s fascinating to hear all of the things that you have done. And if you’re listening to this and you are interested in the Amazon business, I can tell you from firsthand experience, it’s absolutely worth getting into that space. I think there’s probably no better business today that you could be in. Maybe aside from potentially real estate is getting into the Ecom game and learning how to sell products. It’s one of those foundational skills that will go with you no matter what you do in the entrepreneurship game so definitely check that out Amazon mastery and what was the link for the free course I’ll make sure we have that in the show notes. But just one more time for the audience. 

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:26:32  

Sure, yeah it’s FBASellerCourse.com. Reach out to us there, contact us on there and or just email me directly as I said, and we’ll send you the one-hour course. It’s normally 200 bucks. It’s A to Z, everything you need to know about Amazon will send that to you for free if you mentioned the Code Hero.

 

Richard Matthews  1:26:49  

Awesome. And Shaahin, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story today. I really appreciate everything that you have shared. Do you have any final words of wisdom before I hit this stop record button?

 

Shaahin Cheyene  1:26:59  

No, I think that’s it. I think we covered a lot of words of wisdom. So thank you so much for having me on. Richard, I appreciate you.