You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So you have been known to lose your mind at times, have you? I try to lose my mind a little bit every day and it's more important than, you know, okay, so I'll give you my dirty little secret, which I don't live on air a lot. I like to make prank calls. It's one of my favorite things. I do multiple characters. I can do a Persian guy that speaks like these. How are you? I'm Mr. Irani. I can do a Russian guy who Panama Chiba is rusky.

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

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. You know, when people look at you and they look at successes, they think oh, the road to success is easy and or it's not riddled with challenges or obstacles. And that's all it's riddled with and so much self-doubt. You brought it up at a perfect time so much self-doubt in the impossible all you heard was possible, but you took that on as a challenge whatever lit that fire under your butt to say, yeah I'll show them and a lot of great successes that I've had on the show were challenged that they couldn't do it, and they wanted to just show the world you're wrong, I'm right. I can do it. But you give such hope to any entrepreneur willing to hustle.

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

That's why most CEOs that are where they're at. We tend to think that people that are CEOs are these people that have gone to school and done you know the things by the book and they come out like this no and I teach this all the time to my students, my students in my amazon course is that those guys are the smartest in the room for a reason and that reason is not that they've played by the rules. The reason is they didn't think outside the box. They crushed the box. These are real next-level thinkers.

Uh, Walter Isaacson, who wrote the great uh autobiography, sorry not autobiography, the great biography of Steve Jobs talks about how Steve Jobs would walk into a room and he would say, all right guys, uh we're going to need and this was in the early 90s. We're going to need a phone and you're going to be able to touch the screen. Before this, all phones had buttons and there'll be no buttons on this phone and it'll do all these things. It'll have an iPod on it, it'll play music, it'll do all these things. It didn't exist and the engineers would say okay cool, Steve Jobs awesome. Okay, amazing. We could have this for you in the next three to five years. He'd be very cute. 30 days I'm going on stage to announce it. Make it work and he would leave and they would all be sitting there going oh my god what an and what just happened. We just agreed to do this and they would do it and he would make it happen.

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

I don't think there's any key ingredient. I don't think there's anyone thing, you got to have grit, you got to have resilience, you got to be able, the one thing I would say that's key is you got to be able to go out there and take some punches, you got to be able to be knocked down. The people I see coming through my amazon fba seller course, the people who come through my amazon mastery course. The ones that come in with the attitude of hey, I'm going to throw my chips on the table and I'm gonna see where that little roulette ball lands and maybe it'll land on one of my numbers, those are the ones that fail. I haven't had anybody fail yet by the way.

What are some of the mistakes that people make? What's the biggest mistake that people make on amazon I think this goes kind of to what you and I talk about often. This is one of the biggest mistakes that people make in life also. I think it's just going into something with some knowledge thinking that you don't need to learn the fundamentals because it's like that adage you know the one of the students who goes to the master and he and the master's pouring tea and he goes oh master will you teach me and the master has the tea kettle and he pours the tea into his cup and the tea pours over and fills the table and he goes hey what are you doing um and he says I can't teach you and he says why can't you teach me he says because your cup's already full come back when your cup's empty.

It's true. There's no participation prize in the real world. There's no participation prize on Amazon, you don't get an honorable mention for having good intentions. So you have to go out there ready to crush and if you can't handle that, get a job, go work for someone and sell or be a socialist. There are plenty of countries that would love to have you as a socialist, you know, and I know there's a whole political movement of like, oh, everybody should be free and give the money away and feed the homeless and you know what? Get three kids and start an Amazon business. See how socialist you are? You won't be that socialist once you have written your checks. Go read Ein Rand the fountain header atlas shrugged and let's see if your philosophy doesn't change a little bit.

You have to be willing to go the road alone if you have to. The first thing I learned is that people are very quick to tell you that things are impossible and when I started herbal ecstasy back in the early 90s, I remember all I heard was that it was impossible but I had a flaw and that was I didn't listen to anybody and not only that I didn't know that it was impossible. Just because they're saying it's impossible, I didn't want it to be impossible.

But as far as just you know entrepreneurship and business goes I mean like they say you know if there’s blood in the street buy real estate. Dude, there was blood in the street and a lot a lot of wealth was created and now like we’re in l.a like everything’s open. People aren’t wearing masks and stuff and you’re looking around and I’m like people are back to buying 7.50 lattes on the corner here and like it’s almost like nothing changed

That the the first thing we tell people is don’t come to the table with an idea the best thing the best students the ones that succeed the most is the ones that have no idea what they’re going to sell and I’ll tell you why. Because by the way we don’t we don’t believe in building a better mousetrap and the world will beat its way to your door. That’s the old model right. That’s disruption marketing with.

I don’t have one of these big courses and I’m not one of these dudes that’s like check out my lambo check out like the babes in my yacht and like my mega mansions and like all that right. We I do this for a living. We make millions of dollars a year selling on amazon. It’s well documented. I’m many times over a millionaire. I no longer need the money but I do it because I like empowering people.

So there’s mixed messages and there’s vulnerabilities and if you know how to exploit those vulnerabilities you can win, which is why I oftentimes you know I get asked to talk about black hat tactics and grey hat tactics yeah you know white hat tactics and the fact is there’s nobody who is successful that just does everything strictly by uh TOS, you know terms of service you know we follow what they tell us to do.

So there are lots of ways, lots of hacks to do that but you know no one there’s no one thing that you’re gonna do that’s gonna make your thing pop. You got to think again, yeah you got to think foundational. You got to do all of that stuff and then truly you know I’m going to give a disclaimer that I don’t recommend anybody do anything black hat against terms of service but again you know most people do a little white hat greyhound little black hat stuff you know and that’s the way the world goes around.

But we’re making micro moves to get ourselves in a better position or in a less shitty position depending on where you’re at. Until you can you can achieve freedom and at the end of the day, you’ve got to have an unshakable self-belief as Richard Koch talks about in his book Unreasonable Success and how to achieve it.

Usually, you have a set path in life and unless that path is disrupted you will have a tendency to go for wherever inertia will take you. Most kids these days I mean look at 15-year-olds now right they don’t I mean they don’t know how to wipe their own butts. Much less like going out there and starting a company right. Do you have any kids? “No”. Okay, so most kids like I’ve got nephews who I just look at and I’m like oh my god like they’re you know I’ve got one nephew who’s in his teens and I really would like him to be more proactive like he is far from starting a business.

Three things that you need – knowledge courage and action. The knowledge you can buy, you can borrow, you can steal, you can rent, right? Maybe better not to steal it but you can rent it. You can hire people and that’s what I did. I picked up the phone. The first phone call I made was to Andrew Wilde, the great naturopath, the guy who wrote all the textbooks, who’s like now you know he’s got a TV show.

What is an Affordable Trustworthy Nonscammy Course On How To Sell On Amazon? Is Amazon really the place to learn how to sell on Amazon? I had to take my money buying a course on "how to sell on Amazon" and then I had to take my money back after I failed miserably.