You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahiin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Seriousness is a disease. It is not a quality to be admired. Whenever you look at people that are like super tight and they're sphincter as wound up, super tight and they're just very serious about things. There's something else in their life that's imbalanced. You look at the great people in history. I guarantee you they had rip-roaring laughs. You look at Albert Einstein, you look at John Rockefeller, you look at any of these people throughout history. They reach these incredible heights of success and you'll find antidotes of them being funny. Mark Twain is a great example of it. Oscar Wilde is another example of it. Alan Watts, you look at any of these great people throughout history. They didn't take themselves seriously. It's only the that take themselves seriously.

I think, in general, this is an unpopular view. Not everybody is meant to be entrepreneurial. Some people are better off working for other people. Yeah, the fact is, when you ask people, you know, you ask wealthy people, successful people. Why are you successful? They will invariably come back to say I'm passionate about what I do. Ask Mark Zuckerberg. Why why? Why did you succeed and all these other people? I'm passionate about social media. I'm passionate about this. It's really. This Scott Adams says in his book, how to fail at almost everything and still win big. It's something. Yeah, I love that book. I love it. It's a great book. And I, you know, he talks about this and the fact is most people are going to fail.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. We mustn't take ourselves too seriously. That's the problem with most people. Seriousness is a disease. Most people have a pole up there. You know what, and they're walking around with all these levels of seriousness and all this projection of themselves. And that's why I do stuff like that. I try to do some silly thing, make a prank, call a friend and make them laugh. Do something silly and unexpected every day because it breaks me out of that thing. It breaks you out of the traps of the ego of the belief that all this is is real that all this is all there is.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. So by the time I was 15, I was like, man, I got to get out of here. I can't. If I stay here, you know, What's the path for me? And my folks would say, hey, you know, go to school five years ten years to get a degree. Become a doctor. You become a doctor young man, and I'd be like all right. Well, let me look at the doctor. I'd be like, look at Mr. so-and-so out the street and I'd look at the guy and he was bald and fat and the whole family was bald and fat. And you just look at the guy and I'd be like, wow. Yeah, he's got a Benz, but that's not him, the bank owns it, right? And that could be you, right? Yeah, you look at his car and you're like, man, you know, like his house. You're like the bank owns that and the guy leaves at 5 a.m. He comes back at like 8 or 9 p.m. and now he looks miserable. I don't want to be that.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Treat everyone right and nice regardless of where they're at in their life, because of this guy and the agent, there could have been opportunities there. But you know what? Regardless of whether it's a guy parking your car or anyone else in your life. They're there for a reason and a season. And you treat everyone with respect and dignity. You never know where they're going to be, or what they're going to be. And certainly, he probably regretted by the way. I was in the copier business so I know the hum and I know the warmth. That was my first business. So I get that and I fell asleep a few times also good. That was working the 12 hour days but what an amazing story.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. There's another story where while I was you know, living in these abandoned buildings and on the beach and all these places, I managed to get myself a job at a copy place, at a Kinkos copy. It was at the time and I remember we were in the back. I was making photocopies for Scientology because that's it was right next to the Scientology building. Yeah, they would have these like, billionaire contracts that they made. People sign and like there was all this paperwork and I'd be like send the copy machines. I was a kid and I remember that I had this boss who was like this evil man like he was like the monopoly guy. He was like you know, he had this like a cat and a cane and a mustache and all this stuff and I would sleep behind the copy machine because it had a nice droning hum. It was warm back there and I could sleep for a few hours so during my shift. I would set the papers, the contracts to print and I would fall asleep behind the copy machine. Didn't think much of it, but one day I woke up and like to a kick in my side and like his like cane and he's like standing on something beating me behind the machine and me looking going hey, what the man and you know, him like kicking me out. I didn't get my paycheck, right? Mind you, I was sleeping in wherever I could sleep. I didn't have money for food. He wouldn't give me my paycheck.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. My dad worked at a pizza shop and then he worked at a dry cleaner for nearly 30 years. And we never bought new clothes. I hadn't been to a restaurant until I was 15. And you know, then one of the rich kids at school invited me over and I remember going, wait for a second, explain to me how this works again. This guy is going to come and give me a piece of paper and I can pick a hamburger and he will bring it to me. Like, I was like, yeah, get whatever you want. I got my dad's card. I said what? What do you mean? Did you get your dad's? I go, wait. He's like just get anything you want. I'm like, "so I can get a hamburger and the pasta. I can get both of those and he's going to bring them to me." I was like you must be bullshitting. I don't believe you. And you know, that was my level of sophistication. At that time. I had no, we didn't buy new clothes. It was when customers would come and somebody would look cool, we would just cross our fingers and hope they would skip out on their bill. So my dad would keep their clothes and somehow it would trickle down to us. All our clothes were like two-three sizes too big for us.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Yeah, yeah and sometimes you've got to take people's energy and use it as fuel for your fire. And that's worked well for me. I think I see people in mixed martial arts doing that. Yes. Where they use the energy of their opponents to their advantage and business is much the same I think as martial arts where you can take that negativity, that distortion that people throw at you and utilize that as fuel.

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 Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. Positive momentum and negative momentum. When things happen that are crappy, they seem to happen one after another. It affects your attitude, your mindset, everything. And when good things happen, the key is always to keep your foot on the gas and get back to basics. Always grind. Put people in your corner who support encourage you. And what you did, which I love is you were taking every situation in life, you even when you had the chip going back to what you said at the beginning of this interview, when you had the chip on your shoulder, you didn't say, what was it you said, you know what? I'm going to take what I don't have. And I'm going to make something of that. Everything you did was in your favor. Using it in your favor to drive you to do the things that would drive your success and I think that's a phenomenal lesson that everything is good and bad.

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

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.

You're now listening to Hack & Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyenne and his co-host Bart Baggett. I discovered all the great inspirational writers during the turn of the century. People like Napoleon Hill, Andrew Carnegie's. I read the bio, I read you know people like Og Mandino, all these great, old-time, Did you like? Did you read the thinking where rich was that instrumental or? I did read Think and Grow Rich and I think it was it was pretty inspirational for me, you know, I'm not sure I agree with all the concepts in it now but back then it was exactly what I needed and I started reading up on that stuff. I started reading up on the New Age Movement. The self-development movement reading, Tony Robbins, and all these great people. And I was like, man, you know there might be a chance for me. So I took off.

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

You look at somebody one of my all-time heroes of all time. Is this guy Alan Watts? Alan Watts was a philosopher. Are you familiar with Alan Watts at all? Yeah, Alan Watts was a philosopher in the 1950s and 1960s up until I think the 70s when he passed away in I think close to 73 who was responsible for bringing the wisdom of the east Zen philosophy to the west and he did it in such a digestible way that even today, people are remixing his words, his spoken word along with electronic dance music. But Watts was one of the most self-realized people of his time because he took that opportunity to self-reflect not only on his strengths but also on his weaknesses. And similarly, I learned early on that it's not as important to learn what you're good at. Because like we said you can hire people that are good at the things that you are not good at. But it is important to know what things you suck at, what things you are horrible at, what things you will never be great at. Not because you put yourself down, not because you are down on yourself, but because then you have a true knowledge of yourself and you can act closer to the truth.

I was 15 years old thinking I want to find wealth, fortune all the great things that America offers. Books were my friends. I read books by Napoleon Hill, books by Og Mandino, all the great old-time writers of that time. I read Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer and all the personal development guys. This other guy is named Stuart Wilde. I read his books and I thought, man, you know what? I'm gonna leave home and I left home. I left and I was sleeping at that time in abandoned buildings or buildings that were under construction. Los Angeles was in a huge building boom at that time. So I realized that I could get into these buildings late at night when the brokers weren't in there, wake up in the morning before they got there and I'd be out and I'd be living in luxury houses, maybe there wasn't electricity or water in those days in some of the places because they weren't built yet but it was a safe place to lay my head and after that, I realized that there was a big electronic music scene.

The greatest human disease, the greatest thing I think that can hold you back not only in life but particularly in business is seriousness. Seriousness is a disease. You gotta relax. You got to be able to enjoy things and not take things so seriously, not lean into things so much. Let things come to you. It's what professor Caldini talks about in his book Persuasion. Caldini being the great professor that wrote the Canon on Influence also talks about pre-suede, talks about the greatest sales are made before the guy before the prospect ever comes to you and it's all part of this process.

Sure, I talk about one in my book, where uh mysterious man shows up at my office mind you. I was in the maybe early 20s, maybe late teens. He's got an uh a duffel bag with a million dollars in cash and an invitation to go to Japan, to Tokyo on a private plane. What do you do? I went turns out that the mob was interested in taking over my company, maybe not the best move. Maybe maybe it was an okay movie. And there were several moments of self-doubt. I mean I could have potentially been killed. So there was a lot of that.

And I am a huge fan of the law. I love law um and all things related to it and when I had started my first company and we can go into the story. You know, I created a billion dollars worth of revenue in my teens, creating this legal version of an illegal drug. And I remember there was a time when lawsuits were just flying and I didn't realize I thought you would have to wrong somebody to get a lawsuit. I was wrong because there were all these vulture lawyers. And this was at a time when the employment practices laws were coming into place. So there were all these people who I never met, who I had never had any transacting with, who were suing me. And I remember. And this kind of goes into my whole philosophy about hacking life.

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.