Shaahin Cheyene Podcast Transcript
Shaahin Cheyene joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies home of The Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be our guest at www.coruzant.com/brand.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Shaahin Cheyene. During the Iranian revolution of 1978, Shaahin’s family had to escape to survive, and ended up finally migrating to Los Angeles.
At 15 years old, Shaahin left home with nothing but the clothes on his back and created over a billion dollars in revenue by inventing the legendary smart drug known as Herbal Ecstasy. These childhood experiences had a major impact on his perspective of freedom, hard work, and entrepreneurship. Later, Shaahin went on to event Digital vaporization, the forerunner to today’s vapes, and started a number of successful businesses with a couple notable failures.
Today, he’s the founder and CEO of Accelerated Intelligence, a major Amazon, FB, a seller with millions in sales, the lead coach at Amazon Mastery, where he teaches entrepreneurs how to crush it on Amazon platform and an active YouTube creator. Shaahin is considered one of the leading global minds on what’s next in e-commerce, Amazon and the internet.
He is described as the Willy Wonka of Generation X by the London Observer and Newsweek and is one of the most forward thinkers in business with his Amazon Mastery course. He acutely recognizes trends and patterns early on the Amazon platform to help others understand how these shifts impact markets and consumer behavior.
Well, good afternoon, Shaahin. Welcome to the show!
Shaahin Cheyene: Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate it, brother. I really do. I’m in Kansas City generally. You’re in the LA area. I know you travel a lot, so I appreciate you making the time. I do traverse the Globe 54 countries so far. So, let’s just jump in.
Shaahin Cheyene: Absolutely. Let’s do it. I’m excited.
Brian Thomas: Yeah, you’re, so, I love to start out with a backstory question. Your family escaped Iran during the 1978 revolution and by age 15 you left home with nothing but the clothes on your back. How do those early upheavals shape the kind of risk tolerance identity or urgency you carry into business later?
Shaahin Cheyene: Life’s all about risk. Risk is the DNA that makes up who we are. Now, the difference between people who fail and the people who succeed isn’t that one takes risks and the other doesn’t. But how you take risks is everything. For me, we left Iran. I was a we child of, four or five years old.
We came here just at the beginning of the eighties and I didn’t speak a word of English. And growing up, we faced all the challenges that we would face. My, my folks were, fairly poor. They worked their way up to middle class just by working hard jobs. And by the time I reached my teenage years, I realized that.
That path wasn’t gonna lead me anywhere, and that selling my hours, the way my parents were selling theirs would not work for me. So I had to find a way out. And the only way I could do it was to leave home, burn my ships as Napoleon Hill would say, or as Napoleon did, and to figure out what I was gonna do.
But I was hungry. I was gritty. Dude, it was the eighties. A very different, or early nineties, but very different time than it is now. And I, for one, thrived in the environment of I need to eat and I need to earn what I eat. And that worked really good for me. And so I discovered a company, we created over a billion dollars in revenue while I was in my teens pre-internet. And just rode the wave from there.
Brian Thomas: I love the backstory and, again that’s why generally lead like with a question like that, is the challenges you went through, the obstacles, the things that may have forced you or sparked an idea in your mind to do what you did. So, I really appreciate that and appreciate you contributing to this great country.
Many of us or our parents or grandparents definitely migrated to this country and that’s amazing. So I appreciate that.
Shaahin Cheyene: People laugh at me. I always say Greatest country in the world. Maybe not for everything, but I’ll tell you what, for entrepreneurship and opportunity. Go to Europe, right? They live a better lifestyle than we do.
They have less stress than we do, and they live better. But as far as opportunity, you wanna make money, please try to go to Europe, try to go to Asia, try to go to any other place in the world and duplicate what we have here. There is nowhere on the planet where you can come with less than the clothes on your back. Be in debt, be hungry, and still make it, no other country.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely free enterprises on steroids here for sure. So Shaahin, jumping into your next question, you created what you call herbal ecstasy and claim over a billion dollars in revenue as you previously mentioned. Can you take us behind the scenes?
How did you conceptualize, produce, distribute, and scale a smart drug? What moral legal or logistical challenges did you face then, and how do you reflect on it now?
Shaahin Cheyene: How much time you got, Brian? I can give you the, this is a 10 minute show, so I’ll give you the compressed episode. So I left home, no money, no friends, nowhere to go.
All I had was my hunger a tattered up copy of Think and Grow Rich, and a couple other books Mandino’s book. And that’s all I had. Those were my friends. And eventually I got enough cash to buy a broken down old car. I managed to sleep in the backseat and every night with my flashlight, as long as I had money for batteries, I would read the pages of those books.
And what I started to do is to hang around the electronic music scene. I realized that I should not be getting involved in crime because in my adolescence I had attempted that. In grade school and I was really bad at crime, really good at making money, really bad at not getting caught. I would get caught all the time.
So I basically being around the electronic music scene, realized that, hey, there’s money to be made here. Let me feed the market what it needs. What it needed was something that acted like ecstasy, which was the popular party drug of the time, but that was safe, that was legal, that didn’t get anybody injured.
And that’s what I did. I created that. It became a phenomena. And it’s funny because I do big interviews, small interviews, I do interviews of all kinds, and the comment that I get. Most of the time is something that I could not prepare myself for, and it makes me think I’m living in a simulation a different reality.
People are like, well, this never happened. The videos are all over the internet. You could Google me, you could Google Herbal Ecstasy. You can see me on the talk shows as a teen. So it’s all out there. But basically I created this, invented this smart drug. And it took on fire. And I used the momentum from the government coming after me, from all the three letter agencies coming after me to gain press, positive or negative.
And I rolled that press into sales and we made hundreds of millions of dollars doing that at a time where nobody else was doing it. And on top of it, I had no red tape. Brian. There was no red tape. There was nothing. It was all just me. It was me and me. That was it. And I look, now, you know where I represent corporate clients.
I have a Amazon firm where we help people sell products on Amazon, and I teach budding entrepreneurs how to sell products on Amazon, which by the way, another dream story. Love Bezos. Love what he’s about. Love Amazon. And anybody who doesn’t, you’re just a hater. And. The quickest path at the moment to wealth is Amazon and I’ve got an Amazon course.
I’ll give it to everybody on your show for free. All they gotta do is email me, darkzess@gmail.com. I’ll send them that for free. But I teach people this all the time. Big companies, big corporations, they got a lot of red tape. The advantage that we have as entrepreneurs is that we can be a team of one.
And any good business. Talk to Elon Musk, talk to Steve Jobs. Talk to Jeff Bezos. Talk to any of those guys, and I’ve talked to some of them. Any good business is a dictatorship and not a democracy. Beginning entrepreneurs want to get out there. They want to have lots of meetings. Oh, I gotta have lots of meetings and get people around and discuss my ideas and see who smelt it and which way the wind blows.
That’s not how successful businesses work. Successful businesses involve full circle what we were talking about at the beginning. Taking a risk, but how you take that risk means everything.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And again, ties into kinda that first question, your story. I think that’s amazing. You had you took a big risk on yourself and one, the thing that I took away is.
You, you had you and you trust you. You knew you the best and you got after it. You knew what needed to be done and because of that, you were able to be successful. Took a lot of work, perseverance, being resilience, of course. And I just love that story. So thank you. And Shaheen, you run your flagship Amazon Mastery courses, but also Lead Accelerated Intelligence.
It’s an agency. How do you balance teaching versus doing? How do you maintain credibility, staying hands-on while scaling your influence?
Shaahin Cheyene: Well, teaching is natural, right? So I think it, it’s very interesting. So I’ve trained martial arts for a number of years, and one of the greatest things, one of my martial arts teachers from years ago, he was one of Bruce Lee’s prodigies always teaches his students on the wall.
And I, I will never forget, this is the best way to learn something. Is to teach it, and I love that. I think that came from Socrates and it’s really a fact. I learn as much from my students as they learn from me and teaching people how to do Amazon is really a collaborative process. Students will bring me stuff where I go, whoa, I didn’t even think about that.
Yeah, let’s try it. Right? Let’s take that risk, but we’re gonna take that risk intelligently. Let me give you the advantage of my 15 plus years on Amazon, and now you’ve got a tool set where you can take a risk and that risk isn’t gonna lead you to ruin, right? You may win, you may lose. Most people fail.
But if you fail, you’re gonna fail fast and learn how to get up. And next time you do it, you’re not gonna fail. Or at least not fail the same way. And it’s the ones who continue to take action after they failed that are the real winners.
Brian Thomas: I love that. I really do. And we share a lot in common. And we talked a little bit before we hit record, but, martial arts, I totally agree with you. I did many, many years of it several black belts later. And I just love the fact that you can learn better by teaching. And I think that’s an important message here. But again love, love the stories, love your resilience and love helping others.
Shaahin Cheyene: So, what did, what did you get your black belts in?
Brian Thomas: TaeKwonDo and Hapkido. They’re both Korean disciplines.
Shaahin Cheyene: Yeah, those are amazing, man. Those high kicks really can be lethal.
Brian Thomas: Those are no joke. Hapkido even more brutal. It’s like the full on mixed martial arts, but that’s for another podcast.
So, Shaahin, jumping into your last question of the day, you’ve lived extremes from revolutionary upheaval to entrepreneurial high stakes. Looking ahead, what legacy do you want your work to leave, whether it’s your family, your entrepreneurs, the ideas you champion, what’s your North Star for the next decade?
Shaahin Cheyene: That’s a really good question, and I mean. I think the world is changing super rapidly. Everything that we know about the world is being turned upside down. And as always, this has happened from the dawn of time, right? There was somebody in the Roman world who was hanging around thinking they were on top of their game, and then somebody goes, dude.
Here’s a chariot with three wheels, and that just rocked, like everything changed in that moment. And there’s so many things happening now with ai, with robotics, with all these new technologies, medical technologies that are coming out, all the things that are coming out as a result of what we know. I encourage people that there is no better time in history to get rich.
And you owe it to yourself to do that. And I say this all the time, my wife I, I see her pale in the background. When I say this, the biggest. Crime you could do for yourself is to be poor in America. This is the greatest injustice that you could bring onto yourself is to be poor in America. Do not be poor here.
And people will go, well, Shaheen, it’s not in my hands. I would say, okay, if you believe it’s true or not, you’re.
Brian Thomas: A hundred percent believe in that. Absolutely. Whether you believe it or don’t, you’re right. And I think that’s important. I think gosh, there’s so many people that have said some amazing things.
I think maybe Henry Ford said that I can’t recall. But I just love that. I love. Your message here on the podcast today, it’s gonna help a lot of people in my audience for sure. We’ve got a lot of startups, founders and entrepreneurs of that type here, so I appreciate it. And Shaahin, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Shaahin Cheyene: Loves being on. Brian. Thanks so much and anybody wants to reach me. If you wanna get my Amazon course again, it’s normally 200 bucks. I’ll give it to everybody on your show for free. The show is called Digital, what is it called? Brian,
Brian Thomas: The Digital Executive, and we’ll have you your link on our website as well.
Shaahin Cheyene: So just put digital executive in the subject heading. I respond to all emails directly, so you will get me, it might take me a minute, but I will get to you again. That email is darkzess@gmail.com. If you’re interested in being podcasts just like this one, check out podcast cola.com and thank you again, Brian, for having me on your show.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. Bye for now.
Shaahin Cheyene Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
