Today, we're going to talk to an Amazon seller who was twice kidnapped that gunpoint before he even turned 16.

Now he's an Amazon seller and a coach with a seven-figure business.

How cool is that?

Pretty cool, I think.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of this serious sellers podcast by Helium 10.

I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free, unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We have a serious seller in the house today, made the drive all the way up from San Diego. Bashar, Bashar, how's it going? Hey, man. It's been, you know, it's awesome, man. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for coming up. Now, I know we've done a couple of videos in the past for your audience, so I know a little bit about you, but almost nothing. And that's always on purpose because I like learning things along with the rest of the audience here. But our fellow B name, Barkus here said he talked to you a while back. And he told me, Bradley, I'm trying to do a Barker's impression. I don't want to get my beard. But Bradley, you've got to have Bashar on the podcast. He's got a crazy story. So we're here to go over your crazy story, but let's take it back. If I'm not mistaken, you were born and raised in Iraq? I was actually up until I was 16 years old. That was 2006 when we actually made the move after the war, 2003. So, you know, my father said, you know what? We can't live here anymore, we have to go. Okay. What part of Iraq were you in? So in Baghdad in the capital. Okay. Yep. Yep. So then during the war, like, how did that, I mean, like, how was life? Oh, I mean, life was, you know, action movies in real life, you know, like, you know, car bombings all the time, you know, people dead on the streets.

I mean, it was actually, you know, just like war, like active war, although the war only lasted about 45 days, but after the fact, because now there was no government, there was no one actually

holding the people. There was no law. There was no order. You know, the American troops were in a

country that the people didn't want them to be in. So it was just chaos all over the place.

Okay. So what, I mean, could you go to school during this time? I mean, that was like your

high school years, I guess. Right. Right. So I was, I was a ninth grader. And in Iraq, the way it is is that elementary goes until sixth grade and then middle school is, you know, seventh to ninth, and then high school is, you know, 10th, 11th, 12th. So unlike here, right, it's a little different. But there was school because at some point, like, life just has to go on, right?

I mean, okay, sure, there's active war, but you just have to go on.

People have to live.

People have to make money, you know.

So jobs started trickling back in a little bit, you know, kind of like what's happening in China right now, you know?

So there was cool, but everyone was scared.

And then if your family was a little bit wealthy, you would get kidnapped for ransoms. And at the time, because back in the 90s and early 2000s, my dad actually owned the second biggest factor of clothing in Iraq. So we were decently wealthy. So I actually got kidnapped twice. You were kidnapped twice. Yes. First time,

70,000, second time 120,000 of ransoms, right. You increase in value. I do. Yeah. And, you know,

that was the time when my dad said, that's it. We have to go. So tell me about one of those times. Like, I can't just imagine what it's like to be kidnapped.

What are you doing walking to school and the band comes up?

Pretty much, I mean, you know, just walking down, you know, hanging out with a friend, you know, walking down, there was, right around that time, there was a new, a new kind of business that started developing called the actual place was called Network.

But really what it was, it's a bunch of computers that were tied up together and then you would play online.

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