1_11 Sanjay Singhal: Fatherhood, Philanthropy, and the Lifelong Rollercoaster of Failure and Success

Today my guest is Sanjay Singhal who is an Author and philanthropist best known for founding and selling Audiobooks.com. He is the author of the auto-biographical “Zero to Tesla”, and an active philanthropist with Nikean Foundation, founded in 2019 with the hopes of promoting psychedelic science and bringing to the forefront novel medicines for mental health disorders. Starting with psilocybin for eating disorders at Imperial University in London, the foundation is also funding treatment of PTSD, opiate addiction, depression, and end-of-life anxiety with a variety of molecules including psilocybin, MDMA, and 5-MEO-DMT. The foundation is now adding to its focus the education of the public on the benefits and proper use of psychedelics therapeutically with the launch of its psychedelic storytelling project, at www.nikean.org.

You can learn more about the Psychedelic Storytelling Project at https://nikean.org and follow Sanjay at https://www.instagram.com/ssinghal.

Transcript

[00:00:57] SS: Thank you for having me, rod. I'm looking forward to this conversation. 

[00:01:00] RS: I wanna say thank you particularly because you fought two hours of Toronto traffic at this time to get here and in a perfectly zen mode. So I really appreciate you already.

[00:01:08] SS: I do Miss Covid at times, Raad.

[00:01:09] RS: I do a little bit only because I used to be less busy back then , but that's another existential crisis we'll talk about later on. Usually the way the podcast goes, I talk about how somebody grew up, what was that autobiographical sort of story, that narrative, a thread that brought them where they are.

[00:01:23] You are the rare guest that has already written an autobiography which is awesome because that it's such a cool story. Instead of going to how you grew up, I wanna quickly first read out the Amazon description of your book, and then I think we'll start from there.

[00:01:37] The description goes -In 1996, at the age of 31, San J. Singhal had just driven his second company into the ground, declared bankruptcy and gotten a divorce. In his memoir "Zero to Tesla" Sanjay pays it forward to the next generation of innovators and trendsetters through his retelling of success and failure.

[00:01:56] Okay. So what compelled you, first and foremost, to write this book, and what did you want your audience to know about you and the way you grew up and what your story was? 

[00:02:06] SS: Alright, so what compelled me to write a book was. The notion that I thought writing a book would be a fun process or it would be educational process.

[00:02:14] Once upon a time I decided that writing professionally, getting an article printed in a magazine would be a sign of success. And I managed to get that done. But I always had the notion that I was gonna write a book someday. And I think I talked about it and talked about it. And finally, a colleague of mine, somebody I had mentored actually as they grew from being a student at University of Waterloo into an MBA student and then a very successful venture capitalist, he convinced me one day while I was showing off my new Tesla that, you've been talking about writing a book for years, it's time you wrote the damn book. And so I finally thought, okay, it's time. I'm gonna I'm gonna write this thing. And as I was writing it, I was actually thinking, this is something my kids are gonna read someday. And so I'd like it to be a nice story of the arc of my life and make it as honest as possible, teach the lessons that should be taught. And to date, they have not read it. My daughter who's 27 has, but the younger kids who are 12 and 13 years old have not, and have said when's it gonna be the right time for us to read it dad? Pretty much any time now.

[00:03:16] RS: Have you turned it into an audiobook though?

[00:03:18] SS: I have turned it into an audiobook. I didn't for about a year after I wrote it and got so much flack from people for having created an audiobook company and then not recording an audiobook of my own book. I finally, I was shamed in doing it. And it's great because I think more people consume it on audio than they do in print.

[00:03:35] RS: That's great. Okay, I imagine the process of writing a book, particularly if it's about your own life and thinking for posterity's sake, that your kids will one day hopefully read this or have read it. What did you want them to take away again, about how you grew up and what informed the person that you were when you wrote that book?

[00:03:54] SS: I'm gonna step aside from the question you actually asked for a second to tell you something that I had an intention for. I wanted to learn how to write a book. I wanted my kids to be able to read about me. What I discovered was that I actually didn't know my own life story until I did research into it.

[00:04:11] I couldn't, I didn't, I wasn't able to just sit down and recite, here's what happened. I, because I'd forgotten a lot of it. And as I started to do research or find actual emails or newspaper stories, or talk to people and say what happened around this time, I discovered that my recollection of it was just wrong.

[00:04:31] The sequencing of things was wrong. The why certain things happened the way they did. If I looked the actual sequence of events and who introduced me to who, it was like somehow I had gotten my recollection of my own personal story completely wrong, that I had made villains out of people that weren't villains.

[00:04:48] I'd made heroes out of people who weren't heroes and... it was a fascinating process. And so I highly encourage... I mean, I would love to see autobiographies from my friends. Like I, I think everybody's got fascinating stories to tell. I would love to read more about them. But I was shocked to realize that I learned my life story in the process of telling it.

[00:05:09] And, we're gonna be talking about psychedelics later, but the same kind of thing happens when you do psychedelics, where you suddenly realize things that happened to you in your past that you weren't consciously aware of. But all the data was there, all the individual memories were there. You just hadn't put them together. And again, fascinating process and massive growing opportunity for me was writing that book. 

[00:05:31] RS: What was the biggest gap you found? Was it the lapse in memory because so much time has passed or certain things didn't make sense, so you put them away? 

[00:05:41] SS: So I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was in my mid thirties, and it was clear looking back that go becoming manic and becoming depressed had strongly influenced my life over the years.

[00:05:58] And when I took another look at the period of my life where I created these companies, went bankrupt, got divorced, and how the mania had played into what happened there, I had simply blanked out vast swaths of events that had happened in my life. And like I say I realized, especially looking back, that many people who I thought perhaps were villains really weren't.

[00:06:23] They were just acting according to their own interests. They weren't out to get me. They weren't stupid or irrational. , they were just operating according to their own rules. And looking back on it, once I saw the entire arc, I could see it. And so there were a lot of phone calls to people to say, Hey, I'm sorry about how I behaved back then, not realizing how much I contributed to my own downfall.

[00:06:44] RS: How much of the reflection came once you had that bipolar diagnosis? Was it all the things that felt arbitrary or chaotic now all of a sudden make sense? 

[00:06:54] SS: Not enough of them came from the diagnosis. More of them came the writing of the autobiography. And then even more once I had psychedelics to help me probe into that past. 

[00:07:06] RS: And we're definitely gonna dig into that. Yeah. Tell me about what it was like to grow up in New Brunswick. 

[00:07:10] SS: I. I think at many times during my childhood I hated growing up in New Brunswick, but I can say now, looking back, that it's a great place to be from. It was very homogenous. Sorry. I, okay. I'm I'm gonna say things that are factual. I'm trying not to imply judgment. It was very homogenous. I went to a high school of 3000 kids and there were two brown people in that school. It was myself and one other a girl who was a year younger than me. I don't recall any Asians. I don't recall any black people.

[00:07:38] RS: Let's take a step back. Actually. Let's paint us a picture. How did you get there? 

[00:07:41] SS: My dad emigrated from India. I was born in New Delhi and when I was about one year old, he moved to Canada to work on his PhD at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

[00:07:52] Mom stayed behind with me and when I was three years old, we moved to Canada to be with him. And so that was it. I grew up from the age of three in Frederick New Brunswick. This horribly cold environment that was inhospitable in many ways, but there's no overt racism, and I've never actually thought of racism as being a real factor in my life.

[00:08:16] I can look back now and see things that happened and see that there was overt racism. I just didn't, I didn't recognize it for what it was, and I honestly I, I feel pretty good. Not having recognized it. I feel like I could have trapped myself by blaming racism for many things that happened to me, and I didn't.

[00:08:36] Instead, I just said, okay, somebody's being mean to me. Fine. They're being mean. People are mean to other people all the time. It doesn't have, it doesn't really matter what the reason is. You just have to deal with it and move on. But yeah, so grow up from age three and because it was so homogenous, I just did what all the.

[00:08:50] People did around me. So I grew up playing ice hockey and baseball and learning how to canoe. And I like, people look at me now and you're a brown person. Why do you have your kids in ice hockey? It's cuz I grew up playing ice hockey. How in the world did you grow up playing ice hockey?

[00:09:05] Then I explain, I grew up in Fredericton and New Brunswick and everybody's eyes light up and go, oh, okay. Now that makes sense. 

[00:09:10] RS: I remember you once made this comment that it's very important that you never, ever miss your kids' games. Is that because you wanna be a, obviously you wanna be a good dad, right? But is there something else there? 

[00:09:21] SS: I mean, I wanna be a good dad, but honestly I just have more fun at my kids' hockey games than doing absolutely anything else. If I was going to pick an hour to do a, anything I wanted to do, it would be being at a playoff hockey game with my kids and watching them play. They're both goalies. And. It's super exciting to watch. 

[00:09:40] RS: Being a goalie at ice hockey is probably one of the most difficult things you can do. I have, I mean, not very sporty, but I just watching it and go oh my God. How do, the puck is so small. How do you defend the goal

[00:09:50] SS: No it's scary stuff and I tell you, my heart's in my throat all the time as I watch these games and they're the last position of defense. But I also, I love telling stories of my kids sporting exploits. And I realize, I've realized over time that I need to stop doing this because what I think is exciting in my child's athletic life, not that exciting to anybody else. Only exciting to me. 

[00:10:13] RS: That's really cool. Let's go back to okay, so you grew up in New Brunswick. At what point did you leave New Brunswick and what was it like leaving New Brunswick at that time? 

[00:10:23] SS: Sure. I should probably add in too, just to add a layer of context that my father went there to do his PhD, but had difficulty completing his PhD thesis. Got into some ruse with his PhD supervisor who happened to be another Indian actually. And then there was a lab experiment in his final year that destroyed, I think 70% of his vision made it very difficult for him to get a career in that his supervisor made it difficult for him to get a career in that field.

[00:10:50] He ended up having to migrate out of it, getting into real estate development. It was, I can't appreciate how difficult that must have been for him, but I remember as a child until age seven or so when he had reestablished himself in another sphere things were rough and. , in many ways first world rough, not third world, rough.

[00:11:09] There's always roof over our heads, lots of food on the table, things like that. But there was also a lot of stress and angst around the household. And then my sister was born when I was seven years old. Things progressively got better after that. There's always gonna be ups and downs, but he had reestablished himself in a different career by that point.

[00:11:25] And I went through grade school in Fredericton. I did my undergrad in engineering at the University of New Brunswick. And around then when I was I think I, up around age 19, I decided that it was fi time to finally leave. And I went to the University of British Columbia to do a master's degree.

[00:11:48] And upon leaving Fredericton, I realized just how. Homogenous and trapped... trapped is too strong a word. I was closed off, like the world opened up to me once I left Fredericton and I saw, kids like myself actually working in like a McDonald's or something, which was unheard of in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

[00:12:08] Seeing people like me doing all kinds of things and realizing there was a much, much bigger world out there. Going to Vancouver and doing my master's at UBC was just this wonderful eye-opening experience and never been the same since. 

[00:12:21] RS: Before then. How did you as a kid in New Brunswick spend your time? What were your interests? 

[00:12:25] SS: A lot of sports growing up, a lot of reading. I got into reading at a young age and Yeah, I, I was a member of Cub Scouts and I did a lot of hiking and we did camping. I grew up camping. I'm astonished to think of myself as a person who used to go to a provincial park and go camping on the weekends with my parents.

[00:12:42] Like it was a normal thing. I don't know anybody who does that now. , I mean, we have people who go to cottages, right from Toronto, but actually getting a tent that's... was that Child abuse? I don't know. I really enjoyed that childhood actually. 

[00:12:56] RS: I, I had a Syrian friend who just come to Canada and he came here as a newcomer, as a refugee as well. And I told him about camping and he is - so let me get this straight. I came here, you want me to go sleep in the woods in a bag and you want me to poop in a hole? And that's fun. I'm like, yeah. That's what we do here. 

[00:13:14] SS: Yep. If I was trying to articulate why we consider that fun I'd have a hard time right now. It was really funny. 

[00:13:19] RS: How Canadian did you feel cons? I mean, there's all these things that you did that US Canadians do, right? A mm-hmm. a lot of times outdoors, camping, ice hockey, and so on. But being in that homogenous town, there's only one other brown family or a brown person.

[00:13:35] How Canadian or Indian did you feel? What was your identity at that point? 

[00:13:41] SS: I had, I had no shortage of friends. This, the neighborhood kids, we all hung out together. We would take a tennis ball and go play baseball in a park or go play tennis. I'm like, like I f I was just one of the kids. It, so I felt that.

[00:13:55] in at my home. But when I went to school, then I felt a little bit of an outsider because when you're at home, like you're hanging out with these other kids because you have all the same interests as them. But in school for some reason, I never quite gelled and never quite, I, I mentioned that there was one other brown kid in my high school, there was about 60 families, brown families in Frederickson, and we hung out with all of them.

[00:14:18] We had our own community groups and social organizations. So there were other brown people there. , enough to create the sense of community in a sense that I was different. And I wonder if we had truly been the only brown family, if I would've just completely assimilated and not even realized that I was different.

[00:14:35] I dunno. It's an anthropological experiment. 

[00:14:37] RS: That's an interesting way of putting it. Now I appreciated your comment about, I think, I sometimes ask myself the same thing, which is, was that racist? I'm not sure. I mean, and I'm glad that on one hand, maybe ignorance is bliss and not knowing what racism or overt racism is... I'm not saying everybody experienced the same thing. There is overt racism and overt violence for sure, but I think a lot of it's maybe ignorance, a lot of it is, passive, like bias. A lot of it is not having the right language to ask somebody, Hey, where are you really? . 

[00:15:05] SS: Some of it is what I've realized over time is that people looking down on a community or a group of people, so whether it's Indians or Blacks or Gays or whatever that community is, it's usually it's simply from a lack of exposure, right? Once you've been exposed to people then you realize, oh, hey, they're just like me.

[00:15:25] It's much harder to be discriminatory in that sense, which is why you have so much less over racism in urban centers, right? Because you get to see people who aren't like you. And it extends to the general concept of people who aren't like you, as well as specific people who aren't like you. 

[00:15:44] RS: Yeah, that's a good point. For me, I've experienced both growing up in Saudi Arabia, which is overtly racist, because we're overly racist towards migrant class, whether and migrants happen to be brown and black mostly. So experiencing that, and my parents protected me for most of it, but I saw how my parents were treated, how my father was treated day in, day out on the street.

[00:16:02] And then coming to Canada and in hindsight there were probably, I mean, not probably, there were definitely experiences, but it was a lot between. Again, some of it was boiling down to ignorance, lack of proximity to others, maybe. It's very different now. Toronto, like one or every two people were not born in Canada, so as metropolitan and diverse as it gets. To this day I sometimes get questioned oh, how do you speak English? I'm like, okay, I'll tell you. Is it because you think I should nod my head like Apu or you're actually wondering cuz you dont know where Bangladesh is, which is fine, know, I think it's fine.

[00:16:30] So just saying that is a variety of experiences. But coming back to the Amazon description of your book and I have questions about when we talk about audiobook.com, but I wanna touch on this particular point, which is, there's a saying that the future is fixed, it's the past that is unpredictable. Now, I'm curious, given the person you are now and looking back at the book you wrote and the person you were, what is different? How do you look at your past differently? 

[00:16:56] SS: It's a combination of having written the book and then reexamined my history through the lens of, honestly, ayahuasca, where I realized, holy shit, I had a great childhood.

[00:17:09] You get caught up in the angst of the moment and I wanted to run away from home when I was 14 years old and then again, 16 years old. But those moments of of angst are the kinds of things everybody goes through. It you, it's not until you can put it into the context of an entire life that you can see was your life.

[00:17:29] bad in indifferent. I look back at, at a tense relationship that I had with my dad cuz he always wanted me to do well in school. And, I get wrapped across the knuckles if if I didn't do the Times table properly. But when I look at the entirety of that relationship, it was beautiful, right?

[00:17:46] I had a dad who was there and who cared for me and cared that I did well in life and when, and so I've over the course of the years, continued to recast earlier parts of my life in better and better terms. And I just realized as I'm answering this question that, that continues to this day.

[00:18:02] Where, during the time leading up to my bankruptcy and divorce, I thought, there are many aspects of. My life that were troubled at that time. But really it was just little pinpoints that were troubled. The broad arc of my life was actually pretty good, and I learned a ton of stuff.

[00:18:20] Many of the skills that led to later success in my life came during that tumultuous time of my life. And I can't, I wouldn't have the success I've got now without having lived through the tumult and gotten all the learning that I got then. And so I've become gradually more and more grateful for every part of my earlier life as I've gotten older.

[00:18:39] RS: As you were talking, it makes me think sometimes about the distinction between regret and mistakes. Yeah. I wonder what's your thought on that? How do you define them? 

[00:18:47] SS: You can look back and say or I can look back and say, there's these things I should have done differently with the benefit of the knowledge that I have now, but, How many things should I have done differently with the level of knowledge I had then that's what I would consider a true mistake.

[00:19:04] And there's vanishingly few of those in my life. I mean, there's a couple of people I treated poorly at the time that if I had been a bit more aware of myself and my own issues, I might not have done it. But aside from a couple of very specific moments, I don't think I'd change anything.

[00:19:21] It was all a learning opportunity. I find most people say that they have very few real regrets in life. 

[00:19:27] RS: Very sagely. I feel like we are starting starting with the end in a way, but I'll come back to this point cuz I, I do have a follow on about that. I think it'd be a beautiful way to wrap up the podcast.

[00:19:37] But let's put a pin on that for now. Let's talk about how you went from, driving as the description says, driving his second company into the ground, declaring bankruptcy and got and getting a divorce. How did you go from that to what you're most widely known for as the sort of the creator and having massive success from audiobook.com? 

[00:19:58] SS: I completely started over. I was living in my parents' basement after that. I were, was Bank of i the back in f Fredericton. My parents were were still living in f Fredericton at the time, so I had moved while I was married. I'd moved to San Diego.

[00:20:11] So the company I started was based in San Diego and I had the, all the classic Silicon Valley connections and you. What sometimes I forget to mention to people when I talk about this horrible bankruptcy is that we actually created a kick ass product. I actually invented the first mobile email device.

[00:20:30] It was based on the US Robotics Palm Pilot, and at and t and US Robotics were partners of mine. We actually had a product and it worked, and we were selling it and we were making money, but because because I was manic, I didn't under, I didn't, I wasn't able to maintain focus. I started just doing a lot of things.

[00:20:48] Nobody trusted me at enough to give me money. Quite rightfully, they didn't trust me enough to give me money, and I eventually ran out of cash and went bankrupt despite having a great product and customers it. . I was on top of the world when, just before this happened, right? I even, before I started the company, I had a six figure salary in San Diego.

[00:21:09] So I was living in paradise, had the wife, my daughter had just been born. Things were just fantastic. Everything was going great. And then it, looking at it from like somebody else looking at it objectively would say, what the hell happened? You threw your life away. Everything went crashing down.

[00:21:24] There's a lot of, there's a lot of texture to what actually happened. But let's say I had all that beautiful house in San Diego and A B M W and all of a sudden, fast forward three months and I'm living in my old room, in, at my parents' house in Frederick, new Brunswick. All my assets are gone.

[00:21:41] I'm not seeing my daughter. I'm depressed. I'm not able to get outta bed coming. And that was at age 31. Coming from that state. So being so high and then going so low and then gradually building back up again. One of the most interesting aspects of that whole thing, rod, is the happiest I was over a 10 year segment, was building myself back up out of that, living in my parents' house, getting a job again, learning how to budget, getting cash flow, being able to pay cash for a car.

[00:22:17] So I actually had a car cuz I couldn't get a loan because of the bankruptcy. That period of time following the bankruptcy and depression, as I worked my way back up, you don't ha I mean, what it taught me just viscerally was I don't have to have things to be happy, I just have to be working towards it.

[00:22:33] And the success I've achieved as a, as an entrepreneur since then has come, much of it has come from knowing that if I was to lose it all again, , I would then again have that opportunity to work my way back up and be happy through the entire process. So the idea of failure, losing all my money again, just isn't a fear I live with because I did it and I survived.

[00:22:54] And it's been great. I hope I can somehow convey that message out there to would be entrepreneurs, any risk takers, people who are contemplating massive changes like getting divorced or starting or quitting a job and starting a company is that you will survive. You will survive. And that rebuild process, even if you failed, is actually a time of great joy. 

[00:23:14] RS: What was it like having your parents close to you at that time? 

[00:23:17] SS: I was very fortunate that they were there so that I didn't end up, in the typical parents vernacular of living in a gutter. I had my parents home to go to and.

[00:23:27] Because I was depressed. I wasn't worried about, what are people gonna say in our, in Hindi, the phrase is what are people gonna say? My parents fortunately didn't say that to me. And I wasn't capable of thinking it myself. And then I think, there, there is a type of personality that gossips about other people in very disparaging ways I've found.

[00:23:49] it's possible to insulate yourself from that type of personality, first of all, all by not being that type of person yourself, but by just ignoring them and not inviting them into your social circle. I suppose it's easier said than done, but it's worth saying and it's worth doing. 

[00:24:03] RS: I agree with you. I think there's something about the creative energy, which is it does not want to wallow and entertain hearsay and gossip and shit talking and stuff like that. There's simply no time. Yeah. 

[00:24:14] SS: There's no time. And , there's people who do that and they're on their own journey and of self-discovery, but when you find people who are like that, just don't give them the time of day.

[00:24:23] Walk away from it. You don't have to say, what are they gonna say? What will they tell other people? The best solution to that is not finding out by being, by not being in their presence. 

[00:24:32] RS: So over the next 10 years you built audiobook.com. Where did the idea come from? At what point did you know it was a real thing and that you were not only up and coming, but also this was the thing, this was going to change the trajectory of your life? 

[00:24:47] SS: Wow. Okay, so the reason I started the company, I didn't start the company actually, I was an investor in the company. The reason I invested in my partner at the time, Sean Neville, who started the company, was I had listened to audiobooks a lot myself, up top point.

[00:25:01] They're very expensive, very difficult to get ahold of. And so when he pitched me on the idea of starting a company that would mail CDs out to people with audiobooks on them, the way Netflix was mailing out DVDs, the way he pitched me was he said , we're gonna do this. We're gonna mail people these things.

[00:25:17] And I said, that sounds like a stupid idea. And he said there's a video company doing this with DVDs. And I said, still sounds like a stupid idea. And he stood across a press release to me of Netflix had just passed 400,000 users, I think, at that point. And I thought, holy shit, people actually like it.

[00:25:31] Okay, that's great. Let's try it out. And then we almost went bankrupt within six months because the, we couldn't figure out a way to advertise to people the service. Eventually Google AdWords came along and that's when we discovered that, that was the moment I think that you're asking for, is we ran an ad in Google advertising our service.

[00:25:50] And after getting one customer every second day for a couple of months, we got nine customers in one. and from advertising on Google, all of a sudden it was like oh my gosh, there's actually people out there. And so eventually we got it up to, we were getting a thousand customers a day by the time I sold the company.

[00:26:05] But yeah, that was the moment we almost went bankrupt. And then suddenly, I heard this great quote from Vinod Khosla he said, being an entrepreneur, it's the art of staying alive long enough to get lucky . And so I like that. I like that. Stay alive long enough to get lucky. 

[00:26:21] RS: He calls entrepreneurs the creatively maladjusted,

[00:26:28] SS: fountain of quotes that guy . 

[00:26:30] RS: That's great. So why sell? You worked so hard at this. 

[00:26:34] SS: Very few people ask me that question. It's a great question. And I'll admit also, I regretted selling for probably a year and a half. I sold because I wanted to get into venture capital.

[00:26:43] I'd been seduced by the notion that it was sexy to have a lot of money and then invested in other people. And somehow that would put me in, I don't know, some echelon society. I don't, I wanted do a startup venture fund. That was it. And I wanted to do it with 500 startups. And the guy at the head of 500 startups said he would assist me in setting up a version of his fund in Canada, but I couldn't do it if I was also c e o of audiobooks.com.

[00:27:07] And so then I used to get an offer. Couple of offers a year to sell the company. I'd always just say no. And the next offer that came along I said yes to so that I could get into venture capital. And while I found that, to me, a tremendous education opportunity, I didn't have the stomach for it myself.

[00:27:26] The venture fund we created has done phenomenally well financially, but we shut down the investment period very quickly. Within a year of launching the fund, I just wasn't enjoying it. The other partners in the fund went off to create another fund of their own that's also done very well.

[00:27:41] But just wasn't the right personality for me. I didn't like asking other people for money. I didn't like being responsible for other people's money. I just enjoyed interacting with the entrepreneurs and helping them achieve their visions. But I can do that as an angel investor, I didn't have to be in venture for it.

[00:27:54] And then I stopped regretting it because when I sold the company, I got a really good price for it, but I also took a bunch of shares in the acquiring company and then the acquiring company got bought a couple of years later and I made so much money from that transaction , I couldn't possibly regret it anymore.

[00:28:12] And I've, fortunately I've been able to take that money and do some, something quite productive with it that I'm happy with. 

[00:28:17] RS: That's amazing. Congratulations to you and on all the ongoing successes coming to you. There's so much here to dig into cuz you just very rich life so far in, in terms of stories and experiences.

[00:28:28] But I wanna pivot. And I think, you touched on this earlier on the story, looking back changes, particularly as you do psychedelics, and I think this is, being a podcast about meaningful psychedelic experiences, I have to ask, what was your most meaningful psychedelic experience?

[00:28:45] SS: That's a very difficult question because there have been so many meaningful ones in that cross, different aspects of my life. I'll tell you about one that, I told some colleagues about earlier today cuz it involves my daughter. So my daughter she's 27 years old now. Unfortunately has had an eating disorder since she was eight years old and has ha gone through quite her own journey.

[00:29:11] She's currently in the fourth year of a psychiatry residency at the University of Toronto. So she's had some great success in her life, all along with a lot of great trials and tribulations. And I took a lot of, I felt a lot of angst and responsibility for the the disease she found herself with. And she and I did ayahuasca together. In an attempt to somehow treat or cure the eating disorder. We did ayahuasca together a couple of years ago, and in the course of that experience one night... 

[00:29:43] RS: How did that opportunity come about? Did she find out about ayahuasca or did you find out and how did you both a thing to do?

[00:29:49] SS: This is how I came to the world of psychedelics. Let me tell you that story and then I'll come back to the Ayahuasca. Which is, I was at a biohacking conference where I heard Robin Carhartt Harris speaking about the potential for psilocybin treating eating disorders. And then my daughter, Nikki and I flew over to London, England to meet with him and his team at Imperial University heard more about the potential and decided to fund one of his research trials treating anorexia with psilocybin. As a result of meeting him, we started meeting I started talking to a lot of other people in the psychedelic space and gradually went from the aboveground researchers to the underground treaters of people now with that are using psychedelics, including people who have licenses like our licensed therapists or who have PhDs who are willing to treat people underground with psychedelics because they're just so damn effective.

[00:30:41] But I would never have been able to meet those people, or at least my path to meeting those people was through funding aboveground research and then being introduced gradually to the to the underground. And so the Ayahuasca opportunity came about because the principal investigator of a study that we were contemplating funding said she knew somebody that could come into Toronto who had been trained in Peru and sit with us and Administer the ayahuasca and it was going to end up being a private ceremony for Nikki, her mom my ex-wife, myself, and and a couple of other people, a psychiatrist who joined us as well as this investigator.

[00:31:17] So I was very privileged. I mean, I have no illusions that most people wouldn't be able to have this opportunity. But that's how I came to the Ayahuasca. And I was also not a fan of Ayahuasca. I'm still not, even though it's been a wonderfully illuminating substance for me personally.

[00:31:34] It's also incredibly difficult. If people feel called to it, they should do it. But wait till you feel called. Don't think it's, don't think it's pleasant at all. 

[00:31:42] RS: What was it like doing it with your daughter? 

[00:31:44] SS: I mean, I, again, huge felt privileged to have the opportunity to do it.

[00:31:50] So Ayahuasca did. Two major things for her, it helped her realize she was sick. I think up until that point, she didn't except that, that the eating disorder was a disease. And it helped me realize that, that it wasn't my fault. That I could be there for her and help open doors and help with treatment and be compassionate without identifying with myself as the cause of the problem somehow.

[00:32:17] And, everybody's a little bit neurotic and takes it upon themselves things that aren't actually their own fault. Parents of course, do it the most with their kids. And so it somehow allowed me to separate, because what happened was I became her over the course of this four hour ayahuasca journey, where I would look at my hands and they'd become all thin and shriveled.

[00:32:37] And I felt like I was her. And I was, it was very painful. It was a terrible four hour experience, but at the end of it, I thought, oh, I felt what it was like to be her, and I could feel how miserable she was and I could identify with that. And I could take that sense now in my regular interaction with her and say, I can identify with you.

[00:33:00] I was there, I felt the pain and it's terrible, but I'm not you and you're on your journey and I'm gonna help you however I can and identify with the pain you're having. But the sense of responsibility was gone. Somehow it freed me to simply be compassionate and that was a tremendous gift that Ayahuasca gave me.

[00:33:21] RS: Where did that come from? You think that, you said you felt responsible, obviously as a parent, like it's a default, probably a thing to go to, but was there something else? Something else from your past? 

[00:33:31] SS: I felt responsible. It wasn't in the sense that I think I somehow caused it. That wasn't it. It was that I'm the parent, it's my responsibility to fix this.

[00:33:40] And in part it's because my own bipolar ,disorder the depression I was going through, my parents worked very hard to find the right doctors to introduce me, to the right people, to encourage me to get treated. And so I felt a lot of gratitude to my parents for for pushing so hard for me to get better.

[00:33:57] But then I realized that at the end of the day, they pushed. But I was the one who had to get myself outta bed. And I was the one who had to go see the psychiatrist. And I was the one who had to take the medicine and get my life back on track. And I can, I, I can identify a little bit now with the pain they must have gone through watching me, their 30 year old son go through all of that angst. But, I think that feeling of responsibility, feeling that I need to do stuff, I need to be doing things to help my daughter was because I saw how much my parents helped me. But opening doors and doing things for my daughter doesn't mean that I need to identify with success or failure as being whether or not she chose to walk through that door. I can provide the door and then say, this is your journey. 

[00:34:37] RS: What was your relationship like before Ayahuasca? 

[00:34:40] SS: With my daughter? Relationship's always been really good actually. And it remained good through the Ayahuasca treatment. It was, honestly, it was my relationship with my, with myself that changed, not my relationship with her. She always thought I was doing lots for her and that I was being as supportive as I could be. I just didn't feel it myself. But after that experience I did feel it myself. Yeah. 

[00:35:01] RS: There's something that we briefly talked about, and I mentioned to you that I would save it for this podcast. I think the father son relationship, and I don't know if you've had a similar experience or not, although maybe loving, it's always fraught with tension , right? Something about, you not wanting to be your father's shadow or turning into your father.

[00:35:19] But, in seeing seeing my family and the relationship between my father and my sister is a lot more tender. And so somehow my dad allows himself to become vulnerable and go there with her. Whereas with me, there's always a constant sense of tension there.

[00:35:33] And it's probably maybe more true for brown families. I don't know if it's been like that for you, but how did you see yourself as an individual, as an entrepreneur, but also as a father? And how has that changed? You said that this was really mostly autobiographical, how you saw yourself had changed. How did that affect your relationship with Nikki? 

[00:35:58] SS: Again, my relationship with her has always been quite good, but there's been this gradual move to allowing her to live her own life. That was very difficult for me to do. Like I, growing up Indian parents, Take on a certain role or at least the Indian parents, and you took on certain roles for their kids in terms of what they paid for education, paying down payment for the first house or first car, things like that.

[00:36:24] And as a result of that, taking a lot of liberties in terms of saying, and you should live your life this way, and you should, here's where you should live. Here's what you should do. I tried to stay away from that kind of control. But when I look back on it now, I realize I didn't stay away from that kind of control at all.

[00:36:38] I was very mouthy in terms of, I think you should do this career and I think you should live in this city, and I think you should go to this university. In my mind, I wasn't tying it to financial support, but but there was financial support. So I can see how it might have been taken that way.

[00:36:52] But these are lessons I learned from my own dad and trying to step away from that to allow my daughter to live her own life, to take responsibility for things in her life has been difficult. Cuz it meant... this is a journey every father goes through with all of their kids. Being able to step back and say, I will let you fail on your own.

[00:37:16] I'm here to catch you. But I'll let you bounce first. That's a very difficult thing to do with, the resources I've been fortunate enough to have acquired in my life, to be able to then watch somebody fail. That's that's difficult. And what's been great is as I've withdrawn over the course of the last five years from my daughter's life to some extent, she hasn't failed at all, she's soared which has been tremendously gratifying for me to see. 

[00:37:39] RS: How is she doing? 

[00:37:40] SS: You should get her on here someday and ask. 

[00:37:42] RS: I thought about it. I was gonna ask you . I love to, she's outside of story. 

[00:37:46] SS: Yeah. Pre Ayahuasca, I would say she was fairly reticent about talking about herself, talking about the eating disorder, anything. But she's realized she's a bit of an icon and a story that can help other people. And she was she's willing to talk about it and she's willing to have me talk about it now in ways that she wouldn't have been five years ago. Yeah, she has her own story and I would love to hear, how she relates it.

[00:38:06] RS: Maybe I'll have both of you on and I think we'll talk we'll tease this thread out a little more. I think the parent child or like couples and significant others and friends. This is, it's all relational and I think that's what makes life rich in that, We are not a single speck, right? It's life and orientation around others is really what really gives life meaning and value. So , I wanna thank you for opening up and sharing that story boldly. I think that's a very difficult place to be. But through that experience, I think, you can become a beacon for others, inspire others.

[00:38:39] So I'm really grateful that you chose to share that story here, Sanjay. 

[00:38:44] SS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Thanks, man. 

[00:38:46] RS: Of course. Absolutely. There's a few more things I wanna talk about and we're gonna run our time very soon, so I wanna make sure we can touch on them.

[00:38:54] One of those things is, as you become, not only a successful entrepreneur, but having gone through the experience of psychedelics, supporting the ecosystem, now you are perhaps the philanthropist, the guy that everybody goes to and thinks about when they think about psychedelics and wanting support and so on.

[00:39:10] And you are involved in multiple ways, in so many different ways. Before we talk about what it's like to be a philanthropist, I think there's this other very insidious aspect, that a lot of us think a lot about. And from an immigrant perspective, perhaps even more. Which is our relationship to money, right?

[00:39:27] This is a very complex, loaded space. As you found success, as you are known to be a successful entrepreneur, as you're a philanthropist, how do you navigate that space, not only being as known as the guy who has money, but also I'm assuming being constantly bombarded with the requests for money or support in some way.

[00:39:51] SS: Yeah. That this is a deep subject, in fact. Yeah. It's just a deep subject. I mean, philanthropy, there's so many things I've learned over the last few years. When I first created a foundation, I was asked somebody, somebody said, why are you creating a foundation? It doesn't make any sense.

[00:40:07] There. There's also, there was rampant speculation by people, even my own financial advisor, that I was doing this for some bizarre tax gain that had nothing to do with actually giving money away to, to help people because genuine, need-based philanthropy isn't as, as common as it should be.

[00:40:27] And in my case, it was just psychedelics helped me so much and helped my daughter. And I had surplus funds that I didn't need for a living. I just feel like I, I want everybody to have this opportunity. That's the entire mission of the foundation, is I want everyone to have the opportunity that I had, but it's fighting starting my own family the idea of why are you giving away so much money? Charity starts at home, you need to make sure that you have it at home. Yeah, but mom, dad, honestly what do I need this money for? But somehow the notion of building your wealth right up until you die, and so it's maximum point should be what it is when you die, somehow that's built into our immigrant ethos and my parents have absolutely come around and said, this is a beautiful thing that you're doing but it has been a battle. And then of course you have, say more distant relatives who are thinking, who read a news story about the money that my foundation gave UHN and say, oh, he has enough money to give to strangers like that, but he can't, fork over a few hundred thousand for the family in India or wherever.

[00:41:30] There, there's, it's like rapids to be navigated, but I feel like I navigated them and yeah, I get constant request for money. . It's a little bit frustrating because it's really easy to detect now when people say, Hey, I need 20 minutes of your time, or it's always just, I'm just waiting for it.

[00:41:43] Okay, where's the ask? Where's the ask? Where's the ask? But I've also gotten good at saying no. And really targeting, I found the best way to get the most outta philanthropic dollars is to decide what I want to fund and then go find the people who can make that happen, as opposed to waiting for people to come to me with proposals and and pitching me.

[00:42:00] And the UHN donation was very much us wanting to support a group of people as opposed to a group of people coming and asking us for money. 

[00:42:08] RS: Okay here's a public service announcement for everybody's benefit. What's a good bullshit detector? In your mind, how do you discern between somebody who wants your 20 minutes for money, somebody who wants your 20 minutes because they wanna pick your brain or advice and whatever, something that is a little more sincere.... not that wanting money is insincere, I just mean there's a way to ask for it. 

[00:42:28] SS: Right? So I'll tell you something I wish somebody had told me when I was 30 years old and looking to start my first company, is when you want money, ask for advice. And when you want advice, ask for money.

[00:42:39] Okay? it is an absolutely true statement that if somebody comes to me and genuinely wants advice, then I might consider giving them money, right? But they have to ask for the advice in a way that means they actually want my expertise. I'm not an idiot. I know full well that they need money. I can offer it up.

[00:42:57] But when they come in asking for money, the answer is almost always an instantaneous no. And I hope I'm evolved enough to not then give them advice that they don't want. But that's typically what'll happen is you ask somebody for money and they'll say, you know what? You should do. I can't help you out, but here's some advice.

[00:43:13] Yeah. Yes. Genuinely go out if you want money, ask people who have money for advice and don't expect the money. Ask for the advice. Those people can give you troves of valuable advice that will turn into money. But ask for the advice first. 

[00:43:29] RS: Besides what you just said. What is the other best piece of advice or the top three that is like a heuristic for your life?

[00:43:37] SS: Heuristic for my life. Boy, I don't know. I don't think, I don't I should make a list. I have all these valuable things that I've learned, but how about this. There's stoic philosophy that says the obstacle becomes the path. And the realization that my path in life isn't the path I set out to make, it's not to create this foundation or to create an audiobook company.

[00:43:59] It's the path is all the things I learned when I wasn't able to do those things. When I got fired from my own company because I'd taken on an external project. Learning how to leverage the legal system to get my company back was the learning, that was the path, right? With the foundation, the stuff I'm learning now, but let's say how to leverage money properly, how to say no to people, that's the path.

[00:44:22] It's not just this 1, 1, 2, 3 steps of creating a successful foundation. It's accepting that all the obstacles have fallen your way, are the path. They're not the they're not obstacles. So that's been really valuable. That's two. I've given you that. Let's stop with two for now. 

[00:44:36] RS: Very good two lessons. One last question about money from what you just said then, what is money then, given the life you've led and what you just said, what is money? What does it mean? What does it represent? 

[00:44:48] SS: Oh, yeah. Money is clearly, it's freedom to operate, and that's all it is. If you're in a situation where you don't have enough money to be able to make choices in your life, or you have to work a specific job, or you have to stay out in the cold, I mean, that, that's where money can really help you.

[00:45:04] But as you get more and more of it, the greater and greater option set that you get doesn't make you any happier. It just gives you options. People wanna have those options, encourage you to go out there and make more money. I would encourage you to, as you get all that freedom, to use that freedom to help other people, I'm gonna leave you with, or the third piece of advice is a truism.

[00:45:26] If somebody said to me their purpose on earth was to help other people, I used to roll my eyes and scoff. And as a result of some psychedelic journeys and then my own lived experience over the last five years, I've realized that there really is no other purpose. Anybody who says their purpose is anything but to help other people hasn't quite gotten there yet.

[00:45:46] And I try and say this with as much empathy as possible for others and the paths they're on, but there's only one reason why we're all here and that's to help each other get further along our paths. And the faster we all realize that and start helping each other, the faster we'll all get where we're going.

[00:46:05] RS: I think that is such an incredibly important thing to keep in mind because, everybody knows Maslov's hierarchy of needs and on the bottom you have fundamental needs like food, shelter, security, and so on. And the top you have, what Maslov's initially said was actualization, self-actualization.

[00:46:25] But it turns out there's a level above that, which is selfless actualization. And I thought I had read that from a book by Jamie Wheal, but really it turns out it was a derivative of a Blackfoot philosophy an indigenous philosophy. I'm not sure what the source material is. There's something that interesting that happens about money, and I haven't reached the other part, but I feel like money's a double inversion in a way.

[00:46:46] The first inversion happens when you have enough that your mind is allowed to go free. And I experienced a little bit of this given my modest exit from my previous company. And it's the first time I had a little bit of money and it wasn't that, oh, I can just go buy a house. It was the fact that my mind was allowed to go to places that I was never allowed to go given the financial precarity I've lived my entire life in. And so that's the first inversion. The second inversion happens when you make too much of it and you become victim to the money itself, and then you're not free anymore. 

[00:47:17] SS: Oh Raad, I gotta tell you the worst financial crises I've found myself in and my partner and I, when we became successful with our company, we got into more financial trouble after we started to make money. Because you get into this weird realm of thinking, now that I'm making all this money, I can make an infinite amount of money so I can make really dumb purchasing decisions. You. Some of the dumb ass things I did in that first year after my company started to do well and spin off cash. I'm embarrassed thinking back and, but also it's, it took about a year to get over myself and become real again.

[00:47:51] But you're right, there is that second inversion that happens. 

[00:47:54] RS: But you have to go through it, right? All the things you're never allowed to have and all of a sudden go like, oh my God. And it's almost like hard to tell what it is that you want and what your mind's just freaking out. I'm like, I can have this, I can have this, I can have this.

[00:48:03] I was like. But I just wanna acknowledge that I think what you said is incredibly important. I think selfless actualization is really the way, cuz if not for service to others, then what the hell is the point of life really? But it's coming from a point of freedom actually, rather than, scarcity and obligation and all this stuff.

[00:48:23] Knowing that you don't have to give a shit, but you do. 

[00:48:25] SS: Yeah. Kindness is the most, most important thing that we can exhibit to other people. So I saw a kid had a t-shirt said, be kind. I saw that suddenly struck me that, oh my gosh, I just, I should spend more time talking about this

[00:48:38] Because even in our community, the psychedelic community, we actually, we spend a lot of time judging people and saying, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong. And we should spend more time just being kind to everybody, being more kind to everybody. 

[00:48:51] RS: I totally agree with you. And I think we also talk about money in this space too, cuz I think there's this, there's this sort of very self-righteous indignant, all profit is evil. And I find it ironic that people who say money doesn't matter already have a lots about money. Jim Carey has this line where it's like," I wanna make enough money to know that it doesn't matter". 

[00:49:09] SS: Exactly. I don't, I, yeah. I don't know if money can make you happy or not, but I just want a chance to prove it or something like that.

[00:49:16] RS: Fantastic. Okay, so the last question I wanna come back to, ultimately this point about helping others and being kind , the Nikean Foundation, tell us about, why it exists. Why was this the thing that you wanted to do at this stage of your life? And what does 2023 look like?

[00:49:35] There's lots of progress we've made in this space. Hopefully we're gonna have lots of good news next year with MDMA and psilocybin hopefully. But why? Why does Nikean Foundation exist? 

[00:49:47] SS: So the foundation exists. Initially it was a, it was to fund medical research to prove the efficacy of psychedelics. And I think over the course of the last couple of years, enough studies have come out demonstrating the safety and efficacy of MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment resistant depression, that there's no longer any question in my mind about efficacy. Now it's a matter of making them legal and making them accessible for people.

[00:50:14] And we, during a planning session a year ago, we hit on the notion that storytelling, conveying to people's stories of how psychedelics have been used safely and effectively, would aid all of these efforts in storytelling to legislator, le legislators to the public at large, conveying the powerful benefits of psychedelics as well would help with legalization, with help with education so that people use them safely and effectively and would help with accessibility eventually, as more and more people got involved in offering psychedelic services.

[00:50:53] So we created this web platform that's on our website, ikea.org for storytelling. And what we do is we interview people. and we edit those interviews down into 10 or 15 minute stories about how somebody used psychedelics to positive effect in their own life. And in this way, we're creating this massive library of stories, including yours, rod and mine, , that where people can find people who are like themselves, who've used psychedelics positively, and then can lessen some of the barriers that they might feel to using psychedelics themselves.

[00:51:26] And my hope is that eventually people who are in real niche communities like say 70 year old immigrants from Syria, Might find other 70 year old immigrants from Syria on on our website and say, oh, they use psychedelics to get over some of the trauma of immigrating from Syria. Maybe I can do the same, instead of just mindlessly falling prey to the anti-drug culture that's been built up over the last 50 years.

[00:51:50] So that's what the foundation is doing. So we're creating these stories and we're gonna, we've been beta testing it for the last couple of months, and I suspect in the next 60 days or so we'll be ready to really move forward with popularizing these stories on all the social media platforms and we're really excited about doing this.

[00:52:06] We just wanna create more awareness. 

[00:52:07] That's wonderful. Having done a story myself, I think it's a very powerful vehicle because, healing is many different things, but I think at the core, it's an autobiographical experience. Is the fragmented autobi autobiography that often, Turns into behavioral problems or other issues, right?

[00:52:24] That impede your progress, whether it's in a relationship or it's your life. So if we are able to look at ourselves, by using other stories as an inspiration or something like that's a really good way thing to do. I think coming back and bringing it to a close where you are in your life right now, what advice, perspective, your stage, Lee Advice, let's just say do you have for entrepreneurs, fathers, philanthropists, and just people?

[00:53:00] Let's go with something that was on, that's been on my mind the last few days. I see people quite often doing things that are difficult. in order to advance themselves to make money to achieve success. And what I've realized I've made my own share of decisions to do something difficult to advance myself.

[00:53:21] And so the advice I would give everybody is, success doesn't mean you have to do something difficult. It's possible to do something that you find easy, that other people find difficult, but you find easy because you enjoy it or because you're good at it, and you can still achieve great success down that path.

[00:53:40] So I would say to people who are banging their head against the wall and thinking that life is supposed to be difficult. And if it was easy then everybody would do it. No. Success in life is find something that you find easy, that other people find difficult. And go do that to great advantage.

[00:53:57] It doesn't have, life doesn't have to be hard. And that, by the way, this is very different from saying follow your passion. No, screw that. Don't follow your passion . But but find something that you do that you enjoy, that, that can make you money or give you satisfaction and follow the easy path.

[00:54:13] RS: I like that a lot. Naval Ravikant had this saying that when you find something you love, it's not work, it's sport. So I think there's something to be said about flow and effortlessness absolutely. Doesn't mean you hard. Absolutely. You have to work hard, 

[00:54:27] sanjay, this was immensely enjoyable for me.

[00:54:30] I I, I think we could talk for hours. I say that on every podcast, but I think with you, some scotch and maybe many more hours together is in order to really tease out all this stuff. Immensely grateful. Thank you for being here, for your trust and for sharing all the perspective and stories.

[00:54:45] SS: Thanks, Raad. Thanks for having me. And I'm looking forward to that scotch and the subsequent conversation.