I invited 150 people to an island…

Hello friend,

🎟️ Event: Body Language for Entrepreneurs with Mark Bowden: About ten years ago, Chris and I went to a body language seminar and were blown away by how useful it was. I feel like I've thought about body language every day since, and it's been shockingly helpful in both my work and personal life. Well, it's time for a refresher. On May 20th, I'm hosting a workshop with body language expert Mark Bowden, on the nonverbal skills that make you impossible to ignore. Practical skills for anyone who pitches, sells, or presents under pressure. I think it'll be great. Sign up here.

Here's what I'm thinking about…

I invited 150 people to an island.

In 2010 I was sitting at a big circular table feeling nervous.

You know the type — hotel banquet hall, cheesy gold chairs with greyhound bus pattern cushions.

I was twenty-four but could've passed for seventeen, completely out of my element at my first tech conference in Vancouver.

The guy sitting next to me, a prominent venture capitalist wearing a white button down shirt and a Patagonia vest (of course), turned to me.

"What's your startup?" he asked.

I explained that I didn't have a startup. That I had bootstrapped my business and that it was profitable.

"Ah," he said with a withering look. "A lifestyle business…"

Without another word, he turned his back on me to speak to the more interesting founder to his right, leaving me all alone, my cheeks flush with embarrassment, awkwardly sandwiched between two other conversations.

I've never forgotten this feeling. How it felt to be dismissed and discarded based on an arbitrary status game.

(Also: screw that guy.)

Unfortunately, my experience is a tale as old as time. When you go to most conferences, it's all about status. What your badge says. Who you know. Whether you're a speaker. They're packed with people who describe themselves as a "Thought Leader" or "Futurist," or who have the uber-cringe title "Chief Innovation Officer."

They're about sitting. Small talk. Glancing at badges. Bragging at the bar. Jerks like that VC.

Three years ago, I decided to build the event I wish I could have attended all those years ago. I invited 150 of the most interesting people I know to my hometown, Victoria, BC, and put on a very different sort of event.

I called it Interesting People.

I scrutinized every potential attendee with the precision of a jeweler examining diamonds, immediately crossing people off the list when I saw red flags like "Chief Innovation Officer," "Futurist," "Catalyst," "Change Maker," and the most dreaded of all: "Forbes 30 Under 30."

My primary filter was something far more qualitative: did they make me feel warm and gooey inside? Were they down to earth and low ego? Did they speak kindly to everyone — whether they were speaking to an aspiring entrepreneur, a billionaire, or the barista making them coffee?

I flipped the usual conference format on its head:

Conferences: Status to get in. 80% listening. Rubber chicken buffets. Speakers fly in for two hours, give a talk, then jet. Too many people to know anyone. You leave with 50 LinkedIn contacts you'll never talk to again.

Interesting People: Selected for curiosity and warmth. 80% connecting. Chef-curated meals. No speakers — attendees ARE the content, and everyone stays the whole time. Capped at 150 (Dunbar's number). You leave with 5 genuine friendships.

My friend Nick Gray MCs the event. Instead of sticking to a tight schedule, we take the temperature of the room and use it to guide us — if an activity planned for an hour is only interesting for thirty minutes, we jump ahead, letting the energy of the group lead. I hand-pick specific groups for dinner and table conversations, putting people who have similar problems together and giving them prompts so nobody defaults to "so what do you do?"

Each year, we learn a skill together. One year, we had Moth storytelling champion Matthew Dicks come and teach us how to masterfully tell stories — and within 48 hours, a dozen attendees were up in front of the group telling incredible stories of their own. Last year, the theme was humor. Past attendees have included Hannibal Buress, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Sam Reich, Shaan Puri, Cyan Banister, Bill Oakley from The Simpsons — scientists, comedians, film and TV people, magicians, musicians, entrepreneurs. The mix gets wilder every time.

The only common thread is that they're the kind of person who makes you lean in at dinner. Who asks surprising questions. Who has depth, not just credentials. Most importantly? They make others feel interesting too.

It was the highlight of my summer. I got to see a ton of old friends and make dozens of new ones.

We're doing it again July 27-29 in Victoria, Canada. If you're the kind of person who'd rather have five real conversations than fifty handshakes, this is for you. Spots are limited and we turn away most applicants. Apply here.

Andrew Huberman drinks three of these before noon.

Andrew and I met back in 2020, but a couple of years later we were having lunch and he started going off about Yerba mate.

His father is Argentinian, and he'd grown up drinking the stuff. Yerba mate is basically the national drink of Argentina — they consume more of it than coffee. Andrew was ranting about how it boosts dopamine, may trigger GLP-1 production, and gives you hours of clean energy without the jitters or crash. He was evangelical about it.

Every product he'd tried was loaded with sugar and tasted terrible. There had to be something better out there.

I flew back to Victoria thinking about Yerba mate...

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AeroPress just dropped two beautiful new products.

If you like to drink amazing coffee while you travel, you need to see these:

AeroPress Manual Coffee Grinder. This thing is absolutely gorgeous — all metal, Italian burrs, and it slides right into the top of an AeroPress for packing. It even comes with a drill adapter, so if you happen to have a drill it transforms into an electric grinder.

AeroPress Steel. Our long-awaited all-metal AeroPress. Stainless steel, bigger than the original, looks incredible, indestructible. For those of us who avoid plastic, this is it. It sold out in hours.

I love both — they have made my recent travels much more enjoyable. You should buy them.

LA, I'm sorry for hating on you for two decades.

I used to hate LA. I associated it with feeling vaguely nauseous, sitting in the back of an Uber on a series of hour-long drives.

I was doing it way, way wrong.

For the last 3 weeks, Zoe and I rented a beautiful little house in Venice Beach near Abbot Kinney. We stuck to the neighbourhood and rarely drove more than 20 minutes in any direction. We absolutely loved it — we kept asking ourselves "should we move here?"

In contrast to the Victoria cold and gloom that we tolerate from October to May, Venice was a perfect twenty degrees (68°F) and sunny every day — equivalent to a prime summer day in Victoria. Plus the food, the beaches, the people. Just incredible.

Here's a few of our favorite spots:

• Felix — Unreal pasta/Italian
• Gjelina + Gjusta — Restaurant / Deli (same owners). Both amazing.
• RVR — Japanese listening bar with great food
• Great White — Insanely tasty. Try the salmon curry.
• Goop Kitchen — I was skeptical, but god damn this is good takeout. (In general, the takeout in LA was next level.)
• The Lighthouse — One of the most beautiful co-working spaces I've ever seen.

LA, I'm sorry for hating on you for the past two decades. I'll be back soon.

Palm Springs sucks. But it has the best hotel I've ever been to.

On the flip side, I absolutely hate Palm Springs. We went in February and it was the opposite of LA: boring, too many old people, bad restaurants, and nothing to do.

BUT, it has one of the most incredible hotels I've ever been to. So if you're just chasing sun and relaxation, and you don't want to leave the resort, then I highly recommend checking out Sensei Porcupine Creek.

Mega billionaire Larry Ellison converted his Palm Springs compound — more like a small town, really — into probably the nicest hotel I've ever been to. Palm Springs is generally a bit desert-y. Lots of gravel, cacti, and rocks.

From the moment you drive into Sensei, it feels like you're suddenly on a Hawaiian island — lush and green. They must spend millions just landscaping the place.

Every detail was perfect. The rooms have Japanese toilets (of course — Ellison is Japan-obsessed). Even the pool food was unreal. The service was the best I've experienced anywhere.

We were absolutely blown away by this place and I highly recommend it. I think it would be perfect for a corporate retreat or group hang with friends.

It's just unfortunate that it's in Palm Springs.

Zoe and I started using a medical device to fight.

If you don't know, John Gottman is the OG researcher on how couples fight. He took thousands of couples and studied how they fight, and over time was able to predict with 90% accuracy which couples would stand the test of time.

For years, Zoe and I have been using his method for processing fights — he calls it the Aftermath of a Fight conversation...

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Random stuff:

• I love the new Lily Allen album. As so often happens, great art comes from pain. Her husband David Harbour cheated on her, and West End Girl is the raw, story-driven result. Very good. (Apple Music / Spotify)
• After years of terrible security cameras (Hikvision, Logitech, Eufy — tried them all), I installed UniFi Protect and I'm obsessed. Records 24/7, zero monthly fees, footage stays on your hardware instead of Amazon's servers. It recognizes my family's faces and alerts me when a stranger shows up. Reads license plates. Can even tell you if someone's been loitering or repeatedly driving past. The company, Ubiquiti, was started by a former Apple engineer named Robert Pera who quit, maxed out his credit cards, and pulled a Dyson — took enterprise networking gear that Cisco sells for thousands and made it $100-200 with no subscription. Now worth $43 billion. He also owns the Memphis Grizzlies. More involved to set up than a Ring doorbell, but worth it.
• Tim Ferriss wrote a piece called The Self-Help Trap that I can't stop thinking about. His core argument: "To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken." The optimization loop is a treadmill disguised as progress. As someone who has read every book, done every system, and spent years in therapy — this hit hard. The thing that actually helps isn't a better framework. It's sitting still with people you trust.

Victoria:

• I'm looking for a large warehouse or converted retail space (high ceilings required) to house an indoor pickleball facility. If anyone has a space or ideas for somewhere I could lease, email ava@follypartners.com.
• My partner in PressurePros, my pressure washing business, has decided to move to Australia. I'm looking for a GM to take it over. You: smart, scrappy, excited to scale a home services business. Email ava@follypartners.com.
• The average kid spends roughly 15,000 hours in K-12 classrooms. Alpha School does the same academics in about 1,500 hours using AI tutors, then fills the rest of the day with entrepreneurship, public speaking, and life skills. Their students are hitting 99th percentile test scores. I'm not sure if the data fully holds up yet, but I'm curious enough to find out. I'm looking for a space in Victoria to trial one for a year — ideally something with green space and nature nearby but still central. If you know of a spot, email ava@follypartners.com.

-Andrew