Hello friend,
Why you're getting this: this is my Friends Newsletter, a brain dump of interesting things that I send to interesting people I've met and friends I want to stay in touch with. Zero pressure to stick around—just click unsubscribe if you don't want to get it (don't worry, I won't be notified).
Here's what I'm thinking about…
Don't come to this event then.
Every year, I invite 150 interesting people to Victoria, Canada (my hometown) for my aptly named Interesting People event. It's a really unique format (no formal speakers, 100% focused on connecting everyone) and the room is always crazy.
Last year, we had Dan Mangan, Hannibal Buress, Dr. Rhonda Patrick, Josh Johnson, and all sorts of wild people. Scientists. Actors. Comedians. Musicians. Hell, we even had a (mind-boggling) magician.
I always look around and think "how is this my life?"
We allow a small number of people to apply—the randoms keep things interesting.
We don't have many spots, but if you're interesting, warm, and want to make friends with amazing people, you should apply.
On the third day in Maui, Zoe asked me a question—something innocuous, what time was our dinner reservation—and I snapped.
I had been reading the same paragraph in a book for ten minutes, my eyes scanning but nothing landing, and my reaction came out like a snarl, confusing both of us.
That night, after dinner, as we sat on the patio drinking tea and gazing out at the sunset over the palm trees, my hands crawled with anxiety. I was certain I had cancer.
In addition to that, more quietly, I had convinced myself that a comment I'd made to a friend over lunch two weeks earlier had cost me the friendship. I ran the sentence on a loop in my head, like a tongue over a newly chipped tooth.
I was in paradise. Maui. My favorite place in the world. But I had stopped taking my medication eleven days before.
As an experiment, I had decided to stop taking the little pink pill every day—after all, I was happy now. I'd worked through my stuff, done a lot of therapy, and I probably didn't need it anymore.
I had forgotten that, by default, I am a miserable person.
I worry obsessively about what could go wrong, or worse, about what I don't have that I need. My brain lives in the future, and spends every second of every hour thinking about how I'll feel better once X, Y, or Z happens.
Make enough money. Meet the right woman. Go to Hawaii. Or, on a different day: if I don't plan and control everything, something terrible is coming. So I loop on the thing until I've solved it. Then my brain finds a new thing to torture me with.
Rinse, repeat.
This is the itch that drove me for decades. It was useful in some ways—it made me successful.
Built a business. Dated women whose patience I was using up. Bought fancy sports cars. Built my dream house. Got the professional accolades. Optimized my biomarkers to the 99th percentile.
My insides—the upper stomach, the place between the sternum and the throat—were always churning. The itch persisted. The feeling of impending doom.
The problem was: no matter where I went, or what I achieved, my brain came with me.
My cruel, ever present master.
I built a narrative around all of this, the way most of us do, and I wrote about it in my book, Never Enough.
I psychoanalyzed myself. Did Jungian talk therapy to try to muddle through what caused my strange behavior.
From a young age I had learned that I would always let someone down—a teacher, my mother, and as I got older, a boss.
I couldn't deliver anything unless I was 110 percent into it. My brain was the world's worst version of FedEx: losing packages, or just throwing them in a dumpster because I didn't want to deliver them.
The narrative I built was that my parents argued about money, my nervous system got tuned up and stressed out, I became parentified and avoidant.
There is truth to that. But it was never the whole truth.
What I learned later, in a story I told elsewhere, is that I have a brain disorder. ADHD.
It turns out that ADHD lives in your DNA. It runs in families in the same way that height does. If one of your parents has it, the odds you have it too are closer to a coin flip than to a long shot.
I watch my boys, six and eight, gyrate through the house, and I wonder. I do not want them to grow up the way I did—feeling broken, feeling bad at school, for reasons nobody had named yet.
Opening the refrigerator and standing there for forty seconds, having forgotten what I came for.
A tidal wave of overwhelm on an ordinary Tuesday—too many tabs, no through-line.
There's a part of ADHD that work hides. At the office you have an assistant, executives, a team of grown-ups paid to catch the things you drop. You look organized. You are organized—by proxy. Then you come home, and there is no team.
The bills, the calls, the doctor's appointment you said you'd book three weeks ago, the conversation your wife has been waiting for you to come back to—these are the costs the marriage pays for a disorder the business doesn't.
So, looking back: I sacrificed two and a half decades trying to build a solution to the pain inside my head—achievement, money, travel, stuff—when it turned out the problem was solved by taking a little pink pill every morning.
What no one had told me, what I had not been able to imagine, was what my brain felt like once it was treated.
The inside of my head had been Times Square, all night, every night, for as long as I could remember. Vyvanse turned it into a library.
An SSRI took my anxiety from a nine to a six.
This past March, my doctor added Guanfacine, and the six dropped to one.
I read a book, all the way through, in the order the words appeared. I sat through a dinner without auditing a sentence I'd said two weeks earlier. I had not known what ordinary calm felt like. I had assumed everyone else was faking theirs.
Someone asked me recently if the pills might shorten my life. I told them I'd rather live a decade shorter than feel the way I'd felt every day.
Imagine you had seasonal allergies, and instead of taking a Reactine you spent twenty-five years getting a series of radical sinus surgeries. The recoveries went sideways. The complications stacked up. You spent your forties recovering from a problem that had never really been there.
If only you'd taken the bloody allergy pill.
That's a little bit how I feel.
I mourn the fact that I lost my youth. I spent it running marathons to cure a headache. I built businesses to cure it. Bought houses to cure it. Crossed oceans to cure it. None of it was ever the medicine.
I was talking to a young entrepreneur the other day, and he said, "Sure, but if you'd treated your ADHD you wouldn't have all this." He gestured at the house—the view, the stuff.
"Yeah," I said. "But I would have had my twenties."
Like, technically, I existed in my twenties. But I lived in the future. I spent all my time living in a nightmarish future where everything was horrible. I couldn't relax. I couldn't be present.
If you've felt an itch—the looping, the brain that won't quiet, the feeling that something is wrong with you that nobody has named yet—please don't take twenty-five years to find out.
So many people I know are living in a prison inside their own mind, not realizing the door is unlocked. ADHD, OCD, autism, anxiety: most of these have treatments. They don't require courage. They require a doctor or therapist.
I built Deep Personality, partly to help people see what I couldn't see in myself for two and a half decades.
It's not a cure, but it can give you a map to figure out what is driving your itch and direct you to the most effective treatments.
Moving to Bali will not cure your anxiety. Getting rich will not fix your depression and loneliness. Perfectly organizing your desk until it looks like a Wes Anderson movie will not rid you of OCD.
If anything in this piece felt familiar, spend 45 minutes and find out. Take the test.
I thought it was simple. There was a formula: make money, get rich, give it away, do good.
It turns out, it's not so straightforward. There's no clean equation where $1 given = $1 of impact.
Early on, I went to a cocktail party with ~100 of the world's biggest philanthropists. I asked everyone the same question:
"What are the most important things I should keep in mind when doing philanthropy?"
If this were a business conference, you already know the answers I'd get:
Hire great people.
Track everything.
Build in a growing market.
Create a repeatable playbook.
Instead, I heard things like:
"I've given away a billion dollars and still don't know if it did anything."
"Just trust your gut."
"It's just… hard."
These are people who built massive companies with ruthless precision. And yet here, they sounded uncertain.
Why?
Because unlike business, "good" is fuzzy. There's no profit line. No clean ROI.
Almost all philanthropy does something. The real question is: how effective is it?
Take $5,000:
It might save a life in sub-Saharan Africa.
Or fund 20 hours of trauma therapy in Canada.
Or pay for nonprofit overhead.
Or put your name on a building.
Each option has a defensible argument. Local vs. global. Immediate vs. long-term. Tangible vs. abstract.
There's no obvious answer.
I've been doing this for about seven years now and it's been humbling.
We've definitely lit money on fire. But I think we've also done some real good.
One area I keep coming back to is scientific research, which I've often funded in partnership with smart friends like Dr. Rhonda Patrick and Dr. Andrew Huberman.
I like science because of the asymmetry.
A relatively small grant can occasionally lead to a breakthrough that helps millions of people.
The flip side: you often won't know for decades whether it worked.
It feels a lot like venture capital. Most bets don't matter. A few change everything. And you can't tell which is which upfront.
Our grantees are working on problems the world desperately needs solved, but often won't fund:
Alzheimer's.
PFAS contamination.
Treatment-resistant depression.
We recently launched a site to share more of what we've been up to. Check it out here.
PS: If you've made a lot of money and are trying to figure out philanthropy, I'd be happy to help you muddle through and share some lessons. Email me.
I used to wear glasses. I hated them. They'd constantly be covered in finger smudges and made me look like a dweeb.
I'd tried contacts, but they always felt like I had sand in my eyes.
One day, my friend Rajiv told me about a specific brand of contacts: Daily Total One.
They have what they call a silicone hydrogel core, which in non-nerd speak, means that they let oxygen through to your cornea.
I tried them and was blown away. No dry eyes. No sand.
Here's my recipe:
Daily Total One + 1 drop of Systane Ultra in each eye before insertion + 2 drops of Systane Ultra onto the actual contact lens before it goes onto your eye.
I completely forget I'm even wearing them. Magic!
I dread getting sent stuff by people, because it always feels like there's strings attached. A covert agreement to write about it.
So I was not happy when I received a package from my friend Sahil Bloom.
He sent me a big box of products from his new men's skincare line, Wild Roman.
I've mostly been using the body wash, but MY GOD does it ever smell good.
This is a sad admission, but I actually look forward to the smell that it emits: eucalyptus and bergamot.
Highly recommend for washing your body. Check it out here.
Sure, we all kind of get a sense via gut feel. But by going deep on the science of body language, it takes an art and turns it into a science.
Chris and I did a body language workshop about ten years ago, and it was one of the most useful things I've ever done.
For business. For life. For dating. It's one of the most universally applicable skills.
I've got body language expert Mark Bowden coming to Victoria to do a body language workshop for entrepreneurs on May 20th.
There's only 3 spots left. Buy a ticket here.
Years ago, when I first started doing public speaking, I felt like I was going to die.
Sweat through my shirt. Clenched hands. Quivering voice.
I was terrible at it. Which was confusing, because in small groups I was a confident speaker. But put me in front of a crowd and something short-circuited. Hundreds of eyes and my brain just…shut down.
Around that time, I came across a study on beta blockers—drugs that blunt the effects of adrenaline by blocking beta-adrenergic receptors, lowering heart rate and dampening the physical symptoms of fear.
The interesting part wasn't just that they reduced anxiety in the moment. It was that, when paired with exposure to the feared situation, they seemed to help rewrite the fear itself.
The mechanism is subtle but powerful: when you recall a fear, your brain briefly "reopens" that memory. If, during that window, your body doesn't experience the usual panic response, the memory gets stored again in a less fearful form.
So if you're terrified of spiders: take a beta blocker, then spend time around spiders. Your body stays calm, and your brain updates the file from "danger" to "not a big deal."
I tried it.
I took a beta blocker a few times before speaking events. And it was shocking how quickly things changed. The physical panic was gone, which meant I could actually practice being calm in front of a crowd.
Today, I'm cool as a cucumber whether I'm talking to 3 people or 3,000. It feels like my brain got rewired.
I've used the same trick in other situations too.
A few years ago, I was negotiating a deal with a guy who was incredibly intense. He stressed me out, and I found myself folding under pressure.
I took a beta blocker before meeting him.
Boom. The physical fear disappeared. And once my body stopped reacting, my mind followed. That dynamic never came back.
Propranolol is the one I used. I still use it occasionally when I notice I'm having a fear reaction to something (do your own research before taking one!). Just tell your doctor you have some public speaking coming up and they will usually be happy to prescribe you some.
PS: If you haven't listened to Wilco, stop everything you're doing and listen to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: Spotify / Apple Music.
My favorite line: "The bad news is you'll marry the wrong person. The good news is there's no right person."
"I asked someone 'what's the secret to being married 22 years?'
She said 'we never wanted a divorce at the same time'"
–Joanne Jang
-Andrew
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