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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…
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She pushed the needle into my arm. A little poke, a second of discomfort.
No going back now. My palms started gushing sweat.
I lay down on the couch and the nurse passed me an eye mask and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. I slipped them on while she checked my vitals one last time.
Then darkness.
Nothing.
Minutes crawled by as I listened to the pulse of mellow electronic music and forced myself to breathe.
Why did I agree to this, I wondered. I hated drugs.
I flashed back to that unexpected hug outside my kids’ school.
A few months before, I had run into my friend Faisal at school drop-off. He walked right over to me, beaming, and gave me a massive bear hug.
This caught me off guard. It was totally out of character. After all, Faisal doesn't hug. He barely shakes hands. He’s the very definition of nonplussed. Always calm, quiet, and controlled—sometimes with a touch of melancholy.
Now, he seemed like a new man. Bright, expressive, and suddenly…a hugger?
As I thought back to this moment, lying on the brown couch in the clinic, a minute after my injection, I started sinking.
Deeper and deeper.
Not into the couch, but through it. The music warped, stretching around me like taffy. My body felt heavy, then weightless, then…just gone.
I melted into something warm and formless. Like my body was dissolving, spreading like cake batter across space.
Then, a few moments later, I died.
At least that's what it felt like.
The injection I had just received was a drug called ketamine, and it had transformed Faisal’s life. I was wondering if it could do the same for me.
After battling depression for over 35 years, a single injection of ketamine had taken Faisal from managed melancholy to joyous and thriving in a matter of hours.
His depression had lifted completely. For the first time in decades, he felt light. Free of his mental shackles.
After witnessing his transformation, I went down a rabbit hole of research.
How could this be?
We all know that psychedelics had their moment in the ‘60s. Hippies. Timothy Leary. Turn on, tune in, drop out. The summer of love.
Then, Altamont and Charles Manson. The government quickly freaked out and banned it all, and for forty years, nobody could even study them.
Fifteen years ago, a few brave scientists at Johns Hopkins and NYU decided to risk their careers and start running trials again. They figured if these drugs were so dangerous, the data would show it.
Not only did the data show that they were safe, but the results have been nothing short of remarkable.
Johns Hopkins found that 80% of cancer patients showed significant reductions in depression and anxiety after a single psilocybin session—effects that lasted six months.
Another study showed that 67% of PTSD patients no longer qualified for the diagnosis after three MDMA sessions.
Wilder still, with small doses of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, people whose lives had been destroyed by crippling depression were walking out of clinics crying tears of relief after a single hour-long session.
Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), drugs like Prozac and Cipralex have rescued many from depression and anxiety. I know this from personal experience (I’ve taken Vortioxetine for five years, and it has changed my life). But for many, they leave lingering symptoms, and for some, they don’t work at all. These were the people that ketamine seemed to help most — those who had tried everything else, then experienced a miracle.
Before my friend Faisal found antidepressants, it was so bad he sometimes couldn’t leave his bed and, at times, even contemplated ending his life. SSRIs had saved him, but they were not completely effective. While he was able to function on them, he still didn't feel like he was at his best. The symptoms were managed, not gone.
But after ketamine, he said that he felt his depression symptoms were nonexistent, and stayed that way for months after treatment.
Faisal's transformation amazed me so much that I decided I had to try it.
But I wasn't depressed. My thing has always been anxiety.
You know that feeling when you're nervous and your palms feel like there’s electric current running through them? That tight feeling in your chest, like you can’t get enough air to relax?
That's me, 24/7—usually for no good reason.
My brain is a cruel master, constantly warning of looming doom in my health, business, or family if I don't act RIGHT NOW.
Sure, I had moments of calm presence, looking in the rearview mirror, reflecting on past concerns, wondering what I was so stressed about. But it rarely lasted long, and poor sleep, work stress, and a busy life frequently caused my anxiety to boil over.
As they had for Faisal, taking SSRIs had made a profound difference and turned the volume down on my anxiety, but I was curious if ketamine could provide more lasting relief.
To be honest though, I was vaguely terrified of psychedelics. They scared the hell out of me. I’d sworn off recreational drug use years ago, after a five-gram psilocybin mushroom trip that left me wrecked for months.
The way I put it to a friend was:
"When I do mushrooms, it feels like I'm in a hedge maze, and four out of five routes contain a clown with a chainsaw.”
So, as you can imagine, I was nervous as hell to try ketamine. But as I researched it more deeply, I was comforted by a few things:
- It only lasts an hour.
- It has a much lower incidence of “bad trips.” Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, not a classic psychedelic. Users often feel detached from their body/emotions and can gain perspective (rather than confronting the killer clowns directly 😂).
- It’s administered in a clinical setting. There's a whole process: doctors’ referrals, psychological screening, medical evaluations, therapy and integration. This is actual medicine, administered by actual doctors and nurses who monitor your vitals and can intervene if anything goes wrong.
- It’s remarkably safe. It's been used as an anesthetic in hospitals for over 50 years—they even give it to kids having surgery. Unlike other drugs, you can't really overdose on it, and it doesn't suppress your breathing or heart rate.
So, I gulped and signed up for a session at a local ketamine clinic.
Back on the couch that day, tripping balls, something big shifted inside of me.
It felt like I was being dissolved.
Broken down into individual atoms.
That I no longer existed.
That I had died, and this was the in-between space between life and death.
This sounds scary, but oddly, it wasn’t. It felt calm and peaceful. Like I’d zoomed out on life and the thing I feared most wasn’t so scary after all.
What I experienced during the trips was so abstract that it’s difficult to describe, but here are a few things I experienced/felt.
At one point I had a vision of a nuclear bomb blast approaching me. The blast wave rushed toward me, incinerating everything in its path. I should have been terrified, but I wasn't. Just before impact, it stopped. An invisible dome surrounded me and my family and friends.
The realization: me and my loved ones. It was us against the world.
I had this feeling: Keep them safe, and everything will be fine. That it was all that mattered.
Later, new images flooded in. Memories I hadn't touched in decades surfaced.
One struck me hard.
I was eight years old. My friend and I had tricked my younger brother into a wooden box. We slammed the lid and sat on top. His screams echoed from inside, his small fists pounding against the wood. Muffled terror.
Lying there in the clinic, thirty years later, I felt tears stream down my face. I felt his panic, his betrayal. I'd been angry at someone else but took it out on him—the weakest target available.
I felt a deep sense of shame wash over me.
Each session lasted an hour but felt like weeks. As the ketamine wore off, I'd surface slowly, pulling off the eye mask to find myself back in the beige clinic room, saying "Wow..." over and over, like a tripped-out Owen Wilson.
I called my brother right after and apologized for what happened when we were kids—something I'd been carrying around for thirty years like a sharp pebble in my shoe. While he could barely remember it, he appreciated the apology.
This phone call—something I might have felt but never been able to say—was particularly interesting. And I’ve made many more similar calls after the sessions since.
After wrapping four treatments, I've been struggling to describe the experience.
I told a friend about it over coffee the other day, and I sounded like a lunatic.
"It felt like I got melted down into cake batter, then spread all over the world," I told him, watching his face contort with concern. “And like…nothing really matters except your friends and family.”
See, this is the problem with trying to describe a high-dose psychedelic experience. It all sounds completely insane and unrelatable. You end up sounding like that guy at the party who corners you to explain his ayahuasca breakthrough while you slowly back toward the exit.
The imagery and the experience can sound trite. The insights don’t seem that deep. Like, I get it, focus on friends and family. Do you really need to trip balls to find this out?
But what's profound about ketamine isn't the wild visuals or the feeling of becoming one with the universe. It's the emotional processing that happens while you're in that altered state.
After my first session, it felt like I’d done ten years of therapy compressed into an hour.
There were emotional wounds I'd been carrying for decades—resentments, frustrations, hurt, many from childhood. After a single session, feelings that had been a screaming 10 out of 10 on the pain scale suddenly felt like a manageable 2.
Like the sharp edges had been sanded down.
We don't yet know the exact mechanism of how ketamine achieves this, but scientists believe it works in several ways.
Your ego temporarily dissolves, so you can examine your life and problems without your usual defensive barriers getting in the way.
The altered state lets you access memories and emotions that might normally be buried or avoided. Your brain's usual filtering system goes offline, so repressed stuff can bubble up and be processed. It felt safe to peek into the dark and scary closets and go skeleton hunting—thoughts I might otherwise keep locked away.
There's also a direct neurochemical effect that provides immediate relief from depression and anxiety symptoms.
But most importantly, ketamine opens what scientists call a "neuroplasticity window."
Think of your brain like a ski hill. Your thoughts are skiers taking the same runs over and over, carving deeper grooves. Depression and anxiety? Those are the icy moguls you can't avoid. Ketamine dumps fresh powder on the whole mountain. You can interrupt and replace old, destructive thought patterns.
So many of us crave annual trips away—a reset, a change of perspective. To me, ketamine felt like a multi-week pilgrimage for my mind, at a fraction of the time and cost.
Each time I pulled off the sleep mask, just an hour later, I felt like I'd gotten back from a three-week trip, wandering through the Himalayas, finding myself. Something had shifted deep inside of me, in the best possible way.
It's been profound in a way that no amount of talk therapy has ever been able to achieve. It helped me work through deeper issues and little traumas that had been bothering me since I was a teenager.
While it hasn't cured my anxiety (I'm still on an SSRI, and unlike Faisal, I didn't experience a major effect on my symptoms), it has allowed me to let go of some of my most unwieldy and unpleasant pieces of emotional baggage.
The result has been a deeper sense of peace and something I've always wanted: a deep, indescribable sense that everything will be ok.
Who knew that all it would take was being melted into cake batter?
Of course, it's not a panacea. In the time since my treatments, I've had many moments of anxiety and existential angst. For me, it was more deep therapy than a biological fix.
Here's what surprised me most: I had zero desire to do it again anytime soon.
Remember that three-week Himalayan trek I mentioned? That's exactly what it feels like. Not something I’d want to do regularly.
Yes, ketamine can be addictive if you start taking it every time you go dancing. But in clinical settings with proper protocols, addiction is extremely rare. This isn't a party drug experience. It's deep work that leaves you feeling like you just climbed Everest and need to process for a while. Most people do an initial 4-6 sessions, then maybe a booster every few months or years.
I’ve kind of given up on trying to explain the experience. How do you tell someone you became cake batter and found enlightenment? That you died and were reborn four times for the price of a weekend vacation? That an hour lying on a brown couch did what a decade of talk therapy couldn't?
For now, I’m just telling people that, if they struggle with depression, PTSD, or anxiety, they should try it themselves.
If you want to deep dive on ketamine in general, I'd recommend listening to Tim Ferriss's four-hour episode on ketamine with Dr. John Krystal from Yale, who's one of the leading researchers in ketamine's clinical applications. It's been shown to be most effective for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, chronic pain, and certain addiction issues.
If you're interested in trying it, there are reputable clinics sprouting up in most major cities. I did it at SabiMind here in Victoria and had a great experience.
I also recognize this isn’t yet accessible for everyone. A full course of treatment can run a few thousand dollars, and most insurance doesn't cover it yet. After experiencing firsthand how life-changing this can be, I want to pay it forward.
I’d like to cover the full cost of treatment for three people in Victoria who are struggling with treatment-resistant depression or anxiety but can't afford ketamine therapy. If that's you, email me your story by responding to this email. I'll pick three people, and all I ask in return is that you let me share your experience if you end up getting treatment (anonymized if you prefer).
Godspeed 🪄🎂🤯
Note: This is my personal experience. Consult your doctor!
- They got 30,000 people to watch a video about…paper?
Here's what you need to know about business school students: within thirty seconds of walking into a classroom, you can predict who will actually start a business and who will end up as a bureaucrat in corporate finance.
Chris and I recently spoke to a class of local business students at the University of Victoria. As we spoke, I looked out at a sea of faces, most staring blankly—the telltale sign of kids who are there because their parents pressured them into it or because "business" looks respectable on a resume. I felt a bit let down.
But afterwards, two students walked up to me and started peppering me with questions—the kind that immediately told me they were entrepreneurs. Their names were Aiden and Hiroko.
They told me that as a side hustle, they had started doing social media for local businesses and had recently landed a contract with The Papery, one of my favorite local shops. It sells ornate letterpress cards, beautiful wrapping paper, and Japanese fountain pens that cost a small fortune. It’s the sort of place that shouldn't survive in the Amazon era, but whose cult following keeps it alive. It turned out that these two had played a part in that, and were now promoting it on Instagram.
I was even more impressed when they told me that one of the video reels they made got over 30,000 views.
Think about that for a moment: for a small local store with zero ad budget in a city with 250,000 people, that's the equivalent of getting one in eight residents to stop scrolling and watch your content. The video was a behind-the-scenes look at the store, exploring its history and operations. This piqued my interest.
So, when they asked me to grab coffee later that week, I said yes immediately.
At coffee, they showed me their work—clean, professional photography, copywriting, and design with an eye for detail that most agencies lack, plus a solid grasp of business fundamentals that's rare for students. They knew their numbers and were opinionated. Both were obviously driven and hardworking. But they had something that is rare and impossible to teach: great taste.
What really won me over was their pace. Within a few hours of brainstorming, they started emailing me ideas and proposals. There's a particular type of person who operates like this and I've learned to pay attention to this signal. There's a saying in carpentry: measure twice, cut once. Most people just never stop measuring. They cut.
I told them that I owned a bunch of local businesses that needed help, and knew of dozens more. The agencies I'd used in the past either want you to dump huge sums into Facebook ads (not feasible for small businesses) or produce content that makes you cringe (embarrassing!). There was, I told them, a big opportunity for someone to build an agency that could build legions of fans around local businesses by telling their stories.
Stories that explain how that amazing corner bakery makes their extra crunchy double-baked almond croissants. Or how much effort goes into sourcing the incredible ingredients from local farms. Or the history of the business—what went into building what customers see today.
We started brainstorming, and a partnership structure came together over the course of the week: they bring the creative talent and execution, while I help them scale, provide financial backing, and open doors to bigger clients. A perfect match. I get to turn what used to be a business expense into a revenue stream, while helping two hungry entrepreneurs move faster than they could alone.
And just like that, we started an agency together.
It’s called download, and we're helping independent businesses get the attention they deserve by telling their unique stories.
Think tasteful posts, reels and TikToks showcasing what makes each business special: behind the scenes looks. A day in the life. The special care they put into their products.
The Papery’s followers are up over 25% over the last month. If your small business needs help getting the word out in the same way, get in touch.
- I was left feeling unsettled by this Diary of a CEO interview with Geoffrey Hinton, who is largely credited for many of the academic breakthroughs in AI.
My favorite quote:
"If you want to know what life's like when you're not the apex intelligence ask a chicken"
Ignore the clickbait title on the podcast. It’s actually a very calm and rational interview, but it’s fascinating to hear it from somebody who has been at the edge of this for a very long time and no longer has any skin in the game.
Spotify / YouTube / Apple Podcasts
- Speaking of starting agencies: running one is stressful as hell.
Eighteen years ago, I was burnt out from running Metalab, so I decided to go backpacking in Europe.
Being an inexperienced fool, I decided to hand off the operations to one of my best friends from college, Mark Nichols.
At the time, he had no experience running a business—in fact, his only job experience at the time was mopping floors at a Starbucks in a Burlington strip mall—and I did a very poor job of onboarding him.
I let him listen in on a few client calls, showed him how I sent invoices and estimates, and introduced him to a few of my contractors.
Then, I disappeared, telling him to only call if there was a true emergency.
Long story short, there wasn’t. And Mark really ran Metalab after that.
He turned out to be amazing at running agencies, and quickly grew the business from a four-person studio working with fledgling startups, to an internationally renowned firm with a roster of Fortune 500 clients.
He is THE MAN, and remarkably, he’s still one of my best friends, even after working together for decades.
Now, being the grizzled veteran that he is, he finally got fed up with everyone asking him how to run an agency and wrote a book about it.
It’s called You’re On Your Own. I read a bunch of early versions, and it’s great. If you run an agency, it’s required reading.
If you run a services business, or are thinking about starting one, you should go buy Mark’s book here.
PS: Metalab just did some insanely beautiful work.
They just rebranded Windsurf, one of the top AI coding platforms, which just sold to OpenAI for $3 billion. I absolutely love this rebrand.
This comes on the heels of work for Suno, Pika, Grok, and MidJourney 💪
- My hometown, Victoria, used to buzz.
From 2008 to 2018, you could feel the energy building. Great shows, incredible events, a city coming alive.
Then COVID hit. And frankly, we’ve been in a bit of a funk ever since.
Don’t get me wrong—there are still some amazing event organizers doing incredible work here. But their numbers are dwindling. Many of the people who used to bring fantastic performers and mid-sized acts to town have shut down or sold to faceless corporate groups.
Here’s the thing: Victoria is packed with talent and potential. But there’s always been this barrier—you want to book that comedian everyone’s talking about, or bring in that band, or throw an epic party, but you need a huge deposit upfront. Too much risk for one person to shoulder alone.
So my friend Josh Franklin and I decided to do something about it.
We’re launching The Culture Fund.
We’re offering loans between $1,000–$50,000 to help people put on incredible events that make Victoria better.
Music shows. Comedy nights. Festivals. Massive parties. Whatever makes this city more vibrant.
Here’s the deal: This isn’t charity. We’re trying to stimulate a sustainable arts, culture, and music scene. The city doesn’t benefit if these events fail financially. So we’re going to be disciplined about it. The numbers need to make sense. You need to be able to pay us back.
But if you’ve got a killer idea and just need the capital to make it happen, we want to talk.
- My robot-induced cat feces trauma is over.
In my book, I shared a funny story about how a rogue robot vacuum once smeared cat feces throughout my house:
"When I staggered back through the front door of my house, I was hit with a smell so foul it made my eyes water. The whole house reeked like a pit latrine. Gripping my nose, I walked down the hall and into my dining room. Then, I saw something I can never unsee. It appeared that my cat didn’t share my fine taste in furniture and litter boxes. The sand in the box was left untouched, and in the hours since I’d left, she had defecated all over the floor around it. My robot vacuum, on its nightly schedule, had smeared a thin layer of cat feces across the room in a circular pattern, like a Franz Kline painting, and the little Roomba was now beeping shamefully in the corner.”
Well, I’m a glutton for punishment. I’ve since tried 2-3 more robot vacuums, and while I’ve never experienced this level of depravity again, none of them have worked very well. They almost always got tangled on cords or stuck under things, and I ended up spending as much time managing them than I otherwise would have vacuuming manually.
I recently bought one that I absolutely love. It’s called the Matic and it was built by two Google engineers. It’s basically a mini self-driving car, with full machine vision, and can avoid any objects left on the ground.
It’s incredible, and it mops and sweeps our house each night.
My favorite part: we let the boys name it and they somehow came up with the name Gregothy George (pictured below) 😂
- The Verge just called our absurd $3,600 keyboard "the best."
A few months ago, I wrote about an investment we made in Norbauer & Co—my old friend Ryan Norbauer’s company that makes luxury keyboards that cost more than most computers. (You can read the full story here - it’s a fun one.)
Well, The Verge just published their review of his masterpiece, the Seneca.
Their verdict?
"The best, and most expensive, thing I’ve ever typed on."
The reviewer, Nathan Edwards, goes on to say:
“The more normal you are about keyboards, the less impressive the Seneca is. I am not normal about keyboards, and the Seneca is goddamn incredible.”
"For lack of a better word, the Seneca feels permanent."
"The typing experience is sublime."
And no keyboard review would be complete without a typing test:
"A deep, muted thock, without a hint of ping."
If you’re a fellow keyboard obsessive, you can check them out here (we sold out, so you’ll have to wait).
Random Stuff:
- I started posting more on Instagram. Follow me at @awilkinson
- I spent many years of my childhood cackling at Tom Green’s antics on a grainy television in my parent’s basement.
I just watched This Is The Tom Green Documentary, which, as you would guess by the name, is a documentary about Tom Green’s rise from small-town Canadian cable access fame, to Hollywood, and back. I found it insanely nostalgic and laughed a lot. Trailer / Letterboxd
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A few weeks ago, Chris and I shared Tiny’s 2024 Annual Letter, where we walked through what we’ve been up to over the last year.
TLDR: Our cost-cutting program led to a 38% QoQ jump in Q4 Adjusted EBITDA, while recurring revenue is up 4x since 2021. We also acquired a 66% stake in Serato for $66M, which is expected to boost earnings by approximately 45%.
You can read the full letter here.
- A lovely guy from Italy named Giulio Michelon flew out to interview me for his podcast.
It turned out really well. We talked about:
- Why agencies are so stressful (he has one too)
- Why I still feel “Never Enough,” even after writing a book about it
- How incentives make or break companies
And a bunch more. Spotify / YouTube / Apple Podcasts
- We’re still looking to hire someone to manage our local events. Through my personal network and businesses, we host a ton of speakers, lunch and learns, forums, and conferences, and we’re adding to our events team.
We’re looking for someone who is: a big people person, has incredible taste (aesthetics + you know all the best spots in Vancouver/Victoria), and ideally some event planning experience.
You can be early in your career—this is one of those rare roles where we’re willing to hire for potential vs. experience. If you know someone, tell them to email me.
- I’m just going to leave this here. Connor O’Malley never fails to make me cackle. His latest video, presented without comment: Slugs.
That’s all for now…
-Andrew
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