“Love your customer and the problem you're solving. Not everyone's going to work on their passion, but you need to be excited about the problem you're solving day in and day out, or you just won't be able to stick with it.” – Robbie Bent

Robbie Bent (@robbiebent1) is CEO and Co-Founder of Othership, a platform for breathwork, connection, and mental wellness. He previously worked in ecosystem development for Ethereum and was CEO/Co-Founder of INVI Energy. The first company he co-founded was Roamly, a virtual SIM Card marketplace.

To listen to Robbie's quick interview on habits, routines, and inspirations, click here.

Check out this free morning breathwork exercise with Robbie Bent!

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Chapters

Robbie's background in investment banking and entrepreneurship
Advice for high achievers
Learnings from Robbie's first business, Roamly
The importance of loving your customer and the problem you're solving
Understanding the problem before building the solution
On meditation and dark retreats
The creation and scaling of Othership's physical space
The Othership app
Comparison is a killer
Finding meaning in life

Books Recommended in This Episode

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya‍
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Transcript

Daniel Scrivner:

Robbie, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining me.

Robbie Bent:

Pleasure to be here, Daniel. You're catching me three years of work culminating in this week. And so I'm just on a wave of excitement and gratitude. And so really pumped to share our story today.

Daniel Scrivner:

So we're going to spend the majority of this episode talking about what you're building at Othership. And it's fascinating because it has a digital component. It's basically breathwork that you can do in an app. And then it has an IRL component. And we'll talk about what happens at each of those and how those connect. Before we get too far, you also just have a fascinating background. So I wanted to see if you can share just at a high level, a quick sketch of your journey leading up to founding Othership or just what you did before.

Robbie Bent:

Absolutely. And I'll just get really high level and then you can double click on parts you want to go into. And so high achiever, young age, feeling like, oh, I need to go to the best school and I need to have this job and I need to be successful or I'm a nobody. This idea of your whole life is driven by how successful you are, your job title, the money you make, the things you have, what your parents think of you. And so that led to investment banking. So my dad was in business and I went to school and was like, oh, I just want to be... Do what the smartest kids do. It's banking and that's how you make money and that's where you find happiness.

Robbie Bent:

I went from there to startups. And then I was like, oh, I'm going to shortcut this 10 years of grinding and quickly build this company and be rich and famous. Very shallow goals. But at a young age, it's just like, yeah, I want people to like me. I want these nice things. Built a startup and somehow through sheer force of will was able to raise 25 million bucks and grow that business and actually release a product. But the business failed after four years. I completely lost everything. Went through a period of decline living in my parents' basement. Couldn't afford to go for dinners with my friends. Feeling like a total loser, especially because all those things were least material and shallow needs were so important to me. Cue, rock bottom, time for change, Tim Ferriss podcast, meditation, Vipassana retreats, psychedelic medicines, self-worth, moving away to Israel. And through that learned a lot about myself, which we can get into. Then got into, okay, I'm going to go where the smartest people I know are.

Robbie Bent:

And luckily enough learned about Ethereum really early on. So joined the crypto ecosystem when Ethereum was six bucks and moved to San Francisco. Worked with a foundation on grants and ecosystem support and a whole bunch of cool projects. And my life really, really changed. So in that period of self-reflection, I struggled with addiction also in the past. And so used that to get sober. I've been sober for six plus years. It's a big part of my identity now. And took that meditative, psychedelic, what I had learned into Ethereum and found financial success. Met my wife. And so in a period of two years went from parents' basement.

Daniel Scrivner:

Like literal basement.

Robbie Bent:

Almost. Yeah. Literal basement, dark, suicidal, watching Netflix, fucking crying. Just like, oh my God, I'm never going to... What am I going to do? And really dark stuff. Yeah. Went to complete energetic, positive, around smart people, financially successful, just feeling good about my skills. And then went through another transformation to like, okay, this worked for me, how do I get other people into it? And then have spent four years iterating and testing side projects, trying to get people to feel more like themselves and help them. What I found was meditation, psychedelics weren't accessible. And sort of created this entire platform to make mental health and wellness accessible with the goal of, we talked about helping people find meaning, helping solve loneliness.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's fascinating background, and I have so many areas I want to dive into. But I think the place to start, which is super obvious, is just as you think back. Because I like you, I think everyone, at least the vast majority of high achievers I know, I think start out just as you describe it. Just very shallow metrics. Very shallow things that they're chasing after. Because it's almost they're chasing after the outcome. It's not really a journey. It's just like I want this and I'm going to be successful if I have these things, let me get those things. What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time early on to try to help yourself think differently about it or do you think that you needed to have that experience and you needed to go through the full cycle?

Robbie Bent:

One is, it would be hard to have said at that time. Like, "Hey, you need to do X." It's very hard to change. Everyone's on a linear trajectory. And unless you go through something challenging or traumatic, which you don't really seek out, it happens by accident. You're not really forced to change. And an example of this is traditional career path. Maybe accounting, lawyer, investment banking. Careers are changing, now they're becoming much more fluid. But 10, 15 years ago, you start out, you do two years as an analyst, you're an associate. And by the time 10 years go by, the job you chose when you were 20, you're not the same person when you're 30, but it becomes so difficult to change because every year the incremental, oh a small bonus, work harder. Okay, next year you get a 20% bonus. And then all of a sudden it becomes very difficult to leave.

Robbie Bent:

And so the advice when you're young would be hard to... It's like the analogy of the frog and the boiling water where it's just slowly getting hotter. And then I've just seen a lot of people. It's like, I'm 30, I'm 35, I'm 40. I'm like, "I fucking hate my job. I don't know what I'm doing. How did I end up here?" They have regret. And so I just don't think I would've listened back then because it was such a dramatic shock that happened that caused me to figure out something else. And so that's not really tactical advice, unfortunately, but I do have some tactical advice. Which is the more I've gone down this path, the more I've authentically figured out who I am and what I liked and embraced that.

Robbie Bent:

And so in high school, in elementary school, it's like, "Oh, I want to conform. What are the other kids doing?" In university like, "I hope they like me. I want to fit in with the crowd. Oh, what do these people think about what I'm wearing?" It's very awkward to be weird. And what happens is you put up boundaries and as you get hurt, maybe you've said something, tried to be a funny person in grade three and someone was like, "Oh, you're never going to be funny, shut up." You had this moment of embarrassment. And so you put up these walls. And as you grow through these formative periods of your life, you put up more and more walls and you become further and further from your authentic self to avoid hurt, pain, embarrassment, fear. And so the advice I would give, no matter what age you're at, 18, 25, 35 is like, how do you find your authentic self?

Robbie Bent:

And these practices, breathwork specifically, meditation, psychedelic medicines, they help peel back, yeah, therapy as well. They help peel back all these hurts. Help you process them to find who you are. And so my advice is just really feel into your own authenticity and weirdness. And so if you were young and you wanted to design cities or create shoes or just do something fucking weird. You read weird books. What was that? We help people a lot find this feeling of awe. What awe means to me is childlike wonder. And so it was that feeling when you're 10 years old, running through the forest and you're on your bike and hitting jumps or whatever it was that really turned you on as a child and made you feel the sense of magic. It's like refinding that. And so that is my one number one piece of advice is just finding that authentic self by getting rid of those barriers.

Daniel Scrivner:

This is fascinating. I want to talk for a second about [Romly 00:07:19], which was that startup experience that you had. I think you built the company for four years. Raised 25 million. I'm sure the first couple of years of that were probably an incredible experience feeling like you're on this exponential curve. But obviously then at the end of the day, this doesn't work out. I want to maybe give people a little bit more context before I ask for tactical advice. So what I was going to ask there is, could you talk just a little about what that company was. And then can you talk a little bit about that going over the cliff moment and what you learned from that or what you salvaged or what you took away?

Robbie Bent:

Oh my God, there's so many tactical learnings. And so the company was a global telecom platform with a hardware component. So it was basically like a sticker you'd put on your SIM card and it would fit between your SIM and your phone. And when you traveled the phone identifies what network you're on. So you're a AT&T subscriber, you go to Canada, you become a Rogers subscriber. And then the sticker we would over-the-air provision a local identity. So it's like a Rogers identity. And then we would get billed by Rogers and [inaudible 00:08:16]. So we were like a middle man that replaced roaming. And so there was a hardware component. There was the software on the SIM card. There was the backend billing platform. There was the connections with all the carriers. And so at the time it was awesome because roaming was five bucks for a meg of data.

Robbie Bent:

People were like, "What the fuck is a megabyte now? That's nothing, it's not even a third of a photo or something." And so we'd give these out. We had these really junky prototypes, and we would give them out to super wealthy angels. And they would go and fly and they would get a text message. It was like a man in the middle. It wasn't really working at first. And so they would fly and they would get a text message from us. And it'd be like, you just saved $900 on this phone call. And so these super wealthy angels would be like, "Holy shit, this is insane. Everyone's going to use this. You can't even use your phone when you're traveling." And so that's what we used to bootstrap money. And then the problem was we over raised and I just didn't know what I was doing.

Robbie Bent:

And so it was like, oh, I'm living in Toronto, it's a hardware project. It's 2010. So this is kind of like YCombinator just becoming a thing. There's not all these resources on entrepreneurship, Lean Startup maybe isn't even out yet. And so I'm just on my own trying to figure it out. And it's like coming from finance like, oh, the phone. It has to work in an iPhone. It Has to work in a Blackberry. It's got to work for customers going to the UK and we have to have every country. And so we way overbuilt. And not only that, it didn't have to work everywhere also, but we built everything from scratch. So we hired this huge team. We built the software in the SIM. We built the billing platform. All that stuff existed. So we should have just focused on the software in the SIM, single person in Toronto, customer, going to the UK. And just mastered that and spent a fraction.

Robbie Bent:

We kept being like, we were into this fallacy of once the system works, we're going to make money. If you build it, they will come. And so it was just like, oh, if we just added cheaper pricing, because we had more countries. And if we just added more phones and... Total mistake. And so we got to this point where we'd spent so much money to set up the system, we were consistently raising money trying to build these complex products and just huge error that by the time it was up and running roaming prices had declined legit 95%.

Daniel Scrivner:

Wow. In two years, three years.

Robbie Bent:

Yeah, exactly. So that was a legit learning. Was like, when you're competing carriers, use roaming as a profit center. For them, they could offer it... They use it a as a loss leader. And so they were making a ton of money of it, but they can offer it for free and still make money on their home. If you're a AT&T customer, they can make a ton of money off you and offer roaming for free. And so you're competing against something that their marginal costs is almost nothing. So that was really tough strategically. Never really thought through how fast that would happen. And then just the biggest learning was spending so much money without really doing a proper NVP. We built out this crazy thing. We had it in Best Buy. I met with the president of Skype. I'm like, "Oh, they're going to buy us. I'm going to be rich. This is crazy." Because people would use the prototype and be like, whoa, this is cool. And we diluted ourselves into like, because the prototype's cool, it's going to scale. And then you got it into customers hands and one out of 10 would break when they installed it.

Robbie Bent:

And so Best Buy is like, "We're not going to sell something with a one out of 10 return." And so we're like, "Oh, okay, all this effort on that whole deal, couldn't you have just tested it with 50 friends and saw that that was going to happen." So tons of mistakes. And then I went and I was really nervous about, I don't know what I'm doing. I need senior people, gray hair people in the room. Another huge mistake. And so those are people now I always, if I'm going to do something, I get the best three people in the world. And I ask them like, "How are you doing this?" And I use my network and that's the goal and rule of entrepreneurship is you help people and they help you back. And so it's so easy in On Deck, or Ycombinator, Silicon Valley or any of these entrepreneurial hubs to get support and advice on something.

Robbie Bent:

And so I was like, "Oh, I need to hire these people." And so we hired somebody who had managed an 8,000-person team at one of the big telcos. And you're bringing them into a 10-person environment and all of a sudden that person's like, "Oh, we need to hire head of marketing and a head of this and that." And now we have 40 people and we're not even selling anything yet. And so just huge mistakes left, right and center of hiring the wrong people, spending way too much money, not focusing on product early. But its funny because when it failed, I was like, "Oh, I'm useless. What am I going to do?" I'm 28 and I had to sell my car. Move out of my place. I went from living in this nice place in Toronto to this small town, Guelph, where I grew up, and live in the basement.

Robbie Bent:

And just like, I don't even have any skills. What have I done for four years? I'm not an engineer. I'm not a designer. I did this weird thing where I raised some money and hired some people that failed. And then it wasn't until I started the next thing where I was like, "Oh, I actually know what to do in situations." We're going to negotiate a contract. Well, here's how you do it. We're going to hire for a role. Well, okay, here's the best practices. We're going to raise money. Here's how you talk to people. And so all these little things you pick up as a generalist in your first time, makes you way more likely to succeed in your second go. And now I'm on my fourth or fifth. So I really since that experience, have added a lot more, but it's so interesting the first time how much you don't know. And I just, when I started to, I didn't even know that I didn't know. It's like, yeah, I've been... I worked in finance, I could do this. Let's go. And it's just so dumb.

Daniel Scrivner:

I think it's wonderful that you're so open about that because, one, it's absolutely true that you don't know what you're doing. And there's also no book that's going to teach you. One of my favorite quotes is, "There is no such thing as business school." Meaning there isn't generalizable skills. You talked about there's at a lower level generalizable skills around how to hire, maybe go on how and run... How and go and raise a round of financing. Whether that's a seed or a series A. It's very different, there's no book that's like, here's how to not fuck anything up and build the perfect business you've always dreamed. You just have to get going and make some of those mistakes. I guess the question I would ask is how does that now show up when you interact with other entrepreneurs? And what do you say maybe to first time entrepreneurs that you're talking with or that you meet or that are working with to just set their expectations correctly, about how to think about this.

Robbie Bent:

There's a few lessons. And again, I don't think any lesson is generalizable. In all situations something can work and something might not work. And so here's a lesson I'll give that's not generalizable to all but it made a lot of sense to me. And so whenever I've tried to chase dollars in a quick period of time, it's almost fucking impossible. You're going... One, if an idea is very clear, it means there's going to be a lot of competition around it. And somebody that's better capitalized with more resources than you is going to execute. So when you put yourself in a short window, it makes it very hard to experiment. So there's two things that happen if you're just going after dollars. One is when things go bad, which most likely they do. I mean maybe sometimes they don't, but in every company I've been in, there's these hard times. It's like, what's going to carry you through.

Robbie Bent:

And so my business now it's selling something that I did, that transformed my life. And so for me to be in a sauna with somebody and we'll talk about that. And to guide through breathwork, that's what I do at my spare time. I make breathwork checks because I fucking love it. And I get all my validation from hanging out with customers. So love your customer and the problem you're solving. And it doesn't have to be like, not everyone's going to work on their passion, but you need to be excited about the problem you're solving day in, day out. Or you just won't be able to stick with it. So that's a huge one. And then time for emergent behavior to come through, which is like, I think this is pretty misunderstood. Is that the initial... And this is why you have this concept of a pivot and people think, oh you pivot because what you're doing is not working. And it's kind of real. But if you dig a bit deeper why this happens often is because problems aren't super easy to find.

Robbie Bent:

And so generally the first problem you find actually leads to a much bigger problem. And you only find that out, it's not clear, it's not transparent. And so you find that out by working with somebody. And so once you start working with customers and hearing their feedback, you're like, whoa, we're actually solving this thing. And this is majority of tech companies have some kind of pivot or transition. It's because these big things are under the surface. And so to do that, you need time to experiment. And that's why a lot of companies start their side projects. So someone hacking away on something, they do a side project, they have this unique insight, but you're never going to have that unique insight with a business plan and a whiteboard.

Robbie Bent:

So this whole idea, when I went to school, an MBA school. Starting your business makes no sense. If I was an entrepreneur now and I was young, I would say like, "Okay, I'm going to pick something I'm like really interested in, in either the mission or the people or the problem. And I'm going to say, I'm going to do this for three or four years and I'm going to work on it for free around people that are really, really good. And I'm going to just put out side projects and try to spend as little money as possible. Not need money and just be around." And so I actually did this with crypto and it paid back dividends massively. And so I think that's a good place to start if you're like looking for ideas. It would be like, join Discords, join [Dows 00:17:12], watch what's happening.

Robbie Bent:

And wait, hack on little things, and then let emergent properties happen. And so an example for me, I'm rambling now, but I just like this thread a lot. But emergent property for me here was, okay, I love saunas and ice baths. It's what I do because I'm sober. Let's build an ice bath in my backyard. I'm going to have my friends over. Okay, this is dope. Oh, guess what? This isn't really an ice bath for health. It's actually an onboarding into meditation. Well, that's kind of cool. Maybe we'll make meditation classes in the hot and cold. And then it's like, well, you know what? This isn't even really meditation. It's about connecting people. And all of a sudden people are dating that met here. And they're getting married. And these people are going on a trip and only meeting one time and people are crying. And it's like, whoa, you know what? I actually think we can solve loneliness with this thing. So it's just like, as you emerge, I never would've thought that a bathhouse, for me it was around longevity. Because I'd heard around [inaudible 00:18:02] and now what we're building this platform to solve loneliness and increased connection. And so it's just an example of having two years to iterate and test. A customer base will always like emergent properties, will come for something new.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. I love that idea of allowing time for emergent properties. And the last question I'll ask and then we'll jump into Othership and all the different aspects of what you're building there. But the last question I was asked there is you talked about a little bit ago at Romly taking the, if you build it, they will come approach. And one of the things I've noticed is even if you don't think you're doing that, most companies are taking that approach. Meaning it's less about exploration and it's less about trying to learn. And it's much more about here's this thing we've all visualized. Now let's just put it into the world. And so I guess what I would ask is because what I haven't ever heard is another short quipy, here's what you should do instead. So everyone knows you shouldn't do the, if they build it, they will come. But I feel like then there's not a, what is the path to follow? So I just want to ask your take. Is that waiting and spending a lot of time experimenting and hacking and waiting for emergent behavior. What's the other side of the build it and they will come coin?

Robbie Bent:

I think it's understand the problem, which is hard. But it just like, [Steve Blank, 00:19:17], I think it is. And he's like, "Get out of the building." And all these engineers are like, "Oh, I don't... Why this is..." You build it, they will come, is people like to build. And so a lot of people are... Or have been, maybe that's changing now, but we're shy. And so to go and talk to people and ask them about their problems, it was like, I'm going to build something I think I want. And so the opposite of they build it, they will come is actually talking to people before you build. And an example of this there's this book, not The Lean Startup, but there's a tactical book called Running Lean. And he actually writes the book by... He has these little weekly powwows where he just does one chapter and then he ask the people, "How did it go? How did that chapter go?" And he finds out what the next chapter should be. And he designs his book in that way. And so if you read that book, it gives you a really good framework. So maybe we call it the Running Lean approach is the exact opposite of if you build it, they will come. And just really talking to your customers, understanding their problems first.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. And I'll give just one example because I think a lot of people will get that idea. One way I've tangibly seen this in a bunch of founders that we've looked at and invested in recently is honestly just asking questions around how many customers have you talked to and how often are you interacting with them? And what you typically find is, one, the founders that I think have products they just feel amazing, or growth curves that are just working really well. They spend a outsized amount of time talking with customers. And I mean, even just a data point, before we started building, we talked with a hundred potential customers. I think, really is polarizing where the vast majority of companies don't do that. So anyways, I think one metric there would just be, spend more time upfront talking with customers and then make sure that that's on your calendar every single week as a recurring thing.

Robbie Bent:

A really interesting thing on that one is that, an underappreciated point is that's going to help you identify the problem, but it's also going to help you identify the language which you're going to use for marketing. And so [Sam Corcos 00:21:03], you should definitely have on the show if you haven't. From Levels, CEO of Levels. He actually did a thousand customer interviews. And from that, it's like, I know the exact pain point. I know my segmentation, I know my language. So when I go to do ads, the best ads are like, you're not even talking about the solution, you're just talking about the problem. Very, very specifically, very, very tight. So you hear that and you're like, "Oh, that's me. I have that problem. Yeah, I want it fixed." And so customer interviews are important for not just problem solving, but also for language.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. That's really well said. So I want to talk about Othership and I thought one maybe interesting way to get into this would be talking about your early experience with Vipassana in meditation and meditation retreat. And I know from just doing a little bit of research on your background, you had this really profound experience in Israel. Could you just talk a little bit about how you got introduced to meditation and then we'll talk about how you then moved from meditation into what you're building at Othership.

Robbie Bent:

Absolutely. So always interested in consciousness. Did my high school thesis project. And we'd put not serious into meditation, but would use Headspace, would hear on these productivity things. Especially when I was going through that dark time I had mentioned, I was like really a lot of Tim Ferris, which shout out to him. 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Body and Tools of Titans and all these things really helped me change. And so that's where I heard like, "Oh, I got to be like all these high achievers and meditate and..." I got super into it. I went over to Israel and I was going to come home for break, but I had no money. And so somebody I had met at a nightclub was like, "Oh, you meditation, you don't really do meditation until you've tried this thing."

Robbie Bent:

And so I looked at it. I had a friend who'd done it as well. I called him. And instead of going home over the new years and Christmas, I just decided I'm going to do this thing. I want to change my life. I'm interested in what's going to happen. And so Vipassana meditation is a hundred hours of meditation. It's 10 days, it's 10 hours a day, very strict schedule. You wake up at 4:30, it's complete silence. It's very allows you to get into a shifted state, shifted nervous system state basically. And as a result, imagined doing Headspace 10 minutes a day. It's basically two years of that in 10 days. And so you think, oh, it's crazy. But then the reality is if you want to feel feedback from meditation, I have friends who meditate every day for a year and they are like, "I don't know, I kind of feel it I kind of don't." It's hard to continue this practice because the feedback is quite long.

Robbie Bent:

So it's almost when you do that 10 days you have evidence. Real hardcore evidence you felt it. Experiential evidence, that's the word I was looking for. That like, wow, this is powerful and it's worthwhile. And so that experience for me was the first time. A lot of the stuff I'm sharing and I love being vulnerable and sharing like, yep. I was not a great person. I had done these things I'm not proud of. I'd had failures. I struggled with drugs. I love... I was yeah, trying to, I didn't have a lot of self-love and I loved to share these things. But I didn't really know them when they were happening. I wasn't aware. It was just like, oh this is normal life. And it was meditation that helped me start to be aware of like, oh, I'm not feeling a lot of self-love right now. I'm trying sooth that with success to please my parents or I'm trying to feel like women like me by having nice things. So I feel good about myself. So just stuff like those thought processes happened subconsciously.

Robbie Bent:

So I found meditation was really powerful for understanding yourself, how you think. When you get triggered, why you get angry. Really looking into your emotions and I'll leave it on if I asked you right now, how did you feel today, what emotions came up? 95% of people will not be able to give you an answer. It'll be like, "Oh, maybe I was angry. Maybe I was grumpy." They don't understand how they're feeling. And it's just because the thinking mind is like [inaudible 00:24:46] all the time. What do I have to do? What do I have to do tomorrow? What's this person thinking about me? It's just nonstop. And so meditation gives you a space to pause and notice how you're feeling.

Daniel Scrivner:

When you got to the end of those 10 days, you talk about a shifted nervous system state. What does that feel like? What did it feel like in your body? What did it feel like in your mind? And you could also do on day one versus day 10. But as someone who's never done that I would love to do that. I'm curious, what kind of a change was that like? And then what is the state that you end at?

Robbie Bent:

It's so amazing and there's many of these transformative states and so Tony Robbins, Landmark, Kaufman, psychedelic medicines. Even getting deep into like a sports training camp or like an iron man, or if you're an artist spending a few days working on a piece of art. They're all are shutting down the prefrontal cortex, the thinking mind, helping you get into the present. I lived in a cave for eight days in complete darkness last year.

Daniel Scrivner:

Is this a meditation retreat or is this something all together different?

Robbie Bent:

It's called the dark retreat. And so that's a whole other thing. And I was just curious to see what it would happen. And so now very curious about these things. Again, you're meditating, but it's also the added factor of complete darkness. And I wrote a post which we can link in the show notes and we can talk more about that. But I think the difference, and again, totally subjective. This is just my opinion and people listening may be like, no, but so take it with a grain of salt. But for me, I'm just thinking all the time. And so when I get up, boom, phone, let's go, okay. 40 emails, 15 Telegram messages, Slack messages. I've got to get back to my team. I need to make everything happen. And then it's like, what about my food? Am I going to go to the gym later? What does my wife think about me? What do my parents think? What do I have this thing?

Robbie Bent:

It's just nonstop worry, fear of the future, craving. It's like your mind is a wild animal. And then on top of that, if people are listening, they're probably high-performance entrepreneurs. It's like, let's go, coffee. And then it's like open the computer. I'm at my seat, 12 hours a day. Just going, going, going, trying to make something happen. Which is fine, but what you're doing, you're stimulating your fight or flight response, your sympathetic nervous system. And it's so overstimulated. So hundreds of years ago, what was an average day? It's like, oh, sleep on the ground, wake up, fresh air, breathing slow, relaxing most of the day. Then maybe I'll like go for a hunt, come back home.

Robbie Bent:

And there's no... You're not consistently stimulated. And the stimulation now is so strong. If you watch Netflix, there's no commercials. It's just over and over. To watch like TikTok, it's crazy. And so what these things do, they take away all stimulation. So imagine these thoughts that you're running with all the time, they run themselves out. So one analogy I've heard on the Aubrey Marcus Podcast, which I like is your brain has 200 tabs open and there's just so many things going on all the time. And so imagine just slowly how good it would feel to shut each 200 tabs, reboot your computer and open it in a way that's fresh. And so when you're doing that, you're just focusing on your mind and body. It's hard. You're at points where you're physically uncomfortable. Your body is aching, which I was actually shocked by how physically demanding it is.

Robbie Bent:

And every time I'm like, "Oh man, this is so hard." It just allows you to shut those tabs off and start to notice that you're not in control of your thoughts. And it's one thing to say that, but by just focusing on the time, you start to realize like, oh, I'm not. So maybe I can just let go. So you're sharpening your awareness. You're feeling into emotions. You're processing and letting them go. You're learning things about yourself. You're having vivid, vivid memories. Almost as watching a movie of your early life, which can be really beautiful. And then when it ends, you just feel so focused and present. And there's probably things happening neurologically in the nervous system from just lack of stimulation, proper sleep, healthy food, perfect breathing the entire day. There's so many things happening that are good for the body and mind in addition to the meditation. It's like a timeout, a complete reset, a way to better know yourself. And that's what I had suggested. If my recommendation was like, find, figure out your authentic self and this is a way to do them.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yeah. It might be super weird, but it almost in some ways seems like just in daily life with all the stimulus, with all the directions you're pulled, all the thoughts that are rushing through your head. This concept of quantum entanglement, of these two things being entangled. And it seems like as you describe that, it's like over those 10 days, you become more entangled into the present moment as opposed to being pulled everywhere else into your past and your future and all these other things. It sounds really interesting. So then take us back to three years ago. What did you set out to build at that point in time? And how did that evolve?

Robbie Bent:

I noticed a few things like two major problems. And so I had this, we'll call it a transformation. It's not a spiritual word. It just means behavioral change. And so that behavioral change was like, I quit alcohol, I quit using drugs, I started to feel self-love. And so, okay, well how did that happen? And I thought it was psychedelic medicines and meditation. And so I started trying to teach people that. Just because I'd now found success at Ethereum and was like, yeah, I want to help others. This is working for me, I got to share it. I'm that type of person that's high energy. I want to share. And so I'm teaching friends, meditation, I'm sending them to retreats, I'm sending friends to psychedelic medicine retreats. And I'm not really seeing the change happen.

Robbie Bent:

And I realize there's two major problems for creating behavioral change. And one is... The first is there's just a ton of friction. For you to get into my meditation, you almost have to do this 10-day retreat. And everyone's like, "Are you fucking crazy? There's no way I could do that." So, okay, that's a nonstarter. And I have like 200 friends, maybe like three did it or developed a practice. It's like, that's not great. And psychedelics the same. It's like, okay, it's illegal, where do I do it? It's scary. This is weird. And it's becoming more and more normalized every day. But seven, eight years ago, it was like, what are you talking about? You're going to do more drugs to quit drugs. This doesn't make any sense. So I got to that point, it was like, there's a ton of friction in prep.

Robbie Bent:

And then the other problem was when people would do these things, there's a ton of friction in maintaining the change. And so you have a transformational experience and anyone who's done a Tony Robbins or a Landmark or one of these things you come back and you're like, I'm on fire. I fixed everything. I'm ready. I'm perfect. I'm in love. My life is great. Let's go. And that's the problem with psychedelics, you hear so many people like, "Plant medicine changed my life." And be like, yes, it did for that moment. And for a little while after, and I really look at this as a tool to jumpstart behavioral change. But if you don't have the system around it. Majority of my friends were like, "How'd you quit drugs." I'm going to go, they come back three weeks later, doing drugs again. Because you come home, same friend group, same work-life balance situation. A lot of the same thoughts exactly. Exactly.

Robbie Bent:

And so that was a problem I set out like, huh, how can I either get more people into this or help them maintain their gains? And so without really trying to do this, we've now built a system that actually solves both of those problems. And so what does that system require? Well, the first is that there's really tight feedback and that's where we came up with this idea of peak experiences. And so our mission statement one, our goal is to solve loneliness as measured. So why is that important? So there's a loneliness epidemic right now and I'm going through this really fast so we can double click in. But there's basically a loneliness epidemic where people's... The amount of close friends they have for the average person used to be three, two to three. It's 0.8.

Robbie Bent:

So Northern America, the amount of close friends someone has is less than one, which means many people don't have one close friend. It's insane. And they've said loneliness is as harmful as smoking 15 cigarettes a day in terms of inflammation stress in the body. So we need connection to survive. So that's the overarching problem. How do we solve that? And we solve that by helping people find meaning and belonging. Okay. So how do we do that? So we've created this tagline, peak experiences that inspire awe and belonging. It seems like, oh, we have this app, this physical space, but we're building these peak experiences. And the idea was like, they have tight feedback. That's what a peak experience is. It's like a breathwork session, crazy dark sauna with music, ice bath, things that are changing nervous system state.

Robbie Bent:

And in that state you're allowed and able to process emotions. And by processing those emotions, you find these experiences of awe. And then we do it all in the group. So you're building community together. And so that was the mission that came to us, but it didn't happen overnight. It just started as I was going to bathhouses. Well, before I get into that, is there anything you want to double click on there before we like talk about the products?

Daniel Scrivner:

I have so many questions, but I want to hear the rest of the story. So continue on going to bathhouses.

Robbie Bent:

Yeah. So that's where I was at. I'm at Ethereum, I love bath houses, I'm sober. So I'm going into the sauna and the ice bath and I'm like, whoa, this is insane. We've got 40 people here from a conference, everybody's loving it. It's like I'm waking up the next day. I feel amazing. And so then I'm like, I want to build one of these things. And so I want to use it on my house for benefits. And I read all the Rhonda Patrick studies. This is pre before Huberman was out with his podcast. But Rhonda Patrick had this amazing reference of all these cold research papers. I read them all. I did the Wim Hof training. I went to some of his events. And I just built this ice bath in my backyard and with my wife and some of our best friends. And we had people over every night because we're like, "This is fucking cool." And so we'd had a fire in the backyard and people would hang out and we'd go to the neighbors like yo come. And then we had a WhatsApp group and people started being like, "I want to come use the ice bath." I'm like, "Okay."

Robbie Bent:

So I come out for a coffee in the morning. There's four people out there hanging out, just doing it. Oh, this is cool. So it becomes winter. And so in the wintertime we convert my garage into, we bring the ice bath into the garage, we add a sauna tea room. We're like, "Whoa, this is like... I think we could charge for this." And so we start to have neighbors come by and just through word of mouth, it grows to 2000 people. On this residential street, just showing up into this garage, which is insane. And then there'd be six people, seven people and maybe were, "Oh, let's turn off the lights in the sauna and try something." And my partners are world trained sauna masters. We all have background in psychedelics meditation.

Robbie Bent:

So we started taking stuff from therapy and coaching and breathwork and all these modalities and combining them. Mixing and matching just to see what's stuck. And that's when things went nuts. We'd have a 45-year-old lawyer, example, imagine a person you know who just cares about work. Loves work, always on their phone, super pumped about success. Succeeding in making money. A lot of ways like I used to be in, comes in the ice bath. Kind of skeptical, gets in, we're guiding him through a meditation in the ice bath. Remembers about his daughter and his daughter's birthday and how he missed it, starts crying and just comes out and he's like, "Hey, this is the first time I wasn't thinking about work. And I was able to connect with my emotions in years." So we're like, "Holy, this is powerful."

Robbie Bent:

And it's in a way that's cool and fun. So it's not like, come and talk about your feelings. It's like come to this cool space, feel good. It's amazing for your health and for longevity. But then there's something deeper and all that's as we talked about, it's an emergent property. And so from that, we were like, "Okay, let's build a real space around this." And so we designed over the last year and it just opened last weekend, which is why I mentioned it was a big week. 50-person sauna, four ice baths, tea room. Feels like you're in a Soho house in terms of the environment, but then there's classes. And so in the sauna classes like we're doing one tonight in two hours, which I'm stoked about called the warrior class. It's about finding your personal strength.

Robbie Bent:

So you're in the sauna, super hot, drums. People are playing drums like [inaudible 00:36:28]. And it's like, imagine yourself when you were brave, feel into that [inaudible 00:36:34]. And we're getting people to use their voices. Yell and scream together, do things that are a bit uncomfortable, but because the cold and the hot, they increase your norepinephrine, neurotransmitter responsible for mood, attention, vigilance, you feel it's adrenaline shot. You feel alive and ready to conquer your anxiety, which is what people usually use alcohol for. So it's a class-based system where you can learn about really feeling into your emotions in a new way that's cool. And then at night it's a social and it's a hangout. And so instead of going to a bar or alcohol, you come here, there's awesome elixirs and it's a longer session without guidance. It's just people hanging out.

Robbie Bent:

So I think it's like... I mentioned those problems we're solving is you do the ice bath, you do the sauna, you start doing breathwork. And you're now onboarded into like, wow, wellness, mental health is important. And then you're coming back from a transformational experience. You have your community, your place to hang. There's no alcohol. Everybody's on the same path. So that's really the goal is to create this system that allows people to make behavioral change through peak experiences where they can inspire more awe and belonging. And so that was the physical. So I can stop there. And then I can also chat about how the breathwork came because there's almost two separate businesses.

Daniel Scrivner:

Yes. And I want to get into that. So just on the physical space, I mean, things that are fascinating about that is in a lot of ways Starbucks used to have this line of creating the third location. Where it's not home, it's not work, it's the third place you can come. And I might be butchering that terminology. It's kind of loosely my reference. I love the idea, especially someone who's midway through my life. I no longer want to really go to a bar or longer want to go to a nightclub. But I think going and spending time somewhere like that, where it can both be an inward journey, but I can also meet amazing people and do something with my body and leave feeling like I took care of myself and spent time with some amazing people. And the goal is just to share this, you have this initial location. What are your ambitions in terms of how to scale that? Or how does it go from this one location into something that is more broadly accessible?

Robbie Bent:

So I think this idea is so fresh and new, it doesn't exist in North America. Bathhouse certainly exists. Fitness exists. Meditation exists. But the idea of tying using the bathhouse as the atomic unit. And then tying emotional training into this, it's almost like you're paying $30 and getting a therapy session without having to be vulnerable to an individual at like half, a tenth of the price point with a bunch of friends. So the idea is like, we're the first emotional regulation classes in the world. So it's like this cool place you can go hang out, feel into your emotions in a way that feels like, whoa, I'm almost like going to a fitness class or I'm having that level of fun. So we're like, this is big. This is a huge idea. It can exist in every city. There's not even one of these that exists yet.

Robbie Bent:

So we raised venture funding and it was very important to me to have a community backing the project because it's a consumer brand. You need a lot of people involved that buy into the mission of solving loneliness. And so we raised from 70 angel investors, a number of VC funds. And so we now are funded to expand. And so Toronto was the pilot working extremely well, even though we just opened last weekend. Thousands of customers, lineups. It was like people crying. We have a metric of how many people cried in certain classes. Because that's how-

Daniel Scrivner:

Different metric.

Robbie Bent:

... That's how powerful. It's like I was never interested in building a business for money at this stage. It's like, I want to build like this products. I actually have, I don't know if this is recording, but I have the logo tattooed all over my arm of all the logos. Because that's how cool the brand is to me. I think of this as like a Nike instead of I think of this as like a mental health clinic that I'm going to.

Robbie Bent:

So yeah, the plan is to expand in New York and Austin, hopefully by the end of this year, build community. And to build community in these places, we actually do breathwork concert tours in advance to get emails that are pretty cool, which I can talk about. But the goal for me in five years is one of these in every city, a world class app, because it's not enough to just have the physical space. You need space each day to turn off the fight or flight, as I had mentioned. And create space to process emotion. And so that's where the breathwork app come in. And then there'll be a Discord to connect people from across spaces, people that are using the app with the physical spaces. And the idea is that you can build your entire community around this brand with a daily practice and then a weekly practice. And so that's the vision.

Daniel Scrivner:

I want to talk about the app and there's a bunch of stuff to discuss, but I mean just really briefly, maybe I'll set it up and you can try to push back on anything that I get wrong or add onto it. But when you shared this with me, I think we initially talked maybe a month or so ago and I tried the app. And I have someone as well too who's I've tried Ten Percent Happier, I've tried Headspace, which I really like. There's no shortage of, I think, incredible apps now in the meditation space. But I had the same general issue, which is, I feel like time is incredibly precious. I've got two young kids. So at night it's not really take care of myself time, it's go home and take care of the kids. Same thing in the morning. And so it's challenging to find time to meditate.

Daniel Scrivner:

And I think I ultimately just was never able to get into it. But one of the things I immediately realized when I did the first breathwork session, which I think was just four minutes in Othership was literally in four minutes. And the way I have typically thought of and used meditation is a lot of it is just to, if I feel like my mind is in overdrive, or I feel that fight or flight, or I feel a lot of anxiety using meditation to try to get myself... Try to feel in control and try to get myself back to a place that feels good. I felt like I could, in four minutes with simple breathing, I could do previously what it would take me 20 to 30 minutes with meditation. Which I thought was really profound. So talk a little bit about the app and I think we start to get into a little bit of why breathing and why the focus there.

Robbie Bent:

Absolutely. And so, yeah, I mean you're breathing 25,000 times a day. If you stop breathing in a matter of minutes you'll die. It's the atomic unit of what we need to survive. And so most people breathing patterns as per James Nestor have changed significantly. 90% of people have breathing dysregulation, which you can test pretty easily. But our environments have changed. So I mentioned before fight or flight is always triggered. And when fight or flight is triggered, it's like you look at that Slack message, you get nervous. Your heart rate increases. You start breathing from your chest. You're turning on the fight or flight part of the nervous system. When you're eating acidic food. So your Uber Eats before bed, you need to correct your pH balance. Your body becomes more alkaline by breathing out more carbon dioxide. So you overbreathe through your mouth again.

Robbie Bent:

And so changes in our diet, our sedentary nature, our stimulation, have really destroyed breathing patterns. And why that's a problem? Because it determines how much oxygen is actually absorbed in the tissues and brain. So it can affect if you're having problems sleeping, if you're having problems with energy and fatigue. Problems with anxiety, a lot of times it can be you're overbreathing and simply holding your breath can make a huge change in those things. And there's just massive amounts of people reporting issues with anxiety. So that's one thing. It's just like, most people are breathing poorly now more so than ever. Now the second is like, we talked about meditation and it's challenges. Meditation is really about awareness as I said before. Watching your thoughts, what's happening in between your thoughts. Breathwork is changing your nervous system state.

Robbie Bent:

Through your breathing you can control digestion, circulation, immune system response, emotional response. And so it's using music and breathing in certain patterns to change state. And many people are like, "I don't really know how to look at my thoughts. It's a difficult thing. I'm just thinking, nothing's happening." Where everybody knows how to breathe. And so you mentioned in four minutes you can change your state. And what do I mean by that? So there's really three things we use breathwork for. One is call it up. And we've made it super simple to use on our app. And in under 10 minutes and under five it's you can go up. So think of that as pushing the gas pedal on the nervous system. You can think of it as like, I need a coffee. I'm procrastinating. I want like a boost of energy. I want some inspiration and I want to create, bam, you go up.

Robbie Bent:

People know that as like Wim Hof, holotropic, transformational, there's plenty of names for this breath of fire. But it's just turning the nervous system up, second is turning the nervous system down. And so, that's moving into the parasympathetic rest and digest state. That's the state we're in when we're eating food, we're cuddling, we're eye gazing, we're having sex. All these beautiful things where we find meaning and emotion. And so this is the state where high powered entrepreneurs are like, "I've totally left the state for dead." And so this is like coherent breathing, box breathing, long, slow exhales. And so one example, we'll just do it now is if you put a hand on your belly and chest and you just do a nice, slow breath in through the nose. And a nice long exhale, six, five, four, three, two, one.

Robbie Bent:

And you notice the long slow exhale when you're breathing deep into the lungs there's the nerves that trigger the parasympathetic nervous system to turn on. So that long, slow exhale and a breath retention. So slow breath holds. If you're ever having a panic attack, the best thing you can do is just like long, 10, 15, second exhales for three breaths and little holds, five second holds at the bottom. And you can do that in 60 to 90 seconds and totally change your nervous system state. And so we're teaching people to go up, to go down. And then the third is explore. And this is when, if you go up long enough for more than 10 minutes, I was telling you we'll do a session at the end of the show that's maybe like a mini up, that's kind of 10, 11 seconds that we can share.

Robbie Bent:

But what you're doing, your blood vessels are constricting and you're slowing the flow of oxygen to the brain. And as a result, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for the executive function, this thought process like why meditation can be hard. Is you stop. And it's just thoughts and thoughts and thoughts, and your mind's going crazy. Provides space from those thoughts. And when that part of the brain shut down, emotions tend to come up and be processed. And so we call that explore and that's like having an anti-anxiety or a MDMA, or psilocybin or some type of like mini psychedelic experience that's going to get you to feel and release. And so I had people doing these that wouldn't leave their house for six months during COVID. Not even to go to the door to open the door, to order food.

Robbie Bent:

He did some of our fear release breathworks over a period of six weeks. And then boom, I'm going outside, I'm getting people calling me crying like, "Oh, for the first time, I've conquered my fear." So it's really beautiful. Those sessions for grief, a breakup, job security, any type of like fear and challenging emotions that are sort of stuck. You can think of those as you're shutting down this executive function of the mind that doesn't want to be hurt. That's always on. And you're allowing yourself to process these emotions. Can often be super pleasant as well. So you really have all breath work really boils down to our breathing is fucked. It's impacting everything you do in your life. We can change that by going up, down when needed or explore. And so that's the triangle why you might want to use breathwork. And then it's accessible, it's fun.

Robbie Bent:

The other cool thing we do is you mentioned being busy. And so for me, when I shut my computer down end of day, first thing I do a three-minute down breathwork on the app. And I go from fight or flight massively, we're doing this podcast. I got to be on, I got to say all these things to like... Okay, I'm not ready to go hang out with my wife and watch some TV. It's just like a transitionary period. It works before sleep. And the final thing we do that's cool is we have a lot of background breathing. Where you can use it when you're going for a walk or while you're cooking. So the idea is like, you're driving to work. You have 10 minutes there, you are cooking up a little sandwich. You have some time where you can do these breathworks where you're also doing other stuff. As long as you're breathing properly, the state change will happen. It's really trying to fit it into your day as you mentioned. It's like, yeah, you got two kids. You wake up, it's crazy in the morning. Maybe you're only time when you're alone is doing something else.

Daniel Scrivner:

It's so well said. I think just a couple things I would outline is the aha, I've had since using the app. And well, I want to talk about the book in a second as well, too, because I think Breath by James Nestor is amazing. And I'm so glad you recommended that to me. But it's also just so simple because it's something you have with you all the time. I feel like with meditation there's this idea you need to be seated. You need to be in a special place. It needs to be quiet. There's all these special conditions. As you said, since reading the book and using the app, it's now something I think about all the time and it's starting to become on autopilot. And I think that that's been nice just to feel like one, and this gets back on this old gripe I have of breathing now, especially after learning to use it and also being like why isn't everybody taught how to breathe.

Daniel Scrivner:

Why aren't we all taught this? Why isn't this a part of K-12 education? Anyways. So I'll just say that the... I want to talk for a second about Breath by James Nestor, because as you talked about, there's some really interesting things in that book. I feel like the three lessons that I took away is we all need to be nose breathing and not mouth breathing. And if you actually pay attention, almost all of us mouth breath. And there's fascinating stories and historical perspectives around why nose breathing's really important and how it actually is a skill that we've basically lost and we've forgotten. That's one. I think the second one is just this idea, as you talked about, it's fascinating to me that you calm your body down by basically ramping up the CO2 in your body. So you take short breaths, you hold, and then you do really long, slow exhales.

Daniel Scrivner:

And it's data point in the book is, and this was something that was an aha moment for me. But typically you think about breathing. You're like, oh, I just need to breathe more air. So when I breathe, I'm doing massive breaths in, and what's fascinating about the book is it talks as much about the value of actually that we are over breathing and we're over oxygenated and we actually need to have more CO2 in our body, which is holding and breathing out more. So those are a handful of things that stuck out to me. What would you add on to that? Or what other things just in Breath by James Nestor, what do you feel like you took away or was an aha moment or insight?

Robbie Bent:

Those are both really interesting. And so on the second point, you think of your lungs like a glass of full water. So when you're breathing in, you're always 98% saturated with oxygen. So the issue isn't like, I need more oxygen. I'm always full for the most part, unless I'm heavily exercising and my oxygen requirements go up, but I'm always full. And there's also excess oxygen, usually 25% in the lungs per breath. So you can think of like your glass is full, you're pouring more oxygen inside. So where the impact comes is when you start mouth breathing, you can think of your blood vessels like little boats, and they're taking that oxygen from the lungs to your brain and these other places that need it. And without enough carbon dioxide, imagine the boats, the doors don't open. And so you can't actually get the oxygen you're breathing in into the bloodstream, into the tissue, into the brain.

Robbie Bent:

And that's something nobody understands. And so it's actually, you imagine you listen to a therapist and they'll be like, "Oh, take a big deep breath in to relax." And realistically that's actually increasing your heart rate and what you need to be doing is holding your breath on retention. So even just knowing that is okay if I'm panicking, slow my breathing as much as possible. So I thought that was really interesting. The other interesting thing is baseline how awful our breathing patterns are and how society has changed that. And so really cool note, the biggest predictor of longevity in humans is actually lung health, lung size.

Daniel Scrivner:

Just fascinating. And I'd never heard that before, even as a stat ever till reading that book. And there's all sorts of, I think just a couple other things I thought were fascinating just to encourage people to really, whether it's get the audio book of Breath by James Nestor, read the book. But some of the stories that are shared there I thought were just amazing. And one was just around why carbon dioxide is so important. And I think some of the stats that the mechanism by which you lose weight is actually by exhaling out, which is fascinating. And basically carbon dioxide is the conduit for your body to basically... For your metabolic system to be able to work. And then just, it talks about how... I'm blanking on the story, but there's a big portion about basically studying native American tribes. And it's not just native American tribes in the US, but basically native people all around the world.

Daniel Scrivner:

And the fact that there was a massive commonality among all these distributed tribes. So whether you went to Africa and went to the Maasai Mara. Whether you were in the states and you went a Native American tribe, where they all, one, knew the importance of breath and really emphasized it. But they would do crazy stuff like basically tape the mouth of a child closed to teach them to nose breath really early on, which I thought was fascinating. I would just really recommend it. I think it's an incredible book. I want to ask just a couple of closing questions. And one would be, you've had these, you've had just a number of really incredible experiences, but you've obviously been on this rollercoaster and you've been building and working in this direction for three years. And we just talked about, you had this massive breakthrough moment a week ago. What do you feel like the experience of working on Othership has taught you that might be applicable to somebody else?

Robbie Bent:

So there's negative lessons. So one is pretty interesting in that. And so there's comparison and comparison is a killer. And so I went from crypto where I was meeting with like Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz and these big VCs and working on Ethereum, I could get intro to everyone I wanted. A lot of my friends are becoming billionaires. And so now I'm in my backyard doing an ice bath with a bathhouse hat on. And so kind of like, what am I doing? I'm in the big leagues here. I can like... The ego. Would look on Twitter and then I'd go in this whole realm of like, "Oh, I should have stayed. We were building this really crazy scaling solution. And now layer 2s are becoming a thing." For people who are listening, L-2s, they're called. And I was working on the most prominent one. And so I'm like, "Oh, if I just stayed."

Robbie Bent:

And so even if you're doing something you love, which I am now. I love... This is me in a brand. I've helped so many people. Onward of thousands of people, personal messages. Like, "Yo man, you changed my life." And still I had that feeling of, I'm not enough. I should be doing something bigger. And so I think when you're starting something new, it's very insidious feeling of comparison. And so as a lesson, if you find yourself doing that, you have to think about trade offs because you'd look and be like, oh, well, I would've been in crypto doing this. But what was my day-to-day like? My day now I just designed this cool warrior sauna class I'm going to go do later for 50 friends. And they're all going to be crying because they had emotional experience. That is so cool.

Robbie Bent:

So I think that comparison is a huge killer, especially when you start something new and when you notice that and that's what meditation helps with you notice. Oh I'm comparing a short-circuit and think about trade offs. So that's definitely one. And then another one is balance, which I haven't quite figured out. And so there's two parts of me fighting where I still have the same desire of I want validation. I want to build something big. I want to make a mark. I want to have an impact. And part of it is real where somebody comes in and I actually make their day or help them with something. It feels amazing. It's like, wow, I gave back, that's great.

Robbie Bent:

But part of it is ego and it's like, I want to make this huge fucking thing, and that part's not healthy. And so I'm struggling with just remembering to be in the customer's shoes because this really helps me and just focus on that. Because the ego can lead to real imbalances, which I've been feeling, which is like, oh, we got to be first in the US. We can't let somebody beat us. And we're like, we got to make five. And like we got to raise this money and we, not only that, but we're going to do a concert tour also. And we got to go harder and we got to go harder. And so I really struggle because I'm just an intense person with balance. And even if you're doing exactly what you love, which is what I'm doing, if you do it too much, it's not pleasant.

Robbie Bent:

You start to get stressed, you get worried. And this is seven years of work, personal work, many startups, therapy, coaching, all this stuff and I'm still having these issues. So I think it's just very common as a last point on those is just like, yeah, it's okay. You're not going to be perfect. You're going to have struggles. You're going to have doubts. You're going to have fears. You're going to not be balanced at times. And it's fine. And so the other is just trying not to have any judgment. It's just like, love yourself.

Daniel Scrivner:

Self-compassion.

Robbie Bent:

Yeah, exactly. So that was a lot of lessons there, but hopefully that's helpful.

Daniel Scrivner:

No, those were amazing. And I want to ask one closing question and then we'll tell people where they can go to learn more about Othership and follow you. On your Twitter bio, one of the things I like is you talk about obviously the problem you're working on, but you also ask the question why. And then your answer to that is, of why you're doing Othership is to help people get as deep as they can into their own meaning. And so I want to just ask a question around that, which is for anyone listening. And honestly, I assume every person if you said, "Are you interested in getting deeper into your own meaning." Would say, "Absolutely. Help me figure out how to do that." What advice would you share with them? And this could just be, here's been own experience. But I'm curious, you're clearly someone who I think much more than other people, myself included, you seem to have spent an enormous amount of time on this journey thinking about that. What advice would you have for other people that want to get deeper into their own meaning?

Robbie Bent:

Absolutely. And to me, meaning as defined as these kind of moments of awe and belonging and that's what a life full of meaning actually is. And so to find meaning we're using peak experiences. And why we're using those is because they're just like, I wouldn't say the shortest way, but they're definitely a way that you can feel there's something here to start this path to continue. And what it means is you are using the peak experience to short-circuit the fight or flight response, to build emotional resilience. And we talked about this the entire show. It's like, I'm always fight or flight. I'm crushing all the time. And that's majority of people. Even if you're not crushing, but you're just on your phone all the time. It's the same thing. And in that fight or flight state, you're missing out on emotional feeling, emotional complexity, things you feel when you feel like deep love and satisfaction and presence.

Robbie Bent:

And so the first thing we're doing is peak experience to short-circuit that, to bring you into the parasympathetic state. Learning through breathwork, through cold response, through heat response, how to get into that parasympathetic rest and digest. In that space, allowing you to have these moments of awe and to do it in community. And so to me the meaning is like going into the space, sitting in an ice bath, thinking about what I want to let go of really deeply feeling like self-doubt or comparison and just letting go of that, then telling the people I'm with about it and then give them a hug and hanging out and sharing. And that to me is finding meaning.

Daniel Scrivner:

That's really beautifully said. So I think the website where people can go would be Othership.us. And you can also find the app store. I know it's on iOS. Is it also on Android?

Robbie Bent:

Yep.

Daniel Scrivner:

Okay. It's on Android as well too. And I highly encourage anyone listening to download the app. Even just to try it as if you already have a meditation practice, just try it. And at the very least, I think you'll learn a lot about breathing that you can take out of it. At best, maybe it becomes a new thing that you think about daily and it's something you can incorporate while you're walking, while you're sitting down, at the beginning of the day, end of the day. And then I know people can also follow you on Twitter. I don't know how much you tweet, but @robbiebent1, which I love. Is there anywhere else you would point people?

Robbie Bent:

Definitely Twitter. I'm usually tweeting about what we're doing. I'm always sharing if we're doing events and videos and stuff like that. On Instagram, at Othership.app for the app, you can follow. And then I think that's it. Yeah. I think in the app store, one final point is if accessibility is an issue, if you're like, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur. I can't afford this. It's priced as a premium product, very similar to like Sam Harris, but we also want it to be accessible. So if you just DM me, my DMs are open on Instagram and Twitter and you're like, "Hey, I can't afford this." I'm happy to gift the product to you.

Daniel Scrivner:

I love it. Well, thank you so much for the time Robbie, this has been an amazing conversation. We've covered so much ground.

Robbie Bent:

Thanks Daniel. Loved it. Awesome.

On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.

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