Robbie Bent, OtherShip: Breathwork, hot and cold exposure, entrepreneurship, and emotional wellness

welcome to another CEO wisdom podcast we have Robbie bent on today he is CEO and co-founder at other ship which is an app that I use and that I really love it's a breath work app and if you listen to this podcast you know how bullish I am on breath work um pretty much free it's free energy on demand it's also slowing down on demand because these hectic lives especially since kovid can sometimes go up to your head and can prevent you from sleeping I mix breath work with a bunch of things ice bat with sun exposure and with saunas and everything in between so quite excited to dive into that uh today with Robbie Robbie has an interesting background he was um working on ethereum's ecosystem development made the founders pledge so basically Robbie

has good money that's what it means and that he has a good heart wants to do good things with it and um yeah he built a bunch of interesting things as well so ambient radio waves in the environment and yeah he's a cool guy eclectic background I love those and started his career in capital um for those that are interested into that this podcast brought to you

by podfire.com if you want to start scale or be invited to a podcast like this one or found sponsors so that would be podbar.com Robbie welcome to the bod can you tell us a bit more about yourself and about other ship yeah for sure I mean what do you want to know where do you want to start that's a big uh a big question um let's start with yeah your life um the tldr version of it and like less than a minute and what brought you to other ship uh um that's already five seconds I'm just thinking about how to edit out concisely yeah so exactly like you said you know I worked in finance I always wanted to build a big business I had a startup raised Venture Capital it failed went through everything

every every stack uh portion of the business hired 100 people had to fire them all was the last person standing was uh extremely nervous that I had no skill sets it's like oh I don't you know I don't have a specific job what am I going to do felt like a total failure um got into meditation before that got heavily into drugs and alcohol to deal with the depression and uh challenges and just felt like you know really a total loser and uh you know got into meditation and psychedelic medicine it's got fully sober I joined ethereum really early on with San Francisco uh did thousands of meetings there to help build the ethereum network uh all of a sudden had success for the first time during the crypto crash lost everything again during the

next bull market uh did well financially and then during that time I'm really passionate about all the things you mentioned I use them to stay sober and so moved back to Hometown Toronto and started an ice bath in my backyard just to meet cool friends uh you know interesting people people that cared about health so I was away from people using drugs and my wife and I

did it together with three of our friends and that became a garage space for the neighborhood to hang out in route over a thousand customers and at that point we signed a lease and we built other ship which is a physical space primarily a space built around massive sauna and ice bath performance so imagine like a Cirque du Soleil meets hot cold exposure meets sort of like

a berries boot camp class and so you know 100 people at a time in these massive Stadium saunas with music playing and we guide people through emotional regulation classes we have classes on loving kindness anger release you know it's complete pitch black you're screaming uh well the gong is playing and releasing and so we use a whole bunch of different Psychotherapy uh modalities within the hot and

cold to help people express emotions so it's kind of a new way to connect with a community that wants to feel better without really going to therapy and then the app was a so so started doing that full time just because I was really passionate left ethereum we're now building three new spaces and then the uh app was just a side project that we did for our

community because we're excited and you know and Saturday nights instead of drinking we'll have people over and do these giant breath work sessions and the breath work sessions now we've done 500 700 concerts you know Burning Man and Italy and castles and all these different places and so that's something we do for fun it's not really a business it was just creating amazing content that people can

use that they can you know a little bit easier than meditation to do where you can feel the state change immediately and also fun and it's just something that you know we make all the content ourselves we mix and master we look for the scripture research and we write them it's just something I do for fun the same way somebody would you know be an author and

write a book it's just a passion to create these classes and whether the class happens on the app or in the space it doesn't really matter the idea is creating a transformational experiences where you have a moment you can feel your emotions process and then and let them go and then now we're in the process of scaling the business to New York and a few other thanks

fascinating I want to learn more about your upbringing you seem to have a very special brain that is comfortable juggling with a lot of fields at the same time Finance Engineering Building and then uh spirituality and and therapy you're kind of mixing all of that together and building beautiful products uh so how are your parents life like and how did they educated you like before you're 18 .

uh my parents were I was like nothing unique about me uh growing up just average person listening to this you know really cared about fitting in uh was quite insecure really cared about meeting girls and being popular and playing sports and having fun and like high school I just had a ton of fun uh that's where the initial substance abuse problems started always worked really hard but

my parents were very disciplined and very uh wanted me to be successful and they were also you know because they were nervous about my safety there my mom was from an Eastern European family of immigrants and so very intense about like cleanliness discipline very fearful uh which is great and she loved me so much that she just wanted me to be successful and thought the way was

traditional like you need to go to a good school you need to you know if I had to express like hey I want to be creative or be an artist my parents would have like laughed in my face and so I always thought like oh to be a businessman I didn't even know what that meant but I felt like to be a businessman and make money that's the key to life and so I was very competitive as well as I went to Business School and I decided to get into Finance because it just seemed like that was the way to get rich fast but in terms of anything that made me unique I had no idea I was just competing with the rest for you know accounting and Investment Banking consulting jobs never really thought

about what I wanted to do and what my specialty was and what actually led me to finding my like unique set of talents was a failure and so the first you know Investment Bank I got a mid-level Investment Banking job I kind of did that then I left and worked at sort of a tier two or tier three hedge fund that fund ended up imploding and if it hadn't I probably never would have left you know you have these golden handcuffs where you're paid a lot of money and you just keep doing something you hate and I have a lot of friends now who are 38 39 they've been doing Finance for you know 17 18 years and they're just like [ __ ] I get paid so much money I can't leave but I

hate this work and since it really it's it's um very difficult to pick your career when you're when you're super young so I was really lucky at 24 I washed out of that career and said [ __ ] I hate this everyone I look at generalization but everyone I'm looking at doesn't seem like their lives are particularly happy their family lives are great a lot of people

rely on alcohol a lot of people cheating on their wives very like uh intense culture and I then decided oh I'm gonna go into startups just because I didn't know what to do and so I had a partner in Toronto and I I just you know we decided we could try to build something kind of thinking like oh I'm smart it's going to be easy and never really asked for any help and that was a huge mistake and through those four years spent a ton of money didn't know what I was doing so I hired way too many people really kind of [ __ ] up and blew all the money and the company even though we built a decent decent product not quite good enough in an industry I didn't care about at all

it was in in roaming and so it was a SIM card that allowed you to travel and use like one Global Sim kind of like Google buy but before Google fi and uh completely failed and so now I'm like wow I really don't have any skills I'm like six seven years into my career I don't know what I'm doing I don't have a specific role I'm not like a master of anything and I felt so low but the interesting thing I learned doing that was you can pretty much learn anything super fast like in one year and you know one maybe two years for sure and even in a new thing like the ability that okay I don't but you come out of school and it's like I have my checklist I'm going through my

checklist this is what I do to get A's you start your job okay my boss is giving me my checklist here's the role I'm trained I do the role and when you start something on your own it's a completely different way of thinking that we actually don't learn in school and it's like okay there are no [ __ ] rules at all you can kind of do whatever you want and you can figure it out and like make things happen and everything rests on your decision making that's a huge mistake I made in that in that first role was like not asking for help and not understanding models uh of like how to do great work and so the difference for you know other ship now having done this many times and ethereum is like

okay we need to you know Implement a billing system like the first thing I'm going to do is find three people who've done this at scale and like get in touch with them by any means and an interview you know and so 99 of the problems you faced maybe 90 of the problems you face in your business have been solved by other people the 10 is like your unique product which is like the value you can bring but even then you can look at other adjacent Industries to see how they've got distributions see how they've done customer support see how they talk to their customers and Implement those for your business so I think what made me unique now is just having a failed entrepreneurial experience early and realizing like I can ask for help

um and get it and I'd be very aggressive in that and the other thing that makes me unique is I'm just kind of a nut case and so um you know I lived in a whole bunch of places I've done a whole bunch of things and the more things you do like when I lived in Israel for the first time you realize in three months you can you know 10 sessions hanging out with someone you can become pretty close friend and the more new places you go the more new friends you make you realize the person you were in elementary school in high school is actually not the person you are and friends are always available and So You Can't Make Old Friends you can't make new old friends it's kind of an interesting saying

but at the same time it's quite easy to make connections and when you realize that you can better become Who You Are and so an interesting thing I always thought I was like an operator and I'm actually A salesperson and like Visionary and excited person to be out uh selling and I thought I was like somebody who was like by the numbers by the book and so

I did that role for a long time this was only when I became you know kind of 30 31 that I realized like oh my skill is actually more in building community and talking to customers and talking to investors and storytelling and so that was really interesting as well and so what I've come to realize is um what makes you special is something that like you really

had in your childhood and by stripping away through meditation into psychedelic medicines through a bunch of different things I got more and more comfortable with myself less insecure so you know you can see I'm just wearing a [ __ ] shirt I'm like sweating through it like I don't I don't care and so now really what people think of Me comparison that stuff's been Stripped Away from

a lot of personal work and as a result I know what makes me pick what I'm good at and I didn't know that before and so I think that is kind of a superpower then like what feels like play to you um so those are things that I think have changed but only really started when I was 30 in my entire career 20 to 30 was just middling and you know filled with failures that kind of caused me to like search out this path um because of like destruction in my life but then um yeah that's helped me and I think now I'm just also like so excited about entrepreneurship and building like I think about it just all the time you know in like one example I love the founders podcast as I heard

about it a couple months ago and I've listened to like 200 episodes and like every day I'll listen to like just little things like that when I get excited it's like what are you excited about and when you find that like you can do that forever it makes it so hard for people to compete with you Andres podcast great um my first million which you've been at

Danny Miranda as well so these are all great pods my question for you is with that new Robbie nowadays like how do you deal with stress because you mentioned employees I let go of 80 of my team at the beginning of this year and employ AIS AIS do a much better job and uh I just don't think humans should be in the in the capitalist equation it gave me expecting a return from them I can give to humans and be charitable to them but in a business I don't think they're most people are made to work um and there's way more to that equation but bottom line I let go of 80 on your side you're scaling your team plus you're building physical spaces uh which is also pretty stressful anything physical I stay away

from my first business was a nootropic in Canada um and yeah shut that one down so how do you deal with stress nowadays yeah it's pretty it's pretty challenging right like there's just as a CEO and it sounds like a lot of your audience is CEOs like you are the person that has to say no all the time and you're kind of like I feel sometimes like the villain a little bit so you know if I'm dealing with the vendor I'm pushing back on the price if I'm dealing with the landlord I'm pushing back for better terms on the lease if I'm talking to investors I'm pushing for a better valuation or terms if I'm talking to employees like I have to hold the boundaries all the time for everybody and if a problem is

difficult like it just comes to you to solve because you're most likely in a small business the only one who can solve it and so uh boundaries are important learning to say no has been something like I used to I'm like very Junior CEO so I've been doing this for four years um but I would call myself like in terms of communication and um in terms of good communication with people like very Junior and so I used to get so angry that that smelling defense mechanism that's like all why can't this person do this oh my God they don't believe in the company which like is not true and I would run these like stories in my head and use anger and it was like quite stressful um so I got a I have a

therapist I do Parts work with uh once every two weeks which has been helpful I have an Advisory Board one person one lead a chair of my Advisory Board is a conflict resolution an emotional Wellness specialist and so anytime now I have an emotional issue I'll just call her and ask her how to work it through and again it's like find experts who know how to do

this so you're going to fire someone instead of thinking about it for two weeks call an expert talk through I have her like legitimately write out the script of what I'm going to say then we talk through it and so any any type of like even small conflict resolution stuff our whole co-founding team actually works with her uh I also use from like a body-based standpoint I

use the hot and cold like almost every day and so if I'm really stressed with work like there's moments where it's there there's a great line for Mark Andreessen where entrepreneurship is either Euphoria or Terror and so there's moments that are incredible like you know you can see this is our flat iron space in New York that we're opening and it's like so [ __ ] exciting

to like see the designs and touch them and like think about the launch plan and then in other days you don't have periods of two months where it's like man we're going to be way over budget we're super delayed we're going to lose the space uh you know some customers saying acts and and so I think there's a balance of okay I'm running my business day to

day doing like what needs to be done but also ensuring there's parts of your work that you love and like what's really changed for me over the last year is hiring the right team around me so I can do more of the things that I love or some of the things that I love which is like designing classes uh designing the spaces being involved in the product working the front desk like I worked the front desk all weekend which sounds weird for the CEO to do but I just [ __ ] love it I love talking to customers seeing how their experience is ensuring like you know the people on the floor trained properly so uh the learning's for me from a stress standpoint is like get into the things you love about the business

and like really have a why so if I'm really stressed I'm like okay why am I doing this you know it's because I [ __ ] love this product and I want many people to do it I see it's changing lives and so go in and talk to customers that love the product and it just is always like a shot of confidence you know so if you have a course like talk to the most engaged people if you're selling apparel talk to people your power Journeys ask them why they use it get them to send you a picture so I think the best way to deal with stress is to really connect with just the why because the daily pieces of Entrepreneurship are just [ __ ] [ __ ] and you're gonna have so

many like oh my God is this gonna work are we gonna run out of money do people like this thing there's so much criticism okay there's this employee doing that I'm like we're gonna fire them there's like so many emotional things all the time so it's just being able to when you're in those emotions ground in like the why and get excited again so I don't even

think the most important is like Body Mind therapy all that stuff I think it's being able to like when you're stressed to have an outlet to understand why you're doing this because it's also like meant to be stressful because it's [ __ ] hard and so anywhere else in life you can like if you're having a negative friendship you can kind of you know maybe I'll spend

less time with that person as a dad you cannot do that with your children and as a Dad or Mom and as an entrepreneur you cannot avoid difficult conversations like you just can't if somebody is not performing you have to hit it head on if customers having a bad experience like it's a very good test for emotional regulation and like Consciousness just because there's so much conflict

that happens in building a company and like some conflict is good some it's not so I think those are my learnings if I'm stressed is just to hit the conflict head on have a coach that you can talk to about how to address conflict without emotion and then get back into the why you're doing the business very good insights again and yeah I call it Enlightenment through

entrepreneurship it's been one of my core thesis since the last decade it's probably at least 80 percent of the reason why I am more virtuous today um I think it also helps to have other CEOs and Founders to tell you that you're doing a great job you know like I mean I'm quite bullish on you and your business and you're so Innovative you're very creative you're uh

the design of the app is amazing and I think you've got something there you've got like umalgamy of skills that is is sort of your little mode here um I think it will eventually become a big mode talking about that what you have in the pipeline in terms of innovation uh what's what's next for other ship yes I think one thing we didn't talk about when you

asked that question before you know kind of naturally did this by accident and so I worked in you know early stage Tech Telecom and Finance in uh Hardware then in crypto uh my sister had owned a chain of jams since I was always very big into experiences and then personally very very interested in transformation so meditation Retreats psychedelic medicines breath work training um you know bath houses

because I was sober as a drug addict also so and then I lived in you know probably 12 cities and so I've met you know if the average person who lives in a small city has their group of six to ten high school friends I've probably met and spent time with like 4 000 different people and so when you're in many different circles you know you just can push insights together from a bunch and so other ship is really amalgamation of like traditional sauna off Goose which happens in Europe it's the training of sauna Masters uh breath work a bunch of like therapy techniques from Psychotherapy uh meditation and breath work modalities and then somatic healing um and then on top of that like experience with gyms Barry's boot camp Boutique Fitness and experience with

my partner in restaurants and Hospitality so we've used all those you know the first ever to offer like sauna ice bath in in a kind of you know our format at a much cheaper price point so bath house is traditionally three hours you go you get a massage there's like it's a massive environment so we're doing this in a much smaller scale footprint and then two first

ever to do emotional regulation like classes almost like group therapy but making them like you're at a Cirque du Soleil so we just over time you know did exactly what you should do in entrepreneurship started with a nice bath in the backyard iterated on thousands of Journeys started doing classes in a garage iterated another thousand Journey started in a small space you know we've had a hundred

thousand Journeys now uh the space like one I'm really excited The Innovation is we're doubling the size of the sauna so it's going to be the largest sauna in North America uh the ice bass we created from scratch to be like legitimately zero degrees or 32 degrees so it's like it is the same as like an Arctic Lake and there isn't anything commercial at scale we just

saw that temperature was where people in one minute have the greatest emotional breakthroughs uh so I think the Innovation I'm going to I heard most about is just opening in New York like the first of its kind our Flagship location some other Innovation so the point I was making there before though is if you do a whole bunch of different things you can take skills from all

of them and mishmash them into new ideas and I really don't and if you haven't done a bunch of things and you're younger listen to a ton of podcasts you know the founders podcast the story of the top 400 founder biographies of all time like it's all there you can listen on 2x speed and I think it's better I would say it's 50 times better than any MBA it's just listening to those 300 podcasts one per day the learnings that you'll get from that are insane and so going out you know when we designed this we went to 70 bath houses around the world in all kinds of different countries took notes on what's the best what we like and so I really think whenever you're building something having broad experiences across all your competitors

address and industries is super important like even Steve Jobs a lot of his ideas people don't know came from Edwin land who's the founder of Polaroid the whole idea for Apple a building like the intersection of tech and culture is not Steve Jobs idea somebody else idea that he idolized and so great ideas come they exist and it's about like curating and discovering so I really think

that's a lesson listeners can take home is be very prolific and listen to many different things talking to other CEOs understanding how they're growing their business in your product be an expert and so I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of saunas and Ice baths and like breath work Retreats and you know this is what I do in my spare time my vacations are you know going

in a dark retreat in a cave or going on doing a Hoffman process or some type of leadership development so that is I think a huge lesson to like innovate is to surround yourself with just a ton a ton of material that you can pull from and for us that's where our idea came from and now I'm most excited you know to see what these classes look like when we launch in New York the other Innovation I'm super proud of is how we're doing social so it's not many places you can go to at night where there'll be saxophone players and gembe players and DJs but no alcohol and guided breath work sessions throughout a social event so imagine you're at a party and all of a sudden on the speakers comes a 10 minute

breath work and in the breath work it's telling you you know open your eyes look around and connect eye gaze with somebody who beside you and like at the end of the breath work it's saying like hey you know tell somebody about a meaningful experience you've had here before and so there's we're kind of combining deep inner work with external social environments so really innovating on how

people actually connect in a new way and so that to me is like our new space opens in a couple weeks in Toronto and then our New York space opens in April and it's really both of the first of its kind of social experiences so I'm excited to see how do people interact how do we train our guides what can we do to like get them to become friends even faster excited about it too last question uh the 4 000 friends things what was your system for debt did you cold email people like how did you meet so many folks yeah just generally so like you think of like ways to meet people right it's usually through work it's like a fantastic way you join a new company you can go to events you can

socialize and I worked in many Industries and so there's not just the company but there's the like conferences so for crypto specifically there's just so many events and so I think it's like what is the commonality and you're looking for energy and a really good way to pick a career or places like what is the energy you get when you're you're there and so two examples one

was like Telecom I didn't give a [ __ ] about that you know roaming at all and trying to build this business to make money and like there was no energy there and as soon as I went into the crypto space when like early ethereum you could just tell there'd be like a thousand people show up for this like Bush League conference with just a few tables because they were super excited about the technology and people were just willing to help somebody got says if you went to like a climate conference or some you know probably AI right now is it's like when there's something new that people are excited about another example are just not work related but you know like biohackers are super intense Runners cyclists so you can check meetup.com and go

to some of these things and join communities where people are very passionate and there's a lot of energy and you can bond with people just about you know people love to talk about what they're interested in and usually when people somebody's big into you know Andrew huberman and biohacking they're like vortexing their water they're like thinking about this for 20 of their day they just [ __

] love to talk about that so it's so easy to make friends over a shared passion whether it be work or some type of hobby so you know you go to new place you go and join some type of group and it's quite easy to make friends and just because I had so many interests I made different types of people so the people I met at a nightclub I owned drinking and doing drugs was like one category of people people on that in finance was another category played a lot of uh Sports and like weightlifting and stuff like that so just having a lot of passions that you're very interested in can be really helpful to meet people so I don't think you need to call the email just go to events and like do

stuff with people you work with I think I'm gonna organize some here in Oaxaca gonna put some Facebook ads and um entrepreneurs my main criteria all day it might feel non-inclusive but just you need to start [ __ ] up you know and build stuff up to for me to have a nice Convoy together else it's not super interesting for my brain um thank you so much

Rob uh for showing up today sharing that value where can people find out more about you I'm on I don't really I'm not like super active on any social media so I am on Twitter at Robbie Benz and I'm on Robbie Bennett on LinkedIn but um I'm not that active sharing like personal content I'm uh but you can follow us at other ship on Instagram for updates

on our physical space and our in our apps so that's the best place to follow along with the business