Their Life Is Working. Their State Is Not.
I met Ian Lopatin recently through a very close relationship, then had the chance to spend time with him on a trip to Palm Springs.
That context matters, because this is not a piece I would want to write from a landing page. The wellness world already has enough of that. Big promises. Soft desert photography. Words like transformation used before the room has earned them.
Ian did not strike me that way.
What stayed with me from Palm Springs was not a pitch. It was the way he talked about state. Not as a marketing idea. Not as another optimization layer. More like something he has been watching for a long time in people who appear to be doing very well from the outside.
Their life is working. Their state is not.
Meeting Ian In Palm Springs
I knew Ian first through Spiritual Gangster, like a lot of people did. Whether or not that brand was your personal uniform, it caught something real in the culture. It understood that wellness was not going to stay hidden in studios and retreat centers. It was becoming social. It was becoming identity. It was becoming something people wanted to wear, talk about, travel for, and organize a life around.
That kind of brand only happens when someone is paying attention to the emotional weather before everyone else has language for it.
So when I got to spend time with Ian in Palm Springs, I was curious. I have been around enough founders, wellness operators, athletes, investors, and self-proclaimed visionaries to know the difference between someone repeating a category and someone actually carrying a question.
Ian seemed to be carrying a question.
What happens when high-performing people realize the pressure that built their life may not be the state they want to keep living from?
The Stress That Still Performs
Most people imagine stress as obvious. The crash. The blowup. The person who stops answering emails, leaves the company, or disappears into a reset somewhere with linen sheets and no cell service.
But in the rooms I have spent most of my adult life in, stress often looks much more successful than that.
It looks like responsiveness. Standards. Discipline. Taste. The ability to keep moving. The person who can still make the call, still get on the flight, still show up to dinner, still ask the smart question, still be generous, still be funny, still look like they are handling it.
That is the more interesting and more dangerous version.
Stress looks different when it is rewarded.
We have built entire professional cultures around people overriding themselves elegantly. Founders do it. Investors do it. Creative operators do it. Parents do it. The body learns the role. The calendar keeps confirming the identity. Everyone calls it capacity until the cost starts showing up somewhere harder to ignore.
That is the part of the OF COURSE conversation I find useful. Not because every phrase will land for every person. Some of it will. Some of it may feel too earnest, too spiritual, too close to the edge of language people have learned to distrust. I get that. I have my own filter for wellness rooms that get too precious too quickly.
But underneath the language is a clean question: what state is actually running your life?
What OF COURSE Is Pointing At
OF COURSE Sanctuary, the platform Ian is building with Kyle Feng, is organized around the idea that people tend to live from two states. One is stressed, reactive, noisy, braced, and pressure-driven. The other is clearer, more present, more connected, and less dependent on stress as fuel.
Their OF COURSE Scottsdale Sanctuary runs August 16-18, 2026, at Andaz Scottsdale. The public hook is desert luxury meets deep transformation, which is the kind of sentence that can either be true or completely meaningless depending on who is holding the room.
That is always the test.
At B, we talk constantly about rooms, but not in the real estate sense. A room is a field. A room has a temperature. A room has standards. A room either gives people permission to become more honest, more generous, more alive, or it turns into another place where everyone performs the same version of themselves against a nicer backdrop.
In The Product Was Never The Event, we wrote about this more directly. The event is almost never the point. The product is what the right people, in the right state, in the right environment, allow to happen between them.
State Is Becoming The New Operating System
For a long time, the wellness conversation around high performers was mostly about optimization. Better sleep. Better labs. Better recovery. Better focus. Better food. Better protocols. I am interested in all of that. I have spent years around performance, sport, recovery, and longevity, and I still believe the basics matter more than most people want to admit.
But there is a ceiling to optimization if the state underneath it never changes.
You can have the trainer, the wearable, the sauna, the cold plunge, the supplements, the therapist, the coach, the assistant, the clean calendar, and still move through your life from a place of pressure. You can be healthier on paper and still unavailable in the rooms that matter most.
That is why the phrase stress sober is interesting to me, even if I do not think it needs to become a slogan. It points to the moment when a person realizes stress has become a familiar chemical, a familiar identity, and sometimes even a familiar social currency.
The next luxury may not be another escape. It may be a nervous system that is not for sale to every demand.
Why Scottsdale Makes Sense
The desert is a useful place for this kind of work because it does not flatter you too much. Palm Springs has always had that effect on me, and Scottsdale has its own version of it. The heat, the light, the space, the way the day slows down if you let it. The desert has a way of making the noise in your head feel less sophisticated.
That does not mean a three-day experience changes a life. I am careful with that kind of claim. It does not mean OF COURSE is a cure for burnout, anxiety, trauma, or anything clinical. It does not mean everyone who is successful and tired needs to go to Scottsdale.
But it may mean that certain people need a room where they can stop pretending their output is the same thing as their state.
The B Lens
Our interest in OF COURSE Scottsdale is not as a broad event promotion. That would miss the point and frankly cheapen it.
We are interested because B is being built around a simple belief: the people, the setting, the ritual, and the state all matter. A match can reveal someone. A table can change someone. A recovery circuit can lower the guard. A trip can create a kind of friendship that would take years to build in normal life.
But a room is only as useful as the state people bring into it.
That is where this feels connected to what we are building. Not because OF COURSE is B. It is not. Not because every B member or future member should be routed there. They should not. But because this is the kind of signal we pay attention to: a respected founder moving from wellness as identity into wellness as state, practice, and room design.
There is something happening in the culture right now. The most interesting people I know are not only asking what they want to build next. They are asking what condition they want to build it from.
A Few Plain Answers
What is OF COURSE Scottsdale?
OF COURSE Scottsdale is a three-day Sanctuary experience from OF COURSE, scheduled for August 16-18, 2026, at Andaz Scottsdale. The experience is built around state management, connection, practice, and the shift from stressed success toward what OF COURSE calls the beautiful state.
Who is Ian Lopatin?
Ian Lopatin is known for building Spiritual Gangster and is now building OF COURSE with Kyle Feng. I recently met Ian through a very close relationship and had the chance to spend time with him in Palm Springs, which is part of why this story feels worth looking at from inside the larger founder and wellness culture.
What does stress sober mean?
Stress sober is a way of describing the shift from being driven by pressure, reactivity, and constant internal noise toward a clearer and more present state. It is not medical language, and it should not be treated as a treatment claim.
The Real Question
I do not know yet exactly what OF COURSE will become. That is part of why I am paying attention.
But I know the question is real.
How many people have built lives that look impressive while quietly running them from a state they would never consciously choose?
That is not a wellness trend. That is a human problem with founder consequences, family consequences, friendship consequences, and health consequences.
If Scottsdale is the right room for the right person, it may be useful. If it is not, the question still travels.
Their life is working. Their state is not.
That is the line I keep coming back to.
Editorial note: B is helping route a small number of high-fit people toward OF COURSE Scottsdale. Request an introduction if this describes the season you are in.