...And Harems Shall Rule Over Them

Me: “The worst part of corporate DIE-versity is having to adopt foreign cultures & behaviors!”

Scandinavian bikini girl: “Here’s your company-paid beer. Can I sit next to you in the sauna for the staff meeting?”

Me: “IT’S A TRAP!!!”

Want to Network in Silicon Valley? Bring a Bathing Suit

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By Angel Au-Yeung for the Wall Street Journal, 14 November 2024

When tens of thousands of software engineers, tech enthusiasts and salesmen descended on San Francisco for the annual Salesforce megaconference in September, startup founder Jari Salomaa had an idea: What if he rented out a sauna?

Salomaa was looking to pitch his startup Valo, which has built an artificial-intelligence tool that helps users on Salesforce’s platform. But an anti-alcohol movement that’s sweeping through the tech industry is disrupting work gatherings that revolve around drinking or eating. That’s leading Salomaa and others to try “social saunas,” where networking happens inside a steamy 200-degree box. In bathing suits.

The experience can take some getting used to. Bathrobes and bikinis can be distracting. It’s also very sweaty.

Yeah, I was gonna say.

Salomaa is a Salesforce veteran who returned to Finland and founded his Valo company two years ago. He’s trying to combine yoga/massage/socializing with AI, or something like that. I heard “AI practicing espionage on young coeds sharing a shower on company time”.

But investors and venture capitalists say it’s refreshing to have someplace other than a bar to gather and that business is getting done everywhere from a pop-up sauna in a Napa vineyard, to an 80-person sauna in New York.

Salomaa, 46, grew up in Finland where the sauna was part of everyday life and at his first job for Nokia in Helsinki, saunas were built inside the offices.

“There are more saunas than cars in Finland,” he said. “As many saunas as toilets.”

That ain’t helping my mental images of “what were they doing in there?” No, work does not get done in a bar, or in a sauna, or at a rave. Work does get done at golf courses yes, but that’s different. It’s 18 holes of a captive audience who has nothing to do, least of all get hot & sweaty with a bikini.

Still, he worried how Americans would react to hanging out in their bathing suits for a corporate event. “Scandinavians are more at ease with body images than the average American,” he said.

As a Salesforce executive, he had no excuse for not knowing how Sodom Franciscans would react to hanging out half-dressed in a bath house. But hey, he’s willing to find out.

He thought about having one event for women and another for men, but the planning soon got complicated. In the end, Salomaa decided on a sort of social experiment: a coed gathering in San Francisco. He wound up with a wait list of 100 guests.

“We thought about sex-segregation, but that made networking too difficult. Who knew that packing lots of scantily-clad young women into the same room as the most powerful and wealthy men in society would be so popular?”

The only way men-only would have been too difficult to plan, is if somebody invited SF Senator Scott Wiener.

Attendees shared images of the event on social media, and soon Salomaa was fielding calls from friends in the tech industry, asking how they could do a similar event. He’s eager to help, but maintains some reservation about moving too much work inside the sauna.

“If it’s all talk about work, it kind of kills the vibe,” he said.

If you’re half-dressed and sitting next to a coed under strict orders not to flash her boobs, then it’s NOTHING about work.

These are harems, not tiger teams:

New social saunas have popped up in San Francisco, New York and Colorado this year.

The Illuminati say that the people who bless the Jews will be blessed by God, but Denver ended up a shithole the same as SF and NYC.

They are built with stadium seating to fit more people—usually around 20 to 40 people—and conversation is often encouraged.

Let’s talk about work, Barbie. First agenda item: the dress code, followed by massage etiquette and then how AI can do our jobs while we socialize…

At Othership, a new sauna facility that opened in New York City’s Flatiron district in July, the sauna can fit up to 90 people. Lined with ambient lighting that can switch from warm red to neon pink, the sauna looks more like a nightclub than a place of tranquility.

Founder Robbie Bent, 40, said young tech founders make up a large part of his clientele. “They want to be healthier, meet like-minded people, and often don’t want to be out late,” he said.

The company hosts founder nights, as well as events for investors and founders to mingle. Othership says tech companies big and small are considering offering its services as a benefit to employees.

Othership has also offered to organize complimentary “team sweats” as team-building exercises.

I seriously wonder if Othership is operated by the intelligence community. The blackmail potential of these “sauna staff meetings, let’s not be all business” is incredible. From his substack:

Segue

Robbie Bent, CEO of Othership, shares his journey of creating meaning and building resilience through peak experiences. His adventures include psychedelic ceremonies, meditation, fasting, dark retreats, love and entrepreneurship.

End Segue

That’s a textbook description of New Age mysticism. His meditation-and-sex studios are growing in heavily Jewish areas… the first facility was in Ontario… but espionage seems secondary to its psychedelic, transcendental and mind-altering agenda.

But according to Bent, they received pushback from human resources at companies across tech and Wall Street. Colleagues congregating in bathing suits wasn’t going to fly.

In response to these critiques, Bent designed a “corporate swimsuit”—basically a full-body rashguard for people to wear in the sauna.

Making burqas steamy again! HR rears its ugly, piggy head!

Will Drescher, 29, built a social sauna in Boulder, Colo., after going to one in Minneapolis this year. “Neither me nor my co-founder drink,” said Drescher. “And we just thought, why don’t we have this?”

They built Portal, a “more DIY” option than the saunas popping up in New York and San Francisco, said Drescher.

“We wanted to bridge what’s happening in the coasts with what we’re seeing in the middle of the country,” said Drescher.

Venture investor Helene Servillion, 35, proposed a meeting with a founder of a tech company at Portal.

The meeting lasted an hour, which allowed them to cycle in and out of the sauna for three sessions. After learning more about the startup, Servillion said she plans to invest in it soon.

“VCs socialize a lot. If we only have two options—have a drink or a meal—that can just get really exhausting,” she said. When founders or investors ask to meet for happy hour these days, she will often counter-propose with a sauna or a hike.

A hike? Getting a captive audience at a golf course is good sales, but getting a distracted audience on a mountainside, gasping for breath & network service, is not. Perhaps unlike mine, their hikes don’t end with rescue efforts and/or forgotten civilizations? Get lost, losers!

How can a man not be distracted by being surrounded by half-naked girls giggling with the pleasure of sharing a room with rich industry A-listers?

Fintech investor Sheel Mohnot, 42, co-hosted an August social sauna event in San Francisco and attended an investor event in Napa, where a mobile sauna was wheeled on to the vineyard.

Second-generation Pajeet globalist, affiliated with Columbia university and Zuckerberg. While I didn’t see an article for the latter, I did read a biography in which Mohnot brags about holding his marriage in the Metaverse. “My wedding was the most fake and gay EVER!”

“The reality is there are always chances for people to feel uncomfortable, and more people are feeling that way about drinking,” Mohnot said. “We just didn’t have great sauna options here before.”

I’ve begun to read headlines about young adults not wanting to use alcohol for socializing. Hard to say if it’s a result of watching their single mothers drink herself to sleep every night, their graduation to harder drugs, or teetotaling foreign culture influences.

Not all tech workers have bought in. Laila Danielsen, chief executive of an AI software company, was invited to a social sauna event in October. She enjoyed the event and the environment it provided to have conversations, but she didn’t go into the hotbox.

“I don’t know if I’d necessarily put on my bikini to go out and pitch a VC, you know what I mean?” the 55-year-old said. “I’ll consider meeting them at the sauna after we close the deal.”

Choose your reason why she said that!

A. She has old-world etiquette standards.
B. She doesn’t trust a business agreement made while drunk.
C. She hit the Wall 20 years ago.
D. She’s still in love with her husband and would never cheat on him.
E. Now that she’s slept her way to the top, she’ll never put out again.

The economy isn’t just dying, it’s a joke. The top of every org chart are foreigners sleazing with women while stealing everything they can. No honor. No skill. No plans beyond feeding their animal appetites.

No political solution to our troubles can work so long as society’s incentives encourage evil. There’s no incentive stronger than hot chicks… it’s kinda that simple.