The first time Robin Arzón tried to set up a crypto wallet, her stomach was in her throat.
The entire process took more than two hours, and she was afraid the whole time that she might make a mistake. But Arzón has made a career off of blazing past fear to reach her goals. As the VP of Fitness Programming & Head Instructor at Peloton, Arzón tells her millions of followers on and off the bike to push beyond their doubts to realize their true potential.
She eats fear for breakfast every morning, she is fond of telling them.
“I pour fear on my cereal every morning for breakfast,” she said. “And then I say, ‘Yum yum, where are we going today?’”
Now, The New York Times bestselling author is taking those same principles that catapulted her to success in fitness and moving full force into Web3. She is in the early stages of launching Swagger Society, a lifestyle membership club in Web3 that will come with a move-to-earn model and exclusive access to Arzón herself.
But she doesn’t want to do any of this without bringing more women and underrepresented groups along with her in this journey.
“I'm a bad bitch, I'm worthy of having conversations, I am worthy of asking for my value, and I am worthy of sitting at the table,” she said. “And sometimes when you don't have a seat at the table, you need to build your own damn table, and then just say, ‘You're gonna come to us.’”
In her first-ever interview over Twitter Spaces, Arzón shared with BFF how she first dipped her toes in the crypto waters, the vision she has for Swagger Society and why she is working to bring more women and underrepresented groups into the space.
Edited excerpts:
I started to get interested in the last six to seven months. I remember watching BFF’s onboarding tutorial on YouTube and I had my notepad out and I'm like, ‘How the hell do I set up this wallet?’ My ears perked up when I saw folks who I know from other spaces start talking about it. And I thought, Okay, well, these are folks that I really admire as content creators as folks who sit atop really riveting values, such as self-empowerment and self-actualization, and I thought I just wanted to get myself educated.
I have many followers who don’t even know what Web3 is and I totally get it. There are many days where I feel like I'm opening up a textbook and learning. I just decided I'm going to have a growth mindset about this. Rather than telling myself a story that it’s too conceptual or confusing, I am going to educate myself and then more than that, I really want to be a bridge to more folks getting into this space. One of the first conversations I had publicly was with Mark Cuban and I just asked my questions, but I told myself before the conversation there are no dumb questions. I'm still deserving of being a participant and having a seat at this table. And I think that inner questioning and approaching things with curiosity instead of judgment can go a long way.
I'm personally not as interested in technology. I am interested in getting to a place where the user interfaces and technology are creating the magic that I think we could accomplish. I’ve been building communities on traditional Web2 platforms for over a decade. It still feels fragmented, right? It's disparate, we're logging into multiple things. We're having one-way conversations with folks. [With Web3] I can bring all my followers to one place and they can have ownership over their digital identity… I don't necessarily need to go wider. I want to go deeper. It excites me to have deeper conversations about self-empowerment, self-actualization and my principles.
Swagger Society is built on the tenants of what I have built my life of movement around, which are self-empowerment and self-actualization and the resiliency to do one and two. Swagger Society is for folks who want to get shit done. It's for folks who want to have honest conversations about what their weaknesses are and make them their strengths. And I will be damned if this world is built without the input of women and people of color and non-binary folks. The big audacious goal that we have in the near future are helping folks achieve those goals with a move-to-earn mechanism that we’re still working on with one-one interactions and access to me.
It wasn't surprising, honestly. We have the same issues with women and underrepresented communities in tech broadly and business broadly. The social justice movement exists IRL for a reason. My husband has been going to these conferences before I was even interested in Web3. He would send me images from these conferences and I’d be like, ‘You're just going and getting on a plane to hang out with other white men to talk about white men shit?’ And I was like, ‘No, this isn't happening. This isn't happening again.’ We're not creating the whole new world and not having the input of underrepresented communities.
We've been here before in so many other iterations and chapters of creation and business. We should be unrelenting, but also skeptical, continuing to ask questions and surround ourselves with trusted critics like my husband [investor Drew Butler] and the team that we're building to really continue to have roundtables and say, ‘Does this make sense?’ We’re trying to play the long game of creating a community and creating a society. This isn't a flash in the pan thing. I want this to be something that my daughter Athena looks at me and says, ‘Damn, you created that foundation?’ I don’t practice what I preach, I preach what I practice. So when I'm talking about Swagger Society being for people who want to get shit done, that is a lifestyle choice. Whether I'm doing it in front of a Web3 or a Web2 audience or just pen to paper in my journal. We will weather any storm, we just have to keep asking the right questions.
Fear can be incredibly paralyzing. And I am very comfortable leaning on folks who know more than me, but I think that admitting when you don't know something is a superpower as long as you're willing to learn and figure it out. I was diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic. I was already running ultra marathons and I was so daunted by the technology that was going to be required for me to use to live. I was really overwhelmed by all the calculations that I was gonna have to do for the rest of my life. And I think back to that inflection point, and I'm astounded by how much I figured out. I just went down the rabbit hole. And it's obviously little different in this ever-evolving landscape of Web3, but the skill set that I've developed over the years is trusting myself to figure it out. It’s either win or learn, we don’t lose.
When we're creating products that feel like our babies, it feels like putting your phone down for two seconds and you can’t keep up with it all. I understand that. But sometimes, in fact oftentimes, you need to create personal boundaries around your time and your energy. Your energy is your currency. None of these businesses will be built, this entire Web3 world will not be built on an empty tank. Period. The basics still exist. We still are human beings no matter what technologies we end up adopting, we need to nourish and take care of our energy systems.
Caroline Fairchild is BFF’s Editor in Chief.
This article and all the information in it does not constitute financial advice. If you don’t want to invest money or time in Web3, you don’t have to. As always: Do your own research.
