GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Listen to this post
I’ve been tracking this shift for a while, but it didn’t fully click until I was lying inside a 700-pound, NASA-inspired recovery chamber, wired up to electromagnetic pulses, vibroacoustic sound running through the bed to relax my nervous system and red and near-infrared light glowing over my closed eyes to support cellular recovery and circulation. All of this synced to a calm guided meditation and breathwork sequence.
That’s the Ammortal Chamber, the centerpiece of the Recovery Suite at The Santa Monica Proper and other wellness centers across the country. It costs roughly $160,000 to install, and the same machine sits in the training rooms of the NFL’s LA Rams, Denver Broncos and MLB’s Boston Red Sox, and in the recovery suite at Wimbledon to support athlete performance and recovery. At Santa Monica Proper, members are sandwiching a session between a business meeting and a dinner reservation, on a random Tuesday, not a training camp.
I spent a few days living the membership: bloodwork drawn on-site through Hundred Health, a four-handed Ayurvedic massage at the hotel’s Surya Spa, a session in the Hyperion recovery suite, a soak in a mineral bath, and a cold plunge set several degrees warmer than the punishing extremes my hard-core biohacker friends brag about. The experience did not feel like a spa day. It felt much more like infrastructure; the kind I, as a founder and entrepreneur, would love to have wherever I land, work, and unwind.
The social wellness club, a category I’ve been watching mature for years, is finally standing in for the bar, the boardroom, and the country club, funded by entrepreneurs who treat recovery like a KPI, not a perk.
The bar isn’t the default anymore
For most of the last century, “let’s grab a drink” was the default unit of business and social connection. That default is breaking down, and the data is unambiguous. Gallup’s 2025 consumption survey found just 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol at all — the lowest rate in nearly 90 years of tracking, down from 62% just two years earlier. For the first time, a majority of Americans, 53%, now say even one or two drinks a day is bad for their health. Among Gen Z, nearly two in three plan to drink less this year, and almost 40% are going fully dry, not just for “Dry January,” but year-round, according to Circana’s most recent consumer survey.
That shift creates a real estate problem: if the bar isn’t the place anymore, where does business happen? Dr. Jonathan Leary, founder of Remedy Place, the club widely credited with coining the term ‘social wellness club’ when it opened in West Hollywood in 2019, and now with locations in Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, built his entire business on that gap.
“Life is stressful, loneliness is prevalent, and people need to connect, but most social experiences are filled with temptation and toxins,” Leary said of the concept. His model swapped the cocktail bar for an adaptogenic mocktail bar and the conference room for an infrared sauna. Same social function. Different chemistry.
... continue reading