Today on the bench, we sit together with Keegan Kittock, co-founder of Deep Wave Sauna. With the rising tide of sauna also comes marketing talk, pedantic chatter, and graphs and charts about how air supposedly moves in the hot room.

So it's extra special and refreshing to visit with someone like Keegan.

In this episode, we start at the beginning—picturing Keegan after elementary school, dragging a magnet around a building site, earning bubble-gum money working for his father's contracting company.

And like many of us, catching the sauna bug at a young, impressionable age up north at the family cabin: long rounds, long dock time, and plunging in the lake, splashing around with neighbors, friends, and family.

Love of sauna and love of construction are two powerful forces pointing toward building saunas for others. Add to that Aaron—Keegan's lifelong friend, collaborator, and business partner—and you have Deep Wave Sauna.

Ask them at Sauna Days or outside one of their builds how the company got its name and you'll get right to the heart of it. Deep Wave. A nod to the nerdiness without the pedantic edge. Keegan can talk in great technical detail about different wavelengths of heat and steam, but he's well past trying to impress. He's relatable and genuinely fun to Sauna Talk with. Deep heat. That wave that feels so good on the bench.

That's enough.

When we consider the holy trinity of good sauna (heat, steam, ventilation), the first two we can get our arms around, but ventilation is oblique—impossible to see, harder to feel, and easy to misunderstand.

But Keegan has earned the title of "thermal whisperer" among fellow sauna aficionados. He's the one who taught me that air is a fluid and should be understood as such. So when we talk about good ventilation, we talk about the lazy river. Stay tuned for more in this episode—why this is what we aim for, and how many saunas can achieve it naturally and passively without the mechanical buzz-kill easy street.

Keegan brings it down to earth. And I'm overjoyed to have made my way out to his prairie-style sauna on his property west of the Twin Cities. I love his sauna. Spiritual Patina rating: solid 9.0.

Within this article on SaunaTimes are a few photos taken from Keegan's sauna. And you can check these out and it'll likely bring you right there with us, on the bench, where we recorded this episode for you.