Benny Blanco says Ed Sheeran took a 7 and a half day boat to London because Blanco refused to fly

Benny Blanco says his fear of flying once got so intense that Ed Sheeran agreed to take a 7 and a half day boat trip with him from New York City to London. They were working on Sheeran’s Divide album, Blanco says, and because he “didn’t fly,” the solution was apparently: fine, lads, to the sea.

That is the kind of celebrity anecdote that sounds fake until it becomes too inconveniently specific to be fake. A superstar producer, an English pop titan, the Atlantic Ocean, and, because God has jokes, Titanic playing on the boat. The self-help title of this episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast promises to eliminate self-doubt forever. The actual useful thing Blanco offers is much stranger: fear may not leave, but if you’re stubborn enough, you can reroute your entire life around it and still make the album.

I flew a handful of times after 2009 and I flew once in 2018. Then I flew once in like 2019 and then I flew once like a week or two ago or like a month ago.

Benny Blanco frames the flying fear as the one big fear he hasn’t neatly beaten. He describes a bad flight in 2009, then a second flight where a TV screen came loose after turbulence, and after that, the travel methods start sounding like a Bob Dylan tour itinerary: brother drives him across the country, friends drive him, train, bus, tour bus. He says he barely flew for years. For a guy whose job involves making music with the most famous people alive, this is not a cute quirk. This is logistics as psychological weather system.

The boat story is the whole self-help pitch, accidentally made better

Blanco tells Robbins that Sheeran wanted to finish Divide in his hometown in Suffolk. Blanco had a problem. Not a scheduling problem. A plane problem.

Ed, I I don’t I I I I don’t fly.

Sheeran’s alleged response is charming in the way only the very successful can make absurdity sound practical. What if we take a boat? Normal people say this while pricing ferries. Ed Sheeran says it while trying to finish one of the biggest pop albums of the decade.

So, we took a boat from New York City to London and it was 7 and 1/2 days and we watched the Titanic on the boat.

As a motivational parable, this is excellent, mostly because it refuses to be tidy. The standard podcast version would be: I was scared, I got on the plane, I conquered my fear, use code MEL for 20 percent off courage. Blanco’s version is messier and more believable. He didn’t conquer the fear. He accommodated it, mocked it, worked around it, and, eventually, recently forced himself back onto a plane for his book tour because he knew the optics were ridiculous.

I don’t know if I’m cured forever, but I was still very scared, but I did it.

That line also quietly undercuts the episode’s packaging. “Eliminate your self-doubt forever” is a big shiny airport-bookstore promise. Blanco, to his credit, keeps saying the opposite. He says he still has imposter syndrome. He says he still gets scared before things happen. He says he wanted to prove he could fly, then admits he’s taking another boat to Europe in a few weeks. The man is not selling serenity. He’s selling forward motion with a side of panic.

This is more convincing than the brick wall stuff

There is plenty of motivational confetti here. Blanco says people should move an idea “3 and 1/2 in forward.” He says nobody remembers your failures if you forget them first. He says if you quit, you open the door for someone else. Some of that is true. Some of it is gym-wall typography with better celebrity stories.

The more revealing material comes when Blanco talks about the cost of being a person who keeps going. He says Eastside, his first major hit as an artist, crawled toward success after rejections, delays, label messes, Khalid redoing vocals, Halsey jumping on fast, and Sheeran declining to be featured. He says it became “the longest climb to number one in radio history,” a claim that should come with chart footnotes before anyone tattoos it on a calf. But the emotional detail is sturdy: from the outside, a hit looks inevitable. From the inside, it looks like one more phone call after everyone sane has gone home.

That’s why the boat story works better than the slogans about self-doubt. It shows the limits of charisma. Blanco can cold-call Interscope as a teenager pretending to be connected to Jay-Z, charm interns into lifelong relationships, write world-swallowing hooks, and still be reduced to maritime planning by turbulence. Success didn’t make him fearless. It made him resourceful enough to keep moving while afraid.

If Blanco’s claim is true, the lesson isn’t that confidence arrives and fixes the route. Sometimes the route is a 7 and a half day boat ride with Ed Sheeran, watching Titanic, because the work still has to get done.