From Meditation to Innovation: How Stefan Chmelik Designed a Breakthrough Stress-Relief Device

Chris Whyte (: 00:04

Hello and welcome to Why Design? The podcast where we explore the stories behind the founders and senior leaders shaping the world of physical product development. I'm Chris Whyte your host and founder of Kodu a recruitment company dedicated exclusively to physical product development. Over the past decade, I've had the privilege of interviewing remarkable people in this space and their incredible stories inspired me to create this podcast.

In each episode, we dive into the journeys, insights and lessons from founders and design leaders driving innovation in people and planet friendly hardware. So let's get started.

Chris Whyte (: 00:38

Today's guest is Stefan Chmelik founder of Sensate a revolutionary consumer product designed to combat stress and improve well-being through sound and vibration therapy. Before Sensate though, Stefan was a clinician specializing in stress, anxiety, trauma, and complex disease management, an expertise that led him to develop a technology-first approach to well-being. In this episode, we explore the intersection of medicine, meditation, and hardware innovation.

How Stefan went from working with patients in a clinical setting to co-founding a tech company that's now helping thousands of people worldwide. We talk about the science behind stress and vagal nerve tone, the challenge of bringing a wearable health device to market and how fundraising, product design and business strategy all come into play when launching a hardware startup. This is a fascinating conversation about the power of design in health and wellness.

and how innovation can make wellbeing more accessible at scale. So let's dive in.

Chris Whyte (: 01:43

Stefan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me.

Stefan Chmelik (: 01:46

Chris, thank you for asking me.

Chris Whyte (: 01:49

So I'm going to do my best to ramble through a brief little intro here, Stefan. So do jump in and feel free to correct me I get any of this wrong. Stefan, you're a founder of Sensate. We'll obviously talk about that. But prior to that, you've spent kind of 30 years or so as a clinician specializing in stress, anxiety, trauma and complex disease management.

nd teacher. And as I said, in: 2018

product is wearable device that when placed on the user's chest, and it's a is operated via companion app and admits a sub audible tone to help manage stress. You can probably articulate that much better than I can, but get into that shortly. So yeah, today we're going to talk about kind of your entrepreneurial journey, the where you came from really kind of from your medicine background, your

Stefan Chmelik (: 02:55

Maybe.

Chris Whyte (: 03:06

meditation, how that all factors into kind of a technology business. And the lessons learned from, you know, figuring that out, you're not a designer or an engineer kind of by by training. But I imagine you feel like more of one now. And yeah, we'll talk about startup zone kind of world fundraising, all that kind of stuff. And also, we're going to dive quite heavily into distress. And I think that's going to be a topic that a lot of

listeners will resonate with. yeah, but again, welcome to the show. It's great to have you. How did that? How did I do there in terms of a little intro for you?

Stefan Chmelik (: 03:41

That's fine. That lays out all the facts.

Chris Whyte (: 03:42

Yeah.

So tell us your story then what where did it all begin? Maybe kind of talk around kind of your expertise in medicine and meditation and then kind of bring us up to where that kind of where the inspiration for Sensei came from.

Stefan Chmelik (: 04:01

Uh, sure, Chris, absolutely. So mean, you're right. It's not an obvious or very common combination that of well-being health in the natural medicine sector in particular, and technology. Um, uh, but it, it was kind of a natural thing and a natural extension of what I wanted to do, to be honest. So I guess the background is that dad taught me and my brother to meditate at a very young age. So I've been meditating for a long time.

about 50 years. And I've trained with various meditation schools and breathing techniques. And that was very much something I brought to my clinical work. So I specialized and had a particular interest in emotional states. So people with anxiety, trauma, PTSD, sleep difficulties, emotional regulation issues, etc. And the thing in a way that binds all of these together is that they all can have an inflammatory response.

So we tend to, you we do divide up, you physical problems and mental emotional problems. But I think in reality, that division is quite artificial. what what are there are certain conditions, autoimmune conditions, etc. and modern lifestyle based conditions, which can cause inflammation, but also certain ways of thinking can cause inflammation. And they can also cause each other.

This is the thing. there is no clear division between mind and body in that sense. And anything that affects one affects the other as well. But we all have it within our own power and ability to change how our body is working, the homeostasis, the moment by moment balance of how our body is working, particularly things like the breathing, the heartbeat, the circulation.

What we find in clinical studies is that how we feel has a huge impact on how likely we are to get certain common health problems. So we can put a lot of effort into exercise, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do all these things as well, right? But we can put a lot of effort into exercise and getting the right kind of sleep and eating a certain kind of diet. But if we don't also address

how we're feeling within ourselves and our own personal sense of satisfaction, of meaning, of purpose and of wellbeing, then the impact of anything else we do is severely limited. So I think if you're gonna do one thing, if you're gonna focus on only one thing, it's good to focus on your sense of meaning and purpose. And what we found in New Medicine Group over a 15 year period of examining this very closely is,

Chris Whyte (: 06:34

you

Stefan Chmelik (: 06:36

The nearest thing we can get for a way of measuring that is what we call vagal nerve tone. So the tone of the vagus nerve. I can say a little bit about the vagus nerve if you like.

Chris Whyte (: 06:42

Okay.

Yes, please. Because I imagine there's a lot of people listening that know what some of those words mean. combined, this is a technology podcast, usually design and technology. So yeah, but this is fascinating. So fill us in. Give us the

Stefan Chmelik (: 06:56

Yeah, yeah.

Well,

so the vagus nerve is the largest, it's the largest and longest nerve in the body. starts in cranial nerve 10 and passes down. There are many branches, but it passes down through the front and the back and particularly through all the organs right the way down to the pelvis. So it's the largest component of the autonomic nervous system, which is the part of your body that does all the stuff that needs to be done without you having to consciously think about it.

Obviously, if you had to consciously think, heartbeat, gut move, gut move, gut move, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, there's no, and a million other processes that are less glamorous and less obvious. If you had to think about each one of those, then of course, you wouldn't get through the next 10 minutes. So there's the older, the more primitive, you like, the more primordial part of your nervous system, the autonomic nervous system handles all.

Chris Whyte (: 07:39

It can.

Stefan Chmelik (: 07:59

So you don't have to think about it. The thing that's interesting about the breathing is that it's the only one that we can easily override. I mean, you can with training, know, change the way your gut works and change your heartbeat, et cetera, your heart rate variability, but anyone at any time can change their breathing just by holding their breath. Yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 08:20

Yeah, my

watch tells me to do it every hour as well.

Stefan Chmelik (: 08:22

Yeah. and so because it is a very primitive, primordial flight, fight, freeze, emergency response, this is what we tend to do in situations of tension and stress, either acute, you know, sudden situations or where we've been under a lot of stress when early life would lead a later life for a long time. So, you know, we, you if you think about you're trying to be less obvious,

to danger, you kind of make yourself small and you hold your breath. You kind of tend to freeze. There are flight and fight options and indeed form and many other options available as well. But the one that most tends to happen in a situation where we feel overwhelmed or threatened is breath holding. And this over time becomes a pattern. Yeah, it gets literally encoded into the muscles. So again, you're not thinking that you're doing this and

Something that I very commonly encountered in clinic was that people were holding their breath or chronically hyperventilating without knowing that they were. Now we could measure this, measure O2 and CO2 levels and show them that. But, and my original remedy for this was to show people breathing exercises and meditation exercises. And I've been using music and vibration in clinic for a very long time.

But what I really noticed over the last 15 years or so is that people's ability to interact with classical type meditation and breathing techniques has really declined amazingly over the last few decades or two. So,

And even things like even apps that people use to try and help themselves relax and meditate, you know, quite often what I find is they're sort of sitting there looking at their watch waiting for the, you know, the app to finish so they can get on with other things that are important, right? So and I think the problem is a lot of this stuff is beyond words. Yeah, so our autonomic nervous system really big is really from the brain downwards, brainstem downwards. And it's a it's quite primitive and it's quite primal.

Chris Whyte (: 10:09

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 10:24

primordial, but it's also very powerful. So it can override logic. And so you can tell yourself, I'm not actually in danger. It's okay. And it's like somebody saying to you, just relax. Being one of the most annoying things that anyone can say to anyone ever. Because it's, you know, it's not it's not your mind actually telling you to be tense or not relax. It's your body.

Chris Whyte (: 10:40

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 10:49

So you have to work out how to speak to the body, not the logic. And that's where tone and vibration come in. There's a lot of our anthropological notion now that we hummed and we sung long before we talked, and that we communicated through much more resonant singing-like sounds for long time, for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years.

And it's worth remembering or understanding that the vagus nerve goes back about 800 million years to the first bone fish. So the vagus nerve is very old and it's encoded. Therefore it's that that response is encoded into our cellular structures in a deep and profound way. And you can learn how to talk to it through things like breathing and meditation. But what we know is that those are actually

Chris Whyte (: 11:25

Right.

Stefan Chmelik (: 11:45

surprisingly difficult to do. This is what this is what the thing that nobody ever says really about meditation is quite how difficult it is. And I think it's more difficult now because the idea of doing nothing is so challenging and so alien to us, right?

Chris Whyte (: 11:47

Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah, have mild panic when you go

out the house and you've left your phone home and you have a mild state of panic or you just leave the room. It's like, where's my phone?

Stefan Chmelik (: 12:10

Yeah, exactly. And so technology is great, but it also has some implications as well. So so so that's so with so I was using sound in clinic. I mean, obviously breathing and meditation and all kinds of other techniques as well. acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutrition, counseling. But what really seemed to make the biggest difference was getting people to lie down for 10 minutes with headphones on eyes closed, and have vibration deep.

resonant infrasound vibration passing through their body. That's what seemed to make the biggest difference. But I realized, we're in an upmarket Harley Street clinic, it's quite expensive to come and see us. People had to come in and make a special effort. So I had this moment of realization that really, if we could make the technology available in some shape or form easily so that consumers could use it at home, then

Chris Whyte (: 12:38

Okay.

Stefan Chmelik (: 12:58

you could start to have the kind of impact that I actually wanted to have. So the whole idea for Sensate came to me and I realized that by putting the infrasound on the chest, you can massively miniaturize the technology, have almost the same impact via using the body as the instrument. So the Sensate device, you you play, you it, you control it with the app. The app plays stuff you hear on headphones.

device relays low frequency sound, infrasound that you feel on the chest, which is relayed via bone conduction into the thoracic cavities. So, you'll know anyone that's got a half decent speaker at home will know that, you know, there's the speaker, but then there's the speaker cabinet.

Chris Whyte (: 13:43

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, there's those the bone conductor headphones, isn't that cyclists can wear well, anyone can wear them. But for cyclists, it keeps your ears free, but you can still hear the music because it's conducting through your skull. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 13:44

So if you just had, if you just.

Exactly. So our pattern,

so we're the first device which uses bone conduction, not for hearing. Because as you say, mostly it's open air for special forces, for cyclists, so people that need to hear while also being having messages relayed to them. The audible quality is not especially good when you're trying to produce stuff in the audible frequency.

Chris Whyte (: 14:10

Yeah, absolutely.

Stefan Chmelik (: 14:18

But when you're producing information in the sub audible frequency, and you're relaying it via bone conduction, then it has a fantastically strong effect. it's very human beings have found ways to make their chest resonate for 10s of 1000s of years, know, from omming and chanting and singing and dancing around a fire and prayer and meditation and mantra. These have many functions, but one function they all have

is you're using the vocal cords to make the chest resonate. So Sensei is a bit like that. You're using an external device instead of vocal cords to make the chest resonate in harmony with what you're listening to and synchronized with what you're listening to. And the secret source therefore is the fact that it's passive. So you don't have to consciously do anything. Obviously if you're breathing or chanting or meditating, whatever it might be, singing

Chris Whyte (: 14:53

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 15:06

You know, have to consciously be awake and aware and doing that. the, because my experience is that people's symptoms are largely a result of being overstimulated and overwhelmed. What they actually really need is just to be able to relax and let go and allow the autonomic nervous system to go into into balance, which is what the technology lets you do.

Chris Whyte (: 15:27

Awesome.

So you've gone from that kind of, you've had an aha moment or a light bulb moment, whatever you want to call it where I guess, yeah, you've got this, this tech thing. How could I, how could we apply this on mass? what, what, what happened next? What were the steps to, you know, obviously you've got, you've got co-founders, you've never, I presume at this point, you've never developed a handheld electronic device before. So

Stefan Chmelik (: 15:51

No, I I'm not. And I certainly wasn't then a product designer or an electronics engineer or anything similar. I did understand acoustics and sound. My brother's a musician and co-writes a lot of the content with me. My dad was a musician. So I have a very good understanding of the impact of sound on the body. And I was, as I say, was already using sound in the clinic.

I just really wanted to be able to magnify our impact. And actually, I must just mention one stat that was pointed out to me the other day. Apparently, every 12 seconds, somebody somewhere in the world plays a sensate session. Which is lovely, right?

Chris Whyte (: 16:33

amazing.

It's yeah, I mean, what, what, uh, what a really nice thing to, to know. I saw when I was researching for the, for the call as well, I saw that, um, I'll see you've been hugely successful fundraising and, and that stat there is, incredible, but you've been featured in Time Magazine or the business has. Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 16:53

Yeah, so I I'm based in England, Anna

Goodman, amazing CEO, my co founder and about half the team based in West Coast America around LA. And we have CTO Massimiliano Barriola in Berlin. And we have a customer service team in Argentina. So it's a kind of it's a pretty distributed global company. And

Chris Whyte (: 17:14

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 17:15

The a lot of the fund, a lot of the fundraising effort is based in America. I, you know, I would love to have more forward thinking UK or European investors. But for whatever reason, the American market or the American investors are maybe just a little bit in advance of their European counterparts and I've seen the potential in this more than the European side.

Chris Whyte (: 17:31

Mm-hmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 17:37

The market in America obviously is bigger than England, although not bigger than Europe necessarily. We do focus on the European and the American, but also the Canadian and Australian markets in particular.

Chris Whyte (: 17:39

Absolutely, yeah.

Awesome. so what would take me back to that time then when I say you know about acoustics, you've got a good sense of kind of the musically audio side of things. But when it comes to actually creating this thing, what, who did you approach? How did how did the business come to be?

Stefan Chmelik (: 18:05

Well,

we did I did stuff to development in the clinic for a couple of years So I needed to really establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that it did what I believed it did And that there weren't all the factors involved so There was a good couple of years where I experimented with different form factors, you know, I did actually you know Yeah, well, I did solder together a few components and make some you know, rather Heath Robinson bulky big things

Chris Whyte (: 18:26

So you designed it, you?

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 18:33

which we used and which I experimented with in the early period. So I mean, I mean, the basic hypothesis was a low frequency sound could be relayed into the chest via a by bone conduction. And that that would have an impact on things that we know are under the control of the vagus nerve. So well being and heart rate variability and blood pressure and things of that nature.

Chris Whyte (: 18:35

scared the heck out of your patients. What is this?

Stefan Chmelik (: 18:58

And that's, but that's, that's, that's why I really wanted to verify. So, um, uh, over a period of 18 months, two years, you know, worked on hundreds of patients experiencing this gathering feedback, gathering data, measuring things like heart rate variability and heart rate and the subjective wellbeing during that time. And it became pretty obvious that, um, there was a significant measurable impact from the use of the technology.

In fact, the original use case was 20 minutes, but I found that we could have basically the same impact in 10 minutes, which is the use case that we now suggest that people use it for 10 minutes once a day.

Chris Whyte (: 19:33

brilliant.

Fantastic. And so when I get back into the technology bit, but that that kind of 10 minutes a day, is that kind of something that people just do now as a standard? Or is it when they have like a flare up of of stress and anxiety?

Stefan Chmelik (: 19:52

Yeah, so a lot of people, the thing about the Sensei experience is that it's actually enjoyable. So there's lots of things which we know are good for us, like cold swimming. But there's a lot of people who are never ever going to go and jump in a cold lake, even though theoretically, it's good, right? We also know that, you know, eating a certain amount of calories, no more than a certain amount calories a day is good for us and blah,

There are many things which we know in principle are good for us, but which are also quite unpleasant to do or very, very difficult or challenging to do. One of the reasons I think that this works so well is it's actually really nice to do. It feels good, it's simple, it's easy, it requires no skill in a sense. You just have to let it do its thing. You don't have to do anything, you have to lie there.

The biggest challenge is allowing yourself to not do anything. It's just allowing yourself to be entertained and amused while it's working its magic. So therefore it's not difficult for people to turn into a very positive habit. And some people do it once or even several times a day. We have people that do it five, six times a day. And then we have some people who do it once a week and a few people that do it once a month.

Chris Whyte (: 20:46

Mm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 21:06

And sometimes people, you know, don't use it for six months and then come back to it. A lot of people are using it for sleep, which is interesting because it was never a use case that we particularly promoted. But we did notice a lot of people saying, yeah, I use it before I go to bed. this made so much difference to my sleep. So one of the studies we ran at Goldsmiths University last year was a particular sleep study. And we found after 14 days,

On average, people were sleeping an hour longer per night and falling asleep in half the time. Now, I I hadn't actually looked at a lot of comparative sleep studies at that point, but generally sleep studies, they're thrilled if it's like 11, 12 minutes. So to get 60 minutes is, as far as I'm aware, unprecedented, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 21:35

wow.

Yeah.

But almost by accident. Yeah.

Yeah. That's incredible. So, so you've gone from, I'll say the early prototypes proof of kind of that there's a viable thing that you could explore there. it you were you still on your own then did the sensei even a name at that point?

Stefan Chmelik (: 22:09

Yes.

Once I'd satisfied myself that it did what it said on the tin, I went out to, I think it was a hardware pioneers meetup. And I got up and said, I've got this concept, I'm looking for a CTO, a chief technology officer to work with to develop it. And I called Jacob Skinner, who was running a company, basically a wearable technology company said, oh, that sounds interesting.

Chris Whyte (: 22:20

Okay.

Stefan Chmelik (: 22:37

So we formed the first company. He was a co-founder and his company developed the initial device. So we did drawings, we got components together, et cetera, experimented with a few different things. And the first production, well, we initially 3D printed a small run, 36, I think it was, and ran a trial. Because what we'd never had up until that point,

Chris Whyte (: 22:49

Okay.

Stefan Chmelik (: 23:06

was an app that you run it from. So I would have a separate device or whatever that I would play the content through. But we wanted to reproduce the actual experience in the wild as much as possible. So we 3D printed a bunch. We had an app. And people used these at home for a month. And then we collected the data. And again, the data was very, good. So we decided, OK, let's.

Let's do an actual run now. And in fact, what happened was a, journalist, I think had tried it, thought it was amazing. and, wrote about it in the daily mail. And when 24 hours we'd had about 600 people ring up an order. So we didn't have any, we didn't have any production device at that point. So we thought, okay, well, let's make them then.

Chris Whyte (: 23:47

Hmm.

wow, yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 24:00

So we then went through the process of working with the factory in the UK and producing the first iteration of the design and sold it to them. I think we've made a thousand in the first run, sold those and then we've iterated from that.

Chris Whyte (: 24:14

Yeah. Well, in the original founding team, was that still together? Because I don't see Joe on my research here. Or Jacob, sorry.

Stefan Chmelik (: 24:21

No, Jacob. Yeah, so Jacob, Jacob

o-founder and CTO, I think in: 2020

Chris Whyte (: 24:30

Okay.

Stefan Chmelik (: 24:50

So we've been co-founders of the company since.

Chris Whyte (: 24:52

Okay. How was that then in terms of that transition? Because it's deeply personal, it? Create a business, let alone a hardware business of something that has got such tangible benefit to users and then kind of you co-founder exits or and there's a bit of a change. How have you found that kind of transition or is it just relatively straightforward?

Stefan Chmelik (: 25:15

Well, I think it's what you need at the time. So Jacob's technology expertise was exactly what we needed to go from MVP to actual products. And then as we started to scale, you know, because you can hire in quite a lot of skills as well, which is what happens now. So as we started to scale, what we needed was somebody who really was a much bigger business brain.

than I am, and who also who has more experience with apps, digital media, and working in the US, which all of which Anna Goodman has. So it's an ideal partnership in that sense, as you know, I'm kind of concept and daydreamer. And, you know, she raises money and worries about the business metrics. So it's nice combination.

Chris Whyte (: 26:01

Yeah, that's awesome.

Stefan Chmelik (: 26:02

And then, know, then there are other members of the extended team

who work with marketing, with communications, with the technology, with things like our Facebook campaigns or whatever, you know.

Chris Whyte (: 26:12

So how big is the business kind of head count wise now?

Stefan Chmelik (: 26:16

Well, including not many employees, mostly people on contracts, partly because we are a very dispersed company in different areas. And as we grow also the kind of skills and expertise we need change. So I think, you know, this year is about consolidating and settling down. And I think what we're, you know, what we need and what we're to want over the next 12 to 24 months will become

clearer. What is clear, but we'll be able to know is something that we can make much more

Chris Whyte (: 26:51

Yeah, absolutely. so that's Yeah, that's an interesting kind of thing as well in terms of the, you know, having the permanent kind of core team and then complementing that with freelancers or consultancies or contractors so you can deal with the ebbs and flows of demands in the business.

Stefan Chmelik (: 27:09

Yeah, and you know, we are a startup even now. I mean, we are absolutely a startup. And it's a funny old world and especially the last year or two, where the economic climate has been vicious, you know, really vicious. It's been difficult both selling things and raising money. Everybody's felt insecure, people aren't spending as much investors, particularly in in Europe aren't investing as much.

Chris Whyte (: 27:16

Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Chris Whyte (: 27:39

I'm interrupting this episode to share some exciting things happening around Why Design. At the core of this podcast are the incredible design journeys my guests have been on and where they're heading. These journeys stem from the relationships they build, the communities they're part of, and the amazing achievements that come from collaboration. So beyond the podcast, we're hosting regular online huddles and quarterly meetups in the UK with plans underway for an annual gathering in the US.

We're also running hands-on workshops both in person at Makerspaces and online to connect and inspire people in physical product development. So if you'd like to join us or stay in the loop about upcoming events, sign up at teamkodu.com forward slash events or click the link in the show notes. Now back to the episode.

Stefan Chmelik (: 28:28

So you've got to work twice as hard to achieve half as much. And a lot of companies have gone under, you know, and it's not always about the quality of the product. I mean, I think in our case, it's the product and the fact that it works as well as it does has been really helpful in keeping us going, including the dedication of the Astonishing Team and

Ana in particular, simply not allowing anything other than progress to occur.

Chris Whyte (: 28:56

That's great. Yeah, you you need that determination. I suppose.

Stefan Chmelik (: 28:58

So, yeah, so

I think the needs of a company, particular startup change. They change as you enter different markets and as you grow and as you develop new products. We're quite focused about product development. It would be quite easy to come up with new products, but partly...

the device we have. I mean, we've iterated it significantly than what we have now. It's very different internally and functionally to what we started with, although it doesn't actually look tremendously different. You know, because at the end of the day, the body is the body, you know, so the form factor has to fit in a particular place and work in a particular way. But the electronics and the transducer and the app have all developed significantly. But because it works so well, because it's not particularly broken.

The temptation to simply keep on releasing new products to factor into that cycle is less for us.

Chris Whyte (: 29:50

So yeah, I think it's more of just keeping, keeping it relevant, keeping the marketing. If you've got a great product, you just need to make sure people who don't know about it can become aware about it, aware of it and the benefits. great. So what would you say kind of looking back, you've been on this journey for 10 years or so, I think this year. So what have been some of the

Stefan Chmelik (: 30:12

Coming up tonight, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 30:18

you know, the key, key lessons or learning points that, know, if you had your time again or speaking to other kind of wannabe inventors and founders, what would you, what would you pass on?

Stefan Chmelik (: 30:29

Yeah.

The patenting process is much harder and a lot more expensive and a lot more time consuming over a long period of time than I certainly understood or appreciated. I mean, we do have patents in EU and England and America and other places, but it's tricky. It's hard. It takes a lot of money and it costs a fortune.

costs so much more than I thought it would. So that's in a way if you do want to patent your stuff and you probably do if you possibly can, then you need to factor that in. It's gonna cost more and take longer than you can imagine.

Chris Whyte (: 31:08

What's the biggest element of that? it the lawyers that are involved in, or is it literally fees paid to authorities? Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 31:13

yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, it's legal fees, because

you have to be represented in different courts in different countries. And the papers need to be submitted in a particular way. I mean, you can do it yourself. Or you could try to, or could, you could sort of do it a bit more cheaply. But the obviously the possibility of making an error, and then your pattern being redundant is or will

easy for a big company wanting to get around it is there. I mean, think really the purpose of patents is to make it easier and cheaper for a company to buy you than to try and copy you.

Chris Whyte (: 31:40

Hmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 31:52

Because at end of the day, know, the company, if a big company wants to do what you're doing, then they're always going to have more money than you have. But they don't necessarily want to get into a battle if the battle lines are very clearly drawn out. you know, and they know also that the people in the company have the expertise. So I think in a startup in particular,

Chris Whyte (: 32:11

Yeah, you gotta

Stefan Chmelik (: 32:20

So much of the expertise and the goodwill is in the team. That even if you acquire the patents and you acquire the brand or whatever, that doesn't mean that you can easily run the company. Because so much of what that company knows, and this isn't even intentional, it's not that anybody's trying to hide anything. It's just that so much is in your head because you've, in a small company, you do so many jobs.

Chris Whyte (: 32:43

Mm-hmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 32:43

you know, nobody has, it's not like a big corporate where people have one job and they have a team and that's it. And I think we've really noticed that actually, people, when we've tried to work with staff, with people, team members who have come from a corporate background, it's really hard for them. Yeah, because they say, where's my team of people to delegate to? And, you know, where all the, you know, the thick

written guidebooks that tell me what our policies are and what to do. And most of it's in the team's head. So one of the things I've struggled with most is the ambition that you have for how you want the company to be, particularly when it comes to social equality, environmental sustainability, all these things.

Chris Whyte (: 33:13

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 33:30

You know, we're highly dedicated to all of those, but it's, you know, the reality is it's incredibly difficult for a small startup company to really fund those in the way that you would like to. It's very, difficult. And that's a huge shame, I think. I mean, we are, mean, our packaging is now, there's no plastic in our packaging. I think the device is 80 % recycled.

We're now looking this year, we're hoping to be able to use ocean plastic in the recycling process. So, know, there are, you know, there are things we're doing. We'd like to make the very, very, it's incredibly difficult, but we'd like to make the product so it can be returned and refurbished and then given to community programs and things like, know, soldier, vet groups in the US and the UK.

Chris Whyte (: 33:58

Bro, yeah, you're making steps. Yeah.

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 34:17

because it works really, there's a lot of clinics and clinicians who have been using the tech, psychotherapists and also vet, know, vet, war vet clinics for things like PTSD and anxiety and trauma and getting great results. we'd love to be able to return devices to the community to have an impact there as well. And we are doing that and we're slowly increasing that, it's...

Chris Whyte (: 34:22

Mmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 34:42

You know, the rate at which we can do that is frustrating.

Chris Whyte (: 34:45

Hmm. Is it is it just money? That's kind of the limiting factor there? Or is it the you know, other other thing, maybe people or just time? Yeah. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 34:54

Well, I mean, if you have the money, you can tend to get the people as

well. I mean, not automatically, because of course, if you have the money, can also, well, you can go to the dark side, can't you? And indeed get the wrong people. So it's having money, but it's also retaining your conscience and your ethics and your North Star. Without, know, once the temptation is there.

Chris Whyte (: 35:04

You can get the wrong people. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 35:22

know, there's all this money, what do do with it? So that and that's why it's, although I think it's becoming more common, it's relatively rare for companies to have both those things, sufficient money and a really visible, clear, ethical North Star.

Chris Whyte (: 35:22

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. Because you've got those competing needs from the business or wants in terms of business needs to make money in order to fuel the kind of sustainable growth as the kind of sustainable part of the business and the wishes and the North Star. But yeah, they don't exist independently, do they? Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 36:05

They don't really, although the evidence

for cooperation over competition is becoming harder and harder to ignore. And I think, you what I like about that is that's what we need to do as communities and countries in the world. But I think it's also what we need to do in the business space. So I think consumers are more and more aware of when they're subject to green washing or white washing or pink washing.

Chris Whyte (: 36:13

I'd agree with that,

Stefan Chmelik (: 36:33

where a company is just jumping on an agenda because they know it's important to be seen to be doing so. think consumers can see through this more and more easily. So I think the authenticity, you really walking the walk is incredibly important now. And what, because actually an interesting fact that not everybody knows is Darwin never said survival of the fittest.

Chris Whyte (: 37:03

What did he say then?

Stefan Chmelik (: 37:04

He didn't say that he actually actually said he actually said kindness and cooperation win over competition. That's actually nobody's actually read his book, of course, it's been like nobody's read Einstein's special theory of relativity, but everybody quotes E equals MC squared, even though they probably couldn't tell you what the C stands for, which is a good thing because the C isn't constant, actually, but that's a whole different argument. It is yes, the constant is meant to be the speed of light. Exactly.

Chris Whyte (: 37:19

Yeah.

This is the of light, isn't it?

Stefan Chmelik (: 37:32

The only problem with that is the speed of light isn't constant.

But it's challenging to talk about that because if you say the constant isn't constant, then the whole of physics and math falls over. So you can't say it too loud.

Chris Whyte (: 37:47

Yeah, well, that's that's why we have very clever scientists working at places like CERN. They can they can worry about all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 37:51

It is. But their equations still rely on C being

constant. it's, know, it's, I don't, it isn't very, yeah, constant-ish. Reasonably constant. But yeah, so, and I think that's what we're seeing now is actually this tension between a money-based economy which works on competition.

Chris Whyte (: 37:59

Constant-ish, know, around these parts, it's relatively the same. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 38:13

and a cooperation-based community that works much better when people cooperate. And those two things are becoming harder and harder to reconcile.

Chris Whyte (: 38:16

Mmm.

So

where are you seeing good examples of cooperation and kind of, you know, people and companies banding together for the single cause?

Stefan Chmelik (: 38:36

Yeah, I mean, you tend to see it obviously, traditionally more in things like NGOs and environmental groups, etc. You're seeing it in the kind of areas where people that don't really get talked about much and don't get a lot of publicity. So community action groups, know, groups of people in an area banding together and growing food on allotments, know, and being able to and being able to survive and reduce their overheads that

that and its equivalent exist in myriad forms all over the Volunteers who are cleaning up beaches, cleaning up beaches of ocean plastic and then recycling them back to companies like us, say for instance. So there is a virtuous cycle model that does exist and can be enlarged upon, but it's because it isn't the standard model.

Chris Whyte (: 39:15

Hmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 39:31

it's always a bit trickier to do that. But I think as the more available it becomes, as it is doing, and the more clear the evidence for cooperation over competition becomes, the more this will become the standard way that things happen. I mean, you the idea that women didn't have the votes 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it would seem ridiculous now.

Chris Whyte (: 39:55

Absolutely.

Stefan Chmelik (: 39:55

And there

are many things, you know, the fact that people used to be able to smoke on the back of the bus or on tube trains seems utterly surreal now. And there are many things that are equivalent to that, which in a decade will seem, we used to do that. You know, there are many things that are at that level, because technology isn't the only exponential curve.

Chris Whyte (: 40:01

Hmm.

Hmm.

Stefan Chmelik (: 40:24

There in a human societal cultural development is outstripping human evolutionary development. And so there was a number of there are a number of ways in which communities have to adapt to deal with.

Chris Whyte (: 40:38

I think we could have a whole session of podcasts on all that and then AI is going to come in at some point and probably take over the podcast itself.

Stefan Chmelik (: 40:47

which I'm not worried about

AI, this is obviously something we, if I can digress on AI for a moment. I mean, there's a few fundamental blockers that I don't see are resolvable that will stop AI becoming anything near like it's touted. One is the fact that the energy requirements aren't there, and indeed are going in the opposite direction of what we need to be doing. So as I understand it,

AI already, which is obviously a fraction of what it's touted to be, already requires the energy consumption equivalent to the whole of Japan. And the for virtual currencies as well, right? This is why virtual currencies are never going to be the solution because of just the ridiculous energy consumption requirements they have. And then the other issue with AI is it's kind of probably peaked because it developed so fast and trained so fast because it had access

Chris Whyte (: 41:21

nuts isn't it?

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 41:40

illegally, but it had access to everybody's data. But they've read, it's used all the data. There isn't this massive data pool for it to learn from anymore. So I think, I think we should have every expectation that AI has, you know, it's certainly it's meteoric growth has probably peaked.

Chris Whyte (: 41:59

Yeah, I read that somewhere as well in terms of you shouldn't expect the same kind of level of improvements as we've seen in the last 18 months.

Stefan Chmelik (: 42:08

Hmm.

Yeah. And then actually, the third part is that you can't trust it. Because it basically makes up what it thinks you want to hear. I mean, we did an experiment where we got it to do the job of a research assistant gave us some questions. And it came back with these fantastic papers, answering the question in great detail and referencing everything. And then we thought

that's interesting. And then we tried to look up the references, and they didn't exist. It had literally made up the authors, the articles and the publications and just invented them. And we sort of said, did you invent these? Oh, yeah, sorry, I'll give you these ones instead. And it gave another one and they invented those as well. So I mean, it's, there is this kind of weird AI echo chamber where you basically can't trust what you're being told. But that's like,

Chris Whyte (: 42:37

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like,

Stefan Chmelik (: 42:59

But that's the internet all over, of course, isn't

Chris Whyte (: 42:59

yeah, yeah, of course. mean, the way I treat it is literally like having an assistant and you've got to assume that the system is not going to get it right every time. So you need to check their work and you need to give it feedback. So, but yeah, I use AI tools quite heavily in my work just to, you know, save time with this podcast. There's AI tools behind it when it comes to editing. that an AI?

Stefan Chmelik (: 43:23

So I'm not gonna.

Chris Whyte (: 43:25

kind of assistant on my inbox, kind of filtering out the marketing emails and, sorry, can't get involved. Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 43:29

I think as long as we regard it as a tool,

not as a co-founder, then I think that's fine. It's just a very sophisticated plow, really.

Chris Whyte (: 43:36

Yeah, absolutely correctly. Can you imagine?

Yeah,

it really is. Wonderful. So what's next then? What are you kind of most excited about with Sensei or anything else you're involved in at the moment, Stefan? What kind of what does the future hold for you?

Stefan Chmelik (: 43:53

Well, so I

I hope we sense say the plan is to really step into and lean into our ability to impact the largest possible number of people. I do believe absolutely passionately. And this was the whole reason for sense eight is that we can't change any of the critical issues facing the world, unless we can change the way people feel about them. So, you know, you don't

destroy the things you love. Yeah, so the destruction of nature, the issues around plastic, global warming, the breakdown of relationships, the epidemic of loneliness, the epidemic of stress, all of these things are a result of the fact that people are feeling overwhelmed and stressed and anxious because they feel so time poor.

And the only way, I you I said to somebody the other day, you Elon Musk has 24 hours in a day as well, just like you do. The only way to feel like you have more time is to be less anxious about it, to be less stressed about it. And then you learn how to prioritise. But when you're locked into this kind of cycle of panic, you do everything, we try to do everything and you do all of it.

So if we can get people stepping back, relaxing, taking a breath, pausing, and then seeing with new eyes, then all the problems in the world are potentially changeable. So that's kind of the mission is to try and get a critical mass of people, an island of cohesion of people that come together and form with many, many other people doing the similar thing, form a tipping point in opposition to all the tipping points that are trying to move everything in the other direction.

Chris Whyte (: 45:38

Absolutely.

Stefan Chmelik (: 45:38

And we do that by expanding the way the product works by making it constantly by making it more effective. That's really the aim. And it's already incredibly effective, but to that's my obsession is to try and make the hardware and the app work even more efficiently within a 10 or maybe less time frame, 10 minutes or less time frame. And to make it more and more enjoyable and more and more engaging.

Not in a kind click-baity sort of free-to-play app kind of way. So not dopamine-driven.

but rather feel good driven. You know, again, the research is incredibly clear. A sense of wonder, a sense of awe, the ability to be grateful, the ability to give to others heightens your vagal tone. And Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at Berkeley talks about this.

Chris Whyte (: 46:15

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 46:33

And this isn't fairly non-controversial, the fact that if you really want to enjoy yourself, then doing that through experiences which promote compassion and empathy are absolutely the way to achieve that.

Chris Whyte (: 46:37

Mmm.

Yeah, absolutely. mean, it's bonkers to think that if you're, you do nice things and you're a nice person and you're helpful that good things often come as a result of it. It's certainly how I try and try and live my life, you know, and

Stefan Chmelik (: 47:02

Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, you basically feel good. Yeah. We tend to think that feeling good is based on one set of criteria. And then when we get those things, the job, the promotion, the health, the money, the weight, whatever it might be, we find we're no happier. So we try to get more of them. And then there are, and then the other possibilities we realize, well, actually,

Chris Whyte (: 47:05

Yeah.

Stefan Chmelik (: 47:28

I'm going to look at the research which shows that those things don't make anyone happy. Some of the most miserable people I've met are billionaires. The things that make people happy are simple lives. And we see this in traditional communities like, whether it's native communities or shaker, quaker communities, the blue zones, the areas across the world where people live in traditional communities in Sardinia and Loma Linda and Japan.

where they're leading communal lives, growing food together, eating food together, spending their time outside, doing practical work. None of them are rich and yet they all have everything they need.

Chris Whyte (: 48:04

That's it. It's, it's a really lovely way to, I think, kind of wrap the episode up. That on that kind of note, it's just, just be kind to, and be together. You know, you don't need material stuff. don't kind of, it's, that won't make you happier, but, no, that's survival of the kindest. Yeah. Be, be kind, feel good. Yeah. Perhaps we'll do a poll out and we can get some nice kind of

Stefan Chmelik (: 48:21

Survival of the kindest. Survival of the kindest.

Chris Whyte (: 48:30

taglines. No, that's wonderful. So where can people find out about Sensate then? I know it's available on Amazon and other places, but...

Stefan Chmelik (: 48:39

It is yeah, I mean,

the best place to do is go to our website. So get sensate.com. You I'm sure you can put a link. Yeah, yeah, get sensate.com. That's the best place that's global. And that's where we run our deals. And there's a whole blog section there of articles I've written an explanation of some of the things I've talked about today. So yeah, so go there.

Chris Whyte (: 48:45

I'll include a link in the show notes. Yeah.

Awesome. And you're on LinkedIn. think that's how we connected. So if people want to reach out and kind of ask you questions about about Sunset or yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome.

Stefan Chmelik (: 49:07

Yeah, people can reach out to me personally on LinkedIn or Facebook. There is a, are,

there are company Facebooks and company Instagrams, but I don't tend to look at those. But I run a personal page on Facebook.

Chris Whyte (: 49:19

Yeah,

cool. I'll put the link there. And you mentioned a discount code as well if people are interested in trying it.

Stefan Chmelik (: 49:25

Yeah, I mean,

I mean, for me, it's all about people using the tech and benefiting from the tech. So we'll be thrilled to give you a code which you can give to your listeners.

Chris Whyte (: 49:34

Yeah, I'll pop that

in the show notes. I'm sure that'll be interesting to just get the other feedback from the audience, the listeners as well on the product and the impact tells on that those I'm looking forward to trying out myself sleep and kind of anxiety, both things that come and go. So awesome.

Stefan Chmelik (: 49:49

Ahem.

what's not to like. But we have a lot of practitioners,

a practitioner affiliates using it, you know, with their patients because it's a really useful clinical tool.

Chris Whyte (: 50:00

Yeah.

Yeah, it sounds fantastic. So Stefan, thank you so much for joining me. been really interesting kind of, yeah, kind of journey through through your background and through Sensate and yeah, it's been wonderful. So thank you again.

Stefan Chmelik (: 50:20

You're so welcome.

Chris Whyte (: 50:24

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Why Design. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps others discover the podcast. And while you're at it, why not share it with a friend or colleague who do enjoy it too. If you'd like to stay connected or explore more about the work we're doing at Kodu.

feel free to visit teamkodu.com or connect with me, Chris Whyte on LinkedIn. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next time.