Transcript of The Sense That Controls Your Emotions—And Why Tech Is Finally Hacking It | Ep 305 with Siddhartha Kunti Founder of Studio SK

So, Siddhar, when I read what you do, I was blown away. I'm like, Is this even real? And you know what? It reminded me of something. Back a couple of years ago, I was at a CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, and they had a TV from LG, I believe. And that TV was adding scent into the TV. And they were talking about how you would something on TV and then you would smell it. I thought that was the most fascinating. It never came out to consumer. It didn't come out to selling on consumer. But I told that story to so many people because I was really blown away by what this could be and what this could mean for the future. And since then, I never heard anyone really talk about this digitization of stuff. But I have to understand, can you explain exactly, you walked away from a certain life to focus on this? Why and what exactly is it?

Yeah, no, there. Thanks, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here. And to be honest, it's been a real journey of discovery because just taking one step back, in 2018, I was traveling with my wife in Japan. I was doing a tour in the Sontori Akshu Distillery, which we speak distillery. What are the key things that got me hooked was the tour guy and saying the reason we probably, what was a keyword, probably had fresh green apple taste in this whiskey is due to the purity of the water in the mountains behind us. At that stage, I was working in AI with a team of surgical planning. We were looking at how we could use AI to influence the patient's body. I figured, what if we could use a pattern recognition that AI is so good at to actually understand where flavor comes from? Because I've always been very exposed to food, flavor, and sense. My grandfather was beekeeper, so every summer, winter, you will always compare a different flask of and look at this one has a bit more floral loads, this one has a bit more orange. So I've always had this in my youth and throughout my teens, but never really, professionally speaking.

And then in 2018, when I had this, it was like this moment of, Hey, actually, we can use the maybe decode where flavor and a roba come from. I went down a rabbit hole. I was very fortunate to meet Cisal Thollas, who's also one of the leading experts in the Oxycribe space. She's been doing research for 30 years. That's where I got me down this journey of discovering and trying to understand how we as humans interact with millions of molecules that are around us. The point you make about a television is, well, it's such an important element in our daily lives, but yet it's also the least understood simply because it is so complex. The Swedish professor, Jónup Olof, all of a sudden in Stockholm University, wrote even a book about it, calling it the forgotten sense, because at Cool. You get taught to read, to write, to see, to hear. But we never get taught to smell. And yet smell is such an important part of our lives. With food, eating, the choice of your partner, the pheomones. Like nowadays people wear a lot of perfume, which is in a way masks, they are our national body orders.

But I believe in London, a couple of years ago, they used to do these pheomone parties where people wear a T-shirt for a week, put the T-shirt in a bag, and then all of the T-shirts were laid out onto a table, and you would basically choose a partner based on scent, sniffing out a T-shirt as opposed to going, say, with perfumes and everything. So it It's something that I think I was naturally grown to it. And being in technology, 3D printing AI before that, I think prime, we just were going to this.

You bring up something interesting. I was watching the Learning channel 20 years ago, and I'll never forget. They did a study where they had men wear a shirt that was sweating, and then they had women guess who they were more attracted to based on a bunch of women smelling different shirts. That That got me into... There was a few years where I was really into researching. I was buying pheromones online. I wanted to see what this would do and the reactions that people have. It's very interesting. Why do you think I know, and I've read here that scent is the only sense that's directly wired to the emotional center of the brain. Why do you think it's taken us until 2026 to really bridge the gap between technology and It's an excellent question because as you say, I think even in the '90s already, there was this smetoscope where you could go to the cinema and there were like, perhaps a salt, so like, scent come out.

I think it's the least understood and the least digitized because it's also the most complex. We have millions of molecules around us. Then besides the objective molecular component, you also have the human factor because as you all know, what What might smell to you as vanilla might smell as the orange due to somebody else, or they might just label it different simply because smell is not just molecules hitting your zero factory receptors. It's also the cultural connotation. How you describe things like dung might be labeled. It's bad smelling in some societies, but it's almost like a status symbol in other societies. There's a huge cultural connotation and individual impact on the scent as well, like where you live, the condition levels, what type of food you have, where do you at your sites. All of those things make you perceive smell different than I would perceive. That's also, I believe, why it's taking quite long for science and research to get to the point of actually a better understanding because you need the objective scientific chemical part, but you also need the subjective human cultural part. I think it's something that we could probably only figure out with AI to really dive into those massive data sets and then trying to somehow decode and look at paper.

My first project, I chemically analyzed You don't have 30 beverages, of which 690 whisky's. And that alone was like 65,000 lines of molecular data, that's a lot for a human to analyze.

Well, I think it makes me think of a sommelier who can smell a wine. I think it's part of the test. You have to be able to smell the wine and know the region. And then I smell it, and I'm like, I don't know, it smells the same thing like the 45 other ones I've smelled. I could see where the subjectiveness, but then you have people that have really mastered this ability in this art. When you think of how AI is going to play into this and what this will unlock for the good of humanity, do you have to build an LLM of sense How will AI even do this? Then what will this bring to humanity or what are you hoping to achieve with it?

Yeah, you definitely know your onions. It's true. I think an LLM of sense, I think, is a good first stepping story. Having a massive data set of molecules, molecular data, and then as much as human or say, subjective data that's much to it. Then data from lots of populations, not just Western, but Asian, Africa. I think that's what we really believe. Scent LLM. I think that's definitely a good stepping stone. Then as you say, the impact of that, I think, is tremendous. Covid showed us what society looks like if people lose their sense of smell. You start skating, blah, and all of a sudden, when you go to people, you hug them, there's no longer any olpactic use. The long term impact of not being able to smell like anosmic people is actually that you can pretty depressed because a lot of the way your brain works, it's also often triggered subconsciously by its smell. If you walk past the bakery, maybe it takes you back to your grandmother baking cake, or if you're walking past a lawn that's been bought, a freshly-mould grass, it can take you back to when you were a kid to make soccer.

I think there's a lot of research going to the field now, especially since COVID. Where can it lead to? I can just to give one example, in the NHS, I think about 10 years ago, they discovered a woman who was able to sniff out Alzheimer's. About a year before her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she detected this, the change in his body order. The impact of better understanding smell, I think, is phenomenal from guiding people to better food choices, to disease detection, drug discovery. I think it's really something that can help society reach next level. What I personally want to contribute it, and I think through my, say, art and science and tech projects, I'd like to just help put it on the map more, particularly in field of education, teaching kids about the importance of smell is, I think, a good starting point. Taking the art and so we're going to be doing into schools and explaining kids about the importance of smell and using their nose. It's a fun way, paying memory The Game is based on sense. There's a really cool series called the Drops of God, and it's about wine. It's something...

It also speaks heavily about sense. The father trains his daughter from a very early age, blind. Sniff out different types of oranges and citrus, just to get the water. That's what I aim to do, is to get the hard tech and the impact side of me.

This reminds me, I bought a house one time, and my real estate agent could not smell. But I had never really been to the house. When I got into the house, there was so much work that needed to be done because he didn't know there was a really bad smell. It turns out there was a lot of damage in the house. It cost us tens of thousands of dollars that I would have known in advance. I could have had them fixed, or I would have never even bought the home. But I didn't even know he couldn't... I never even thought that was a And then he's like, Oh, sorry, I can't smell. I didn't smell it.

I didn't smell. Yeah. And so the flip side of things is, I mean, that's, of course, the way we as humans, the way we picked food or not was simply by smelling it, like no refrigerators and stuff. So often it's just through the sniff test. It has this meat gone off or not. It's the way we used to do it, but vice versa. So I think that's everything from a prevention set. If you flip it to the other side, big companies like Nike, April from me, they're leveraging sense to drive sales in stores. There's Nike stores. I think Nike did tests where they had stores with freshly cut grass and stores that didn't have it. If I remember the stats, Greg, I think the stores that had the fresh scent sold about 20% more simply because it gives people a feeling of comfort. It's a different dimension to an experience.

I feel like every store, everywhere I go, the scent is really used in a lot of things. Even my wife, she had this spray. We keep going back to the store because she wants to smell this spray. Three days in a row, she keeps going. I'm like, Why you keep going back? She's like, I really, really like this smell. It's now on our clothes. I can smell it on my shirt. It's fascinating. If somebody's watching this and they're like, What industry? They always say, This is a trillion-dollar industry. How big is this industry? I imagine it's pretty untapped because you're the first person that have 1,500 people that I've interviewed. I've never heard anyone talk about this. The other thing is, how do you see... Can people use this? You're saying about sense and sales and stuff. How can somebody use this right now?

As you say, in Paris, it's grand, it's building up. You see shower systems, shower manufacturers that are introducing systems where you have water come up, then it's vaporizing, sent to create a home spa. There's an effort, I think, even by Sony, I think is developing a gaming or a bit of hardware add-on for gaming. So I think industries are gradually catching up to the importance of as well in terms of creating experiences, not just in gaming or in wellness, but also in art. One of the curators for reading museums in the New York, the Witten Museum, also has olfactory art on the road. So I think anything where you're consumer-facing and you want to basically better people's experiences somehow get sent to the ball. But you see it in all the leading hotels in the world, all that be small, so like tubes sticking out of the wall, where it then dispenses, sent at certain points during the day just to create different kinds of atmosphere. It simply boosts the experience tremendously. There's been plenty of studies that showcase that if the scent is somehow gaged or part of the experience, that the recombination or the impact is significantly higher.

How big is the industry? Tough one. I haven't done any YES to it. You, of course, have all the big companies like Jivudo and Fivunish and IFF, they're already heavily pushing Yungluck. I need to do my math, the whole bracket, see how big it can get.

Well, I know you have an interesting childhood because your grandfather was an Austrian wood sculptor, and you're storing church relics, and you spent summers from what I've read chisel like wood as a kid. It reminds me of when I was a kid, I'd go with my dad to a bookstore. Now, when I smell books, people think I'm crazy because I'm like, When I smell a book, it actually makes me feel really calm because it reminds me of going to a bookstore with my dad, because we always just went to a bookstore. So for you, How does it... Going through your experience as a kid, what influences you now, or what do you smell that reminds you of that time?

For me, so to answer the second part, any any wood-related sense, for me, it brings me back to my grandfather's workshop because we spent so much time choosing different kinds of wood and chopping and sawing and putting things together. So would anything wood for me has a... I have one of my favorite perfumes here. It's the Italian brand called the Merchant of Venice. They made this lovely grano glass. It's also quite a wood scent. So wood for me, definitely does that one. And then how it shaped my way of thinking is seeing my grandfather as an artisan working with his hands is something that after spending time in the tech world where everything's write down above my computer, I love the manual. I think now in my practice, what I aim to pursue as well in the future is combining those two, like craftsmanship together with some artisan artisanal work, I would say. So for the first collection I did around whiskey, I actually started making these wooden frames and grand everything and inlaying gold a 24 carat gold, even to it. I think if you look into where society is heading from a tech and AI perspective, AI will be able to do a lot of rational things.

I think in 5 to 10, 15 year window, I think robots will also, probably more than 10, 50, robots will also be able to do the valuable stuff. I think society will probably value everything that's really craft-driven in the short to mid-term range. That's just my five sense.

Yeah. So you got me. Thinking about all this, you really got me thinking, I wonder if there's a mental health crisis going on right now. I wonder if AI could understand, like you're saying, if you smell wood, it brings you back, it calms you down. I wonder if there's a way in the future where AI could then release whatever scent knowing how you feel. If you're anxious, you're depressed, and then it knows about whatever your profiles are, and it releases them. Or somebody passes away. Your husband or wife or partner passes away. They always wear the cologne that you showed, and then it sprays it in the air, so then you smell it. But I imagine you tell people this. They're just like, Satar, you gave up everything before to focus on something that nobody is doing. I think this is the great part about entrepreneurship is you pay to save sometime a path that no one's really thinking about, but everyone thinks you're crazy. But then once you hit success, then they're like, You're a genius. Then you become the smartest person on the planet. How What are people saying to you when you tell them about this?

There's a lot of things in there. Just want to go back to your two initial points. Definitely. You really get it because I'm actually in touch with somebody from the NHS in UK about potentially putting this work into hospitals because it's... The lady that I work with, CISO, she's a legend in the in a sense, simple factory space, and she Basically, at some point, she had a client who had, I think, a dramatic relationship with Envamme. Exactly what you mentioned, CISO extracted said point of views from clothing, from Envamme, but basically shortly after she passed away and turned that scent into a soap bar so that the person could actually, when she was taking a shower, as you say, she had the scent of her mom being released in the shower and she had a calming effect. I think there's definitely lots of areas where, as you say, it can be used for a therapeutic purposes. I hope to have one of my works. It's a UK hospital, actually, as you say. That being said, I think it's Peter Diamant that always says, The day Before something comes mainstream, it's always a crazy idea. I think I was somewhere in the middle of it.

What I had told my family or people in my family were extended family years ago, when I was working, they were like, They definitely didn't get it. Now that I'm indeed Getting a bit of publicity and some visual and some visibility. Now it's like, Okay, he's on to something. But yeah, I think it's part of the journeys you have this inner call. Because the funny thing is, I did not If you told me a year ago that I would be working at the intersection of art and science and tech, I said, no, wait, I'm a tech guy. I'm sticking to tech. Finding myself here at the intersection, it's like a journey. Something pulls you. I'm glad something's pulling me in. We'll see where the road leads.

That's the beauty of entrepreneurship, right? You get the ability to go and do something crazy and go all in. It might not work. It might work. We never really know up front, but that's the amazing part. That's the excitement. Everything could collapse tomorrow or everything could skyrocket to the moon. We never, ever know. And that's the beauty that I love, even Even though it's scary and exciting. But I got to say, I'm just blown away. I can't wait. You got to come back at some point because I want to hear more. Six months, a year because technology moves so fast. Set molecules, and you're just talking about the soap and hospitals. Before this conversation, I wouldn't even think this is even possible. But the fact in 25 minutes, my mind is blown. This is amazing. You got to definitely fill us in. If people want to follow along your journey, because I think everybody needs to know this and everyone wants to know, this could be the future of our businesses, how can they do so?

Thanks. Happy to come back and give an update. Yeah, my big downside is I'm not a social media person, so I literally created my Instagram a few months ago. I think LinkedIn is probably easiest to connect with me. Then I'll be posting actually some of the visual works on my Instagram, so @sidharthacouti. But yeah, I think LinkedIn is easiest to connect and happy to be back in a few months and I would say a year and give some updates.

Siddhartha, this has been great. I'm really excited for the feature. It was really good.

It was a pleasure. Thanks for putting this together. And we'll definitely be in touch soon.