Setl Immersive brings art, sound, and science together to help people reset their nervous systems in minutes.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Zander Thiele, Founder & CEO of Setl Immersive, at the Health Span Summit in Los Angeles. Zander shares how Setl creates multisensory environments that help people regulate stress, improve focus, and find balance. From wellness pods to full-scale immersive rooms, his mission is to make mental restoration as accessible as a daily coffee break.
About Setl Immersive
Setl aims to enhance public wellness through a framework focused on approachability, accessibility, and entertainment. Utilizing advanced spatial audio and immersive visual technologies, such as 360-degree projection and virtual reality, Setl’s multisensory envelope is designed to promote meaningful shifts in mental state. This innovative approach seeks to facilitate stress reduction, enhance emotional regulation, improve mood, and encourage relaxation and mindfulness among participants, ultimately fostering mental well-being through immersive artistic experiences.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, so today I am in Los Angeles, California, and I’m a Health Span Summit. Let me tell you, Elia and his team put on quite a show, and this is a two day event.
We’re on day two right now, and the next guest I have on is Xander. Xander, welcome to the show. Thanks very much. Glad to be here. All right. So first off, health Span Summit. Have you been to one of these before? Is this the first one? Like what, what’s the connection to the conference first summit for me? Uh, so Oh, a newbie.
Tell, tell me about your experience. I’m a newbie. Yeah. So it’s, it’s been a wonderful summit. We ran into Elias, uh, at the Mission Matters, uh, leadership conference earlier this year. Uh, so we had brought our experiences down there. Ran into Elias. Yeah. Um, got to talking and yeah, he invited us out here to check the, I love it.
The community out here. Longevity, the space. I mean, it’s. Booming and I love to be on the front line of that 100%. So talk us about your company Zander. Yeah. So subtle immersive creates audio visual experiences, uh, that provide an opportunity for people to regulate and regulate their nervous system, come down from high stimulus, high stress environments, immersed in our work and music.
So tell me, how did you originally come up with this idea? Yeah. So a couple years ago, uh, I had left my last job at Bird Scooters. And I was looking at the next opportunity. I’d been looking for the next role, thinking about what I might wanna do. Mm. And I had been thinking when I was a bird about a relaxation pod for the office environment.
Yeah. Uh, we used to take breaks in the, uh, the zoom pods. Where’d you go? Take a conference. Right. We’d go on there for 20 minutes just to take a break, listen to music. Those things are cool, by the way. I’ve never had the luxury of working at a place that had one, but mm-hmm. I always wanted to Go ahead, continue.
They’re great. They’re just cool. They’re great. I would go in there, you know, open up my laptop, listen to music, and just. Take a break, right? Yeah. My father makes musical instruments. Mm. He makes the type of drum, uh, that’s tuned so that anybody can play, anybody can make beautiful music. Mm. And I’d been thinking about this idea of taking an instrument like that that’s accessible for anybody, putting it in pod in an office environment where people could take a break from the meetings, take a break from the hustle, and go beat in music for a couple of minutes.
Wow. So kind of like this idea of the pod, you’d be like taking a little nap or whatever else. This is like you. I guess really hit on that right brain, right? Right. Like you’re bringing the, just like, let me go pound on the creative side of the brain for a little bit and wake me up. Correct. Yeah. I mean, an artistically facilitated or musically facilitated reset, you know, middle of the day, kind of an enhanced break.
Mm. So I’ve been thinking about this. Um, I went all the way to talking to my dad about getting a prototype of a drama with inset into one of these pods. I was talking to my older sister about it. At the time she was working on an immersive, uh, album that was for, uh, she was calling it The Adult Lullaby Project.
And this was music that was mixed in spatial audio, uh, to serve the purpose for helping adults facilitate coming down at the end of the day. Um, and really kind of regulating from, from the dresses in adult lullaby. Correct. Yeah, I’m in. Go ahead, continue. So, so she’s here, she came across the idea to put some visuals to this album, right?
Yeah. She wanted to, to pair some immersive visuals with the, with the music. And she hit me up. She said, Hey, you know, you’re a project manager. Can you help me put some structure around this and try to get this thing off the ground, make a demo. So we did, uh, we made a demo of a AI generated visuals that went along with, uh, one of the pieces of music she was working with.
Yeah. As we got to talking, working on this, we started to realize there was a lot of synergy between me, sort of thinking about the burnout and stress that it faced in the corporate office environment and then what she was trying to solve for with, you know, seeing anxiety out in the world and wanting to help people regulate and come down.
Yeah. So this kind of synergy kept, kept coming up, kept coming up, and we finally said, well, what if we do both? What if we try to do both? We merged the ideas. One thing led to another, and then we incorporated about three months later. So what? That’s where we started. And so how did you know that this was gonna be like something that you were gonna spend a lot of time on as, as entrepreneurs, this is where I’m coming at with this question.
Yeah. A lot of entrepreneurs at home, a lot of people watch this and Right. And sometimes we have ideas, but like, then do we take ’em to the finish line of like getting to a product? How did you know? Was it one of those that you could like, or did you know in a sense, I’ve been working on this product my entire life.
Wow. So I grew up. I grew up around art, music. My dad’s a drum builder. Um, my co-founder, by the way, is my sister. Yeah. Um, so I’ll say our cool, our No, of course. That, that’s cool. Our, yeah. Our dad’s a drum builder. Uh, our mom teaches piano. Both of us have grown up, uh, in music. Our brother as well, I grew up playing classical piano singing choirs.
Um, and then through our, through our dad’s, uh, business building drums, we were attending art shows. You know, from the time we were. We could walk and end before, um, so we’ve always been immersed. It’s in your blood artwork and music. It’s been here. Uh, I started dancing in college and this has been part of my course.
So when I say I’ve been maybe working on this my entire life, dang. Um, for me it’s been a growing connection with a, and music, it’s always been there. Mm-hmm. Um, the arts have always been there for me. And so once this came along, I mean, it’s a, it’s kind of a no-brainer thing because I. So it’s one thing I have faith in.
It’s the primal, uh, sort of power of, of music and of art. And so each day that’s what we’re channeling, you know? Mm. Um, so talk to me about where you’re at with the company today and like visions for the future. Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, do you want the mission, vision or the strategic vision? I want ’em both.
All of them. Yeah. So I mean, the mission for us is to be. Everywhere, and that’s kind of a useless comment from an execution perspective. But the goal for us is giving people, uh, that are experiencing stress or experiencing high stimulation, which we live in a very high stimulus world right now. Yeah. Yeah.
Giving them a tool to relax and reset a tool that in under 10 minutes they can immerse themselves in something compelling, something awe inspiring and beautiful. That does them some good in that day. Mm-hmm. And so, I mean, the mission is for this to be as easy to find as walking down to the next Starbucks down the street, right?
Yeah. Now talk to me about, a little bit about the strategic rollout side of things. Yeah, absolutely. So the first thesis for us was rolling out via live events. So we were looking to sell through producers, event promoters, um, and bring the experiences, bring the installations to events. Mm-hmm. He was at Sundance this year.
We got into a number of conversations about permanent installations. Mm-hmm. We started talking to people about corporate office environments. Yeah. We spoke to a woman who was in, uh, HR for an investment banking firm, and she said, Hey, my investment bankers are stressed out. Could you do something like this in the office?
Yeah. Could you bring it in? Uh, we met a gentleman who was building a longevity clinic, uh, in the Middle East, and he said, are these experiences something that you guys could bring out to an environment like this? Mm-hmm. So through these conversations. It got us thinking that perhaps permanent installations didn’t need to be a second order.
Perhaps that was the starting point. Wow. And live defense is really the place where you get exposure, um, you know, meet people, network, et cetera. So that’s really been the focus. Mm-hmm. Uh, is selling permanent installations. What does it look like to have an installation? Like what, what are, like, talk to me about like some of the different, and I’m sure it’s customized per experience, per what they’re looking for, but like, so people can kind of wrap their head around what that looks like that aren’t here today.
Yeah, of course. So we consider ourselves. Content first. Mm-hmm. We start with the content. We start with the music and the artwork, and then we think about how to package that. And how to package that is really a multimodal affair, right? Mm-hmm. Depending on the needs of where we’re going, uh, virtual reality is one of the modals that we work with.
Yeah. And this is nice because it’s portable and it’s individual of course. So if there’s a space, we don’t have a dedicated room. Maybe it’s just a couch on the side of a, of a venue. You can take VR headsets. If we’ve got a dedicated room to work with, we build what we call. Subtle spaces. Mm-hmm. And subtle spaces can take a number of factors depending on the capabilities of the room.
From a visual perspective, we can, we typically either have one, one live wall or Yeah. A multi-surface installation that can be LED walls or projection walls. Mm. On the audio side, uh, if we’ve got capability, we’ll build a full spatial audio array. Yeah. We can talk about spatial audio later. Yeah. And that’s a really compelling sonic envelope.
Um, if there’s not, you know, space or budget to build that type of array mm-hmm. We’ll work with RAL headphones and that would be an individualized audio experience. Mm. So either way, it sounds like if, if a, if a, if a company wanted, like they had obviously a lot of space, they could, you could do like the full gambit, but if they don’t and all they have, if they had a corner.
It sounds to me like based on headphones or other things, like they can, there can be some form of this created so that people, their employees can get unplug and get, get creative and kind of get recharged. Am I off on that? I wanna make sure I understand it right. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So if we’ve got a dedicated room, we’re always gonna be recommending we build a settle space, of course.
And the cocoon is the physical environment that we build. Mm. Um, if we don’t have that dedicated room, uh, we build what we’re calling flow stations. Ah, and, uh, subtle Flow was actually born outta Sundance. This is something we were asked to do. Um. By some partners down there called Ludi, you may be familiar with them.
They’re here at the, at the summit and Ludi said, well, at the end of the, of the lounge that we’ve got, what if we just have a giant screen? You go bank of headphones, what does that look like? And our response was. Let’s figure it out. Well, no, the response was, well, that’s not gonna be fully immersive. Oh, they’re just gonna be sitting in front of the screen.
It’s just headphones. You know, we, we thought it was, you know, fine. Yeah. So we built it. We rolled it out. Yeah. Yeah. Much toward the light. The first day we came down there, people were rolling through the clinic, taking a seat, putting the headphones on, and loved that they could come and go sort of freely, they could for 60 seconds, they could stay for 10 minutes.
Uh, and the experience loops about every five minutes. Yeah. So there was this kind of nimbleness to flow, um, interesting. So you weren’t expecting that, right? We were not, we were, we were shocked. So it’s, it’s modular. It’s easy for people to flow through. Mm. And this took us to thinking about flow. To your point, in an environment, say an office, you know, an airport somewhere that’s kind of a concourse thoroughfare.
People can step to the side where they’ve got. You know, a live wall. Yeah. And bank headphones, they can tune in, stay for a minute, stay for 10, whatever they need. And you mentioned content first. So how does the content piece of it work? Is it, uh, obviously there’s one experience, like in that case you mentioned about Sundance.
Yeah. Um, and that’s gonna loop, but for an office environment or for something else, is the content being refreshed or like, like what does that look like? Yeah. Correct. So we’ll be building out our content library. Mm-hmm. Um, what we’re thinking of right now is we think of content in generations of experiences.
Uh, each generation having its own artistic identity, right? Mm-hmm. So one generation from a visual perspective may be really centered around movement and dance, and then the music comes along with that. Another generation may heavily orchestral by nature in the music, and then the visuals are done by a different artist.
Yeah. So we’re expanding on that library over time. Um, with the permanent office installations, what we do is we build the installation up front and then there’s a subscription to that library of content that’s continually refreshed over time. Yeah. And what becomes interesting there then is for the employees, they stay engaged, right?
Yeah. So they may be able to have their favorite, but then it’s like, oh, by the way, we’re unrolling or we’re unveiling this next thing, or next generation, I think you called it. That’s right, that’s right. Wow. Yeah. So then that makes it to where it’s also fresh. Mm-hmm. For everyone so that they don’t get bored.
I mean, you don’t wanna. Exact content every time forever. Correct. So you wanna make sure, especially for a company that’s gonna be, you know, dedicating the space or building out the full cocoon, I believe you caught with it. Absolutely. Um, then that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s right. And the way we think about programming those rooms, if we have a subtle space, is we’ve got what we call our feature experiences.
That’s gonna be a six minute dedicated experience mm-hmm. From one of these generations of content. Mm-hmm. In between that in the room, you’re not just hitting feature experience, feature experience, feature experience. We’ve got sort of, um, call it an ambient. Default experience that’s in there, that’s a little more, um, a little more cyclic, um, and a little more passive, so that that will go for, let’s say 10 minutes, 15 minutes in a passive mode, somebody can sit in.
Enjoy the room. Sort of be calm, but they’re not being hit with the full experience. Yeah. Well, Xander just saying, man, first off, it’s been great having you on the show. Um, last thing I want you to do, look into the camera. How do people connect? How do they bring these experiences to their office and or event?
Yeah. Best way to, uh, connect with us is to email, uh. Info settle ai. You can also find our website, settle AI and reach out to us there. Fantastic. And for everybody at home watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes so you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your. First time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Xandr man, appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks, Adam.
