Transcript
00:00:00Most people think that back pain and low energy and bad posture are discipline problems.
00:00:07You think that they're design problems. Why is that?
00:00:10Yeah, very interesting. Well, if you look at the data on the population of people around the world,
00:00:15certainly people in the United States, a significant percent of adults in America, for example,
00:00:22have chronic or repeated back pain. It's a huge problem. And as you get older, it gets worse and
00:00:29worse. I think it's clear if you look at what people do day to day, you can see quite clearly
00:00:36that there's a cause and effect there. What's the evidence around sitting in back pain?
00:00:43You can look at sitting postures. The most interesting thing about that is you look at
00:00:49postures when people sit. I study people sitting. I think it's quite interesting. There's data on this
00:00:55too. But if you were to look anywhere in buildings here in Austin or buildings in Tokyo or Singapore,
00:01:01anywhere, you would see people sitting at their desk, hunched over their desk, their back probably
00:01:07not even touching the back of their chair, keying on their computer for hours and hours on end.
00:01:14That's how people sit. I even at one point I needed a slide for my deck of someone sitting in that posture.
00:01:21So I Googled photo of person working on a computer or something like that. And I got hundreds of
00:01:26pictures. They were all essentially identical. People hunched over their decks.
00:01:30Your spine is now curved forward, which is incredibly unhealthy. And what happens when you lean forward
00:01:41like that is you put more stress on your spine. But interestingly also, your vertebrae is curved
00:01:47forward. So each vertebrae comes together on one side and opens up on the other. So on one side,
00:01:53it's putting pressure on your desk and the other side, it's opening up the desk. There's probably,
00:01:58I can't imagine. And in fact, I'm pretty sure there's, aside from lifting very heavy weights,
00:02:03there's probably nothing worse for your back than doing that. And that's how everyone sits.
00:02:07Do you know Dr. Stu McGill? Do you know who he is?
00:02:10No, no.
00:02:10Back mechanic. So he is the world's number one lower back pain doctor. And I had a ton of back pain
00:02:18in 2017, 2018. So 2019, after I brought him on the podcast, I flew to Gravenhurst,
00:02:24which is two hours north of Toronto. So I landed in Toronto on my own, rented a car from Toronto
00:02:28airport, drove two hours north to Gravenhurst to see this guy.
00:02:31And your back was killing you by the time you were stuck.
00:02:33It wasn't assisted at all. And I get there and it's this sort of crazy wizard of the lower back
00:02:41that I went to go and see with huge mustache. It looks like Santa Claus on his off day.
00:02:47And he said, I don't take private clients. I'm sort of full with all of this stuff. But if you come
00:02:54out with me and we go fishing, and if you catch a fish, then I'll do your entire consult. He's
00:02:59quite playful like that. He's the best. He's the absolute best. And I love that guy. But I remember
00:03:04I was sat with him morning after we'd been together and we were becoming really good friends.
00:03:10He gets a phone call and it was a woman. I don't know how she'd got his number. Maybe somebody had
00:03:15passed her on. And this woman said, I'm in so much chronic pain for my lower back that I want
00:03:22to take my own life or I want to find a way to end my life. And I'm thinking about doing it tomorrow.
00:03:27And I watched this guy who I'd just met and was dealing with me, a young dude that had done too
00:03:32much CrossFit and listened to him sort of talk this person back off the ledge of there are a ton of
00:03:40different interventions. Do not get surgery. You don't need to do this. You don't need to do that.
00:03:44But this person was, oh, that was it. Sorry. No, they'd wanted to do that. And the only solution
00:03:48they could think of was surgery. But the outcomes for lower back surgery are usually worse. People go to
00:03:55a lower baseline afterwards because the complications, the potential complications. This is what happened
00:04:00with Ronnie Coleman, if you know him, Mr. Olympia, big, huge, eight time Mr. Olympia guy. And now he
00:04:06walks with crutches. I think he said his pain day to day is regularly a nine out of 10 and he's on the
00:04:12maximum legal dose for Percocet or some sort of other opioid. So yeah, sometimes the medicine is worse
00:04:19than the disease when it comes to that. It's a very, it's a really tough surgery, long, long recovery
00:04:25periods. And often, as you said, you know, often the results aren't so great. The key to this whole
00:04:31thing is really prevention rather than intervention. If you have, if you have really bad back, you have to
00:04:38intervene and deal with it. But ideally, you don't want to, you want to protect your back.
00:04:43I found some stats around office workers. Around 80% of office workers sit between four and nine hours
00:04:51daily. Desk job syndrome now includes back pain, headaches, numbness, and eye strain. Musculoskeletal
00:04:57disorders account for one third of all workplace injuries in the US, costing employers an estimated
00:05:03$50 billion annually in compensation and lost productivity. People who predominantly sit at work
00:05:09have a 16% higher risk of all-cause mortality and a 34% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
00:05:17And office workers can spend over 10 hours sitting each day. Some estimates, but a typical office
00:05:22worker's total sedated time up to 15 hours a day when you include commuting and leisure. And then sleep
00:05:29on top of that. You're basically going from static to static with brief interludes of movement.
00:05:34And sleeping is good. And by the way, laying down in a bed is a very healthy thing to do. And by the way,
00:05:42the interesting thing when you're sleeping is you move. You're not perfectly still by any means. We all
00:05:49move. We use our large muscles in moving. Isn't that hilarious that people might move more when they're
00:05:53more asleep than when they're at work? Oh, much more. No, much less. Without a doubt. Without a doubt,
00:06:00they move more. Because once you're in a chair and you're hunched over on your computer, people don't
00:06:06move. And you've seen these, you obviously have seen the same stats I have. People don't move. And the data
00:06:17is clear, and there's all these articles that say that sitting is as bad for you as smoking. It's
00:06:23one of the worst things you can do. It's not actually sitting that's problematic. It's sitting
00:06:28still. When you sit perfectly still, it's the only time in your life, pretty much, when you're not using
00:06:34your large muscles at all. And that's what's causing a lot of these problems. That's what's causing the
00:06:39vast majority of these health problems, aside from the musculoskeletal issues.
00:06:42Are humans just not meant to sit at desks, then?
00:06:46You could certainly say that. Yes. Sitting is not the greatest thing in the world. Yeah, I think
00:06:53that's true. However, there are healthier ways to approach sitting, and we need to sit. And by the
00:06:59way, if we're standing all day, and we had a sit-stand desk and we stood all day, the data on that is
00:07:06clear, too. That's not healthy. Your blood and your fluids pool in your lower legs.
00:07:11Veins. There's problems with your veins. Your veins have to return blood to your heart. That's
00:07:19done with movement, by the way. The pumping is not really effective anymore. You move, and that's
00:07:24what moves the blood back to your heart. And when you're standing up, it has to fight gravity. So
00:07:29standing isn't the answer either. I don't think sitting is going to go away, but I think it's
00:07:33really important that we sit in a healthy way. And that's what we at Human Scale are obsessed with,
00:07:40of course. If sitting is the new smoking, why has no one's behavior changed?
00:07:47I don't think there's a lot of data behind sitting is the new smoking. The data shows that the problem
00:07:56isn't really sitting. The problem is really sitting perfectly still and not moving.
00:08:01Do you think most people who sit sit still? The vast majority of people sit still. And they sit still
00:08:09for a number of reasons. But the main reason they sit still, in fact, this goes back
00:08:13when before we made chairs, I never understood why everybody was hunched over their desk.
00:08:20I'd see people, wherever I was in the world, everyone's the same. They're all typing, leaning
00:08:25forward on their desk, hunched over their desk. As I said earlier, their back not even touching the
00:08:29back of the chair. And that's not comfortable. I mean, if you're sitting at home watching a video
00:08:36podcast, you wouldn't be on your couch like this, right? You would lean back and relax.
00:08:42And so we know it's incredibly unhealthy from a musculoskeletal point of view. We know it's
00:08:47incredibly unhealthy just from a longevity point of view. So I used to ask people, I asked my friends
00:08:53who work that way. I asked strangers in offices why they work that way. And no one knew. Everyone said
00:08:58it was comfortable or something like that. So it's interesting. Your question is, don't they know?
00:09:03And the answer is, no, they don't know that it's unhealthy. And they don't know that it's not good
00:09:10to sit that way. And they don't even know why they're sitting that way.
00:09:13What's the problem with the static sitting? Why is that particularly bad for us?
00:09:18Well, I think that's what it comes down to. As I said earlier, that's the only time in your life,
00:09:25aside from maybe a special situation, maybe you're in a cast or something,
00:09:29where you're not using your large muscles. The rest of your day, you're using your large muscles.
00:09:35When you're sleeping, you're using your large muscles. When you're sitting in your office,
00:09:40working on a computer, you're hunched over your desk and your large muscles,
00:09:43your quads and so on, are not engaged for extended periods of time.
00:09:47Hmm. Okay. What is a better way to think about designing a healthy work environment
00:09:53that you're going to be at? Whether you're one person in your
00:09:55spare bedroom or you're part of an office and you get some say in how your office is designed?
00:10:01Well, certainly having a sit-stand desk helps because then it's appropriate and healthy
00:10:08once an hour to stand for a bit, whatever's comfortable for you. Half an hour, 10 minutes
00:10:13would be, is a very healthy thing, getting movement.
00:10:17I was just standing over, however I was standing over the other day, a large financial trading floor
00:10:23in London. It was a huge floor, 1200 seats and it was all open and I was standing with the head of
00:10:29workplace design and we're looking at this, at this space and there's 1200 people there.
00:10:34And I said, oh, so these all have height adjustable desking, right? Yes. She was quite proud of that.
00:10:39I said, you know what would be fun? Let's count how many people are standing.
00:10:45And she said, sure. And so we counted, we counted five people, Chris out of 1200.
00:10:53So it was very interesting. So she, she assured me that more people sit, stand in the morning.
00:10:58So I was like, okay, fine. Yeah, I'm sure.
00:11:01Okay. But so I think a sit-stand desk is very, is a good thing to have. If you, if you use it,
00:11:08the data tells us that unfortunately most people don't use it. So that's, that's, I think that's
00:11:14important. The second, the second thing is, and this gives you a little idea of what my journey was.
00:11:21I couldn't understand why people were hunched over their desk like that. Everyone told me it was,
00:11:25it was comfortable and it's not. And so, because I'd ask, I'd ask a lot of people that question.
00:11:31And then an ergonomist, a friend of mine, I told him the story and he said, Bob,
00:11:35you're asking the wrong question. So I asked my friends, I asked strangers in offices,
00:11:41you know, if there's some, a stranger in an office who's hunched over their desk like that,
00:11:44which is pretty much everybody, I'd go over to them and I'd say, oh, excuse me, that's a cool chair.
00:11:51What kind of chair is that? And that was just to break the ice so I wouldn't look like an idiot
00:11:56asking the next question. And they'd invariably say, oh, I'm not sure. And I'd say, hey, I'm curious.
00:12:01How do you lean back in that chair? Because that's what he told me to ask. How do you lean back in
00:12:06that chair? What I found shocked the hell out of me. What I found was that literally no one,
00:12:13maybe someone in facilities or a professional, but outside of that,
00:12:17no one knew how to lean back in their chair. Everybody said, oh, you know,
00:12:21it's one of these levers here. I have the instructions in the draw or something like that.
00:12:27And I thought, oh my God, this is crazy. That's why people are sitting this way. The chair is locked.
00:12:32Nobody knows how to operate the controls. So it's user error.
00:12:35You can't, I would say design error. Right, right.
00:12:38I'd say design error. No one knows how to. So what do you do? You can't sit bolt upright for
00:12:42very long. Your muscles start getting tired really quickly and you very quickly go into this posture
00:12:48and it's perfectly natural or your chair is unlocked. It flops back, doesn't support you.
00:12:52You get in that posture even sooner. So I thought, wow, that's the problem. The complexity of chairs,
00:12:58I think is a considerable contributor to the, to the issue of lack of movement because you can't move.
00:13:05Your chair is locked. You're locked as well. Okay. So sit, stand desk or have another environment
00:13:11that you could work. If you don't want to get a sit, stand desk, presumably you could go from your
00:13:15seated desk to the kitchen counter or to like we've got in here. We've got this sort of high bench that
00:13:21allows people to go to, if they don't want to adjust their desk or let's say that we didn't have them,
00:13:25even though that we do. Second thing, get a chair, which is sufficiently simple that you understand how
00:13:30to use it. Right. Right. Okay. What else? What are we thinking about with regards to head angle,
00:13:36arm angle, hands, eye positions, stuff like that? Well, all that stuff is important. Your, your eyes
00:13:44should be approximately level with the top third of your monitor, roughly. Right. You don't, you don't
00:13:51want, you don't want it to be looking, you don't want to look down. You certainly don't want to look
00:13:55up because that can cause neck issues. You, you, it's natural for your eyes to look slightly down. So
00:14:01your eyes should be level with the top third of your monitor, even on the top line of the text on your
00:14:07monitor. And other than that, you want, you want to move. You should, it's, it's healthy to, you know,
00:14:13if you, if you have a document you want to read, don't read it like this. Lean, lean. And by the way,
00:14:19it's natural to lean back and read a document like this. Grab, if you want to have a phone call,
00:14:25back in the old days, we would, we would go like this, but now lean back and have a chat. Some, if someone
00:14:30says, oh, hey, did you see what happened in San Francisco yesterday? It's natural to say, no, what
00:14:38happened in San Francisco? And, and chat like that. It's natural to do that. But the problem is if you
00:14:44have to operate controls to, to do those things, you won't move. And that's what I recognized back in the,
00:14:50in the nineties, because I was always obsessed with this. And I asked all these people,
00:14:53these questions. I I've asked hundreds of people, Hey, how do you lean back in your chair?
00:14:59And, and no one could answer it. And so that goes to my journey just to tell you,
00:15:04I figured, all right, we were obsessed at human scale. We're always obsessed with simplicity.
00:15:09We designed the first keyboard support where you put your keyboard on a platform and it's on your,
00:15:13basically on your lap, uh, where you just put it where you want it. And it stays there.
00:15:18Historically, you'd have to undo a knob and move it and tighten the knob down
00:15:21and the knob would be hidden under the board. So you couldn't see it. So we came up with a,
00:15:25actually a designer, uh, George Malayos, who we hired, figured it out, which is a whole separate
00:15:31story, but quite interesting sort of a separate, uh, where you just put it where you want it stays
00:15:34there like magic. So we became the market, the market leader by far in that category. Same with
00:15:39monitor arms. Uh, we designed an arm with roller bearings, so you could move it with one hand
00:15:43instead of wrestling with it with two and so on. And so, uh, I was always obsessed with, with simplicity.
00:15:51And then I thought, I always thought chairs were furniture. And then I realized when after asking
00:15:58all these folks, this question that a chair is actually an ergonomic device, more than a piece
00:16:04of furniture, a desk chair is. And so, uh, we've, we've, we, uh, I figured this is perfect. We'll design
00:16:11a chair that's easy, easy to use and, um, we'll solve all these problems, make people work in a
00:16:18health, people work in a healthier way. They can move from one position to another. It'd be great.
00:16:23Uh, how hard can it be? And of course it turned out to be really, really hard.
00:16:27You supplied Obama with his chair, right? That he used in office for a good one.
00:16:32He apparently bought a chair from us. I didn't know that until I saw a picture of him on TV one
00:16:37day when he was doing an ad, I think, uh, and in his home office, he's, he sits in a freedom headrest.
00:16:44Uh, so a huge number of world leaders, business leaders sit in freedom headrest and it's none of
00:16:51our doing. I wish I could say we were sharp and smart enough to figure that out how we got them to get
00:16:56our chairs, but that people just, just figured it out by themselves, which is kind of cool.
00:17:00You know, when I saw it, I understand freedom. You don't need to be overcomplicated in the chair,
00:17:05et cetera. I assumed wrongly when I first saw it, that you'd named the freedom chair
00:17:10after the fact that Obama used it. No, no, no.
00:17:12You know, as in the freedom chair. Yeah. We came out, we, we launched the freedom
00:17:16chair in 99 when Bill Clinton was in the office. Okay. Yeah. That would have maybe been called
00:17:21a different kind of chair. A quick aside. There is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first
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00:18:39slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Columbia University study that I came across
00:18:48found that people who took a slow five minute walk every 30 minutes experienced an almost 60%
00:18:53reduction in blood sugar spikes after eating and even just one minute of movement every 30 minutes
00:18:58lowered blood pressure. This is all just playing into your move. We've always believed in movement,
00:19:05getting, allowing people to move. If you allow people to move, they move. It's natural for people
00:19:10who don't like to sit perfectly still. If you give them the freedom, if you will, to move, they'll move.
00:19:16And that's what we do with chairs. After many years, I wasn't able to find a designer who had any idea
00:19:25what I was talking about when I said we need a chair that's easy to use so people can move without
00:19:29thinking too hard about it. And no one really had an idea about that. What are the most common posture
00:19:35myths that you see? Well, the one myth is that there are postures that are good and you should stick with
00:19:44that. It's not about posture. It's about movement. You can pick any posture you want. Well, that's not
00:19:53really true. You want to move from one posture to another. That's the most important thing you can do.
00:20:00Posture-wise, leaning forward like this and bending your spine forward like that is
00:20:06one of the worst things you can do for musculoskeletal health, for your shoulders,
00:20:11your neck, obviously your spine. You don't want to be in that posture. There's more stress on the
00:20:17spine if you do that than almost any other posture. Sitting upright is much better, but not great,
00:20:25because now when you're perfectly upright all of your weight, of course, goes right down your body
00:20:31and fully loads your spine right into your sitting bones. What I will say is watch what happens when
00:20:37you lean back. Now your weight is distributed to the backrest of the chair and not so much straight
00:20:45down your spine. So the more you lean back, the less stress you have on your spine. If you lean back
00:20:51enough, you'll be laying on a bed and you have almost no stress on your spine. So there's a famous quote by
00:20:56Niels Differen who designed our chairs that, I forget exactly, but it came to the point where he said,
00:21:04but the best chair is a bed, which is ridiculous because it's not a chair, it's a bed.
00:21:11But he was pointing out that the more you recline, the less stress there is on your spine.
00:21:17Hmm. Well, maybe that would, I don't know whether people have developed bed desks,
00:21:21but I imagine that. Oh, they don't worry. They have plenty of those. Yeah.
00:21:25Okay. Yeah. Very good. Very good. I'm sure. I'm not sure those are so great for either.
00:21:29I'm not going to take off. Um, so is most posture advice nonsense then if it's not talking about
00:21:36just keep moving? No, no. I mean, you, no, they're not, it's not just nonsense. I mean,
00:21:41hunching forward like this is something you should avoid, uh, for sure. Uh, there's a number of things
00:21:47that you should avoid. Leaning back is, is good. The more you lean back, the better. I would, I, I,
00:21:53I would say just be natural. And, and I think it's very natural to lean back and, you know, do a zoom
00:22:01call leaning back rather than you don't want to, you typically wouldn't do a zoom call leaning forward.
00:22:06How much of human behavior is dictated by the environment versus discipline? Do you think that
00:22:12environment shaped behavior more than willpower does? Well, everyone have a different opinion on
00:22:16that, Chris, of course, I believe very strongly that environment drives behavior. Um, I, I don't think,
00:22:23I don't think many of us are, are truly disciplined day to day. Some people are, it's good to be
00:22:30disciplined. I try to be disciplined. Sometimes I'm disciplined, sometimes I'm not, but, but if you have
00:22:36the right environment that can drive the right behavior. How so? Well, a chair, uh, if you have
00:22:43a chair, a traditional chair, if you look at the internet and you see all these chairs for sale,
00:22:47they all have locks on them. So you can lock them in place. They all have knobs to adjust the reclined
00:22:53tension on the backrest. They all have all these manual controls. If you are truly disciplined,
00:22:59you would, you could operate these controls. So to lean back in a traditional chair, the chairs you
00:23:03see on the internet for sale, if you wanted to lean back, say, say you got a phone call and you want to
00:23:08chat with somebody, you first lean forward, get all your weight off the backrest because there's a safety
00:23:14lock on all chairs. There has to be because the tension might be set incorrectly. Then while you're
00:23:19leaning forward, you reach back and operate a control, a knob or a lever and release it. And then you
00:23:24could lean back and then take your call or read a document. And then to sit up, you do the same thing
00:23:29in reverse, weight forward, click the, uh, the control back where it started. You, if you were truly
00:23:36disciplined, you could do that regularly and get all the movement you need. But the data, the data
00:23:43tells us, and just pure observation tells us that no one does that. So discipline or no discipline, no one's doing it.
00:23:51But if you sit in a chair that, that, that allows you to move freely, it's, it's very common. We see,
00:23:58we see people lean back and chat, lean back, read a document, sit up and work on the computer and, and move.
00:24:05Getting the obstacles of movement out of the way is the, is the key to the whole thing.
00:24:08What does that do to productivity, efficiency, mood?
00:24:13Well, it's obviously, I haven't seen any hard data on, on that because there's not a lot of chairs
00:24:18that do that. I mean, we pioneered that whole concept. We, I say we, with our designer, Neil's
00:24:23different, a brilliant designer, the last of the mid-century modernist. We were very blessed
00:24:28to work with him for 16 years, uh, until he passed away. Um, it's, um, there's, there's no hard day.
00:24:37There is some data we've, we've got, there's a couple of studies out there that have said that if
00:24:42you, the simpler a chair is to use the, the fewer musculoskeletal, um, incidents you have.
00:24:50Um, I haven't seen anything on mood, but people are, are, say they're more comfortable and there's,
00:24:55there's fewer musculoskeletal injuries.
00:24:57Hmm. Well, I have to assume physical discomfort degrades cognitive performance.
00:25:02If you were trying to work and I just kept nipping the back of your calf the entire time,
00:25:05I didn't think I'd be able to get that much work done. And there's small insults like that,
00:25:09that happen all the time. I mean, I think about some of the places that I've worked back in the day,
00:25:15like some of the old chairs that we would have had in our office when I was running nightclubs,
00:25:18and we would get something at Facebook marketplace or cafes that I've worked at. I mean, some
00:25:25European cafe with my laptop out on a wrought iron outdoor, you know, having a wonderful cappuccino
00:25:33or an espresso or something like that. And I'm sat on something that looks like it was made to be the
00:25:37front gate of a British, British house. Yeah. No, that's not, that's going to be distracting,
00:25:43but also if you're sitting in one posture, I think you don't, your blood flow is less,
00:25:46your, your, when you don't move, your, your, your, your blood flow slows down.
00:25:50Thought, thought on that. So there's, there's all of those things.
00:25:53If you're in an uncomfortable seat, it might cause you to move more.
00:25:56There you go. So I wonder if some seats that are uncomfortable would increase your discomfort,
00:26:02but also increase your movement. So maybe it would be better for you from a cardiovascular
00:26:07standpoint than it would be to be in a comfortable, but locked chair.
00:26:11Yeah. Well, true, except, except that it'll change. You, you might move less, but you might move,
00:26:18you might move more, but you might move more in a really awkward posture, like hunched forward.
00:26:22Ah, right.
00:26:22If you can't, if you can't lean back. I don't know. I haven't seen that one.
00:26:26Yeah. But basically you want to allow people to move. You want to get rid of those obstacles.
00:26:30Uh, and, and you want to encourage, encourage people to move, but again, by getting rid of these
00:26:35obstacles in, in, in, in our chairs, you can just move from one position to another without thinking
00:26:40about it. If you have a height adjustable desk that takes discipline, you have to say, all right,
00:26:45I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to stand up every once an hour for 10 minutes and, and that's it.
00:26:51You know, it would be fun. It would be to make a sit stand desk that you could put a timer on.
00:26:56Well, no, that's very interesting you say that.
00:26:58You're working, it's like, fuck, damn it, damn it.
00:27:00Well, we're, we're, we're, yeah, it's interesting. So we're working on a, on a sit stand desk is a,
00:27:07they're all kind of the same. It's a bit of a commodity. You push a button, it goes up,
00:27:11but we're working on a new handset that we'll release later in the year that actually, um,
00:27:16it'll keep track of how much time you spend standing. And you can even set a goal. I want
00:27:20to stand, I want to stand for, I don't know. Automate it.
00:27:2350 minutes. Bob, I'm telling you. 50 minutes.
00:27:25Automate it, automate that thing. If you automate that sucker and someone's in the middle of working
00:27:30away and they're sat down and it just, the desk starts rising, guess what? You're going up with it.
00:27:34You know what I mean? You can put it in hardcore mode and there's nothing that you can do.
00:27:37Like you're in the middle of a call, you're desperately trying to sign some documents that are now at head
00:27:40higher. I'm telling you. I like it.
00:27:42That's this, that's this. Hey, bring me on the table.
00:27:44That's good. Write, write that one down.
00:27:45Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Um, so I think about, you know, the, how good design can remove the need
00:27:50for willpower. Um, you can't eat the cookies that aren't in your house. You know, if you're trying
00:27:54to avoid snacking late at night, you should. Oh, when you said that, I was looking for the cookies.
00:27:59I'm afraid not. Sorry. Uh, but that we've got a lot of stimulants. I can give you those. Um,
00:28:06yeah, making things, making the thing that you want to do as easy as possible,
00:28:11right? It just has to be the first stage of, of everything when it comes to designing your
00:28:15environment. Hey, do you want to spend less time on your phone? Put it outside of the room. If you
00:28:20don't want to be on your phone when you're at work, put it outside of the room. And I guess
00:28:22the problem now is there was already even 30 years ago before social media and before the internet
00:28:29being as ubiquitous as it is now, there was already things that could distract you. There's sort of
00:28:34inherent just human distracted. Oh, that's something going on outside. Or somebody comes in and has a
00:28:38talk with me or this phone call or whatever. And now after that, you've got to think, okay,
00:28:43well, I want to design my environment so that I'm not too distracted. Maybe I'm going to, uh, have
00:28:48curtains that I can draw in front of me so that when people walk past, I'm not going to get
00:28:51distracted by that. Or maybe I'm going to look out at a, uh, window so that I get a little bit more
00:28:55light coming into my eyes. That's probably good for eye health, et cetera, et cetera. But you don't
00:28:59just have to design your physical environment. Now you have to think about your digital environment.
00:29:03So now you need to use app blockers and screen time apps, and you need to have different devices
00:29:07in different locations. The world is becoming incredibly complex, Chris. You're absolutely right.
00:29:12Yes. Yeah. It's getting worse and worse and worse. This episode is brought to you by
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00:30:11Talk to me about eye health because this is something, kind of an unseen challenge. Actually,
00:30:16Gerry, can you ask Chad what the rates of eye problems are over time? Are they getting worse due to screen
00:30:26news? Is there any data around that? That'd be great to find out. Thank you to our partner,
00:30:30ChatGPT.
00:30:31David Pérez: The interesting thing, what you said though, is that the world is becoming more
00:30:37complex. We're dealing with software on phones, software on computers. And yet, we have chairs.
00:30:46Most companies, when they get chairs, and most individuals when they get chairs,
00:30:51they teach people how to use their chairs, how to operate these knobs and levers. I think that's
00:30:57totally wrong. I think it's super important that people, as the world becomes more complex,
00:31:03things become simpler. And chairs and things like that work for you automatically.
00:31:08David Pérez: Look at that. So myopia rates have been increasing globally,
00:31:10especially in children and young adults. Some projections suggest 40 to 50% of the world may
00:31:15be myopic by 2050. Large meta-analysis of 335,000 people. Every hour a day of screen time increase
00:31:23is around 21% higher odds of myopia. And risk rises sharply between one to four hours a day,
00:31:30almost doubles by the time you get to four hours. This is one of the strongest over time findings.
00:31:34The exposure to screens has increased. Myopia prevalence has risen in parallel, especially in kids.
00:31:40Go down a bit more for me. Jared. Okay, dry eyes. I've seen that one before. Keep going.
00:31:44David Pérez: It's debated. Myopia. Screens themselves may not be the only cause reduced
00:31:50outdoor time near work. Anything up close, just not screen. Yeah, I suppose if you...
00:31:56Unless there's something special about screens, if you just spent a ton of time
00:31:59reading something at distance, screens are particularly harmful because they replace outdoor exposure,
00:32:04which protect eye development and the overtime pattern. So yeah, massive increase in daily screen
00:32:09time. Parallel rise in myopia in the 2000s to the 2020s in the smartphone.
00:32:14David Pérez: Less than an hour a day near baseline risk, one to three hours a day noticeable increase,
00:32:18and four plus hours a day, sharply higher risk, especially for myopia. Yes, eye problems have
00:32:23increased. What do we do about this?
00:32:25Mark Leary: That's not my area, Chris. I'm sorry.
00:32:29David Pérez: Well, I've got...
00:32:30Mark Leary: It's a huge issue, but it's not something that we've addressed.
00:32:34David Pérez: Okay. Well, I've got... The only thing that I know from this, which was episode 20 or
00:32:39something, you'll be episode 1120. I'm really digging into the archives. So there's something
00:32:44called interesting called the 20-20-20 rule. So for 20 minutes, every 20 minutes, for 20 seconds,
00:32:51you look at something that is more than 20 feet away. And unfortunately, what I realized, because I was
00:32:56doing the Pomodoro technique at the same time, so that's 25 minutes on with a five minute break,
00:33:01doing blocks of that, and then a bigger break, and then coming back. And then also, I was thinking about
00:33:07needing to sit and stand at the same time. So I've got this endless fucking spirograph of intersecting
00:33:13timings that I need to do. I've got this endless amount of different intervals. Okay, well, 20 minutes,
00:33:17I need to look at something. And in five minutes, I'll take a break. And then it becomes a little
00:33:23bit difficult to try and do this. And it's what we said before, that humans maybe aren't meant to do
00:33:29this kind of work. And what Ergonomics is trying to do is to create a good solution to an artificial
00:33:37problem. And yeah, at my most complex, at my sort of most sterile and ridiculous, the office I was
00:33:47working in in Newcastle, we all had different bings and bongs and timers going off on our phones to
00:33:51remind us that we needed to stand up or go for a walk or remind us that we needed to look at something
00:33:54that was more than 20 feet away. So I'm coming in when I first start the podcast, I'm coming into this
00:33:59office filled with 18, 19, 20 year old kids. And I'm going, I just learned about the David Allen
00:34:05getting things done. I've just done Tiago Forte's external brain. I've got to show you this notion,
00:34:11this Evernote template. Let me show you how you can capture all of the thoughts that you have.
00:34:15And these kids are made of rubber and magic. They don't care. They don't care what I've got to say.
00:34:19No, that's right. They didn't care at all. Kids don't care. They're indestructible.
00:34:24Correct. They're literally indestructible. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm trying to do it.
00:34:27But after a while though, the boss says that he's doing it. So maybe it'll be good for me to do.
00:34:31And before I knew it, I was like, it was so over complex. But at the same time, if you don't do it,
00:34:38then yeah, you end up with this situation where you think, I mean, I was talking to, I had a streamer
00:34:42sat here, Nick Nocturnal, great musician streamer. And he was saying to me that there was days
00:34:49that he would work on music because he would write music live. And there would be days where
00:34:54he wouldn't see sun. He wouldn't see the sunlight. He wouldn't go outside at all during the day.
00:35:00And that's just, you know, on one hand, very disciplined, like really grinding. He's
00:35:07incredibly successful. He's done really great. And now he's got this house with his wife and
00:35:11everything's going wonderful. You think, look at the benefits that this world that you've constructed has
00:35:17afforded you, but then also all of the costs are hidden. You know, the costs of your eyes degrading
00:35:24over time, the cost of your cardiovascular degradation, et cetera, et cetera.
00:35:27Yeah. That's an interesting point. Most people work indoors all the time under artificial light.
00:35:35That's not much different than working in darkness. Artificial light generally is very far removed from
00:35:42from real sunlight. So people work indoors. It has huge health implications.
00:35:48The main problem with it is sleep. There's clear data on this. If you work outdoors,
00:35:57you're healthier, you live longer, primarily because you sleep better.
00:36:02No way. That's what the link is. There's nothing special about the al fresco thing,
00:36:07or maybe there is a little bit. There may be some
00:36:09other things too, but the sleep thing is hugely important. It's hugely important. So what happens is,
00:36:15if you work outdoors, you know, under sunlight, sunlight, blue light, it's not blue, but they call it blue
00:36:23light. It's a very high-spectrum light. Suppresses melatonin, suppresses your body's production of
00:36:32melatonin. And there's, you can see, I've seen many graphs on this. So the graph of melatonin production
00:36:38will be a flat line, really low, right? But then toward the evening, actually, if you stay outside,
00:36:46the sun goes down and all of a sudden the sky becomes very warm. During the middle of the day,
00:36:51it's very cool lights, we call it blue light. In the evening, it goes down, it's very warm light,
00:36:56very orangey, right? That light and actually darkness allows you to produce, it stops the suppression of
00:37:07melatonin and allows melatonin to be produced at a rapid rate. So now your body, it's suppressed
00:37:14melatonin production all day. Now it's kind of free, and it produces a ton of melatonin.
00:37:20And melatonin puts you to sleep, allows you to sleep well. But if you're indoors, your body has
00:37:26no melatonin suppression. So the graphs will show melatonin production, for someone working indoors,
00:37:32quite high. By the way, that affects your alertness and all, right? And then in the evening, when it
00:37:40normally spikes up, it'll bounce up a little maybe, but barely. So you have the same melatonin production
00:37:47during the day as at night, maybe a little different, but not much different. And so people
00:37:52struggle to sleep. I met with an architect years ago, and he said, "Oh, I love this building." He just
00:37:58moved into a new office. He said, "I have more energy now. I'm more alert. I just love this space."
00:38:07And I was like, "What was your old space like?" "Oh, you know, I had a cubicle, whatever."
00:38:12And then he's, "Let me show you my office." And his office was all 100% glass, floor to ceiling,
00:38:19facing south. And the sun was like coming right in. And it felt amazing. He felt amazing because he was
00:38:25in, he was essentially working outdoors. My best friend was working in Dubai on his
00:38:30business. And we've got the guy actually who's in that photo over there, the dude with the beard
00:38:36in the rough. So Alex kind of popular. He's been around for a while.
00:38:40Yeah, we're aristocracy. He kind of popularized, essentially working in a cupboard. You can
00:38:48glorify it however you want, but it's a cupboard. You can call it a focus chamber or whatever. But it
00:38:52was a wardrobe, a very, very large wardrobe. And there would be no windows, no nothing. And he'd be
00:38:58completely undistracted, pair of noise-canceling headphones on, and he would work. And this was
00:39:06what worked for him. So George, my friend, decided, he's like, "I'm going to follow what Homozi does."
00:39:12He says that, he says that working in a, essentially in a cupboard's fine. And in Dubai,
00:39:16they have these, they're kind of like servants' quarters for if you have a maid. So in these houses
00:39:21that aren't even that big, but they're just kind of common because of the sort of expats that live
00:39:24there. You've got the smaller bedroom with the bathroom on side. He's like, "Hey, this is a mini,
00:39:30it's a one-person office. It's like a studio office." And he went in and he noticed over time,
00:39:36in the space of three months or so of working in there, he's like, "I'm really moody. I'm not
00:39:42sleeping that good. I'm not being that productive. And I kind of don't like my life." He's like,
00:39:46"Hang on a second. I locked myself in a room for hours every day." And then thought, "Okay,
00:39:53maybe it works. There's a certain type of personality that this does work for." And his wasn't that.
00:39:59So yeah, I get it. One of the favorite things I've had since moving to America and especially
00:40:03living in a city in a state that's got way better weather is the opportunity to just work in different
00:40:09places. I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to get up and go outside." And if I've got a little table outside
00:40:13that I can work at, that's lovely. But in the UK, what am I going to do? Okay, I can work in front of
00:40:19a window, but for the most part, I'm just going to be covered in rain. If I want to go outside and work,
00:40:23it's going to be raining on me. So yeah, the idea of going al fresco and that difference.
00:40:29That's the other thing as well, actually. On an evening time, originally, people thought that
00:40:34looking at blue light from screens was what caused the suppression of melatonin that meant that people
00:40:40weren't sleeping as much. There's some new research I've looked at. Jerry, can you look at this? What is
00:40:44the latest research on screen use at night affecting melatonin versus social media and the mindset
00:40:56people are in impacting their sleep? So at least what I saw was that it's way less to do with
00:41:04the light and way more to do with the cognitive environment that you're in. You're in this
00:41:11hyper-stimulated, open-loop, probably agitated, tribal soup. And then you go, "Okay, Bren, time to turn
00:41:22off." And that's people's bedtime routines. Right. Well, their feed is stuff such that it gets them
00:41:29stimulated. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in your feed. So if you're a right-wing extremist, you're seeing all
00:41:36this crazy stuff that's happening and it gets you all worked up. Yeah, of course. Real-world effects
00:41:41from screens are smaller than people think. A large study of 122,000 people. Screen use before bed
00:41:46linked to slightly less sleep of around five to eight minutes and worse perceived quality. Some
00:41:51reviews find minimal or overstated effects of the screen itself. Okay, go down.
00:41:56Bigger takeaway, behavior. Here it is. Psychological stimulation, doom-scrolling, delayed bedtime,
00:42:02cognitive and emotional arousal, notifications interrupting sleep. Several studies emphasize
00:42:07that content and engagement are often more important than the light itself. Interactive
00:42:11or emotionally-engaging screen use has a longer, stronger sleep effect than passive viewing.
00:42:17Timing, context, matter. Yeah, I mean, obviously.
00:42:20Yeah, that makes sense. I think that makes sense. You know, also don't forget, chances are you're
00:42:24looking at your phone and your phone is a fairly small generator of light and it's not so big
00:42:31compared to your whole room. So maybe that's part of it too. Maybe if you're looking at a 34-inch
00:42:35display, if you're swiping on Instagram on your widescreen TV. Might be a little different, yeah.
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00:43:46Have you looked at anything to do with like flux and apps like that that kill some of the blue light
00:43:53from screens? Yeah, those have been around for a long time. Everybody has access to that. And I don't
00:43:58know, I haven't seen any data on it, but it's probably a good thing. And blue light isn't great,
00:44:03but this is pointing out that blue light from your screen isn't that big a deal.
00:44:07Not for the melatonin. I wonder whether there's something else that's going on,
00:44:11the dryness in the eyes. But again, maybe academics since the beginning of time,
00:44:16you know, dusty librarians that have been looking at books up close. Perhaps they have also been
00:44:20suffering with this thing too. I don't know. Maybe there's something more active because you're
00:44:24still reading on a screen. I don't know. I can't look at it.
00:44:27I'm sure there's issues there. I mean, one of the real big problems with your eyes,
00:44:34if you were to develop glaucoma or one of these things that can cause the long-term loss of vision,
00:44:41I just know this because my automatrist keeps telling me about it, is exposure to sunlight without
00:44:46protection. When you're out during the day and the sun is very bright, it's very damaging to your eyes.
00:44:51Everyone I'm talking to says wear sunglasses. So I'm very careful to wear sunglasses. In fact,
00:44:58they can see the damage when they look at your eyes when you go for an eye exam and they'll say,
00:45:02oh, that's sun damage. So I think it's really important to wear sunglasses, certainly outside.
00:45:07But again, that's not my area of expertise.
00:45:09When you look at the work environments for men and women,
00:45:13are there any sex differences for what men need and what women need? Have you split this off by gender?
00:45:19Well, no. When it comes to gender, we look at size and we think it's really important.
00:45:29A lot of products are designed by men and essentially for men. It's kind of weird,
00:45:38but you could look at a chair and say, that's a very masculine chair.
00:45:41You mean by color?
00:45:45No, just the way it looks, the way it's designed. It's designed in a rough, kind of heavy way,
00:45:54whereas other chairs you would say are more neutral. We are very careful to design everything
00:45:59we do in a neutral way. Is that aesthetic or functionality?
00:46:04It's both, of course. Aesthetic for sure, but function as well.
00:46:09Jared actually optimizes for a feminine chair, don't you?
00:46:12Yes.
00:46:13At any point, you've got to try and offset that mustache.
00:46:16It's interesting. When you think about it, how do we design things for humans?
00:46:21We take the average female, we take the average male, we average them together to get the average
00:46:26human and we design for the average human. On the whole planet, there isn't a perfectly average human,
00:46:31so we're designing for this mythical being. That's problematic in itself because the further you
00:46:37happen to be from being perfectly average, the worse your experience is with that particular product.
00:46:43That's one of the things that we think a lot about. Neil's different who designed our chairs. It was
00:46:48quite brilliant. He designed the chairs so that basically, the reason he doesn't have all the
00:46:55knobs and levers, isn't it? Simple. Every chair has a spring under it and a knob to control the
00:47:00force on the spring and a lock to lock it. He got rid of all that. He got rid of the spring,
00:47:04he got rid of everything, and he just used the weight of whoever happens to sit on the chair
00:47:09as a counterbalance. The linkage just transfers a percentage of the weight to the backrest as a
00:47:14counterforce. So that means if a light woman, a 20 percentile female sits in it, in the chair,
00:47:20it uses her weight to create the recline force for her specifically. If a 90 percentile male sits in
00:47:28it, it does the same for that person. That's what I think is really important when it comes to gender.
00:47:38Men and women are very different. The average male and the average female are very different.
00:47:41You know that study around the fighter pilot seats, the sort of thing that you're referencing
00:47:48there that if you try and design for the average, you design for nobody. So I think it was US government
00:47:53or US military were trying to work out what proportions a particular fighter jet seat needed
00:48:00to be. And they put millions and millions of dollars into aggregating all of this stuff. And it turned out
00:48:05that zero fighter pilots could get into it. None. They designed for average, which meant they'd actually
00:48:11designed for nobody. Right. That's how everything is designed. It's designed for the average. And
00:48:18that's a problem. A famous critique of design wrote an article about one of Neil's first chairs,
00:48:27our Liberty chair. The Liberty chair, I'll tell you the story really quickly. It's kind of interesting.
00:48:35Back in 2000, we had launched our freedom chair. This chair we're sitting in, which was very successful.
00:48:41It's self-adjusting and all that. But at that time, the Aeron chair from Herman Miller,
00:48:47you've seen that chair. It's the most successful chair in the history of chairs,
00:48:51designed by Bill Stump, Don Chadwick, two great designers. So it was the first mesh chair. And mesh is
00:48:59nice because it breathes. It doesn't, it's on an insulator and uses less materials. It's better for
00:49:05the environment and all that. So every new chair that came out back then was a mesh chair. And so
00:49:12like everyone, and so we had just done the freedom chair. So I went to Neil's. I said, Neil's, I've been
00:49:17thinking about this and it's pretty clear what we need to design. I've, I've have a vision of the future.
00:49:22We should design a mesh chair. And Neil's said, Bob, that's a genius idea. Another genius idea. You're,
00:49:29you're brilliant. Actually, that's not what he said. He said, Bob, that's one of the stupidest ideas I've
00:49:34ever heard. Something along those lines. He said, number one, everybody's doing a mesh chair to copy
00:49:39the Aeron chair. That's a good reason not to do it. But he said, secondly, the way you make a mesh
00:49:43chair is you take stretch mesh, you attach it to a frame. So you can't control the shape like you can
00:49:48with molded foam, like on this chair. Furthermore, you stretch mesh and it won't wrinkle. So when
00:49:54someone sits in it, it gives. So you need a lumbar support. And that's one more thing you have to
00:49:58adjust. Then no one will adjust. So you're gonna make the whole situation worse. Anyway, funny story.
00:50:03So he called me. I said, I said, fine. And so I called me a few weeks later or a month later, maybe.
00:50:09And he said, I solved the mesh problem. Come on up to the studio. He lived in Connecticut. I live in New York.
00:50:14So I drive up there all the time, which is a lot of fun. So when I got up there, he had a chair,
00:50:21the freedom chair from the seat down and something new from the seat up. The back of the chair was mesh,
00:50:26but it had three panels of mesh that was shaped funny. And he said, I got an idea from the clothing
00:50:32designers. They use panels of fabric to create a fitted shirt or fitted jacket. He said, I did the
00:50:37same thing with the back of a chair so I can get the shape on. He said, but I can't use stretch mesh.
00:50:43That won't work. So he said, I experimented with very minimal stretch mesh, but super flexible mesh.
00:50:49And he said, when I got the right mix of minimal stretch, high flex, it was interesting that you
00:50:54push a form into that material, the material will fill in the hills and valleys of the form rather
00:50:59than stretch over it because it has nowhere else to go. And conversely, it fills in the hills and valleys
00:51:04of the sitter's back. It takes on the exact shape of the sitter's back as if it was made for that sitter.
00:51:11That's pretty clever. We ended up with two global utility patents from that technology.
00:51:16But what's interesting about it is now this light woman sits in the chair. It uses her body weight
00:51:23to adjust the recline force and takes on the shape of her back as if the chair was made for that person,
00:51:28not for the average person, but for this particular 20 percentile female. If an 80 percentile male sits
00:51:34in and does the same for that individual. So that's a new way of thinking about design that Neil's
00:51:40pioneered, which is pretty cool. It gets away from this average concept.
00:51:45What about saddle stools? I've seen those around a lot. Do you have some in the office? People like those?
00:51:50Yeah, a good saddle stool is great. Neil's developed a saddle stool. In fact,
00:51:55I think he might have been the first to do a saddle stool. And the saddle stool,
00:52:00it's shaped kind of like a saddle or also like a triangle. I was more like a triangle,
00:52:05but it means you basically have one leg over each side of a saddle type thing. And that encourages you
00:52:12to drop your thighs down in front of you. And by dropping your thighs down, it puts your back in a
00:52:19healthy lordotic. It's really hard to sit on a saddle stool with a curved spine. It's like being a
00:52:27question mark or something. Once your thighs drop down, it's really hard to hunch forward and it puts
00:52:32you in a really healthy posture. So those are really, a lot of labs are going to use those and
00:52:37that sort of thing. It's good for individual too, but I think it doesn't encourage you to move though.
00:52:43I think a long-term sitting, you wouldn't want to be in a stool. You'd want to be in a chair.
00:52:47You should see Jared. He's whizzing around the office on his stool all the time. What do you think
00:52:51a biologically aligned workday would look like?
00:52:55What do you mean by that, Chris?
00:52:57Something that's going to maximize somebody's longevity. They've got a normal office job.
00:53:03They've got the stuff that they need to do, but from an ergonomics perspective,
00:53:07from a movement perspective, here's your eight hours. This is what this would look like.
00:53:11Obviously moving. I think if you have a sit-stand desk and you use it,
00:53:16it's really healthy. It's good for your muscles. It's good for longevity. A chair that allows you
00:53:23to move from one position to another without thinking about it. So while you're sitting,
00:53:27you're moving. When you're standing, you're moving. And then encourage people. Again,
00:53:35this takes discipline and only a small number of people are disciplined. You're obviously a very
00:53:40disciplined person, but most people aren't. Go for a walk. Go for a walk around the office and chat with
00:53:46people every couple hours. Hard time. Again, it takes a bit of discipline, but that's really important.
00:53:53Then the other thing about that too, though, is, you know, I always worried. We always worried about
00:53:59people sitting in a healthy way, allowing people to move, sit-stand desk, making sure your monitor
00:54:05is in the right position. Because if your monitor is on the front of your desk,
00:54:10you're not going to lean back too much because you have to be a certain distance away from your monitor
00:54:14to read it. So we think it's really important to have the monitor on an arm. Almost every large
00:54:20company has a monitor arm so you can move the monitor. Just like this microphone is on an arm.
00:54:26This arm is actually very similar to the arms we make for monitors. So those things are really
00:54:33important. And we used to think and continue to think a lot about that. But then I started thinking
00:54:39about other things. I started thinking about all the other things that impact people's health in the
00:54:43office. And one really important thing is indoor air. Indoor air is incredibly unhealthy, as you probably
00:54:51know. And the reason it's unhealthy is we have all this stuff in it. And all this stuff off gas is
00:54:57chemicals and carcinogens. And I had a bit of an epiphany at one point when I started reading about that
00:55:07and reading about how all this stuff off gas is. And I thought that's something that needs to be addressed.
00:55:13And we looked really hard at that. And we lead our business. We lead the business of office furniture
00:55:20and even home furniture in getting rid of the chemistry that off gas is.
00:55:25What's the biggest cause of it? I get the sense, great, that you're not off-gassing from
00:55:30being sat on a seat that's slowly leaking particulates into your brain.
00:55:37What about paint in buildings? What about the stuff that you guys don't know? Do you make carpets?
00:55:44Where is most of this coming? What are the places that people should be looking at as the prime
00:55:47culprits for off-gassing? I mean, carpeting is certainly one. Paint is another. And there's a big
00:55:56movement now. By the way, desking is another. Pretty much every desk is made out of MDF,
00:56:04medium density fiberboard, just ground up sawdust and glued together. All that stuff has formaldehyde in
00:56:12it, a lot of formaldehyde, and that formaldehyde off-gasses. Carpets have all kinds of VOCs and off-gas.
00:56:20There's a big movement now to have ingredients labels on your products.
00:56:28Declare and HPD are the two standard ingredients labels. Just like food labels, there was a big
00:56:33movement, it must have been 30 years ago, to have ingredients labels on food. So now anything you
00:56:40drink or eat has an ingredients label. So you can make a thoughtful decision about, do you want to buy
00:56:47that product and put it in your body? Historically, products that go into your home or office don't
00:56:54have ingredients labels. And there was an article about this a couple of years, probably like 10
00:57:00years ago. And they brought this topic up to one of the largest furniture companies in the world.
00:57:07I won't mention who it is, just not to embarrass them.
00:57:09Do it, throw them under the bus. No, they'll get mad at me. But basically, it doesn't matter who it is.
00:57:17All the large furniture companies in the world, essentially, have fought not to put ingredients
00:57:24labels on their products. So this executive said, and it's quoted in the magazine, he said,
00:57:30"It's ridiculous to put ingredients labels on furniture. Since last time I checked,
00:57:36we didn't eat the furniture." And I thought that was the most self-serving thing you could ever say.
00:57:43We don't eat it, but we breathe it. We breathe it. And that's an issue. So there's a huge movement.
00:57:49Google, for example, Google, Harvard University, a bunch of organizations now have said they won't
00:57:54consider a product for their office or dorm or anything, unless it comes with an ingredients
00:58:03label. It's a Claire HPD label, which is a really important movement. It's happening more and more.
00:58:09Designers are saying they won't spec a product unless it has an ingredients label. And it's pushing
00:58:15folks to do the right thing.
00:58:15I mean, there's enough issues since living in Austin. This country is great, but the building materials
00:58:22that you use are primitive. It's wood. It's timber.
00:58:26Yeah.
00:58:27And it gets wet and hot, wet and hot and wet and hot. And then it gets wet and hot and insulated
00:58:34and contained inside of cavity walls. And it's just a breeding ground for mold.
00:58:38Mold is a big problem. Yeah.
00:58:41It's huge. And that's why we've got these Jasper air filter things. They're everywhere inside of this
00:58:47office because I lived in a house when I first moved out of an Airbnb that I was in. The first
00:58:52house I ever lived in properly in Austin infected me with toxic mold. And I'm still detoxing from there.
00:58:59No, mold. I've heard terrible stories about mold. Mold is very dangerous.
00:59:03It is no joke. And the stupid thing is, I actually feel like it's karmic justice.
00:59:08Because Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter, she whined about mold all the time and we'd be
00:59:15catching up or whatever. And she'd be talking about how we've got into this new house and it's
00:59:18mold and I've got headaches and I'm tired and whatever. And I was like, God, you've got defeated
00:59:23by penicillin. Throw the bread out. Just making jokes. And then sure enough, the universe decided
00:59:29to deliver to me this nut kick from infinity. Just going like, oh, you thought that this was funny? And
00:59:37then sure enough, I got popped at the same thing. And now I'm like, dude, I got to tell you about the
00:59:40mold. It's so horrible. You need to get to filter. So yeah, it's a mold. Mold is serious business.
00:59:46But by the way, other people have had similar experiences with chemistry. Did they breathe PFAS?
00:59:55Formaldehyde. There's tons of examples of people being hospitalized because they breathe too much
01:00:01formaldehyde from flooring they put in. There was a big lawsuit in California a while ago.
01:00:06We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train
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01:01:33Chris Ashenden, who was the founder and still the main shareholder in AG1, Athletic Greens,
01:01:42the multi-billion dollar company, Kiwi. He was in a house that was off-gassing something to do with the
01:01:52paint. And what happens when you are exposed to mold, as you probably know, you get something called
01:01:56SERS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So your system's hypersensitized to being around mold.
01:02:01Then even if you get out of the mold and detox from it, there is a window of time where you're hypersensitive
01:02:08to being exposed to mold again. And Chris basically had the same thing, but for off-gassing.
01:02:15And he went and stayed in, he was basically medical tourism, tourisming his way around the world,
01:02:24trying to find a solution to this and this treatment and that detox and this IV and this blood cleaning.
01:02:29And one of the places that put him up said, "We put you in the brand new, it's the Four Seasons,
01:02:34it's a brand new place." He went in and within half an hour, it was so brand new that it was still
01:02:41pissing tons of paint particles into the… Brand new is the worst. When you walk into a room
01:02:45that's brand new, you can smell that new smell. I'll take something from the 80s, thank you.
01:02:49And you're like, "Ooh, that smells great." Or a new car, "Oh, a new car smell." That smell is
01:02:54basically VOCs filling your lungs with carcinogen. It's a really good case for buying used cars.
01:03:05What you're doing is, you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to let the first 10,000 miles and this person
01:03:10breathe in all of the VOCs. And then once they've got it in their lungs, I can step in." It's
01:03:15like wearing a cricket bat or a baseball bat or whatever. You've got to play it in.
01:03:19Yeah. When I get in my car, I just leave the windows down for the first 15, 20 minutes.
01:03:28Air-conditioned cars are the worst because the windows are up, of course. Down here,
01:03:33everybody has air-conditioned cars probably.
01:03:35Yeah, yeah. That's way too hot.
01:03:36But it's in homes and workplaces too. Formaldehyde is prevalent everywhere. I mean,
01:03:42this is solid wood, but if this wasn't solid wood, it would invariably have formaldehyde in the MDF.
01:03:49I'm very proud of my table.
01:03:52I love solid wood. I love wood.
01:03:54Very, very proud of it.
01:03:55Have you seen the unnecessarily complex base plate that we put in as well?
01:04:00Look at that. Look how sexy that is. I feel like I'm on a galleon ship.
01:04:04I think there's a pretty low probability that even if I lean on this table,
01:04:08that it's going to fall over on me.
01:04:09Yeah, you could imagine if they use this in the WWE, it would kill people.
01:04:13It takes six men to move.
01:04:14Yeah, it did take six men to move. Maybe we had to build the thing in here.
01:04:18Okay, so-
01:04:19But I think this whole topic of breathing healthy air is hugely important.
01:04:28Another advantage of being outside.
01:04:30Being outside is great. Most people can't work outside.
01:04:34And so it's really important.
01:04:36And there's a lot of work being done in that area.
01:04:40And I think there's a lot of work being done by the design community, architects, and so on.
01:04:47And a lot of forward thinking organizations are saying,
01:04:49we'll only consider products that have an ingredients label.
01:04:53At HumanScale, by the way, we pioneered these ingredients labels.
01:04:56We were the first ones to use them.
01:04:58At one point, I think it was around 2018, we had 80% of all the ingredients labels in the whole industry.
01:05:06And we're not that-
01:05:07In one company.
01:05:08What?
01:05:09In one company.
01:05:10In not only one company, but we're not that big.
01:05:12I mean, we have, I don't know, we have 1,500, 1,600 employees.
01:05:16We're not that big.
01:05:17We account for only about 4% or 5% of the whole industry.
01:05:20And we had 80% of all the ingredients labels.
01:05:23Even today, we have about 39% of all the ingredients labels at, say, 4% of the revenue.
01:05:29So we pioneered it.
01:05:33And I think it's important to deliver product to customers that don't have carcinogens in them.
01:05:43Call me crazy for coming up with that.
01:05:44What a radical belief there to say we should deliver products to people that don't kill them more quickly.
01:05:49Right.
01:05:49And we should actually try and encourage them to live in a way that makes them live longer as well.
01:05:53Bob, you're awesome.
01:05:54I love your stuff.
01:05:55Thank you for fueling the country with your furniture.
01:05:58Where should people go to check out more of the things that you're doing?
01:06:02You know, we don't do a lot of online sales, but you can buy our chairs and our products online.
01:06:09So, obviously, humanscale.com.
01:06:12And we have offices.
01:06:13You can go there and see where our showrooms are.
01:06:16Heck yeah.
01:06:17But thank you, Chris.
01:06:17It was really nice talking to you.
01:06:18So thanks for that.
01:06:19Appreciate you, Bob.
01:06:21Bye, everyone.
01:06:23Thank you very much for tuning in.
01:06:25If you enjoyed that episode, another one that I know you love.
01:06:27love, it's just here.
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