Most people think that back pain and low energy and bad posture are discipline problems.
You think that they're design problems.
Why is that?
Yeah, very interesting.
Well, if you look at the data on the population of people around the world, certainly people in the United States, a significant percent of adults in America, for example, have chronic or repeated back pain.
It's a huge problem.
And as you get older, it gets worse and worse.
I think it's clear.
If you look at what people do day to day, you can see quite clearly that there's a cause and effect there.
What's the evidence around sitting in back pain?
You can look at sitting postures.
The most interesting thing about that is you look at postures when people sit.
I study people sitting.
I think it's quite interesting.
There's data on this too.
But if you were to look anywhere in buildings here in Austin, or buildings in Tokyo or anywhere Singapore, anywhere you would see people sitting at their desk, hunched over their desk, their back, probably not even touching the back of their chair, keying on their computer for hours and hours on end.
That's how people sit.
I even at one point I needed a slide for my deck.
So of someone, you know, sitting in that posture.
So I Googled photo of person working on a computer or something like that.
And I got hundreds of pictures.
They were all essentially identical.
People hunched over their decks.
The old C-spine. your spine is now curved forward, which is incredibly, incredibly unhealthy.
And what happens when you lean forward like that is you put more stress on your spine.
But interestingly also, your vertebrae is curved forward.
So each vertebrae comes together on one side and opens up on the other.
So on one side, it's putting pressure on your disc, and the other side, it's opening up the disc.
I can't imagine and in fact I'm pretty sure there's aside from lifting very heavy weights, there's probably nothing worse for your back than doing that.
And that's how everyone sits.
Do you know Dr. Stu McGill?
Do you know who he is?
No, no.
Back mechanic.
So he is the world's number one lower back pain doctor.
And I had a ton of back pain in 2017, 2018.
So 2019.
After I brought him on the podcast, I flew to Gravenhurst, which is two hours north of Toronto.
So I landed in Toronto on my own, rented a car from Toronto Airport, drove two hours north to Gravenhurst to see this guy.
And your back was killing you by the time you were stuck for two hours.
It wasn't assisted at all.
And I get there and it's this sort of crazy wizard of the lower back that I went to go and see with a huge mustache.
It looks like Santa Claus on his off day.
And he said, I don't take private clients.
I'm sort of full with all of this stuff.
But if you come out with me and we go fishing and if you catch a fish, then I'll do your entire consult.
He's quite playful like that.
He's the best.
He's the absolute best.
And I love that guy.
But I remember I was sat with him morning after we'd been together and we were becoming really good friends.
He gets a phone call and it was a woman.
I don't know how she'd got his number, maybe somebody had passed her on and this woman said I'm in so much chronic pain from my lower back that I want to take my own life or I want to find a way to end my life and I'm thinking about doing it tomorrow.
And And I watched this guy who I'd just met and was dealing with me a young dude that had done too much CrossFit and listened to him sort of talk this person back off the ledge of
There are a ton of different interventions.
Do not get surgery.
You don't need to do this.
You don't need to do that.
But this person was, oh, that was it.
Sorry.
No, they'd wanted to do that.
And the only solution they could think of was surgery.
But the outcomes for lower back surgery are usually worse.
People go to a lower baseline afterwards because the complications, the potential complications.
This is what happened with Ronnie Coleman, if you know him.
Mr. Olympia, big, huge, eight-time Mr. Olympia guy.
And now he walks with crutches.
I think he said his pain day-to-day is regularly a nine out of 10 and he's on the maximum legal dose for Percocet or some sort of other opioid.
So yeah, sometimes the medicine is worse than the disease when it comes to that.
It's a very, it's a really tough surgery, long, long recovery periods.
And as you say, you know, often the results aren't so great.
The key to this whole thing is really prevention rather than intervention.
If you have really bad back, you have to intervene and deal with it.
Ideally, you wanna protect your back.
I found some stats around office workers.
Around 80% of office workers sit between four and nine hours daily.
Desk job syndrome now includes back pain, headaches, numbness, and eye strain.
Musculoskeletal disorders account for one third of all workplace injuries in the US, costing employers an estimated 50 billion annually in compensation and lost productivity.
People who predominantly sit at work have a 16 higher risk of all-cause mortality and a 34 higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
And office workers can spend over 10 hours sitting each day.
Some estimates put a typical office worker's total sedated time up to 15 hours a day, when you include commuting and leisure.
And then sleep on top of that.
You're basically going from static to static with brief interludes of movement.
And sleeping is good.
And by the way, laying down in a bed is a very healthy thing to do.
And by the way, the interesting thing when you're sleeping is you move.
You're not... perfectly still by any means.
We all move.
We use our large muscles in moving.
Isn't that hilarious that people might move more when they're asleep than when they're at work?
Oh, much more.
Without a doubt.
Without a doubt, they move more.
Because once you're in a chair and you're you're hunched over on your computer, people don't move.
And you've seen these, you obviously have seen the same stats I have.
People don't move and the data is clear.
And there's all these articles that say that sitting is as bad for you as smoking.
It's one of the worst things you can do.
It's not actually sitting that's problematic.
It's sitting still.
When you sit perfectly still.
It's the only time in your life, pretty much, when you're not using your large muscles at all.
And that's what's causing the vast majority of these health problems, aside from the musculoskeletal issues.
Are humans just not meant to sit at desks then?
You can certainly say that.
Yes, sitting is not the greatest thing in the world.
I think that's true.
However, there are healthier ways to approach sitting, and we need to sit.
And by the way, if we're standing all day—we had a sit-stand desk and we stood all day—
The data on that is clear too.
That's not healthy.
Your blood and your fluids pool in your lower legs.
There's problems with your veins.
Your veins have to return blood to your heart.
That's done with movement, by the way.
The pumping is not really effective anymore.
You move, and that's what moves the blood back to your heart.
And when you're standing up, it has to go fight gravity.
So standing isn't the answer either.
I don't think sitting is going to go away, but I think it's really important that we sit in a healthy way.
And that's what we at Human Scale are obsessed with, of course.
If sitting is the new smoking...
Why has no one's behavior changed?
For one thing, people didn't.
I don't think there's a lot of data behind sittings when you're smoking.
The data shows that the problem isn't really sitting.
The problem is really sitting perfectly still and not moving.
Okay.
Do you think most people who sit, sit still? the vast majority of people sit still.
And they sit still for a number of reasons, but the main reason they sit still.
In fact, this goes back when, before we made chairs, I never understood why everybody was hunched over their desk.
I'd see people wherever I was in the world.
Everyone's the same.
They're all typing, leaning forward on their desk, hunched over the desk.
As I said earlier, their back not even touching the back of the chair.
And that's not comfortable.
I mean, if you were sitting at home watching a video podcast, you wouldn't be on your couch like this, right?
You would lean back and relax.
And so we know it's incredibly unhealthy from a musculoskeletal point of view.
We know it's incredibly unhealthy just from a longevity point of view.
So I used to ask people.
I asked my friends who work that way, I asked strangers in offices why they work that way.
And no one knew.
Everyone said it was comfortable or something like that.
So it's interesting.
Your question is, don't they know?
And the answer is, no, they don't know that it's unhealthy.
And they don't know that it's not good to sit that way.
And they don't even know why they're sitting that way.
What's the problem with the static sitting?
Why is that particularly bad for us?
Well, I think that's what it comes down to.
As I said earlier, that's the only time in your life aside from maybe a special situation where maybe you're in a cast or something where you're not using your large muscles
The rest of your day, you're using your large muscles.
When you're sleeping, you're using your large muscles.
When you're sitting in your office working on a computer, you're hunched over your desk and your large muscles, your quads and so on are not engaged for extended periods of time.
Okay.
What is a better way to think about designing a healthy work environment that you're going to be at?
Whether you're one person in your spare bedroom or you're part of an office and you get some say in how your office is designed.
Well, certainly having a sit-stand desk helps, because then it's appropriate and healthy once an hour to stand for a bit whatever's comfortable for you.
Half an hour, 10 minutes is a very healthy thing, getting movement.
I was just standing over however, I was standing over the other day a large financial trading floor in London.
It was a huge floor, 1200 seats, and it was all open and I was standing with the head of workplace design and we were looking at this space and there's 1200 people there.
And I said, oh, so these all have height-adjustable desking, right?
Yes, she was quite proud of that.
I said, you know what would be fun?
Let's count how many people are standing.
And she said, sure.
And so we counted.
We counted five people, Chris.
Out of?
1,200.
1,200.
So it was very interesting.
So she assured me that more people stand in the morning.
So I was like, okay, fine.
Yeah, I'm sure.
So I think a sit-sand desk is a good thing to have if you use it.
The data tells us that.
Unfortunately, most people don't use it.
So I think that's important.
The second thing is, and this gives you a little idea of what my journey was.
I couldn't understand why people were hunched over their desk like that.
Everyone told me it was comfortable and it's not.
And so, because I'd ask a lot of people that question.
And then an ergonomist, a friend of mine.
I told him the story and he said Bob, you're asking the wrong question.
So I asked my friends, I asked strangers in offices.
If there's a stranger in an office who's hunched over their desk like that, which is pretty much everybody I'd go over to them and I'd say oh, excuse me, that's a cool chair.
What kind of chair is that?
And that was just to break the ice so I wouldn't look like an idiot asking the next question.
And they'd invariably say, oh, I'm not sure.
And I'd say, hey, I'm curious, how do you lean back in that chair?
Because that's what he told me to ask.
How do you lean back in that chair?
What I found shocked the hell out of me.
What I found was that literally no one maybe someone in facilities or a professional, but outside of that no one knew how to lean back in their chair.
Everybody said, oh, you know, it's one of these levers here.
I have the instructions in the draw or something like that.
And I thought, oh my God, this is crazy.
That's why people are sitting this way.
The chair's locked.
Nobody knows how to operate the controls.
So it's user error.
You can't, I would say design error.
Right, right.
I'd say design error.
No one knows how to.
So what do you do?
You can't sit bolt upright for very long.
Your muscles start getting tired really quickly and you very quickly go into this posture.
Mm-hmm.
And it's perfectly natural.
Or your chair's unlocked, it flops back, doesn't support you.
You get in that posture even sooner.
So I thought, wow, that's the problem.
The complexity of chairs, I think, is a considerable contributor to the issue of lack of movement.
Because you can't move.
Your chair's locked, you're locked as well.
Okay, so sit-stand desk or have another environment that you could work.
If you don't want to get a sit-stand desk, presumably you could go from your seated desk to the kitchen counter or to like we've got in here.
We've got this sort of high bench that allows people to go to if they don't want to adjust their desk or let's say that we didn't have them, even though that we do.
Second thing, get a chair which is sufficiently simple that you understand how to use it.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
What else?
What are we thinking about with regards to head angle, arm angle hands, eye position, stuff like that?
Well, all that stuff is important.
Your eyes should be approximately level with the top third of your monitor, roughly.
You don't want to look down.
You certainly don't want to look up because that can cause neck issues.
So it's natural for your eyes to look slightly down.
So your eyes should be level with the top third of your monitor, even on the top line of the text on your monitor.
And other than that, you want to move.
It's healthy to you know, if you have a document you want to read, don't read it like this.
And, by the way, it's natural to lean back and read a document like this.
Grab, if you want to have a phone call.
Back in the old days we would go like this, but Now lean back and have a chat.
If someone says, oh, hey, did you see what happened in San Francisco yesterday?
It's natural to say, no, what happened in San Francisco and chat like that.
It's natural to do that.
But the problem is if you have to operate controls to do those things, you won't move.
And that's what I recognized back in the 90s because I was always obsessed with this.
And I asked all these people these questions.
I've asked hundreds of people, hey, how do you lean back in your chair?
And no one could answer it.
And so that goes to my journey just to tell you.
I figured, all right, we are obsessed at HumanScale, we're always obsessed with simplicity.
We designed the first keyboard support, where you put your keyboard on a platform and it's basically on your lap, where you just put it where you want it and it stays there.
Historically, you'd have to undo a knob and move it and tighten the knob down.
And the knob would be hidden under the board so you couldn't see it.
So we came up with actually a designer, George Meleos, who we hired, figured it out, which is a whole separate story, quite interesting story, but separate, where you just put it where you want and it stays there like magic.
So we became the market leader by far in that category.
Same with monitor arms.
We designed an arm with roller bearings so you could move it with one hand instead of wrestling with it with two, and so on.
And so I was always obsessed with simplicity.
And then I always thought chairs were furniture.
And then I realized, after asking all these folks this question, that a chair is actually an ergonomic device more than a piece of furniture.
A desk chair is.
And so I figured, this is perfect.
We'll design a chair that's easy to use and we'll solve all these problems, make people work in a healthier way.
They can move from one position to another.
It'll be great.
How hard can it be?
And of course it turned out to be really, really hard.
You supplied Obama with his chair, right?
That he used in office for a good one.
He apparently bought a chair from us.
I didn't know that until I saw a picture of him on TV one day when he was doing an ad, I think.
And in his home office, he sits in a freedom headrest.
So a huge number of world leaders, business leaders, sit in freedom headrests and it's none of our doing.
I wish I could say we were sharp and smart enough to figure that out, how we got them to get our chairs.
But people just figured it out by themselves, which is kind of cool.
You know, when I saw it, I understand freedom.
You don't need to be overcomplicated in the chair, etc.
I assumed wrongly when i first saw it that you'd named the freedom chair after the fact that obama used it.
No no no, you know, as in the freedom chair yeah, we came out we, we launched the freedom chair in 99 when bill clinton was in the office.
Okay yeah, that would have maybe been called a different kind of chair if he was A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it.
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Columbia University study that I came across found that people who took a slow five minute walk every 30 minutes experienced normal 60 reduction in blood sugar spikes after eating.
And even just one minute of movement every 30 minutes lowered blood pressure.
This is all just playing into your move.
We've always believed in movement, allowing people to move.
If you allow people to move, they move.
It's natural.
People don't like to sit perfectly still.
If you give them the freedom, if you will, to move, they'll move.
And that's...
That's what we did with chairs.
After many years, I wasn't able to find a designer who had any idea what I was talking about when I said we need a chair that's easy to use so people can move without thinking too hard about it.
And no one really had an idea about that.
What are the most common posture myths that you see?
Well, the one myth is that there are postures that are good and you should stick with that.
It's not about posture.
It's about movement.
Right.
You can pick any posture you want.
Well, that's not really true.
You wanna move from one posture to another.
That's the most important thing you can do.
Posture-wise.
Leaning forward like this and bending your spine forward like that is one of the worst things you can do for musculoskeletal health for your shoulders, Your neck obviously, your spine.
You don't want to be in that posture.
There's more stress on the spine if you do that than almost any other posture.
Sitting upright is much better, but not great.
Because now, when you're perfectly upright, all of your weight of course goes right down your body and fully loads your spine right into your sitting bones.
What I will say is watch what happens when you lean back.
Now your weight is distributed to the backrest of the chair And not so much straight down your spine.
So the more you lean back, the less stress you have on your spine.
If you lean back enough, you'll be laying on a bed and you have almost no stress on your spine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's a famous quote by Niels Differin who designed our chairs that...
I forget exactly, but it came to the point where he said but the best chair is a bed, which is ridiculous because it's not a chair, it's a bed.
But he was pointing out that the more you recline, the less stress there is on your spine.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that would, I don't know whether people have developed bed desks, but I imagine that.
Oh, they don't worry.
They have plenty of those.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Very good.
Very good.
I'm sure.
I'm not sure those are so great for either.
I'm not going to take off.
So is most posture advice nonsense then if it's not talking about just keep moving?
No, no.
I mean, no, they're not just nonsense.
I mean, hunching forward like this is something you should avoid for sure.
There's a number of things that you should avoid.
Leaning back is good.
The more you lean back, the better.
I would say, just be natural and, and i think it's very natural to lean back, and you know, do a zoom call leaning back rather than you don't want to.
You typically wouldn't do a zoom call leaning forward.
How much of human behavior is dictated by the environment versus discipline?
Do you think that environment shaped behavior more than willpower does?
Well, everyone would have a different opinion on that Chris, of course.
I believe very strongly that environment drives behavior.
I don't think many of us are truly disciplined day to day.
Some people are.
It's good to be disciplined.
I try to be disciplined.
Sometimes I'm disciplined, sometimes I'm not.
But if you have the right environment, that can drive the right behavior.
How so?
Well, a chair.
If you have a chair, a traditional chair, if you look at the internet and you see all these chairs for sale, they all have locks on them so you can lock them in place.
They all have knobs to adjust the recline tension on the backrest.
They all have all these manual controls.
If you are truly disciplined, you would you could operate these controls.
So to lean back in a traditional chair the chairs you see on the internet for sale if you wanted to lean back say, let's say you got a phone call, you want to chat with somebody you'd first lean forward, get all your weight off the backrest, because there's a safety lock on all chairs.
There has to be because the tension might be set incorrectly.
Then, while you're leaning forward, you reach back and operate a control, a knob or a lever, and release it.
And then you could lean back and then take your call or read a document.
And then to set up, you do the same thing in reverse.
Wait forward, click the control back where it started.
If you were truly disciplined, you could do that regularly and get all the movement you need.
But the data tells us, and just pure observation tells us, that no one does that.
So discipline or no discipline, no one's doing it.
But if you sit in a chair that allows you to move freely, It's very common.
We see people lean back and chat, lean back and read a document, sit up and work on the computer and move.
Getting the obstacles of movement out of the way is the key to the whole thing.
What does that do to productivity, efficiency, mood?
Well, it's obviously.
I haven't seen any hard data on that because there's not a lot of chairs that do that.
I mean, we pioneered that whole concept.
I say we, with our designer, Neil's different, brilliant. the last of the mid-century modernists.
We were very blessed to work with him for 16 years until he passed away.
It's...
There's no hard data.
There is some data.
There's a couple of studies out there that have said that the simpler a chair is to use, the fewer musculoskeletal incidents you have.
I haven't seen anything on mood, but people say they're more comfortable and there's fewer musculoskeletal injuries.
Well, I have to assume physical discomfort degrades cognitive performance.
If you were trying to work and I just kept nipping the back of your calf the entire time, I don't think I'd be able to get that much work done.
And there's small insults like that that happen.
All the time.
I mean, I think about some of the places that I've worked back in the day, like some of the old chairs that we would have had in our office when I was running nightclubs and we would get something at Facebook Marketplace or cafes that I've worked at.
I mean, some...
European cafe with my laptop out on a wrought iron outdoor.
You know having a wonderful cappuccino or an espresso or something like that.
And I'm sat on something that looks like it was made to be the front gate of a British house.
Yeah.
No, that's going to be distracting.
But also, if you're sitting in one posture, I think your blood flow is less.
When you don't move, your blood flow slows down.
Thought on that.
So there's all of those things.
If you're in an uncomfortable seat, it might cause you to move more.
There you go.
So I wonder if some seats that are uncomfortable would increase your discomfort but also increase your movement.
So maybe it would be better for you from a cardiovascular standpoint than it would be to be in a comfortable but locked chair.
Well, true, except that it'll change.
You might move less, but you might move more, but you might move more in a really awkward posture like hunched forward.
Right.
If you can't lean back.
I don't know.
I haven't seen that one.
But basically, you want to allow people to move.
You want to get rid of those obstacles.
And you want to encourage people to move.
But again, by getting rid of these obstacles in our chairs, you can just move from one position to another without thinking about it.
If you have a height-adjustable desk...
That takes discipline.
You have to say, all right, I'm going to stand up every once an hour for 10 minutes and that's it.
You know what would be fun?
Would be to make a sit-stand desk that you could put a timer on.
Well, no, that's very interesting you say that.
You're working it, it's like, fuck, damn it, damn it.
Well, yeah, it's interesting.
So we're working on a sit-stand desk.
They're all kind of the same.
It's a bit of a commodity.
You push a button, it goes up.
But we're working on a new handset that we'll release later in the year that actually it'll keep track of how much time you spend standing.
And you can even set a goal.
I want to stand for I don't know.
Automate it.
50 minutes.
Bob, I'm telling you.
50 minutes.
Automate it.
Automate that thing.
If you automate that sucker and someone's in the middle of working away and they're sat down and the desk starts writing, guess what?
You're going up with it.
You know what I mean?
You can put it in hardcore mode and there's nothing that you can do.
You're in the middle of a call.
You're desperately trying to sign some documents that are now at head height.
I'm telling you.
I like it.
Hey, bring me on the team.
Write that one down.
Yeah, that's good.
So I think about how good design can remove the need for willpower.
You can't eat the cookies that aren't in your house.
If you're trying to avoid snacking late at night, you should.
When you said that, I was looking for the cookies.
I'm afraid not.
Sorry.
But we've got a lot of stimulants.
I can give you those.
Yeah, making the thing that you want to do as easy as possible, right?
It just has to be the first stage of everything when it comes to designing your environment.
Hey, do you want to spend less time on your phone?
Put it outside of the room.
If you don't want to be on your phone when you're at work, put it outside of the room.
And I guess the problem now is there was already, even 30 years ago, before social media and before the internet being as ubiquitous as it is now, there was already things that could distract you.
This sort of inherent, just human, distracted.
Oh, there's something going on outside, or somebody comes in and has a talk with me, or there's a phone call, or whatever.
And now, after that, you've got to think okay well, I want to design my environment so that I'm not too distracted.
Maybe I'm going to have curtains that I can draw in front of me so that when people walk past I'm not going to get distracted by that.
Or maybe I'm going to look out at a window so that I get a little bit more light coming into my eyes.
That's probably good for eye health, et cetera, et cetera.
But you don't just have to design your physical environment.
Now you have to think about your digital environment.
So now you need to use app blockers and screen time apps and you need to have different devices in different locations.
The world is becoming incredibly complex, Chris.
You're absolutely right.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's getting worse and worse and worse.
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Talk to me about eye health, because this is something, kind of an unseen challenge.
Actually, Gerard, can you ask Chad what the rates of eye problems are over time?
Are they getting worse due to screen use?
Is there any data around that?
That'd be great to find out.
Thank you to my partner, ChatGPT.
The interesting thing, what you said, though, is that the world is becoming more complex.
We're dealing with software on phones, software on computers, and yet we have now, and we have chairs
Most companies when they get chairs and most individuals when they get chairs.
They teach people how to use their chairs, how to operate these knobs and levers.
I think that's totally wrong.
I think it's super important that people, as the world becomes more complex, things become simpler and chairs and things like that work for you automatically.
Look at that.
So myopia rates have been increasing globally, especially in children and young adults.
Some projections suggest 40 to 50% of the world may be myopic by 2050.
Large meta-analysis of 335000 people Every hour.
A day of screen time increase is around a 21 higher odds of myopia and risk rises sharply between one to four hours a day.
Almost doubles by the time you get to four hours.
This is one of the strongest overtime findings.
As exposure to screens has increased, myopia prevalence has risen in parallel, especially in kids.
Go down a bit more for me.
Jared, okay, dry eyes.
I've seen that one before.
Keep going.
It's debated.
Myopia.
Screens themselves may not be the only cause.
Reduced outdoor time near work.
Anything up close, just not screen.
Yeah, I suppose if you...
Unless there's something special about screens if you just spent a ton of time reading something at distance.
Screens are particularly harmful because they replace outdoor exposure, which protect eye development.
The overtime pattern.
So yeah, massive increase in daily screen time, parallel rise in myopia in the 2000s to the 2020s in the smartphone industry.
Less than an hour a day near baseline risk.
One to three hours a day noticeable increase.
And four plus hours a day sharply higher risk, especially for myopia.
Yes, eye problems have increased.
What do we do about this?
That's not my area, Chris.
Sorry.
It's a huge issue, but it's not something that we've addressed.
Okay.
Well, I've got the only thing that I know from this, which was episode 20 or something.
You'll be episode 1,120.
I'm really digging into the archives.
So there's something interesting called the 20-20-20 rule.
So for 20 minutes, every 20 minutes, for 20 seconds, you look at something that is more than 20 feet away.
And unfortunately what I realized because I was doing the Pomodoro technique at the same time.
So that's 25 minutes on with a five-minute break doing blocks of that and then a bigger break and then coming back.
And then also I was thinking about needing to sit and stand at the same time.
So I've got this endless fucking spirograph of intersecting timings that i need to do.
I've got this like endless amount of different interval.
Okay well, it's 20 minutes, i need to look at something, and in five minutes i'll take a break, and then it becomes a little bit difficult to try and do this, and it's what we said before that humans maybe aren't meant to do this kind of work, and what ergonomics is trying to do is to create a good solution to an artificial problem.
And, uh Yeah, at my most complex, at my sort of most sterile and ridiculous, the office that I was working in in Newcastle, we all had different bings and bongs and timers going off on our phones to remind us that we needed to stand up or go for a walk or remind us that we needed to look at something that was more than 20 feet away.
So I'm coming in when I first start the podcast.
I'm coming into this office filled with 18 19, 20 year old kids.
And I'm going, I just learned about the David Allen getting things done.
I've just done Tiago Forte's external brain.
I've got to show you this notion, this Evernote template.
Let me show you how you can capture all of the thoughts that you have.
And these kids are made of rubber and magic.
They don't care.
They don't care what I've got to say.
No, that's right.
They didn't care at all.
No, kids don't care.
They're indestructible.
Correct.
They're literally indestructible.
So I'm like, okay, well, I'm trying to do it.
But after a while, the boss says that he's doing it.
So maybe it'll be good for me to do.
And before I knew it, I was like, so over complex.
But at the same time, if you don't do it, then yeah, you end up with this situation where you think I mean I was talking to.
I had a streamer sat here, Nick Nocturnal, great musician streamer.
And he was saying to me that there was days that he would work on music, because he writes music live.
And there would be days where he wouldn't see sun.
He wouldn't see the sunlight.
He wouldn't go outside at all during the day.
And that's just, on one hand, very disciplined, really grinding.
He's incredibly successful.
He's done really great.
And now he's got this house with his wife and everything's going wonderful.
You think, look at the benefits that this world that you've constructed has afforded you.
But then also all of the costs are hidden.
You know the costs of your eyes degrading over time, the cost of your cardiovascular degradation, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
Most people work indoors all the time under artificial light.
That's not much different than working in darkness.
Artificial light generally is very far removed from real sunlight.
So people work indoors.
It has huge health implications.
The main problem with it is sleep.
There's clear data on this.
If you work outdoors, you're healthier, you live longer, primarily because you sleep better.
No way.
That's what the link is?
There's nothing special about the alfresco thing?
Or maybe there is a little bit?
There may be some other things too.
But they're on the margins compared to when you just sleep at it?
But the sleep thing is hugely important.
It's hugely important.
So what happens is if you work outdoors...
Under sunlight, sunlight, blue light, it's not blue, but they call it blue light.
It's a very high spectrum light suppresses melatonin, suppresses your body's production of melatonin.
And you can see, I've seen many graphs on this.
So the graph of melatonin production will be a flat line, really low, right?
But then Toward the evening.
Actually, if you stay outside, the sun goes down and all of a sudden the sky becomes very warm.
During the middle of the day, it's very cool light.
We call it blue light.
In the evening, it goes down.
It's very warm light, very orangey, right?
That light and actually darkness...
Allows you to produce, stops the suppression of melatonin and allows melatonin to be produced at a rapid rate.
So now your body, it suppressed melatonin production all day.
Now it's kind of freed and it produces a ton of melatonin and melatonin puts you to sleep, allows you to sleep well.
But if you're indoors, your body has no melatonin suppression.
So the graphs will show melatonin production for someone working indoors quite high.
By the way, that affects your alertness and all, right?
And then in the evening, when it normally spikes up, it'll bounce up a little maybe, but barely.
So you have the same melatonin production during the day as at night.
Maybe a little different, but not much different.
And so people struggle to sleep.
I met with an architect years ago.
And he said, oh, I love this building.
It just moved into a new office.
He said, I have more energy now.
I'm more alert.
I just love this space.
And I was like, what was your old space like?
Oh, you know, it was...
You know, I had a cubicle, but whatever.
And then he's, he's, let me show you my office.
And his office was all like a hundred percent glass floor to ceiling facing South.
And the sun was like coming right in and he felt, it felt amazing.
He felt amazing because he was in, he was essentially working outdoors.
My best friend was working in Dubai on his business.
And we've got the guy actually who's in that photo over there, the dude with the beard and the ruff.
So Alex kind of popular.
He's been around for a while.
Yeah, we're aristocracy.
He kind of popularized essentially working in a cupboard.
You can glorify it however you want, but it's a cupboard.
You can call it a focus chamber or whatever.
But it was... a wardrobe, a very, very large wardrobe.
And there would be no windows no nothing, and you'd be completely undistracted.
Pair of noise-canceling headphones on, and he would work.
And this was what worked for him.
So George, my friend, decided, he's like, I'm going to follow what Hormozy does.
He says that working in a, essentially in a cupboard's fine.
And in Dubai, they have these They're kind of like servants' quarters if you have a maid.
So in these houses that aren't even that big but they're just kind of common because they're sort of expats that live there.
You've got the smaller bedroom with the bathroom on site.
He's like, hey, this is a one-person office.
It's like a studio office.
And he went in and he noticed over time the space of three months or so of working in there.
I'm really moody.
I'm not sleeping that good.
I'm not being that productive.
And I kind of don't like my life.
He's like, hang on a second.
I locked myself in a room for hours every day and then thought, okay, maybe it works.
There's a certain type of personality that this does work for and his wasn't that.
So yeah, I get it.
One of the favorite things I've had since moving to America, and especially living in a city in a state that's got way better weather, is the opportunity to just work in different places.
I'm going to get up and go outside.
And if I've got a little table outside that I can work at, that's lovely.
But in the UK, what am I going to do?
Okay, I can work in front of a window.
But for the most part, I'm just going to be covered in rain.
If I want to go outside and work, it's going to be raining on me.
So yeah, the idea of going alfresco and that difference.
That's the other thing as well, actually.
On an evening time.
Originally, people thought that looking at blue light from screens was what caused the suppression of melatonin.
That meant that people weren't sleeping as much.
There's some new research I've looked at.
Jerry, can you look at this?
What is the latest research on screen use at night affecting melatonin versus social media and the mindset people are in impacting their sleep?
So at least what I saw was that it's way less to do with the light and way more to do with the cognitive environment that you're in.
You're in this hyper-stimulated, open-loop, probably agitated, tribal environment Like soup.
And then you go, okay, Brian, time to turn off.
Yeah, right.
And that's people's bedtime routines.
Right.
Well, their feed is stuff such that it gets them stimulated.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be in your feed.
So if you're a right-wing extremist, you're seeing all this crazy stuff that's happening and it gets you all worked up.
Yeah, of course, real world effects from screens are smaller than people think.
A large study of 122 000 people screen use before bed linked to slightly less sleep of around five to eight minutes and worse perceived quality.
Some reviews find minimal or overstated effect of the screen itself.
Okay, go down.
Bigger takeaway behavior.
Here it is.
Psychological stimulation, doom scrolling, delayed bedtime, cognitive and emotional arousal, notifications interrupting sleep.
Several studies emphasize that content and engagement are often more important than the light itself.
Interactive or emotionally engaging screen use has a longer, stronger sleep effect than passive viewing.
Timing and context matter.
Yeah, I mean, obviously.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I think that makes sense.
You know also, don't forget.
Chances are you're looking at your phone and your phone is a fairly small generator of light.
It's not so big compared to your whole room.
So maybe that's part of it too.
Maybe if you're looking at a 34-inch display.
If you're swiping on Instagram on your widescreen TV.
Might be a little different, yeah.
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Have you looked at anything to do with like Flux and apps like that that kill some of the blue light from screens?
Yeah, those have been around for a long time.
Everybody has access to that.
And I don't know, I haven't seen any data on it, but...
Probably a good thing.
Blue light isn't great.
But this is pointing out that blue light from your screen isn't that big a deal.
Not for the melatonin.
I wonder whether there's something else that's going on, the dryness in the eyes.
But again, maybe there's maybe academics since the beginning of time, you know dusty librarians that have been looking at books up close.
Perhaps they have also been suffering with this thing too.
I don't know.
Maybe there's something more active because you're still reading on a screen.
I don't know.
I can't look it up.
I'm sure there's issues there.
I mean one of the real big problems with your eyes, If you were to develop glaucoma or one of these things that can cause a long-term loss of vision.
I just know this because my optometrist keeps telling me about it is exposure to sunlight without protection.
You know, when you're out during the day and the sun is very bright, it's very damaging to your eyes.
Everyone suffers.
I'm talking to says, wear sunglasses.
So I'm very careful to wear sunglasses.
In fact, they can see the damage when they look at your eyes, when you go for an eye exam, and they'll say oh, that's sun damage.
So I think it's really important to wear sunglasses, certainly outside.
But again, that's not, that's not my area of expertise.
When you look at the work environments for men and women, are there any sex differences for what men need and what women need?
Have you split this off by gender?
Well, no.
When it comes to gender, we look at size, and we think it's really important.
A lot of products are designed by men and essentially for men.
It's kind of weird, but you could look at a chair and say that's a very masculine chair.
In fact, most chairs- You mean by color?
No, just the way it looks, the way it's designed.
It's designed in a rough kind of heavy way, whereas other chairs you would say are more neutral.
We are very careful to design everything we do in a neutral way.
Is that aesthetic, a functionality?
Um, it's both, of course.
Aesthetic, for sure, uh and.
But function as well.
Jared actually optimizes for a feminine chair, don't you?
Yes, at any point, you've got to try and offset that mustache.
It's interesting when you think about it.
How do we design things for humans?
We take the average female, we take the average male, we average them together to get the average human and we design for the average human.
On the whole planet there isn't a perfectly average human, so we're designing for this mythical being.
That's problematic in itself, because the further you happen to be from being perfectly average, the worse your experience is with that particular product.
And that's one of the things that we think a lot about.
Neil's different.
He designed our chairs.
It was quite brilliant.
He designed the chairs so that basically the reason it doesn't have all the knobs and levers is that it's simple.
Every chair has a spring under it and a knob to control the force on the spring and a lock to lock it.
He got rid of all that.
He got rid of the spring, got rid of everything.
And he just used the weight of whoever happens to sit on the chair as a counterbalance.
The linkage just transfers a percentage of the weight to the backrest as a counterforce.
Yeah.
So that means if a light woman, a 20 percentile female, sits in it, in the chair, it uses her weight to create the recline force for her specifically.
Right.
If a 90 percentile male sits in it, does the same for that person.
So that's what I think is really important when it comes to gender.
I mean, men and women are very different.
The average male and average female are very different.
You know that study around the fighter pilot seats, right?
The sort of thing that you're referencing there, that if you try and design for the average, you design for nobody.
So I think it was US government or US military were trying to work out what proportions a particular fighter jet seat needed to be.
They put millions and millions of dollars into aggregating all of this stuff and it turned out that zero fighter pilots could get into it.
None.
They designed for average, which meant they'd actually designed for nobody.
Right, which is what, that's how everything is designed.
It's designed for the average, and that's a problem.
A famous critique of design, wrote an article about one of Neil's first chairs, our Liberty chair.
The Liberty Chair.
I'll tell you the story really quickly.
It's kind of interesting.
This is back in 2000.
We had launched our Freedom Chair, this chair we're sitting in, which was very successful.
It's self-adjusting and all that.
But at that time, the Aeron chair from Herman Miller, you've seen that chair.
It's the most successful chair in the history of chairs.
Designed by Bill Stump, Don Chadwick, two great designers.
So it was the first mesh chair.
And mesh is nice because it breathes.
It's not an insulator.
It uses less materials.
It's better for the environment and all that.
So every new chair that came out back then was a mesh chair.
And so, like everyone.
And so we had just done the freedom chair.
So I went to Niels.
I said, Niels, I've been thinking about this and it's pretty clear.
We need to design.
I have a vision of the future.
We should design a mesh chair.
And Niels said, Bob, that's a genius idea.
Another genius idea.
You're brilliant.
Actually, that's not what he said.
He said, Bob, that's one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard.
Something along those lines.
He said, number one, everybody's doing a mesh chair to copy the Aeron chair.
That's a good reason not to do it.
But he said secondly, the way you make a mesh chair is you take stretch mesh, you attach it to a frame, so you can't control the shape like you can with molded foam, like on this chair.
Furthermore, you stretch, mesh, and won't wrinkle.
So when someone sits in it, it gives.
So you need a lumbar support.
And that's one more thing you have to adjust that no one will adjust.
So you're going to make the whole situation worse.
Anyway, funny story.
So he called me.
I said, fine.
And so he called me a few weeks later, or a month later maybe, and he said i solved the mesh problem.
Come on up to the studio.
He lived in connecticut.
I live in new york so i drive up there all the time, which is a lot of fun.
Uh, so when i got up there he had a, a chair the freedom chair from the seat down and something new from the seat up.
The back of the chair was mesh but it had three panels of mesh.
That was shaped funny and And he said I got an idea from the clothing designers.
They use panels of fabric to create a fitted shirt or fitted jacket.
He said, I did the same thing with the back of a chair so I can get the shape I want.
He said, but I can't use stretch mesh.
That won't work.
He said, I experimented with very minimal stretch mesh, but super flexible mesh.
He said, when I got the right mix of minimal stretch, high flex, it was interesting that if you push a form into that material, the material will fill in the hills and valleys of the form rather than stretch over it because it has nowhere else to go.
Conversely, it fills in the hills and valleys of the sitter's back.
It takes on the exact shape of the sitter's back as if it was made for that sitter.
And so I said, that's pretty clever.
We end up with two global utility patents from that technology.
But what's interesting about it is now this light woman sits in the chair and It uses her body weight to adjust the recline force and takes on the shape of her back as if the chair was made for that person not for the average person, but for this particular 20 percentile female.
Hmm.
If an 80 percentile male sits in, it does the same for that individual.
So that's a new way of thinking about design that Neil's pioneered, which is pretty cool.
It gets away from this average concept.
What about saddle stools?
I've seen those around a lot.
We have some in the office.
People like those.
Yeah, a good saddle stool is great.
Neil's developed a saddle stool.
In fact, I think he might have been the first to do a saddle stool.
And the saddle stool, it's shaped kind of like a saddle or also like a triangle.
Ours is more like a triangle, but it means you basically have one leg over each side of a saddle type thing.
And that encourages you to drop your thighs down in front of you.
And by dropping your thighs down, it puts your back in a healthy lordotic, we call it curve.
Really hard to sit on a saddle stool with a curved spine.
You feel like, it's like being a fucking question mark or something.
Once your thighs drop down, it's really hard to hunch forward and it puts you in a really healthy posture.
So those are really, a lot of labs are going to use those and that sort of thing.
It's good for individual too, but I think it doesn't encourage you to move though.
I think long-term sitting, you wouldn't want to be in a stool.
You'd want to be in a chair.
You should see Jared.
He's whizzing around the office on his stool all the time.
What do you think a biologically aligned workday would look like?
What do you mean by that, Chris?
Something that's going to maximize somebody's longevity.
They've got a normal office job.
They've got the stuff that they need to do.
But from an ergonomics perspective, from a movement perspective, you know, here's your eight hours.
This is what this would look like.
Obviously, moving.
I think if you have a sit-stand desk and you use it, that's really healthy.
It's good for your muscles.
It's good for longevity.
A chair that allows you to move from one position to another without thinking about it.
So while you're sitting, you're moving.
When you're standing, you're moving.
And then...
Encourage people.
Again, this takes discipline, and only a small number of people are disciplined.
You're obviously a very disciplined person, but most people aren't.
Go for a walk.
Go for a walk around the office and chat with people every couple hours.
Again, it takes a bit of discipline, but that's really important.
Then the other thing about that, too, though, is...
And I always worried.
We always worried about people sitting in a healthy way, allowing people to move sit, stand desk, making sure your monitor is in the right position.
Because if your monitor is on the front of your desk, you're not going to lean back too much because you have to be a certain distance away from your monitor to read it.
So we think it's really important to have the monitor on an arm.
Almost every large company has a monitor arm so you can move the monitor, just like this microphone is on an arm.
This arm is actually very similar to the arms we make for monitors.
So those things are really important.
And we used to think and continue to think a lot about that.
But then I started thinking about other things.
I started thinking about all the other things that impact people's health in the office.
And one really important thing is indoor air.
Indoor air is incredibly unhealthy, as you probably know.
And the reason it's unhealthy is we have all this stuff in it, and all this stuff off-gases chemicals and carcinogens.
And I had a bit of an epiphany at one point when I started reading about that and reading about how all this stuff off-gases.
And I thought, that's something that needs to be addressed.
And we looked really hard at that.
And we lead our business.
We lead the business of office furniture and even home furniture in getting rid of the chemistry that off-gas is.
What's the biggest cause of it?
I get the sense.
Great that you're not off-gassing from being sat on a seat that's slowly leaking particulates into your brain.
What about paint in buildings?
What about the stuff that you guys don't make?
Do you make carpets?
Where is most of this coming?
What are the places that people should be looking at as the prime culprits for off-gassing?
I mean, carpeting is certainly one.
Paint is another.
And there's a big movement now.
By the way, desking is another.
Pretty much every desk is made out of MDF medium density fiberboard just ground up, sawdust and glued together.
All of that stuff has formaldehyde in it, a lot of formaldehyde, and that formaldehyde off-gases.
Carpets have all kinds of VOCs and off-gas.
There's a big movement now to have ingredients labels on your products.
Um, declare and HPD are the two standard ingredients labels, just like food, food labels.
There was a big movement when it must've been 30 years ago to have ingredients labels on food.
So now every, anything you drink or eat has an ingredients label.
Um, So you can make a decision about, a thoughtful decision about do you want to buy that product and put it in your body?
Historically, products that go into your home or office don't have ingredients labels.
And there was an article about this probably like 10 years ago.
And they brought this topic up to one of the largest furniture companies in the world.
I won't mention who it is just not to embarrass them.
Do it.
Throw them under the bus.
They don't care.
No, they'll get mad at me.
But basically, it doesn't matter who it is.
All the large furniture companies in the world essentially have fought not to put ingredients labels on their products.
So this executive said, and it's quoted in the magazine he said it's ridiculous to put ingredients labels on furniture, since last time I checked we didn't need the furniture.
And I thought that was the most self-serving thing you could ever say.
We don't eat it, but we breathe it.
We breathe it, and that's an issue.
So there's a huge movement.
Google, for example Google Harvard University.
A bunch of organizations now have said they won't consider a product for their office or their dorm or anything, unless it comes with an ingredients label.
It's a Claire HBD label, which is a really important movement.
It's happening more and more.
Designers are saying they won't spec a product unless it has an ingredients label.
And it's pushing folks to do the right thing.
I mean, there's enough issues since living in Austin.
This country's great, but the building materials that you use are primitive.
It's wood.
It's timber.
Yeah.
And it gets wet and hot, wet and hot and wet and hot.
And then it gets wet and hot and insulated and contained inside of cavity walls.
And it's just a breeding ground for mold.
Mold is a big problem.
Yeah.
It's huge.
And that's why we've got these Jasper air filter things.
They're everywhere inside of this office, because I lived in a house when I first moved out of an Airbnb that I was in.
The first house I ever lived in properly in Austin infected me with toxic mold and I'm still detoxing from that.
No, mold.
I've heard terrible stories about mold.
Mold is very dangerous.
It's no joke.
And the stupid thing is, I actually feel like it's comic justice because Michaela Peterson... jordan's daughter she whined about mold all the time and we'd be catching up or whatever and she'd be talking about how we've got into this new house and it's mold and i've got headaches and i'm tired and whatever and i was like god it's like penicillin oh you've got defeated by penicillin throw the bread out like just making joke and then sure enough the universe decided to deliver to me the this like nut kick from infinity uh just going like oh you thought that this was funny and then sure enough i got popped at the same thing and now i'm like dude i gotta tell you about the mold it's so horrible you need to get to filter so yeah it's uh Mold is a serious business.
But by the way, other people have had similar experiences with chemistry that they breathe, PFAS.
Formaldehyde.
There's tons of examples of people being hospitalized because they breathe too much formaldehyde from flooring they put in.
There was a big lawsuit in California a while ago.
We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar.
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Chris Ashenden, who was the founder and still the main shareholder in AG1 Athletic Greens, the multi-billion dollar company Kiwi.
He was in-house.
That was off-gassing something to do with the paint.
And what happens when you are exposed to mold?
As you probably know, you get something called SIRS chronic inflammatory response syndrome.
So your system's hypersensitized to being around mold.
Then even if you get out of the mold and detox from it, There is a window of time where you're hypersensitive to being exposed to mold again.
And Chris basically had the same thing, but for off-gassing.
And he went and stayed in.
He was basically medical tourisming his way around the world trying to find a solution to this and this treatment and that detox and this IV and this blood cleaning.
And one of the places that put him up said we put you in the brand new, it's the Four Seasons brand new place.
He went in and within- half an hour.
It was so brand new that it was still pissing tons of paint particles into the- Brand new is the worst.
When you walk into a room that's brand new, you can smell that new smell.
I'll take something from the 80s, thank you.
You're like, ooh, that smells great.
We're a new car.
Oh, a new car smell.
That smell is basically VOCs filling your lungs with carcinogen.
It's really, it's very, very bad.
It's a really good case for buying used cars.
What you're doing is you're saying hey, I'm going to let the first 10000 miles and this person breathe in all of the VOCs?
And then once they've got it in their lungs, I can step in.
It's like wearing in a cricket bat or a baseball bat or whatever.
You've got to play it out.
Yeah.
When I get in my car, I just leave the windows down for the first 15, 20 minutes.
Yeah.
Air-conditioned cars are the worst because the windows are up, of course.
Down here, everybody has air-conditioned cars probably.
But it's in homes and workplaces too.
Formaldehyde is prevalent everywhere.
I mean this is solid wood.
But if this wasn't solid wood, it would invariably have formaldehyde in the MDF.
I'm very proud of my table.
I love solid wood.
I love wood.
Very, very proud of it.
Have you seen the unnecessarily complex base plate that we put in as well?
Look at that.
Look how sexy that is.
I feel like I'm on a galleon ship.
I think there's a pretty low probability that even if I lean on this table, that it's going to fall over on me.
Yeah, you could imagine if they used this in the WWE, it would kill people.
It would take six men to move.
Yeah, it did take six men to move.
Maybe we have to build the thing in here.
Okay, so...
But I think this whole topic of breathing healthy air is hugely important.
Another advantage of being outside.
Being outside is great.
Most people can't work outside.
And so it's really important.
Yeah.
There's a lot of work being done in that area.
And I think there's a lot of work being done by the design community, architects, and so on.
And a lot of forward-thinking organizations are saying we'll only consider products that have an ingredients label.
Yeah.
At HumanScale, by the way, we pioneered these ingredients labels.
We were the first ones to use them.
At one point I think it was around 2018 we had 80 of all the ingredients labels in the whole industry.
And we're not that-
What?
In one company.
In not only one company, but we're not that big.
I mean, we have, I don't know, 1,500, 1,600 employees.
We're not that big.
We account for only about 4% or 5% of the whole industry.
And we had 80% of all the ingredients levels.
Even today, we have about 39% of all the ingredients labels at, say, 4% of the revenue.
So we pioneered it.
And I think it's important to deliver product to customers that don't have carcinogens in them.
Call me crazy for coming up with that.
What a radical belief there to say we should deliver products to people that don't kill them more quickly.
And we should actually try and encourage them to live in a way that makes them live longer as well.
Bob, you're awesome.
I love your stuff.
Thank you for fueling the country with your furniture.
Where should people go to check out more of the things that you're doing?
You know, we don't do a lot of online sales, but you can buy our chairs and our products online.
So obviously humanscale.com.
And we have offices.
You can go there and see where our showrooms are.
Heck yeah.
But thank you, Chris.
It was really nice talking to you.
So thanks for that.
Appreciate you, Bob.
Bye, everyone.
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