Modren Wisdom - The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs - Bob King - #1098
158 claims analyzed
Transcript(158 claims)
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. If well, if you look at 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 in America, for example, have chronic or on or repeat repeated back pain. It's a huge problem, and as you get older, gets worse and worse. I think I think it's it's clear.
If you look at what people do day to day, you can see quite clearly that there's there's a cause and effect there.
What's the evidence around sitting and back pain?
There you can look at you can look at sitting postures. The most interesting thing about that is you look at postures when people sit. I I study people sitting, and I think it's quite interesting. There's data on this too. But if you were to look anywhere in in buildings here in Austin or or buildings in Tokyo or or 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 opening up the disc. Yep. There's probably I can't imagine, and in fact, I'm pretty sure there's there's aside from lifting very heavy weights, there's probably nothing worse for your back than doing than doing that, and that's how everybody's everyone sits.
Do you know doctor 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
talking him. Yeah. 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 huge mustache. It looks like, 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 consultation. 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 wanna take my own life, or I want to find a way to end my life, and I'm thinking about doing it tomorrow.
And I watched this guy who I 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 were 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, mister 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 the key to this whole thing is is really prevention rather than intervention. If you have if you have really bad bad back, you have to intervene and and deal with it, but ideally, you you don't wanna you wanna protect your back.
I found some stats around office workers. Around eighty percent of office workers sit between four and nine hours daily. Desk job syndrome now includes back pain, headaches, numbness, eye strain. Musculoskeletal disorders account for one third of all workplace injuries in The US, costing employers an estimated $50,000,000,000 annually in compensation and lost productivity. People who predominantly sit at work have a sixteen percent higher risk of all cause mortality and a thirty four percent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
And office workers can spend over ten hours sitting each day some estimates put a typical office worker's total sedated time up to fifteen hours a day when you include commuting and leisure, and then sleep on top of that. You're you're basically going from static to static with brief interludes of movement.
And sleeping is is 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. No. Much more. Without a doubt. Without a doubt, they move more.
Because once you're in a chair and you're hunched over on your computer, people don't move. You've seen these well, you obviously have seen the same stats I have. People people don't move, and the the data is clear, and that there's all these these articles that that say that sitting is 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 a lot of these that's what's causing the vast majority of these health aside from the musculoskeletal issues.
Are humans just not meant to sit at desks then?
You can certainly say that. Sitting is not the greatest thing in the world. It's yeah. I think that's true. However, there are healthier ways to approach sitting, and we we need to sit.
And by the way, if we're standing all day, we had a sit stand desk, we stood all day, that the data on that is clear too. That's not healthy. Your your your your blood and your fluids pool in your in your lower legs. Veins. There's there yeah.
There's problems with your with your veins. Your veins have to return blood to your heart. That's done with movement, by the way. There's no the the pumping is not really effective anymore. You move, and that's what moves the 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 gonna go away, but I think it's really important that we sit in a health in a healthy way, and that's what what us what we at HumanScale are obsessed with, of course.
If sitting is the new smoking, why is 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
Mhmm.
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 their desk.
As I said earlier, their back not even touching the back of the chair. That's not comfortable. Mean, I 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 from just from a longevity point of view. So I asked 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 and the answer is no. They they they don't they don't know. It's 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. That that's the 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 your office is designed.
Well, certainly having a sit stand desk helps because then it's it's it's appropriate and healthy once an hour to stand for a bit, whatever is comfortable for you. Half an hour, ten minutes would be would is very 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, 1,200 seats, and it was all open. I was standing with the head of workplace design, we were looking at this space.
And there are 1,200 people there. And I said, Oh, so these all have height adjustable desking, right? Yeah. She was quite proud of that. I said, You know what would be fun?
Let's count how many people are standing. She said, Sure. And so we counted. Yeah. We counted five people, Chris.
Out of? 1,200. So it was very interesting. So she she assured me that more people sit stand in the morning. So I was like, okay.
Fine. Yeah. I'm sure. Okay. Maybe.
So I think a sit stand 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, because I'd ask a lot of people that question, and then an ergonomist, a friend of mine, I told him this story, 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 drawer 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, 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 to the issue of lack of movement because you can't move. Your your chair's locked.
You you're locked as well.
Okay. So sit stand desk or have another environment that you could work at. If don't wanna 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 they don't wanna 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 to head angle, arm angle, hands, eye position, stuff like that? All that stuff is important. Your your eyes should be approximately level with the top third of your monitor, roughly. Mhmm. Right?
You don't you don't want you don't want it to be looking you don't wanna look down. You certainly don't wanna look up because that can cause neck issues. You you 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. You should it's healthy to you know, if you have a document you want to read, don't read it like this.
Lean 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. Some 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. So that goes to my journey just to tell you, I figured, alright. We are obsessed at Human Scout. We're always obsessed with simplicity. We designed the first keyboard support where you put your keyboard on a platform, and it's on your 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 Millaios, who we hired, figured it out, which is a whole separate story, but quite an interesting story, but separate, where you just put it where you want, and it stays there like magic. So we became the market 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, think, and in his home office, he sits in a Freedom headrest. So a huge number of world leaders, business leaders sit in Freedom headrest, 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 the people just just figured it out by themselves, which is kinda cool.
You know, when I saw it, I understand freedom, you don't need to be overcomplicated in the chair, etcetera. 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 signed. A quick aside, there is a stat that genuinely surprised me when I first heard it. Ninety five percent of people don't get enough fiber.
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We've we've always believed in movement, getting allowing people to move. If you allow people to move, they move. It's natural for 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 what we do 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 could move without thinking too hard about it, and no one no one really had an idea about that.
What are the most common posture myths that you see?
Well, the one one myth is that 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 want to 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 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 all 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 Differing who designed our chairs that I forget it 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 the more you but he was pointing out that the more you recline, the the less stress there is on your spine.
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 survey free either.
Not take off. And so is most posture advice nonsense then if it's not talking about just keep moving?
No. No. I mean, you no. They're not that's just nonsense. I mean, hunching forward like this is is something you should avoid for sure.
There's a number of things that you should avoid. Leaning back is is good. The more you lean back, the better. I would say just be natural, 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 just you typically wouldn't do a zoom call leaning forward.
How much of human behavior is dictated by the environment versus discipline? Do do you think that environment shape behavior more than willpower does?
Well, everyone have a different opinion on that, Chris, of course. I believe very strongly that environment drives behavior. I I don't think I don't think many of us are 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 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 were truly disciplined, 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 you got a phone call and 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 sit up, you do the same thing in reverse. Weight 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 on that because there's not a lot of chairs that do that. I mean, we pioneered that whole concept. We I say we with our designer, Niels Diffeent, a brilliant designer, the last of the mid century modernists. We were very blessed to to work with him for sixteen years until he passed away.
There's there's no hard there is some data. We've we've got there's a couple of studies out there that have said that if you the simpler a chair is to use, the the fewer musculoskeletal incidents you have. I haven't seen anything on mood, but people say they're more comfortable, and there's 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 didn'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, did 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, European cafe with my laptop out on a wrought iron outdoor you know, having a wonderful cappuccino or Nespresso or something like that.
And I'm saddened something that looks like it was made to be the front gate of a British British house.
Yeah. No. That's not that's gonna be distracting. But also, you're sitting in one posture, I think you don't your blood flow is less. Your your when you don't move, your your your blood flow slows down.
Thought on
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. They might. 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 except that it it it'll change you you might move less, but you might move you might move more, but you might move more in a really awkward posture, like hunched forward.
Ah, right. I understand.
You can't you can't lean back. I don't know. I haven't seen that one. Yeah. 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, alright. I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna stand up every once an hour for ten minutes, and 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's like, fuck. Damn it.
Well, we're we're we're yeah. That's interesting. So we're working on a on a sit stand desk is a 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. Fifty minutes. Bob, I'm telling you. Fifty 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 they just their desk starts rising, 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.
Like, you're in the middle of a call. You're desperately trying to sign some documents that are now at head height. Yeah. I'm telling you.
That's I like
it. That's the that's the hey. Bring me on the table.
Write write that one down.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. So I think about, you know, the how good design can remove the need for willpower.
You can't eat the cookies that aren't in your house. You know, if you're trying to avoid snacking late at night, you should Oh, when
you said that, I was looking for the cookies.
I'm afraid not. Sorry. But that we've got a lot of stimulants. I can give you those. Yeah.
Making things making the thing that you want to do as easy as possible. Right? It just has to be the first stage of of everything when
it
comes to designing your environment. Hey. Do you wanna 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 thirty years ago, before social media and before the Internet being as ubiquitous as it is now, there was already things that could distract you, the sort of inherent just human distractibility. Oh, there's something going on outside, or somebody comes in and has a talk with me or this phone call or whatever. And now after that, you've gotta think, okay. Well, I wanna 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 gonna get distracted by that.
Or maybe I'm gonna 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, etcetera, etcetera. 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
you're absolutely right.
Yes. Yeah. It's getting worse and worse and worse. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years.
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If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally. And right now, you can get 10% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to Jim dot s h slash modern wisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's jim.sh/modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 at checkout. Talk to me about eye health because this is something kind of an unseen challenge.
Actually, Jerry, 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 our partner, Chatuchipiti.
The interesting thing, what what you said though, is that 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 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 forty to fifty percent of the world may be myopic by 2050. Large meta analysis of three hundred and thirty five thousand people. Every hour a day of screen time increase is around a twenty one percent higher odds of myopia, and risk rises sharply between one to four hours a day, almost doubles by the time that you get to four hours.
This is one of the strongest overtime findings. 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 in the overtime pattern.
So, yeah, massive increase in daily screen time parallel rise in myopia in the two thousands to the '20 twenties in the smartphone. 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 not my area, Chris. Sorry.
Well, I've got okay.
But I it's a huge issue, but it's not something that we've that we've addressed.
Okay. Well, I've got the 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 called interesting called the twenty twenty twenty rule.
So for twenty minutes every twenty minutes, for twenty 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 twenty five 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 endless amount of different interval.
Okay. Well, twenty minutes, I need to look at something, and in five minutes, I'll take a break, and then it 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, yeah, that that 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 I've just done Tiago Forte's external brain. I've gotta 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 they're indestructible.
Correct. They're literally indestructible. So I'm like, okay. Well, I am trying to do it, but after a while, they're like, well, the boss says that I'm he's doing it, so maybe it'll be good for me to do. Before I knew it, I was like, you oh, it's so overcomplex.
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 a 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 he would write music live. And, there would be days where he wouldn't see sun. He wouldn't see the sun. He wouldn't go outside at all during the day. And that's just, you know, on one hand, very disciplined, like, 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, etcetera, etcetera.
Yeah. And it's 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. If you're if 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 there is a little
may be some other things But there
But there are margins
compared to you just sleep sleep thing is hugely important. It's hugely important. So what happens is if work outdoors, you know, 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 there's 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 lights,
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.
Melatonin And puts you to sleep, allows you to sleep well. But if you're indoors, your body has no melatonin suppression.
The differential.
So the graphs will show melatonin production for someone working indoors quite high. By the way, 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. I 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, know, I had a cubicle, but whatever. And then he's, Let me show you my office. His office was all like 100% 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 is in that photo over there, the dude with the beard and the rough. So Alex kind of
popular older. He's been around for
a while. Yeah. Yeah. We're aristocracy. He, he kind of popularized essentially working in a cupboard.
It's you can glorify it however you want, but it's a cupboard. You can call it a focus chamber or whatever you but it was a wardrobe, a very, very large wardrobe. And there would be no windows, no nothing, and he would be completely distract 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 gonna follow what Hormozi does. He says that 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 for if you have a maid. So in these houses, they 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 mini 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, he's like, I'm really moody, and I'm not sleeping that good. And I'm not being that productive, and I kinda 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 a certain type of personality that this does work for, and, his wasn't that. So, yeah, I I I get it.
I one of the favorite things I've had since moving to America and especially living in a a city, in a state that's got way better weather is the opportunity to just work in different places. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna 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 gonna do? I yeah.
Okay. I can work in front of a window. But for the most part, I'm just gonna be, like, covered in rain. If I wanna go outside and work, it's gonna be raining on me. So, yeah, the, the idea of going al fresco 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 hyperstimulated, open loop, probably agitated tribal soup, and then you go, okay, Brendan, time to turn off. Yeah. Right. And that's people's bedtime routines.
Right. Well, their feed their feed is stuff such that it it gets them stimulated. Otherwise, it wouldn't be in your feed. So if you're, you know, 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 a hundred and twenty two thousand 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, doomscrolling, delayed bedtime, cognitive and emotional arousal, cog 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 longer, stronger sleep effects than passive viewing. Timing and context matter yeah. I mean
Yeah. That makes sense. I think that that makes sense. You know, also don't forget, chances are you're looking at your phone, and your phone is a is a fairly small generator of light, and 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 inches display
If you're swiping on Instagram on your widescreen screen.
A little different. Yeah.
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That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. 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 for a long time. Everybody has access to that, and and I I don't know. I haven't seen any data on it, but it's probably probably a good thing. Blue light isn't great.
But this 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 eye. 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
I'm sure there's there's there's issues there. Mean, one of the real big problems with your eyes, if you were to develop glaucoma or one of these things that can cause long term loss of vision, I just know this because my optometrist keeps telling me about it, is exposure to sunlight without protection. When you're out during the day and the sun is very bright, it's very damaging to your eyes. Everyone I'm talking to says wear sunglasses. So I'm very careful to wear sunglasses.
In fact, you can they they can see the damage when they look at your eyes when you go for an eye exam, and 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. We look at when it comes to gender, we look at 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, 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 you would say are more neutral. We we are very careful to design everything we do in a neutral way.
Is that aesthetic or functionality?
It's both, of course. Aesthetic for sure 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. Niels Differin, who designed our chairs, was quite brilliant. He designed the chairs so that basically the reason he doesn't have all the knobs and levers isn't simple. Every chair has a spring under it, 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. 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. If a 90 percentile male sits in it, it does the same for that person.
Jared. So that's what I think is really important when it comes to to gender. I mean, people are very men and women are very different. The average male and average female are very different.
Mhmm. So you you know that study around the, fighter pilot seats, right, the what 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.
Yeah. They designed for average, which meant they'd actually designed for nobody.
Right. Which is which is what that's how everything is designed. Mhmm. It's designed for the average, and that's that's a problem. A famous critique of of design wrote an article about Neil's one of one of Neil's first chairs, our liberty chair.
The liberty chair, it's yeah. 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
Super popular.
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 on an insulator, 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, so like everyone. And so we had just done the Freedom Chair, so I went to Neil's.
I said, Neil's, I've been thinking about this, and it's pretty clear. We need to design I've I've had 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 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 Aaron 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 to 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 making 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. So when I got up there, he had 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 he said, I got an idea from the clothing designers. They used 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. So 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 in 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, 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. If an 80 percentile male sits in and 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 so many office. People like those.
They were there. Yeah. I think a good saddle stool is great. Those 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 like a kind of like a saddle or also like a triangle.
I was 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, dream. Really hard to sit on a saddle stool with a curved spine. You feel like it's like being a 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 use those and that sort of thing. It's good for individual too, but I think it doesn't encourage you to move though. 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 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. Like, they they've they've got a normal office job. They've got the 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 gonna be that's really healthy. It's good for your muscles. It's good 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 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, you know, I always worried we always worried about people sitting in a healthy way, allowing people to move, sit, stand desks, 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 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.
Most almost every large company has a monitor arm so you can move the monitor just like just like this microphone is on an arm. This arm is actually very similar to the arms we make for 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. I thought that's something that needs to be addressed. We looked really hard at that and that's we lead our business. We lead the business of office furniture and even home furniture in in getting rid of the chemistry that that off gases.
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 know about? Do you make carpets?
Do you make where is most of this coming? What are the places that people should be looking at as the prime culprits for off gassing in that?
I mean, carpeting carpeting is 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 all 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. Declare and HPD are the two standard ingredients labels. Just like food labels, there was a big movement, well, must have been thirty years ago, to have ingredients labels on food. So now anything you drink or eat has an ingredients label.
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, oh, a couple of years probably like ten 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, but the
Do it. Throw them under the bus. They don't pass.
No, they'll get mad at me. 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 eat 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 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 Klair HPD label, which is a really important movement. It's it's happening more and more.
Designers are saying they won't 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 mold is mold is a big problem.
Yeah. It's huge. And that's why we've got 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 there.
No. Mold. I've heard terrible stories about mold. Mold is mold is very is very dangerous.
Joke. And I the the stupid thing is I I actually feel like it's karmic justice because Mikaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter, she whined about mold all the time and would 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, I'm tired and whatever. And I was like, god. It's like, you 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. 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, mold. I gotta tell you about the mold. It's it's so horrible. You need to get
to fill that. So, yeah, it's Yeah. Mold mold is serious business. But by the way, other people have had similar experiences with chemistry. Did they breathe PFAS?
Formaldehyde, there's tons of examples of people being hospitalized because of they they breathe too much formaldehyde from flooring they put in. There was a big lawsuit in California a while ago.
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That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Chris Ashenden, was the founder and still the main, shareholder in AG One, Athletic Greens, you know, they're multibillion dollar company. Kiwi, he he was in a 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. Yeah. And he went and stayed in he was basically like, medical tourisming tourisming his way around the world trying to find a solution to this, this treatment and that detox and this IV and this blood gleaning. And one of the places that put him up said, oh, we put you in the brand new it is the Four Seasons.
It's a 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 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 eighties.
Thank you. Like, oh, that smells great. Or a new car. Oh, new car smell. That smell is basically VOCs filling your lungs with carcinogen.
It's really a
it's It's a good
It is very, very bad.
It's a really good case for buying used cars. What you're doing is you're saying, hey. I'm gonna let the first 10,000 miles in 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.
Yeah.
That's You've play it in. Yeah. When when yeah. If I when I get in my car, I just leave the windows down for the first, you know, fifteen, twenty minutes. Air conditioned cars are the worst because the windows are up.
Of course, down here everybody has air conditioned cars probably.
Yeah,
yeah, But it's in homes and workplaces too. Formaldehyde is prevalent everywhere. I mean, this is this is solid wood, but if this wasn't solid wood, it would invariably have formaldehyde in the in the MDF.
I'm very I'm very proud of my table.
This is this. I love solid wood. I love I love wood. Very, very proud of it.
I love that. Unnecessarily complex base plate that we put in as well. Look at that. Look how sexy that is. It looks like I 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 gonna fall out
from me. Yeah. You could imagine if they use this in the WWE, it would kill people. It takes six men to move. Yeah.
It did take six men to move. It was maybe we had to build the thing in here. Okay. So But
I think this whole this whole topic of of of breathing healthy healthy air is is hugely important.
Another advantage of being outside.
Being outside is great. Most people can't work outside, and so it's really important. And there's a lot of work being done in that area, and I think there's there's a lot of work being done in by the 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. At Human Scout, 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
In not one that company. What? In one company.
In not only one company, but we're not that big. I mean, have, I don't know, 1,500, 1,600 employees. We're not that big. We account for only about four or 5% of the whole industry, and we 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 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. 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 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 but you can buy our chairs and our products online. So, obviously, humanscale.com. And and we have offices. You can go there and see where the our 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. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them, so I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own.
And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found, and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com/books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com/books.
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