The Health Crisis Of Office Jobs - Bob King - #1098

26:12Well, 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. Ah, right. If 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, all right, I'm going to stand up every once an hour for 10 minutes, and that's it.

26:51You 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, 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.

27:26Automate 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 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. 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. That's this. Hey, bring me on the table. That's good. 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

28:08making the thing that you want to do as easy as possible 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 distractibility. 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.

28:40And 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.

29:08The world is becoming incredibly complex, Chris. 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. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real world training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Gymshark. Their hybrid shorts, especially in Onyx, Grey and Navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly. They don't bunch. They're super lightweight. You can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The Geo Seamless t-shirt is what I train in almost every single session.

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30:15Actually, 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 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.

30:58I 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 matter analysis of 335 ,000 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.

31:34It's 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 and the overtime pattern. So yeah, massive increase in daily screen time, parallel rise in myopia in the 2000s to the 2020s in the smartphone.

32:14Less 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 increase. 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 1120. I'm really digging into the archives. So there's something called 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.

32:54And 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 endless amount of different intervals. 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.

33:30And what ergonomics is trying to do is to create a good solution to an artificial problem. and uh yeah that that at my most complex at my sort of most sterile and ridiculous um 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.

34:07I'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, these 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 you oh it's 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 a streamer sat here Nick Nocturnal great musician streamer and he was saying to me there was days that he would work on music because he would write music live and uh there would be days where he wouldn't see sun.

34:56He wouldn't see the sunlight. 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, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Most people work indoors all the time under artificial light.

35:35That'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. um the the main problem with it is sleep if you're if there's clear data on this if you work outdoors you're 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 but they're on the margins 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.

36:23It'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 lights we call it blue light in the evening it goes down it's very warm light very orangey right that's that that light and actually darkness allows you to produce it stops the suppression of melatonin and allows melatonin to be produced at a rapid rate.

37:12So 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. The differential. 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.

37:51And 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 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 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 uh we've got the guy actually who's in that photo over there, the dude with the beard in the rough.

38:37So Alex kind of popular. He's been around for a while. Yeah, yeah, 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 Hormuzi does. He says that working in a, essentially in a cupboard's fine.

39:15And in Dubai, they have these, they're kind of like servant's quarters for 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 side. 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. 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.

39:47I 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? Yeah, okay, I can work in front of a window. But for the most part, I'm just going to be covered in rain.

40:22If I want to go outside and work, it's going to be raining on me. So, yeah, 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.

41:09You're in this hyper-stimulated, open loop, probably agitated, tribal soup. And then you go, okay, brain, 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's screen use before bed linked to slightly less sleep, around five to eight minutes, and worse perceived quality.

41:51Some 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, 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.

42:30It'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. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. But it turns out water alone isn't just the problem. It's also what's missing from it, which is why for the last five years, I've started every single morning with a cold glass of Element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science-backed ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

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43:26You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Have you looked at anything to do with 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 it's probably a good thing.

44:02Blue 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 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 at it. 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 automatist 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 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.

45:04So I think it's really important to wear sunglasses certainly outside. But again, 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 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.

45:47It'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 or functionality? It's both, of course. Aesthetic, for sure, 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. Gosh, 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.

46:28On 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 who designed our chairs. It was quite brilliant. He designed the chair so that basically the reason he doesn't have all the knobs and levers is 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.

47:03He 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. So that's what I think is really important when it comes to gender. I mean, people are very, men and women are very different. The average male and average female are very different.

47:42You 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. And 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're designed for average, which meant they're actually designed for nobody. Right. That's how everything is designed. It's designed for the average.

48:18And 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 it's i'll tell you the story really quickly it's kind of interesting um 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 um but at that time the aaron chair from herman miller you've seen that chair it's the most successful chair 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.

49:01It's on 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 every one. 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 Neil 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 Aaron chair.

49:40That'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 it 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.

50:11Come 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 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. So he said, I experimented with very minimal stretch mesh, but super flexible mesh.

50:49And he said, when I got the right mix of minimal stretch, high flex, it was interesting that 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. And 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 that's pretty clever we end up with two global utility patents from that from that technology but with 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.

51:33If an 80 percentile male sits in, it does the same for that individual. So that's, that's a new way of thinking about design that, that Neil's pioneered, which is, which is pretty, 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 offers, people like those. Yeah. I think a good saddle stool is great. Those, Neil's developed a saddle stool. In fact, I think he might've been the first to do a saddle stool. And the saddle stool, and it's shaped like a kind of like a saddle or also like a triangle ours is more like a triangle but it it it means you you basically have a one leg over each side of a saddle type thing and that encourages you to drop your thighs down um in front of you and drop by dropping your thighs down it puts your your back in a healthy lordotic recall it's really hard to sit on a saddle stool with a curved spine you feel like yeah it's like being a question mark once you're your thighs drop down, it's really hard to hunch forward and it puts you in a really healthy posture.

52:33So 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 a 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, here's your eight hours.

53:10This 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. Hard to, again, it takes a bit of discipline, but that's really important.

53:53Then 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, 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.

54:31So 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 i i had a bit of an epiphany epiphany um at one point when i started reading about that and reading about how all this stuff off gases and i thought that's that's something that needs to be addressed and and we we looked really hard at that and that's we lead our business we lead the business of furniture office furniture and and even home furniture and in getting rid of the chemistry that off-gas is.

55:26What'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? 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. um 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 glue together all and all that stuff has formaldehyde in it a lot of formaldehyde and that formaldehyde off-gasses.

56:16Carpets 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, it must have been 30 years ago, to have ingredients labels on food. 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 and there was an article about this oh a couple you probably like 10 years ago and they 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.

57:10Do it. Throw them under the bus. 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 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 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.

58:04It's a Claire HPD 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 is 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.

58:42And 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 is no joke. And the stupid thing is, I actually feel like it's karmic 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.

59:20And I was like, God, it's like, 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 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 they breathe too much formaldehyde from flooring they put in.

1:00:04There 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. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body, which is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid, nutrients, liver, and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer.

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1:01:07With Function, it is$365 a year. That's$1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now you can get$25 off, bringing it down to$340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional$25 by going to the link in the description below by heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Chris Ashenden, who was the founder and still the main shareholder in AG1, Athletic Greens, uh you know they're multi-billion 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 SERS 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 and he was basically medical tourism tourism 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.

1:02:44When 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. Or a new car. Oh, a new car smell. That smell is basically VOCs filling your lungs with carcinogen. It's really - It's a good - 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 10 ,000 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.

1:03:17Yeah, that's right. You've got to play it in. Yeah. When I get in my car, I just leave the windows down for the first 15, 20 minutes. Air-conditioned cars are the worst because the windows are up, of course. Down here, everybody has air-conditioned cars probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's way too hard. 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. Thank you. I love wood. Very, very proud of it. I love that. Have you seen the unnecessarily complex base plate that we put in as well?

1:04:00Look 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 use this in the WWE, it would kill people. It takes six men to move. Yeah, it did take six men to move. Maybe we had to build the thing in here. Okay, so let's - 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. And there's a lot of work being done in that area.

1:04:40And 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. 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 - In one company. 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.

1:05:17We account for only about 4 % or 5 % of the whole industry. And we had 80 % of all the ingredients labels. 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. Right. 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.

1:05:55Thank 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, humanscow.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. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out.

1:06:35And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, and there's real-life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.