Ep239: Reduce Pain, Increase Productivity, and Enhance Your Creativity with the QOR360 Chair | with Turner Osler, MD

Zack Arnold

I am here today with Turner Osler who is a trauma surgeon turned epidemiologist, now turned inventor and entrepreneur. You have a BA in neurobiology from Princeton, you're an MD from the Medical College of Virginia, you have a surgical residency at Columbia and Harvard, a fellowship at the University of New Mexico. And then, of course, after that 20 years, in both academia, as well as a trauma surgeon, and you have over 300 peer reviewed papers and book chapters, and decided, You know what, forget all this, I'm just going to go and I'm going to make a chair. So we're going to have a lot of interesting conversations about career paths, about changing fields, career transitions. And of course, the most important reason we're here today is to talk about sitting and specifically sitting in your chair. So Turner, really, really excited about today's conversation. Thank you for being here.

Turner Osler

Zack, it's great to meet you. I've enjoyed your podcasts a lot.

Zack Arnold

Well, I very, very much appreciate that. Here's where I want to begin. This is an age old battle that I've had with many people in my industry throughout the many years that I've worked in it. Now that I'm speaking to a consummate professional not only on the medical side, but also on the ergonomic and chair design side. Ergonomically speaking, I believe the Aeron chair was designed by Satan himself agree or disagree?

Turner Osler

Well, yes and no, because I know the guy who designed the Herman Miller Aeron chair, and I like it.

Zack Arnold

Let's take the person away from it, because I didn't realize how personal we're gonna get so quickly. How about the idea of it, because I know nothing about the person. I'm sure he's wonderful.

Turner Osler

No, no. So here's the story. I was, I was at an ergonomic conference. And, you know, showing our chairs, some guy walks by and he's got, you know, stubble and scarf and groupies. I mean, he's obviously an important guy. And he walks by and sits down our chair, and he looks a little puzzled. And then his wife sits down on our chair, and she says, Oh, Fransisco, this is terrific. And it turns out that this guy was on the Herman Miller Aeron design team in 1994. So he sits down on our chair, and we have a very interesting conversation, because he's all about chair design, and, and ergonomics and office furniture and manufacturing. And I'm like, I know buddy, emeritus professor from the University of Vermont. You know, I know about anatomy and physiology and anthropology and a bunch of other ologies. But this guy is like, a legend in the chair world. And so we have a, an animated conversation, and then we split up, but we've just swapped emails. And about a week later, I get an email from this guy, and he says, I feel terrible. I spent my whole life trying to make chairs so comfortable. No one would want to get up. And now you tell me that they are killing people. But what do you want me to do? We've convinced people they can't sit without armrests, a backrest and a headrest and lumbar support. And now we can't sell a chair unless it has these things. So the poor guy got it. But the whole industry is trapped by their legacy. It's a very interesting problem.

Zack Arnold

Well, little did I know I knew this story, because you talked about it in your TED Talk, which we're going to link to but you didn't mention that the person that story was one of the members of the design team and Herman Miller that designed the Aeron chair. So that was completely coincidental. But I find that hilarious that that's where I randomly started. And here we are.

Turner Osler

Well, it's a very interesting story, because it tells you so much about the chair industry. You know, they've been they've been selling the same, basically the same chair for over 50 years. And 80% of America still has backpack. If the backrest and the lumbar support are the answer, how come everybody still has back pain?

Zack Arnold

Well, the interesting thing, when you bring up the industry, there is a phrase that you use that I'm totally going to be stealing, which is big chair, like everybody knows, like, you know, big oil or Big Pharma, but to you, big chairs, a whole another thing.

Turner Osler

And it's not a made up term. Another story, I gave a TED talk a while ago, so I'm, you know, I have an affection for the TED group. And, and they reached out to me and said, you know, we're going to have our big Ted thing and LA, you know, where, you know, only 300 People are allowed in and they have names like Bill Hillerich, you know, names like that. And, and the tuition is, the donation is 24 grand. And so the TED group reaches out to me and says, you know, we'd like to have some of your chairs as favors to give away to people who come to the, the event like me, so Well, that'd be great. Yeah, we're happy to donate chairs. Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. And then like a couple of days later, we got a call from the TED people saying, Sorry, Steelcase has had their lawyers look over contracts, and we're not allowed to use any other kinds of furniture. So, steel cases, a billion dollar company has been in business for 100 years, you know, trying to crush a little startup, it was really, it was really amazing. I'm flattered, really. But this is big chair, you know, they, they have ideas about how things should be done. And they're, they're not above trying to kick the legs out from under upstarts.

Zack Arnold

Alright so I there's a lot that I want to get into next, just a quick note for the audience, as they may have heard, there were a couple of small technical issues, we've worked them out. So it'll sound a little bit different going forwards, but you're gonna sound a whole lot better and clearer for us, which is really important, because I think of all the things all the messages that you have out there, this might be the most important one answer for me the following? Are you just trying to make a better chair?

Turner Osler

Um, no, it's not really about the chair, it's really about changing people's, the way people sit people's relationship to sitting. And, you know, we've we've tried to do that a lot of different ways, you know, absent reminding people to stand up. And, and, you know, there's a lot of good research that's been done, you know, double blind crossover studies, looking at how often you have to get up and walk around in order to not be undone by chemically by your chair. And it turns out, you have to get up every half hour and walk around for five minutes. You know, it sounds simple enough. But, you know, that's 16 interruptions a day, and 80 minutes that you aren't at your computer, the hard sell to employees and maybe their employers as well. So, in order to get people to sit differently, you really, you can't do it by asking them, you have to change their built environment, so that it becomes non negotiable. I learned this in graduate school when I was my mentor and public health was Professor Susan Baker at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. And she says, you know, you can't ask people to do stuff, you have to make it impossible for them to do the wrong thing. And this is how, how it has to be, you know, we, we made a huge leap, we can beg people not to drink and drive. But you know, what you need is divided highways so that people can't hit each other head on, you need airbags, so people will be protected no matter what they do. By changing the built environment, you can keep people safe, asking people to do stuff you really doesn't succeed.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the quote that really resonated with me was where you had said that I'm not trying to make a better chair, I'm trying to change the idea of what a chair is. And as soon as I saw that, like, this is a guy that I want to talk to, because otherwise, it's just variations on the same theme. And variations on the same theme have gotten us exactly where we are now.

Turner Osler

Right and and the people who write the books on ergonomics are just kind of copying off each other's paper, there really hasn't been any new thinking and ergonomics. For the last 50 years. It's it's really kind of shocking. And when when we show our chairs to or people who have, you know, formal ergonomic training, they take one look and they say, is very interesting, but no one could sit on that all day, you know, you have to no one is strong enough to sit all day without a chair and a chair back to lean against. Can't be right, I'm 73 years old, been fine without it. And actually, for most of human history, people's chairs didn't have backs, I mean, chairs with backs didn't come along until you know, the 1900s for crying out loud. You know, before that people sat on stools and benches and or were not at all. So so the idea that you can't sit without all the supports the backrest, the headrest, the foot rest is preposterous. And yet, it's dogma in the ergonomic world.

Zack Arnold

Or like you said, it's in the world of big chair. Right?

Turner Osler

Exactly. Well, so they don't they don't want to change anything because they are making bank

Zack Arnold

Which, you know, much larger issue far beyond big chair. That's the biggest issue for Big Pharma or big oil or anything else, right? It's not about what's what's best for the country or the world or the individual. It's about what's best for the bottom line. And it sounds like big chair has the same problem.

Turner Osler

And I find myself battling these, you know, when I was a resident when I was a physician, you know, we're constantly battling Big Pharma, you know, trying to find drug combinations that wouldn't bankrupt the poor patient. And, you know, it wasn't till later that discovered these drugs don't cost the pennies. And the drug companies are, you know, just raising the last dime out of these poor people. So, you know, I came to have a very, very severe view of Big Pharma and I'm afraid maybe terrorism but better?

Zack Arnold

Well, I'm glad that you brought up this idea of your previous life, your former life. And when you're fighting big pharma, because what I actually want to do is book and this conversation where we started with the tease, going a little bit more into the chair, and I want to come back to it later. But I'm actually just as or frankly, even more fascinated by your career trajectory, because I'm really interested in how you've done so many different things and then decided and what would you most would consider the final stage of your life, I'm going to start over and try something totally different. So I want to learn a little bit more about your background, because your background is actually very relevant. When I say background, I say that with partial pun intended. But for most of the people, if not all, the people that I've talked to about sitting being the new smoking or other manufacturers of other chairs, they didn't have the level of understanding of the human body or movement or the spine that you do from your decades in the medical world. So can you give us a little bit more of a background of where you came from? And what led you to this point of deciding to make this chair?

Turner Osler

Yeah, no, I No one is more surprised by this turn of my life than me or maybe my wife, she's like, she's like a normal. rheumatologist. You know, she's shocked by you know, what's happened to our norm stayed normal trauma surgeon husband, but, you know, I got my first degree from Princeton and neurobiology, and then went to medical school, and, you know, surgery is just, you know, it's just too exciting to pass up, you know, I just can't understand how anybody who went to medical school didn't want to be, and most people did, but people were smarter than that, because it's a lot of darn work, you know, the surgical residency is go on for five or six years, and then you have to go fellowship, it's quite a long path. But you have the incredible opportunity to look under the hood of the human body, you know, you get to go into basically things that nobody else gets to see. And it really changes how you think about the human body, you know, you know, I You just come to be more and more amazed at how perfect it is. I mean, everything just fits and works, which is an odd thing to say, because the reason we're operating on people is things aren't quite perfect. But, but for the most part, you know, the design is pretty darn good. And so, you know, it comes as sort of a shock that 80% of America has backpack. How, how bizarre is that? You know, it just, it just doesn't make any sense. But to continue that career trajectory, so you know, medical school, and then residency and then fellowship. And in trauma surgery, which is the most general kind of surgery there is because people can be shot anywhere. And if you wreck your car, anybody cavity can be ruined. So I spent 10 years on the trauma service running the trauma service at the University of New Mexico, and then you're on the trauma service at the University of Vermont. But I ultimately aged out of you know, taking nightclub I'm okay, staying up all night. It's just the next day wasn't so, so great. So along the way, I gotten a master's degree in biostatistics, and I'd started doing epidemiology and got a grant from the NIH for a couple of million dollars to study how we know which trauma centers are doing better than other trauma centers. So the laggards can be brought up to speed by the leaders and quite a lot of math involved. And when I started doing that, I was mostly writing computer code. And so for the first time, my life I was sitting because as a surgeon, you just run around the O or the ER, the the ICU clinic, and my back started to bother me. See some. But you know, how hard can this be? I've been to medical school, like I understand statistics and research. And it turned out that it was kind of hard because no real good research had been done. And the more I looked, the more astonished I was at just the poverty of what we call ergonomic science. It was it was really laughably bad. These guys are showing pie charts to each other for crying out loud as this is beggars the imagination. So but if you bring, you know, serious research tools to it, you kind of come to the conclusion that what we're calling ergonomic chairs are basically a failure. And I had other interests in bodywork, Feldenkrais and Pilates and yoga and also martial arts, Aikido, which has a lot to do with body posture and using your spine to move other people around. And all of these things kind of kind of came together for me that, you know, really, your body is perfectly designed to generate its own posture and And when you try and impose posture on the body with external struts, the backrest, the headrest, the foot rest, lumbar support, all that kind of stuff, you wind up just kind of ruining the basic balanced posture that is integral to martial arts and dance and walking. So, you know, I thought, well, let's just make a chair that allows people to adopt that posture unconsciously. And so, you know, we we found that by making the seat pan of a chair, and just a little unstable, people would suddenly be responsible for their own posture. And it's very interesting because people have to learn how to walk. And it's a it's a system where the body programs itself. And this is why all kids go through creeping and crawling, and titling and walking. As the body kind of figures out its reflex arcs to get it to move gracefully through through space. Kids are laying down the synapses and re spinal reflexes that allow a balanced posture, that laying down millions of new synapses a second, as they're developing their their spinal reflexes, you have those wired in at the spinal reflex level for your whole life. It's just a matter of accessing. And if you put people on an unstable surface, you know, they their spinal reflexes immediately kick in as though they're their spine was having a silent conversation with gravity. You can listen into that conversation if you want, but you don't need to, because the spine is going to orient itself in space. Automatically. It's mostly a matter of getting out of the way, and letting the the brilliant architecture of the body work as its intended.

Zack Arnold

The thing that I find very fascinating about talking to you specifically about this topic, and I'll make sure we put in the show notes, the Litany the multitude of conversations I've had with others, about sitting in chairs and movement. And I've talked to Dr. Joan Vernikos, formerly NASA scientist, I've talked to Dr. John Ratey, who's the author of Spark and really kind of generated this movement around movements and how it affects creativity and thought and cognition and all the the brain neuro chemistry, talked to Dr. Kelly Starrett. But none of none of those people who are some of the foremost experts in this field have literally held somebody's spine in their hands, and fixed it. And not only that, but with the epidemiology background, I'm fascinated in any field by the intersection of different specialties, where it would be very easy to say you had of a past life and medicine, and you decided you wanted to quote unquote, start over and become an entrepreneur, but the intersection of all of your specialties and your skills and your abilities in the medical field, intersecting with a world of making a chair, you're probably the world's foremost expert on somebody that both understands the spine has worked with it in a life and death situation, knows how to do the research and knows how to design something that actually works.

Turner Osler

No, it's shocking that my career kind of led me to this point. But then it kind of led to I kind of letting myself down because I don't have any entrepreneurial skills or ability really, or, frankly much interest, you know, I'm more interested in the design and, and how people's physiology and anatomy interact in space with unstable surfaces. So far, I love to tell because my son isn't here, my son went off to Cornell to study computational biology. And with the expectation he go to medical school, too. So he comes home after four years, and he discovers that I've pissed away his inheritance on his crazy chair project. And, you know, he's horrified and and he discovers that the only way he can claw back his inheritance is to try and put this project on a, on a more sustainable, entrepreneurial business footing. So, so I got a printer so we could print labels, so we wouldn't have to, like, you know, fill them out by hand. When we send out chair, we're making all these things in the basement kind of stuff. And my son was, you know, he was, he got us organized. And so really, he's the entrepreneurial enforcer.

Zack Arnold

So most, if not all good businesses, they need a visionary and then they need somebody that can operate. I'd encourage them that you and I are we're going to be talking about Facebook ad funnels, right. That's probably not your specialty. But again, it just it fascinates me that at the intersection of these three areas of actually physically doing the surgery and understanding how the spine works at the most advanced level and understanding how to do research and understanding how to create a Enter a chair like the intersection of those, that's a very, very unique place for you to be in.

Turner Osler

Yeah, and, and it all really kind of comes from really surgery. Because when you walk into an operating room, you know, with water dripping off of your elbows. And if it's trauma surgery, you have to be able to walk into the room and say, I don't know what's wrong, but I'm sure I can fix it. Yeah, you know, it's crazy talk, you know, it's hubris of the worst kind. But if you can't say that mean it, you got no business being in the operating room. And often you're in an operating room with, you know, a team that's just assembled on the fly. So you don't even necessarily know all the scrub tech and the circulating nurse and anesthesiologists. So you have to build a team rather quickly, and get the best performance you can out of everybody. Same with entrepreneurial projects, you know, I've been very lucky to run into brilliant industrial designers who are just swept up in the project, you know, or we have a structural engineer who, you know, does finite state element analysis for us. So all of these people have really special skills that they bring to the table and are happy to work on the project because they share the vision of trying to change the way people sit. So it's not that I'm good at all these things, but I am good at meeting people who are good at these things.

Zack Arnold

Yeah. And that's, that's the hallmark of a good leader. And whether it's a good CEO, or at least a good visionary and founder, it's knowing where your weaknesses are and filling those weaknesses with strengths, by surrounding yourself with people that are better than you are at those things, which I admire.

Turner Osler

Burlington is, Burlington, Vermont, where I am is just the place to do it. Because it's it's big enough that there's somebody who can do anything. And small enough that you know, people do stuff with a handshake. And so you can do it very quickly.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, that's, that's a good combination. What I'm what I want to go into next that I'm equally fascinated by, there are a whole host of reasons that sitting is really, really bad for us. And we can get into some of those. But the reason for me personally, that I both discovered that I needed to stop sitting and I needed to move more didn't so much has to do with just back pain. Or all they say shortening my lifespan, but what do I care, I'm in my 20s, I'll deal with that, you know, in a few decades, it was how detrimental sitting and being sedentary was to my creativity, and my creativity and focus, those are my entire livelihood, if I can't sit and focus and solve creative problems, I'm not going to get paid. And I can't imagine maybe there are a handful of jobs at most, where the ability to focus for a long period of time, for a long period of time, like you had to is literally life or death. Right? So for you, you went from I am laser sharp focus with literally somebody's life in my hands, too. All of a sudden, I'm sitting all day long, and my back hurts, but I would imagine that you probably noticed there were a lot of other cognitive effects to this new life where you're sitting all the time.

Turner Osler

No, it's very easy to stay focused in the operating room. And, and, and you're very willing to adopt, you know, whatever posture it takes to like, you know, get to the posterior aspect of the spleen or, or you know, the the hilum of the liver. And you know, you just can't but but these things are transient. When you sit badly, you sit badly for many hours a day. And that's really what the problem is, if people were able to change their posture and get up and do something else, none of this would be an issue. But in order to focus people find they need to be at a desk. And as soon as they're at a desk and sitting still. Now a lot of bad things happen because your pulmonary excursion, the amount of movement that you have on your chest wall goes down, and so you're moving less air in and out of your lungs. And there's dead space in the trachea in the bronchi. So you really aren't getting as much oxygen as you would as if you were just standing up. Also, blood pools in your legs. If you aren't using the muscles in your legs. The there's a column of blood that goes from your right atrium down to your ankles, and the blood has to come up against gravity to get to your heart. Typically that's done by when you're walking the big muscles in your calves and your thighs are constantly flexing the veins pass through the muscles. And so when the when the vein is squeezed, the blood is squeezed back toward the heart because the deep veins have valves. You have valves in the veins of your hands and see all your veins have valves. So you do a lot of blood pumping. But with your legs by walking, when you sit still your legs are dependent, they're hanging down the blood pools, then the veins dilate. And really not much not much happened. So the blood that's coming back has been sitting around for a while and is way low and oxygen. So you know we can measure these kinds of things. It's harder to measure create tivity people feel it. And we got like 12,000 of our chairs out in the world, we swap email with everybody. And one guy who worked for Goldman Sachs sent us an email and said, You know, I used to need espresso A two and another one at four to get through the afternoon. But now I don't, after he got one of our chairs. So you know, people find that merely moving their blood around because they're moving their body around makes a huge difference in their perceived level of alertness.

Zack Arnold

Well, for the procrastinators out there who hear all the statistics and know how bad sitting is it's the new smoking, and they're thinking, that's something I'll worry about in a few decades, you're going to feel the effects of having more energy at two o'clock in the afternoon, or four o'clock in the afternoon that day. To me, I mean, that was life changing. And it's now been so long since I was a chronic sitter, I don't even remember what it felt like, if you were to put a security camera in my office, you'd think that I was a squirrel and a burlap sack. Because I am constantly standing sitting on the couch in my core 360 chair, which we're going to get even deeper into in a few minutes, I'm going on taking a walk outside over like, I cannot sit still. And the amount of energy and creativity that that gives me to just continue to push through and do the work that's necessary. With all of these consistent breaks. I've had days where I will be at like another office and I have to sit in an office chair. And by the early afternoon, I'm just like, kill me now. Like I just I cannot do this in this environment. And like you've already talked about the environment shapes who we are, right, we can shape the environment once, but the environment just continues to shape us forever. So what we put in our environment is so important.

Turner Osler

No and and by changing the environment, you know, it's very hard to make yourself you know, get up and do jumping jacks every half hour. But if you just swapped to a chair that requires you to be muscularly engaged in order not to fall off, it's an easy bar to clear. And it's just one decision, you have to make the swap your chair out, and you're done. Rather than having decided to, you know, get up every half hour and run up and down the stairs. So there's there's a lot to be said for designing an environment so people don't have the opportunity to behave badly. They're there, their environment just gives them good behavior for free.

Zack Arnold

Well, speaking of good behavior for free, it seems seems to me that the simpler solution is the opposite of sitting, which is standing, isn't it?

Turner Osler

Yeah, no, you would think but standing is just the linguistic opposite of sitting. If you look at people sitting there slumped and, and pretty much immobile. And if you look at most people that standing desks, they lock one hip out and lean against the desk, and then they don't move again. So standing is really just as immobilizing as sitting just in a different posture. And it turns out that this standing immobilized posture, is if you can believe it worse than sitting immobilized. This is a shocking sentence, because standing ducks are, as you probably know, a billion dollar industry. That's the

Zack Arnold

New panacea now, right. 10 years ago, I would ask for a standing desk and they will look at me cross-eyed. Now everybody's got one. But when I say is that height adjustable, they say no, I'm like, well, that's just bad.

Turner Osler

So so the idea that, you know, all we got a standing desk is the opposite of sitting will solve the problem turns out to be just a misunderstanding, standing isn't the opposite of sitting movement is the opposite of sitting. And standing still, it's it you can read in the Geneva Accords, standing as a stress posture. You know, it is a war crime to make people stand for hours at a time. And if you have a terrorist who's got it, and you want to know where the ticking bomb is, just make him stand and he will tell you, we I can't tell you how many people I've talked to said, you know, I try to stand all that by stating that I just can't it hurts my back so much and hurts my legs. And, and all I can say is, you know, you should listen to the fact that your makes your back or to make your legs or because that's God whispering in your ear. Don't do that. And, you know, we know that standing is bad for people. I had a career in the operating room, and I've stripped miles of varicose veins out of people's legs that came from standing on assembly lines. Because if you stand with a column of blood thinner, right atrium, down your feet, it dilates the veins, and over time the veins get overstretched and they can't recover. And then you know, they get inflamed and they're hurt and the and then we take them the Ord is not an elegant operation, I'll tell you but it's an operation you don't want. So, you know, they're they're very clear downsides to standing for prolonged periods of time. And adjustable high desk gets you up and moving around. It's a different project but people who are standing stockstill all day checkout people in the supermarket You know, they complain loudly about how much their legs hurt them. And those of us who have you know, stood for long operations in the operating room, Oh my Jesus, you can't wait to get out of the operating room, get your feet higher than your, your heart for just a few minutes because it feels so much better even a long plane flight. And if you've if you've gone along plane flight and happen, do this experiment after the next time you're on a plane flight, take your finger and push the just right in front of your tibia, you know, six inches above your ankle, and it'll just sink in and leave a dent in your flesh, edema, swelling, because water, plasma leaks out of your veins when they're when your legs are dependent. If you aren't walking and pumping the lymph back into your into your central circulation, your ankles swell. And you know this has several downsides it's hard on the tissue. It's It hurts, it feels bad. And it predisposes you to deep vein thrombosis. So every so often somebody will you know, get up after a long flight and fall over dead because they flipped to PE. So you know, the so there's, there's there's a lot of downside to sitting still, we're standing still where the blood is pooling and the plasma is leaking into your tissue and the swelling, you just have to look at it to know it's not right. So

Zack Arnold

So, then I just need to get a pair of cushy shoes that should solve it right? Nice cushy soft shoes, maybe insoles. I'm good to go.

Turner Osler

Yeah, well, if only if only the problem is that your whole leg is swollen. And so now you find people wearing compression stockings, you know, trying to find a workaround to do that, which were, you know, invented for people who that answer surgery and stuff. So it's a workaround, but by the time you need compression stockings, you need to kind of rethink how you're living your life.

Zack Arnold

So don't want to talk a little bit more about standing that we're going to find kind of this this in between. There's a product that I've been recommending for years and years. I don't know if you're familiar with the Topo Mat, it's created by a company called Ergodriven. I don't know. All right. So this I'm going to introduce you in the the audience is like oh my god, he's been talking about this for a decade, I want to introduce you to it now. Because I think there's a world where it might be the equivalent to standing what your chair is to sitting, which I've been looking for for years. And coming from both your background medically. And now your background designing this product, what I have here, my audio might get weird. So I have to step a little ways from a microphone, it's a standing mat. But it's not flat. Right, it's got all this different terrain. And what the designer of this mat has found is that it subconsciously promotes consistent and constant movement because it's uneven. So I've had like just to like the cook the chef's mat, right where it's just flat, and I'm still stuck in one position. But I'm constantly doing this all day long without thinking about it. And I still don't stand for 12 hours at a time. But I feel a lot less locked in. And it seems to

Turner Osler

I love that idea, you know that the idea of the human foot. Well, one quarter of the bones in the human body are in the feet. You know, I mean, there's, it's homologous to the hand that there's but so that your feet are designed to do these amazing things about walking on uneven ground. And there's a transverse arch and a longitudinal arch and the plantar fascia and the lumbar Komaba. It's a marvelous machine that's designed to do amazing things. And then we stuffed it in a box surrounded by pillows. And we walk on a surface that is flat one Pardon 10 million. And so the foot really doesn't have a chance to do any of its cool stuff for most of our waking lives. And so what happens is, you know, the toes are looking to get purchase, as you're walking. They can't because they're inside of a slippery shoe. And so over time, they keep trying and trying and trying and trying until you wind up with contractures in your little toe and maybe some other toes and then bunions and then and then the joints erode through the skin and pretty soon we're snipping out pieces of bone and taking out toes at will hypocrisy is a observed 2000 years ago that which is used develops and that which is not used wastes away. And if you stuck your foot in a in a padded shoe and then walk on a perfectly flat surface. The foot really kind of loses. Well, it just loses its architecture and finally doesn't function well. The idea of a mat that lets your foot kind of do what it's designed to do is really brilliant. I had the idea that it would be fun to make a treadmill only it wouldn't have a flat surface that would be like you know, running through the mountains you know with bumps and lumps that would like come around the sequence. My my son wrestled me to the ground and told me you can't do that.

Zack Arnold

Oh, well, if you're looking for a tester for your hiking trail treadmill prototype, I would be it because I find myself all the time, when I'm out walking somewhere trying to get away from concrete. I'm trying like if I, if I'm on a sidewalk, I'm actually off the sidewalk walking through the grass in the dirt. So it sounds like the basically, I have a tribe, a trifecta of products that I can't live without one of them is the topo map, right. So I want to make sure that when I'm standing because I find them a lot more active, and I can communicate better and speak better when I'm standing you and catch me dead either teaching or podcasting from a chair. But when I'm being creative, I like to be sitting in the chair, that's when I'm doing my editing or my writing. So there's different stances for different positions. But having the Topo Mat is I got to have it. Another one is I have to have an active type of balanced chair. And the third one in the trifecta is minimal shoes. So if I

Turner Osler

Absolutely, you know, I, I know the guys at Vivo Barefoot and I know the guys at Xero Shoes,

Zack Arnold

I was gonna bring up Steve Sashen, the creator Xero Shoes has also been on the podcast and we've talked about the foot extensively. So that's what reminded me of that.

Turner Osler

No, no Steve is such a great guy was on his podcast, actually, you know, he's done so many different things. But, you know, we were just like, we're brothers from different mothers or something. You know, his his idea is that if you free the foot to behave as it's designed, all the problems are solved. And our chair is basically the barefoot shoe of sitting, because it allows you to express your natural posture without any imposition from the outside of expectations of chair designers, just just like barefoot shoes. So no, I, there's a lot of synergy there.

Zack Arnold

So I love this idea that you said that your chair is basically the barefoot shoe of sitting, because this to me is the perfect encapsulation, and just very simplification of why I think that this chair might actually finally be the one. Because I've looked for years, I've tried so many different ones. I've done the Mogo stool, I've done the Pivot Chair, I've done the Sit Tight, and all of them are kind of different variations of the same theme and that they're trying to keep you active. And they're trying to keep you balanced or keep you like they're trying to keep you off balance, actually to be more accurate. But what I found over and over and over again, with everything that I tried is that I'd use it for a little while. I'm like, Oh, this is great. And then halfway through the day, I'm like, oh my god, this is awful. Right? There's just something like I couldn't do it consistently the where I actually started, which is you can talk to this a little bit more if you want to actually started with, oh, just sit on a balance ball. Oh, my God is that horrible for you, but you think it's active, and you think it improves your posture, but three minutes later, it's horrible, right? But I started with the balance ball chair, then I tried all these other options, the closest I got was the Sit Tight. But even that it just after a while it just didn't click. And the difference for me is that when I saw your chair, I'm like, You know what, I'll give another one a try. But then I forget that I'm sitting in it. And I don't have that point two or three hours later, I'm like, Oh, I gotta get off of this chair. And it's too much work or like, this is the first one that I completely subconsciously just kind of melt into and forget that I'm in a chair exactly like I feel with a Topo Mat. Right.

Turner Osler

And that's and that's the whole point, you know, by by getting out of the way and letting people's spines have a silent conversation with gravity, you know, their spine is constantly active, which involves a lot of muscles. Also, if you if you move anything, you move everything. So by moving around on our chair, it turns out that your ankles are moving, your toes are moving. And and it's an almost recapitulates walking because the pelvis is free, and you're perched on your ischial tuberosities. And so it's it's kind of like walking on the you don't have to decide where to go and have kind of a low metabolic costs or chairs bump up metabolic rate by 20 or 30%. But like, like most active chairs, the thing that makes our chair different is that many of these chairs like the sit tight and in The Swapper, and all these things are basically a seat on a pole and in the pole tips. And then you can just kind of lean against that post and nothing much happens. Our chairs tip in all direction, right? We put the center of rotation as close to the tip of the coccyx as we could get it. And in order to get that kind of motion. You know, we we we had to like invent this thing. This is like the rocker that makes our chair work. It's the intersection of two cylinders at right angles, non coincident axes and possibly different radii so you wind up with a shape and if you put it on a surface that rocks you put another surface on top of it. It rocks there 90 degree he's opposed rocks in every direction. But because it's just a geometric solid, it doesn't wear out. It's it's good forever and it's inexpensive to medically, we injection molded these things, you know, five miles from where I'm sitting, you know, it's two pieces of felt like carbon that that fit together and and create this. This basically well it's a it's a new geometric solid. Archimedes sniffed around it, but missed it. We found it. And patented, it turns out, you can own a shape. You know, how about that? Who knew?

Zack Arnold

I'm curious who wants to circle? But the interesting thing about it is so simple. You just look at it, you're like, oh, okay, but I can only imagine the process to get to that level of simplicity, because there's nothing harder than simplicity.

Turner Osler

No, no, no, this surely was not the first thing and you know, I, there's a community of people who who are engaged and trying to make active chairs, I swapped email with 20, maybe 30 different guys, or have different kinds of chairs, different ideas about this stuff. And one guy in Israel had like this immensely complicated things with levers and gears and springs. And I mean, it was they've worked on it for a long time. And he sent me one I was wrong. And I sent him one of our chairs. And then we were on a zoom call. And he said, You know, I paid my engineers on money to make these things better. And I said, Well, I said, Well, you know, that's the problem. You hired a bunch of engineers, you know, who think in terms of levers and springs and cams and this and that. And the other thing, I'm a washed up surgeon, and I kind of think in terms of how, how the I don't know how the femur moves on the tibial plateau, or how the how the femurs fits into the acid tabula, I kind of think, is more of a biologic joint, which kind of makes sense, because it's gonna have to interface with a bunch of biologic joints. And I really kind of think that it's just because I wasn't trained as an engineer, that I had a leg up on the problem.

Zack Arnold

Yeah and that's one of the things that I admire, again, about this intersection of all these different specialties, is that if you were a hammer, all you see are nails if you're an engineer, all you see are levers and springs and pulleys and fulcrums. But for you, you see, I don't know if this is going to be the right term or not. But the term that comes to my mind is how fluid and effortless that shape is in the body, the joints, everything about it's all about being very fluid and smooth. I remember when I was taking the chair out, because I looked at it online, I think I could be wrong. But I think I actually found this via Google search. I don't even remember how I came upon the website. It wasn't like, I'm actively searching for podcast guests, or whatever I just, I was looking for, I think that my sit tight had finally broken because I wore it out. And I found this via Google search. I'm like, Hmm, this looks interesting. But I remember taking it out of the box and thinking No way, this is way too simple. Like, it was almost like opening the box can where all the other parts from what I remember, you literally click it together, add the wheels, and I was done in about two minutes. Right. And the best word that I can use to describe it is it's just fluid.

Turner Osler

Now that's, that's, that's what we're going for, you know, because we're going to we're interfacing with a with a biologic organism. So we want the, the the active mechanism to approximate that sort of thing. And, and this, you know, it looks a lot like the patellar. You know, it looks like a, you know, a joint mouse, it looks like you know, any number of things that you would find in a biologic situation.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, the first thing that I actually thought of, and for those that are listening that don't have any video, it actually looks a lot like a shoulder pad that you would put like under your shoulder or something just a very similar shape. So beyond the fascination with the look of it, and the simplicity of it, here's the real question, how does it actually help? How does it relieve back pain? And how does it relieve all of the other challenges that come with sitting all day long.

Turner Osler

Um, so I kind of one of my degrees is in math. And so I kind of think of it as a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation problem. Which is to say, you know that the human spine has six joints between every two vertebrae, and they're 24 vertebrae, so there are a lot of joints in the spine. So the spine can adopt an immense number of different confirmations, most of which are silly, painful, or, or, or more impossible. And because there are so many different configurations of your spine, it's very difficult to figure out how it ought to be. But if you make a chair just a little bit unstable, people are constantly exploring the space of how their spine could be a little bit different because they're constantly having to adjust it in order to stay balanced on the chair. And automatically people explore the space you know, if they tried a slightly different posture and it's not more comfortable, they go back to the posture they had Before, if they try a slightly different posture, and it's more comfortable, they stay there, and then explore some more. And very quickly people find a posture that really works for him. I've done this experiment many times where we go out to the Walking Street in Burlington, Vermont, Church Street, and just put on some chairs, and watch what happens. And it's nice to say, you know, people sit down for a moment, you know, they, they're surprised that it's unstable. And then, you know, they there's this moment of recognition where they, they, their spine says, oh, yeah, no, I got this, I have all these spinal reflexes. And so you know, their shoulders come down, their sternum comes up, the head comes back, the lumbar lordosis, and their back reasserts itself. And within 90 seconds, or a couple of minutes, people are really sitting in a very balanced, very stable posture, that looks a lot like, you know, the way people look when they're sitting in Zen meditation or something, you know, because the spine is just like exploring the space of all the different ways it could be. And finding the way that is, is is the way it should be. So

Zack Arnold

So given that I can understand with the ergonomics of it, the lack of balance, which is very intentional, very similar to the Topo Mat, you're constantly but subconsciously having to change and shift, and it's all these minut differences. But does that go as far to say that if you're going to be sitting in this chair all day long, it negates all the negative effects of sitting all day long,

Turner Osler

I would never say that, you know, I mean, you're much you're much better off, you know, getting up and going for a walk in the woods with your kid, you know, there's just so many things that are better than a PC. But if you have to sit at a PC, you know, one thing you can do is to stay moving while you're sitting at a PC so that when you get up, you don't have that aha moment of, you know, trying to get up because you kind of been walking the whole time. And you know, as a result of, you know, being moving all the time, your core muscles will be stronger, you'll have less back pain, all of this will make you more available for the rest of the pursuits of your life, your kids, your hobbies, your whatever. And, you know, it's astonishing to be the number of people who kind of love the idea of active sitting, the equestrian crowd really embraces it, because you know, sort of recapitulates what Horseback riding is like, and so, you know, they can only go riding on the weekends, but you know, they can kind of stay in shape for riding all week long. The martial arts crew loves it, because you're the optimal posture for martial arts is a posture where you can move in any direction without preparation. So, and this is kind of what Balanced sitting is you can move in any direction without preparation. It's a it's a habit of the nervous system. And the and the way of holding the body that is extremely useful dance and martial arts and so on. The easy thing to measure, of course, is you know, we just hook people up to a real breathing mask and measure their expired co2, and they're inspired out to, you run it through the weir equation, and you can compute how many calories people are burning. And we find that people are born in 20, or 30, or even 40% more calories when they sit actively, which has very salutary effects on on blood chemistry, your good cholesterol goes up, your bad cholesterol goes down, your glucose goes down, all of the all of the things that matter, over the long haul 20 or 30 years, come along for free.

Zack Arnold

What I love the most that you just said, which tells me that I'm talking to the right kind of people that I like to round to surround myself with, is you're basically saying, you shouldn't be using my product all day long. You shouldn't be using it. But if you have to, I want to create the best experience that I can but get out, go walk or stand at your height adjustable station or use the topo matter whatever it is. But if you're stuck, and you have no other choice, this is a good option. And the reason I bring that up is because I want to talk more about the initiatives above and beyond just creating this chair and marketing. It is you know another desk chair, and that is this idea that you actually have what you call the button chair. So it's it's not just about oh, I've got an idea for a new kind of office chair and I'm an entrepreneur and I want to turn it into a business and I want to help people what I want to make money for you. There's a much bigger impact based vision. Right. So I want to talk about the buttons here. But I also want to talk about it in conjunction with a stat that blew my mind. Which is and you mentioned the one earlier that 80% of people in the US have back pain. What percentage of people have back pain and say Japan?

Turner Osler

Yeah, no, it's changing. You know, it used to be 3%. But as Japan is switching to a more Western seating arrangement, the incidence of back pain is steadily increasing. And it's a phenomenon we've seen before. You know, breast cancer was at a very low rate in Japan. But if you look at Japanese people in Hawaii, it's about halfway to what North American breast cancer rates are. And by the time Japanese people are fully acculturated in North America, they have basically the same breast cancer rate that the rest of us do. So you know, that they're better off sticking with their traditional culture for a number of health reasons. Back Pain being just one of them. You know, and in Japanese martial arts, you're, you don't use you sit in Saison, you you sit in a kneeling position that has your spine with its normal Lord, or lumbar lordosis, or you sit on the floor, the business of sitting in chairs just just isn't isn't part of it. It's very tough for Westerners to get back to being able to sit on the floor. It turns out that squatting is probably the premier posture for human beings. This is the way the hodza hunter gatherers in Tanzania comport themselves when they're when they're in an active rest posture. But, you know, although kids are quite comfortable squatting, you watch him, they lose, you know, toddlers, when they lose their balance, catch their balance by dropping into a squat. Most of the adults, you know, squatting is just, it's just a dream, because they've lost the ability. Almost always, by the time they're in grade school, almost certainly, because they've been sitting in, in western chairs. We're crippling our children, by making them sit in these chairs all day long. It's it's really kind of heartbreaking.

Zack Arnold

So how does that lead to the button chair, because I was fascinated by this when you share this in your TED Talk?

Turner Osler

Well, so, you know, we had the idea that getting adults to try some weirdo chair would be a heavy lift, because we're up against the big chair and disinformation and the whole advertising world, but kids are much more open to new ideas. So we thought, you know, that would be the place to start. Because if you could get kids to expect to be able to sit and move at the same time, they would carry that with them, you know, and maybe over the longer haul, make act of seeing the norm rather than the exception. So we thought, okay, fine, let's get active chairs under kids. But schools, you know, they don't have money to buy glitter for art projects, you know, and the idea that you're going to be able to sell them some complicated, cool chairs, aspirational. I will say that in other countries, by come, Norway, have some very cool active chairs for kids that are hundreds of dollars. But that that didn't seem like something that would happen in North America. So we had the idea that we'll just make a chair, an active chair for kids, it'll be free. You know, we'll just like give away the design. And it'll be made out of plywood, which is, you know, kind of ply was very cool stuff. I mean, it's the carbon fiber of the 20th century. It's strong, and it's light, and it's cheap. And so, we we have a website where we give away plans for making these mobile columns, button chairs, we call them button chairs, because they kind of look like a button because it's kind of stitched on with a little piece of bungee cord. The thing that makes it unstable is a tennis ball. Actually, we started out using tennis balls, because there's so many US tennis balls are available that they're basically free people pay you to take them off their hands. But we also found that kids would wear holes in a tennis ball in less than a week. So we had to switch to lacrosse balls, which are solid and couldn't wear those out. And then the rest of it is just four pieces of plywood that are cut with a CNC router that is got self locking joints, so you hit it with a rubber mallet. And that just becomes a solid structure. And we give away the design on a website button. chairs.org. And it's the design has been downloaded over 4000 times around the world now. One, one school here in Essex, Vermont, somebody donated a lot of plywood, and they made 100 of them. So you know, it's a design that's getting out into the world. And, you know, we get fan mail from all over the place because your kids love them and the Boston Globe wrote a piece about it.

Zack Arnold

Well, and when have learned from a lot of the other research that I've done for other products are just learning how to like we've talked about create a much better and more conducive working environment, if you're a knowledge worker, if you do creative work, is that you need to be moving more often. But there's another piece of the puzzle and I want to know if you've done any research into this is that especially with kids, or people that have attention issues, it's easier to focus and pay attention when you are moving, which is one of

Turner Osler

My my my sudden awakening, you know my Satori moment there was we have high stakes testing in New England. Where kids take a test. And that determines, I don't know, their, their future and academics and stuff like that. And we had our chairs out on Church Street, and we're just kind of showing them to passers by and some woman sat down on one of our chairs and, and she immediately got it. And then she, and then she started to weep. And she said, you know, my kids had to sit through the kneecaps on high stakes testing last week. And I know he would have done better if he'd been on one of these chairs. And, you know, it's just one parent, but it's one parent who really knows their kid. And I thought, you know, yeah, we don't, we don't have the data yet. But it is that one parent really sent me off on on sort of a quest. And it turns out other people do have data, there's work that's been done in Germany, where they take kids and they hook them up to 32, lead electroencephalograms, and then put them on tippy chairs. And watch what comes out of the electroencephalogram when they're sitting, you know, on a dead chair or a Tippy chair. And the electroencephalogram looks quite different, you know, more alpha, less, less theta, kind of knows that even good, you know, it's a change, but, but fortunately, the researchers had had the wit to give a math test to these kids, while they were sitting on active and non active shares. And the kids were sitting actively, you know, scored 30%, higher on this math test. So, you know, the, the output is really quite substantial. So there's a lot more research to be done to understand the intersection of creativity and movement. But, you know, just to say the early the early findings, point, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's huge. And, and we have, you know, I have friends who work with in the education space, and when they have kids with ADHD, they are, they have to, like invent ways for them to move while they're in class, you know, that they take a broom and turn it in soft the handle and put a cane tip on it. So the kid can kind of move around while he's in class. And I thought, well, you know, we could think something better than that, a little more stable and a little more. So. So I kind of think it's a big deal. I'm going to a conference and spaces in Charlotte, North Carolina next week to kind of talk to the powers that be in big chair. And as you may know, there are tippy chairs for kids that are kind of making their way into the school space. Now. I think ours is more interesting and better, but I'm, I'm eager to get in the conversation.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, well, I wish that I could speak to all kinds of double blind controlled studies that are all this data. And like you said, that's just not there yet. But I have so much anecdotal evidence, whether it's from my own experience, whether it's from clients and students of mine, whether it's from my wife, who's a third grade teacher and all of her classroom by her choice by getting donations, not because the public school district funded it, but she found a way to sell fun. So all of her kids have active chairs. My father's a former reading specialist, worked with people with dyslexia, ADHD, autism. And what all of them have universally seen is that you can get kids to focus more if you can keep them moving. Because one of the things you said in your TED Talk that, frankly, got the biggest laugh, is that what to what kids teach us and their default state is that the worst possible thing we could do is sit in one place all day long.

Turner Osler

Right. Just watch him, you know, you know, they're all over the place, no matter what kind of crap he's here to give. But it says a lot that your wife has to sell fun chairs for her classroom. I mean, just how wrong can that be? You know, what is wrong with this country? But yeah, that's different.

Zack Arnold

That's a soapbox for a very different podcast conversation. And I don't want to go off on that tangent. But yes, I have a lot of very, very enthusiastic and not so pleasant thoughts about that, but we won't go there. So I want to I want to end with digging a little bit more into what I call the self promotion phase of the program, which is talking a little bit more about the different products that you have, because it's not just one chair or one option, you're now developing a whole series of options. So I guess the first place to start is where can we send people? And then how can we figure out what are the best options for people based on their needs?

Turner Osler

So we have a website, QOR360.com. It's like core, but all the C's were taken. So we got the Q.

Zack Arnold

I was gonna ask why, like, where did that come from? From from an entrepreneurs perspective I know there are at least 15 different meetings and whiteboard sessions and like how they come up with QOR and you're like, the C was taken, I love it.

Turner Osler

The C's were taken. So and the K's were taken, so we were down to Q. But it's easy to find because Q is in English as always followed by U, but not on not on our website. You know, it's it stands out in a search. So, our as a as an epidemiologist, you know, my, my task is to try and make a chair so inexpensive everybody can have one. So, you know, we we started out by inventing a rocker that seemed like it would like make chairs less expensive because it was dropped dead simple. But it's it's hard when you're working in Burlington, Vermont, and it's a US product and you have to pay for patents and pay for insurance and so on and so on, so forth. So our first year kind of used a, one of our rockers, but then we thought, well, you know, maybe if we got rid of even more stuff, we can make something that we could sell even less expensively. So then. So the next thing we came up with was something that we call the tilt, which kind of gets rid of the gas cylinder, and all that kind of stuff, and, and it and it even gets rid of our signature rocker and just uses a single industrial grade mammoth motor mount, but it does everything you want, you know, tense in all directions, have a handle the carrier heights adjustable, but we can sell that a lot, a lot less expensively, we've got a couple other versions of our chair that body workers really love because, you know, they, they're very precise in what you can feel while you're moving. Most people I think, just want something that's comfortable enough to sit on all day. So they can work on their spreadsheet, while their spine is moving, and their hips are moving and their feet are moving. So anyway, we got four or five different kinds of chairs on our website. And, you know, we're happy to talk to people via email, if have any questions about which one they'd like the best. But any of our chairs are way better than most of the chairs that big chairs passing out.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, and the biggest, I was just gonna say you stole the words out of my mouth is that one of the biggest barriers for a lot of people is, if I don't want to sit in my Aeron chair anymore, oh, I can save a bunch of money. And then they look at the other options. And they're like, Whoa, this is just as expensive. Now, you know what, I'm just gonna stick with what I have. And for me, the clincher on the site was like, Oh, this is actually really affordable. And that to me is that that's really the difference maker between I'll give it a try versus this thing isn't guaranteed to work, I'm not even going to bother, I'm just going to stick with what I have. And that was one of the other reasons I reached out and really pushed to make sure that I could test this and then do this conversation is that there's now an option that works. It's also affordable, which has been like the Holy Grail that I've been searching for for a decade.

Turner Osler

Right. And as an epidemiologist, you know, if people can't afford a solution, it isn't a solution. So I am my designer chums have worked very hard to try and you know, design out cost. So we can sell these things less and less expensively. And, you know, we got other things on the drawing board that we hope can be still less expensive. Because, you know, we want to we want to make this so easy that everybody can have one.

Zack Arnold

Well, I'm going to make sure that everybody goes to QOR360.com. And that's QOR360.com. Knowing how passionate you are about this topic, is there anything that we've missed that it's just going to drive you crazy that you didn't get to talk about before we wrap up?

Turner Osler

Well, we want people to move even more if we can arrange it. So it's in beta still, but we have an app that keeps track of how much you move on a chair, and reports it as how many calories you're burning in real time. took a year to write the code runs off of the accelerometers in a smartphone. So you don't need any hardware. It's free, you can you can download it for free. It runs on iPhones, and on Android phones. It's called the Fitter Sitter. F I T T E R S I T T E R. So it allows you to keep track of how many calories you're burning, but also has the game of pong, where you use your body as the game controller, with the idea that if you need to take a break from what you're doing, you can play Pong, but you are the game controller. So it gets people to move even more. Or we're trying to design more engaging and more active games to kind of build into it. So it turns out there's a lot of different directions you can take if you're just trying to get people to move more, which is our end game. Well,

Zack Arnold

Well, I very much appreciate you taking the time today to speak with me. I appreciate all the work that you're doing in this the golden years when you could be sailing or playing golf, you're instead trying to solve the sitting epidemic. And I'm going to do my absolute best to get as many butts in your chairs as I can because I'm now a believer.

Turner Osler

Well, that's that's the goal. And we've had a lot of help along the way. And thanks so much.

Zack Arnold

Yeah, you're more than welcome. I really appreciate your time today.

Turner Osler

Thanks again, Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai