Turner Osler has the usual academic trauma surgeon back story: BA Neurobiology (Princeton), MD (Medical College of Virginia), surgical residency (Columbia, Harvard), fellowship (University of New Mexico) and then 20 years an academic trauma surgeon (University of Vermont) with over 300 peer reviewed papers and book chapters.  But then Turner went off scrip, got a masters in Biostatistics and an NIH grant and abandoned the operating room to study trauma epidemiology.

Somewhere in the last decade he became obsessed with the problems that come from sitting too much, and especially sitting passively.  Because no one else was doing it, Turner and some friends created a company to make active sitting chairs that were affordable enough that everyone could have one and attractive enough that everyone would want one.

Turner lives in Colchester with his wife, son and dogs (Bella and Suki) who have been surprisingly tolerant of his mania and are being gradually drawn into the madness.  Except the dogs.

Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Turner Osler about how sitting doesn’t have to be bad for you.

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

  • Why sitting on bad chairs can cause all kinds of back pain.
  • How moving while you’re sitting is one of the best things you can do.
  • Why a chair should let you move in all directions and not pre-position your body.
  • How making a chair unstable makes people continuously engage their body.
  • How everyone already has the spinal reflexes so sit on balanced chair in an unbalanced way.

Connect with Turner:

Links Mentioned:
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Guest Contact Info
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Connect with Steven:

Website

Xeroshoes.com

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@xeroshoes

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facebook.com/xeroshoes

 

Episode Transcript

Steven Sashen:

You may have heard some people say that sitting is the new smoking. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not sitting, maybe it’s the way you’re sitting. We’re going to find out more about this whole topic on this episode of THE MOVEMENT Movement Podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first because those things are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology and often the outright lies you’ve been told about what it takes to walk or run or play or hike or do yoga or CrossFit, whatever it is you like to do and to do that enjoyably efficiently, effectively and did I mention enjoyably? Don’t answer, it’s a question I know I did.

Because look, if you’re not having fun, do something different until you are. Because if it’s not enjoyable, you’re not going to keep doing it anyway. So why start with something unpleasant? Have fun first. I call this THE MOVEMENT Movement Podcast, and by the way, the I part of that, I’m Steven Sashen, cofounder and CEO of Xero Shoes and it’s THE MOVEMENT Movement because we’re creating a movement that involves you, it doesn’t take any effort or cost, I’ll tell you about that in a second. We’re creating a movement about natural movement, helping people rediscover that using your body the way it was designed is the better obvious healthy choice, just the way we currently think of natural food.

That movement part, really easy, just share it with your friends. And if you want to know how, go check out our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find previous episodes, all the places you can interact with us on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram, etcetera, all the places. You can download a podcast. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let us jump in. Turner, as I said before we started this, I’m not going to do the intro for you. I want to let people find out from you tell people who you are and what the hell you’re doing here.

Turner Osler:

Well, so I have the usual backstory of my normal mild-mannered trauma surgeon. I went to Princeton, undergrad neurobiology and then medical school and then residency and then a fellowship and another fellowship and another fellowship, trauma, critical care, burns, that kind of thing. Then I spent 25 years-

Steven Sashen:

Just pause. Just from that part alone. If I hear one more story just like that, I tell you.

Turner Osler:

It’s a little bit fun. You get to meet a lot of people and you get to do some good. It was all good fun and then I lurched off when we had a kid and I wanted a little more time at home. So I got a master’s in biostat. I got a grant from the NIH and I started doing trauma epidemiology, looking at what trauma centers are doing well and what trauma centers were not doing as well, to figure out what the difference was and how we could do better taking care of patients who are the sickest of the sick.

So it became mostly a matter of writing computer code to do statistical modeling. All of a sudden for the first time in my life, I’ve given up the peripatetic life of a trauma surgeon or in the clinic, the OR or the ICU and back to the OR, off to clinic, down to the ER kind of thing and I was just sitting. And all sudden, my back started hurting. And I thought, “That’s new.” And so, I started … I thought, “Well, I’ve been to medical school. I’ve taken bodies apart from the dissection lab. I put them back together in OR. I can figure this out.” It’s not so easy and it took a deep dive in a while before it came clear that really the problem was sitting. And not even just sitting, but sitting on crappy chairs that leave people hunched and inert four hours a day.

And it’s like basically bought every kind of chair that was supposed to help and none of them succeeded really. And so as a surgeon, you get used to just trying to take control of situations where you don’t know what you’re doing, because that’s what trauma surgery for sure. You walk away from the sink with water dripping off of your elbows and some guy’s on the table with a bunch of gunshot wounds. You walk in the room and you say, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m sure I can handle it.” It’s hubris, it’s crazy, but if you can’t say that sentence, you can’t walk into an operating room. You got no business being there. You have to have crazy confidence.

So I don’t know anything about entrepreneurship or chairs or design or any of that stuff, but there’s a great maker community in Burlington, Vermont and I fell in with some guys who studied design in New York City. And before long, we had a solution and we had prototypes and we started making these things and firing them out over the web. He would write to us and say, “This is terrific but,” and so we had long email conversations. And finally, we have all designs for chairs that are unique because they let people move while they’re sitting. And that’s really the solution to the problem.

Steven Sashen:

So I love that you said that. Have you read Daniel Lieberman, he’s from Harvard, his book Exercised. So you know that he-

Turner Osler:

He’s written more books than Exercised, I got to say.

Steven Sashen:

His most book. And Daniel and I had a very entertaining time actually. When I first met him, he had just started proposing his idea that we’re all persistence, endurance athletes, that we evolved from people who slowly hunted their prey by very slowly jogging, walking, etcetera. And I said to him, “Yeah, that’s not true.” And he’s like, “What?” Because he was not used to people come confronting him and criticizing his Harvard credentials.

I said, “Well, that may be true for some of you, but it’s not true for me and my people.” He says, “What do you mean?” I said, “I’m a sprinter. It’s a whole different world.” And he says, “Oh, no, you guys didn’t train the right way.” “That’s what all you slow guys say. No, a whole different game.” I said, “Here’s what happens. Your friends slowly walked down the antelope. My friend showed up, picked it up, carried it over his shoulders and carted it at home. Because my friends, we all deadlift three times our body weight and you guys can barely do a push up.”

And it took a couple of years until, I think, he got over that and we’ve become friendly, but the reason that I bring it up is this whole idea of sitting is the new smoking, as you know, got a lot of press in the last few years, because sitting is the problem. And he talks about in that book, looking at indigenous cultures, where they do a lot of sitting. They do a lot of lying around. They don’t go-

Turner Osler:

They do. They have a lot of downtime if you put accelerometers on them, but if you go watch them, they’re not sitting in an office chair. They’re squatting.

Steven Sashen:

That’s right. And so when I heard about what you were doing, I will confess, I knew nothing about it and I was curious/dubious/curious/doubtful/who knows what. And then the moment I got your chair, and of course, using the word chair for what you’ve sent me is at best a bit of a stretch. I’m going to hold it up for people who can see. And for people who can’t see, why don’t you describe what I just held up and then I’m going to tell you my experience with it.

Turner Osler:

We wanted to make a chair that would let people move in all directions without prepositioning. And so because they’re completely unstable, they have to be utterly balanced in order not to just fall off. I tell people, no one has ever fallen asleep on our chair, you can’t. If you find yourself on the floor, most people wake up before they get that far. So by making a chair unstable, you cause people to engage with their posture continuously. The shocking thing is and maybe you had this experience, your brain doesn’t have to get involved. Your brain can watch what’s going on, but it doesn’t have to participate because it’s a matter of spinal reflexes.

Did you know what takes children like six months or nine months or a year to learn how to walk? What is wrong with those little beggars, right? Are they lazy or are they stupid? The answer is walking is very hard, especially if you’re starting from ground zero. So that’s why they go through the creeping, crawling, coddling kind of thing. What they’re doing is they’re developing spinal reflexes that let them exist in gravity effortlessly.

So everybody already has the spinal reflexes to sit in a balanced way on an unbalanced chair like that, but they don’t use those reflexes because they’re being supported by a backrest and a foot rests and an arm rests, and then coup de grace, lumbar support that’s trying to recapitulate something that looks like normal posture, but profoundly is not. The way your spine looks is determined by gravity and it’s an interesting thought experiment. If you raise the child free of gravity, what would their spine look like?

Steven Sashen:

Has there been any information about people who spend a lot of time in space and what’s changed posturally?

Turner Osler:

Well, we know that they have a hard time when they get back to Earth because of other things. They have osteoporosis because-

Steven Sashen:

Loss of a lot of bone mass.

Turner Osler:

The business of your spine is constantly relying on gravity to clue it in to what’s going on. And if you take people out of gravity, things go wrong rather quickly. It’s astonishing how quickly the problems develop, but just to say, so you can be sitting on your chair and your spine is having a silent conversation with gravity, your spinal reflexes are keeping everything in order and your brain can like be reading or email or writing poetry or I don’t know why, but in the meantime, your posture is perfect. I have a friend who is a serious meditation type. He lives at the Zen center. And the first time he ever sat on one of our chairs, his eyes got wide. He said, “This is amazing. I go exactly where I go when I meditate.”

“When I sit on your chair.” And we talked about it for a while and it turns out, of course, there are mirror neurons in the human brain and this and that. And because the chair induces a posture that approximates the noble posture of meditation, his body is in the meditation posture and his brain thinks, “Oh, I recognize his posture. I must be meditating.”

Steven Sashen:

Those Zen boys, posture is their thing. When I was living in New York, the Dalai Lama came in to town and there was this big sort of sunrise meditation thing. And you could spot the different meditation traditions by how people were sitting. So the Theravada meditators, the people who are most familiar with that would be like Mindfulness or Vipassana, they tried to remain still, but they didn’t have great posture necessarily. The Zen boys, great posture. They were statuesque literally.

And then the Tibetans, the Dalai Lama included, were my favorite because they were just sitting comfortably, and then every now and then, they just have a conversation with the guy sitting next to them. So they could not have been more nonrigid about everything from the sitting posture to what they were doing, which is very entertaining, watching the Zen boys freak out when the Dalai Lama is opening his eyes and waving to people. So let me back up a little bit, and for people who didn’t see what I’m doing and I can do this while Turner goes to turn off the phone.

So the thing that I’m sitting on, the best way I can describe it and when I’m going to … I’m looking at it to do this. Imagine taking a small, well, let’s take a normal-sized oval dinner plate, which dinner plates are typically not oval, but work with me on that. I know you’re showing it, but I’m trying to describe for people who can’t see. So take a small dinner plate, put a tiny little duckbill on the back that goes a couple inches up, behind you a little bit, but you don’t even need that really. And then put that on a ball, on something that rotates, it’s unstable. And so that’s what you’re sitting on. It’s padded of course, not massively, but you’re sitting on this thing that you can’t find a …

Well, you can find a spot where you lock in, but during the course of the day, because I’ve been sitting on this thing for a couple of days now, what I love is that not only do you find yourself having to move and adjust dynamically, but you want to or I want to. I really enjoy, I find myself swiveling and doing a little dancing moves and things. And it’s very, very pleasant. And you can tell that, for some people who do not have the same core strength that one develops training to be a Masters all-American sprinter, I imagine this really … Some people, they get a real workout, workout other than just feeling the, I don’t want to put it, it just feels … This going to sound crazy. It feels strangely right to not be stable. I enjoy …

Look, nothing wrong with planting myself on a couch or in a chair and just kicking back and doing nothing, but I was on this thing for nine hours yesterday. So far, it’s been six hours today. I know it says right here start with 30 minutes, but I ignored that like people ignore when we say, “Just do a 20-minute run on our shoes to start,” because I just didn’t want to get off and felt totally fine at the end of the day and this morning as well. Actually, I have a little scoliosis from having other problem within my spine and I can definitely feel my spinal erectors today, they definitely got a bit of a workout yesterday. But it’s been super, super fascinating. So anyway, that’s the description both of the physical thing and you can add to that if you’d like, but also just my personal direct experience.

Turner Osler:

We get that a lot actually. People just love it and can’t get off it because it’s fun. And so exactly, what is it doing? Well, it’s doing a couple things. One of the things that does is it puts people in a balanced posture pretty much automatically. So their posture gets better and pretty much their back stops hurting within days or weeks. It’s astonishing, a number of people who send us emails and videos about how great it has been for their back. But more than that, it turns out that you don’t actually need your legs to walk.

There’s a great piece of video, you can find it on YouTube, looking about a guy who’s congenitally born without femurs, but he’s walking perfectly well with great posture and good balance, but he’s walking on his ischial tuberosities. He’s just marching along on his sitz bones because that’s what walking is. Walking is accomplished with your spine and your hips. Your legs are just the extensions that let you take longer drives. But all of the power of walking comes from the spinal engine, the interaction of the spine and the hips. So when you’re sitting on our chair, you can actually be walking without the bother of trying to figure out where you’re going to go.

And because you’re walking, because you’re walking, your metabolic rate goes up to about 1.3, 1.4, maybe even 1.5 METs depending on how intensively you play. Well, that’s right up there at a point where you’re making a difference in your age. Your bad cholesterol is going down, your good cholesterol is going up, your insulin is going down. There are metabolic consequences to sitting with your muscles going dark all day long slumped in a conventional ergonomic chair because your muscles aren’t just activators that move your bones around. They are very complex biochemical factories that are spinning off molecules that communicate the rest of your body.

And your metabolism got used to five or 10 or even 15 miles a day when we were hunter gatherers on the savanna. And when you tad away and you go to a mile or half a mile or a quarter mile, people working from home maybe not even, this is catastrophic for your biochemistry which requires exercise uniquely among primates, gorillas, orangutans, chimps, all these other cousins of ours are fine just sitting around cracking nuts in a zoo. They maintain a lean body. They have a 10%, even less, body-fat ratio doing nothing. A chimp, he’ll just crack some nuts and eat them and then amble over and climb a tree and sleep for the night and that’s it, then he knocks off. They don’t require the kind of intensity that human biochemistry requires to thrive.

Steven Sashen:

Well, it’s interesting, I thought about this yesterday actually and this morning, is that the whole idea of non-exercise, what does NEAT stand for? I cannot remember, non-exercise something thermogenesis. What’s the A? You just froze. Oh crap.

Turner Osler:

It’s non-

Steven Sashen:

Non-exercise-

Turner Osler:

Active thermogenesis.

Steven Sashen:

There we go, active. That was the easy word. And so just the whole idea basically, that for people who don’t know, just we expend a bunch of calories by doing little things, fidgeting, little ways we move around. And so I was thinking about this quite a bit yesterday is that I just was doing more moving during the time that I was sitting than I have at any other time with all the time that I spend sitting and I have a treadmill desk. I have, obviously, a standing desk as well. I remember when I first started using that I dropped five pounds effortlessly. And there’s some activities and some work that I can do while standing or while walking and there’s some that I really can’t, but it really felt like I was getting that same kind of benefit, a very similar benefit from just sitting on this because of how much moving I was doing.

And again, you make a little move and it changed your balance and this is going to sound so weird to me, not to you, is it just feels like, once you realize you’re doing that, it just feels fun to move a little bit more before you try to come back to some balance posture. It just was more enjoyable to move.

Turner Osler:

And you’re exploring the space of all possible spinal configurations, which is an immense space because you have 24 vertebra, six joints between every two vertebra. There’s the intervertebral disk. There’s a lot of different ways where your spine can be, most of which are terrible. By sitting on something unstable, you’re really exploring the space that all of your spine could assume. And when it finds one it likes, it goes there and then it explores some more. If it finds one it likes better, it goes there until it optimizes your posture. We take these things out and put them on a walking street here in Burlington. We let people try them out to see what will happen.

And we were doing this one day and some like 13 or 14-year-old young woman was sitting at the periphery just on one of our chairs, just blissing out, just rocking-

Steven Sashen:

Hold on, wait, you said blissing out-

Turner Osler:

Just sitting.

Steven Sashen:

You said blissing out, then I lost you for about 10 seconds.

Turner Osler:

So just blissing out in the sun without even a phone. She’s just sitting there. Five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. And then she gets up and she walks away, but she just gets about 10 steps and she turns around and she said, “I think it’s making me walk better.” Because it was like hitting a reset button for the way she inhabits her spine and her posture.

Steven Sashen:

I’m going to be very careful about what I say here because I don’t want to draw a causal relationship where it may not be because there’s a lot of other things that I’ve been doing in the last few days that could affect this. But I noticed this morning that the way my shoulders were being held was different, not unusual, it’s not unfamiliar, let’s say, but it was habitually different. The resting position was a little different than it normally is. That’s a position I have to consciously normally think about. And this morning, I was noticing, “Hey, I’m not thinking about that one and they’re in the spot that I like them to be.”

Turner Osler:

How amazing is that?

Steven Sashen:

That’s a high on the list of things that don’t suck, let’s call it that.

Turner Osler:

But the idea that you can harangue or shame or browbeat people into better postures, it’s a failed game, right? You can’t consciously control your posture, but if you put people on an unstable surface, their posture is automatically generated by their spinal reflexes and their spine having a conversation with gravity. So they don’t have to do anything because they already know how based on having learned to exist in gravity as a child.

Steven Sashen:

Well, I want to address two things from what you said. The first is unstable surfaces because there are a lot of people who have gotten the idea that unstable is good for everything. So for example, in footwear, there are companies that make footwear that they explicitly say is designed to be unstable and they say that that’s somehow going to be good for you. In that case, totally not. There are some people who are doing workouts on unstable surfaces thinking that you’re somehow building up, what are they called them, the stabilizing muscles, which there are no magic stabilizing muscles. They’re just the muscles that you use for different things. And it’s not about you’re doing … You’re not making the muscles strong, you’re changing your neurology to use your muscles a little differently. But if you’re trying to get stronger, you want to be on something stable to use your muscles in their strongest position.

So there’s a lot of misconception about this whole unstable-stable thing, but with sitting, it’s a very different game because you’re not trying to build strength. You’re not trying to deliberately put yourself in a compromised position. You’re giving yourself the opportunity of finding a natural position. Because with shoes that are unstable, as you’re going through your gait cycle, you’re putting yourself in dangerous positions. With sitting, it’s not a fundamentally dangerous positions. So these little stabilizing motions, it’s a whole different world than unstable training which has gotten a lot of press and the research has been very clear, not really helpful.

Turner Osler:

It’s a very interesting phenomenon that instability should become something that’s a lot of just in and of itself. Sometimes it’s appropriate, but mostly it’s not. I don’t know what the injury rates look like from unstable shoes, but I have a feeling it’s not favorable.

Steven Sashen:

Well, let’s say there aren’t statistics on this that I’ve read, but I’ve been getting a lot of anecdotal information from people in the footwear industry that with the new shoes that are super, super high where the foam is not particularly stable wears out very quickly, that the incidence of emergency room visits for broken wrist and collarbones has gone up.

Turner Osler:

And we know that when women started wearing those very high platform shoes, the incidence of ankle fractures and stuff went way up, even in young people where you wouldn’t expect that.

Steven Sashen:

Well, as a former all-American gymnast, I had a bet that I could do a standing backflip anywhere, anytime. And one of the girls at this gymnastic camp I was at said, “Well, just do it on beam.” And so I did a standing back on beam, but my foot landed slightly off it, so my foot twisted and I heard that come out of my foot, “Aw, I just broke my foot.” Everyone laughed. I’m not kidding. And when I got to the emergency room, the doctor says, “Yeah, we normally only see this break,” it was a fifth metatarsal break, “We normally only see this from women who fall off their platform shoes.” “Can you talk to me about what football players get instead? Can you give me something else?”

So actually, back into something else you said, I want you to dive into this a little further, you talked about the ineffectiveness of lumbar support for in chairs and whether you’re in a chair or if you’re in a car, lumbar support products are huge, huge sellers. Can you dive into that a bit more?

Turner Osler:

Sure. So the lumbar lordosis, the normal arch in your low back just belongs there because that’s how the spine is designed. When you put people in a chair with a backrest and footrest and armrest and all that kind of stuff, the small of their back goes flat just because they’ve been constrained in so many ways. And the chair designers took a look at that and said, “Hmm, that doesn’t look right.”

And so they put a lump right behind the small of the back, trying to recapitulate, trying to recreate the lumbar lordosis which ordinarily is emergent but the brilliant synthesis of the way your spine works and the way gravity affects your spine. And they’re trying to simulate it by just mashing something into the small of your back. Anybody who’s ever sat against lumbar support pretty much knows that you’re not going to stay there for very long. It’s just a failed concept.

I had a very interesting conversation with a guy at an ergonomics conference I’ve been. I’ve been to a lot of conferences that I wouldn’t ordinarily go to. So this is when I went to ErgoExpo in Las Vegas where I met a guy. I was showing our chairs and people couldn’t make much sense out of it because it was unlike anything else at their ergonomic conference. Although a couple people said, “This is the only new thing we’ve seen in a decade,” but anyway, this guy walks by and he’s got stubble and he’s swarthy and he’s got groupies. And he sits down on our chair and he has this look, a little puzzled.

And then he gets up and a woman sits down and she sits on it for about a minute. She says, “Well, Francisco, this is terrific.” And it turns out, this is a guy who was part of the design team for the Herman Miller Aeron Chair in 1994. And so we had a very interesting conversation because he knew a lot about chairs, which I didn’t. I’m like an emmeritus professor in the Department of Surgery from the University of Vermont and he spent his whole life designing office furniture, so he knows a lot, but I know a lot about anthropology and anatomy and this and that. And so it was a conversation and I go back to Burlington, we’ve swapped email addresses.

I get an email from two days later 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 I find that sitting slumped all day is terrible for their posture, back pain and their overall health, but what do you want me to do?” We’ve spent our lives convincing people they can’t sit without lumbar support and now I cannot sell a chair unless it has lumbar support.”

Steven Sashen:

This is the exact conversation that I haven’t had directly, But a friend of mine has had directly with the CEOs of two multibillion dollar footwear companies and a senior vice president of a third where they said, “We know this natural movement, this whole minimalist thing is legit. We can’t do it because it would be admitting everything we said for 50 years is a lie.”

Turner Osler:

And to roll that back, it’s just so hard for them. And not to put too fine a point on it, but I gave a TED Talk some time ago, so I have a soft spot in my heart for TED. And I was really charmed when TED reached out to me and said, “We’d like to give away some of your chair at the TED event and it’s going to be in Southern California.” And it’s like the big deal. It’s two days. The tuition is 24 grand. People who are philanthropists are people who show up for this kind of thing. And then they have names like Bill and Hillary, that kind of people. “This is just terrific. We’ll get some more chairs under some of these people and how great is that? Sure. No, yeah, no, we’ll find what contribute some chairs, TED. That’d be terrific.” And they said, “We just got to check one thing.” Two days later, I got a call saying, “We can’t do that. It turns out we have a prior arrangement with Steelcase and Steelcase said no.”

Steven Sashen:

Hysterical. We’ve had similar things. We had over a million dollar order in the system from a major retailer. And at the literally last minute, within hours of them clicking submit, coincidentally actually, they got a phone call from someone who makes big thick padded motion control stuff saying and they sell a lot of them through this retail chain saying, “Yeah, we don’t want that product in your stores.” That was three and a half years ago. And it set us back quite a bit. Happily, it’s all worked out fine since, but we have similar things. What amazes me, I don’t know about you, actually you and I have some things in common, so we’re both gymnast when we were younger, were you always an individual sport athlete? I’m testing out a theory here.

Turner Osler:

I know, it was gymnastics and then it was martial arts, wrestling, that kind of thing, swimming.

Steven Sashen:

I have a theory and it may be completely not true that most individual sport athletes have a particular mindset. And the mindset is best thing wins. Best man wins, best thing wins. And of course, what we have learned in businesses, that ain’t true. And that when people are well established in something, they don’t just go, “Oh my gosh, that’s better. What can I now do to move in that direction or to help or to bail out of what I’m doing because it’s hurting people.” They dig their heels in even more firmly, if that’s how one digs, one seals and they will do all manner of crazy things to keep themselves alive. And of course, when I say that way, it makes sense what I’m describing, rather than do the better thing. And I, as an individual sport athlete who likes best thing wins, I understand it, but I also find it completely impossible to understand because it just seems so ridiculous.

Turner Osler:

Although it’s just an organism trying to prolong its life. And the older and more decrepit an organism becomes, the more viciously it will start strive to carry on. So I think we’re at an inflection point where Big Chair is getting into trouble. Their stock isn’t doing that well and so on. It’s an interesting time to be alive.

Steven Sashen:

Did you just say Big Chair?

Turner Osler:

I did say Big Chair.

Steven Sashen:

I don’t know if you know, I refer to shoe companies as Big Shoe.

Turner Osler:

And I’m just riffing on Big Tobacco.

Steven Sashen:

Exactly.

Turner Osler:

And the analogy is quite strict. Back in the ’50s and ’60s, people thought smoking was normal because everyone smoked.

Steven Sashen:

They thought it was good for you. They thought it was exercising your lungs. They thought it was-

Turner Osler:

Well, actually, they hired people to impersonate physicians and say that kind of a thing, but real physicians, we’re not totally on board, but it was a hard lift to prove that smoking was actually causing not just lung cancer, but emphysema and heart attacks and a whole raft of things, in part because the statistical methodology didn’t yet exist, but I do this kind of work. But ultimately, it became very clear that smoking was a public health catastrophe hiding in plain sight. And it’s taken 50 years to roll it back. And now we’re down to 18% of American smokes. So we’ve made a lot of progress, but it’s been very, very hard. Just so much chairs, hiding in plain sight.

Steven Sashen:

Well, I think you and I would make the same claim, which is the “sad” part about what we’re doing and I’m putting sad in air quotes, is that shoes and chairs, “normal shoes”, which by the way, people … Actually, you and I are in the exact same situation this way. People ask me for the proof about what we’re doing. I go, “No, we’re not the intervention. The modern athletic shoe is only 50 years old. 99.5% of human history, people wear stuff that look like Xero shoes.”

Turner Osler:

We’re the controller.

Steven Sashen:

That’s right. But what I say is it’s too bad and I’m not being literal when I say this, it’s too bad that shoes, or in your case, normal chairs don’t kill people because if they did, there would be a tobacco-like investigation. But instead it’s just become a multibillion dollar circle of people trying to make money by trying to correct a problem that the product that they bought to begin with caused. And it’s like the fact that there’s a multibillion dollar aftermarket for products to make shoes more comfortable says there’s a problem with the shoes. And people don’t want to put two and two together.

You may have a variation in this, in the footwear world, every couple of years, someone has some new form of cushioning or padding, same basic idea. And it’s always hailed as the next greatest thing. No one ever says, “Hey, sorry about that crap we were selling up until now.” But more, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, is that in that story, the villagers eventually got smart and didn’t show up. But when the shoe companies cried cushioning, people keep showing up.

Turner Osler:

It’s like Lucy and the Football.

Steven Sashen:

Exactly. So there’s an analogous thing that I’m now just thinking of with chairs. I haven’t been paying exquisite attention to this, but enough to know like, “Here’s some new chair thing. Now we have …” My God, I heard a commercial on NPR for some chair company and they were advertising as a benefit that there was something 32 different adjustment points. All I could think was, “I don’t even want to spend the time to figure out one.”

Turner Osler:

Right, and that’s really the genius of our chair, is there’s nothing to adjust except the height. Everything else you adjust in real time on the fly. We have the same thing in the world of chairs where we tell people slyly, “If lumbar support is the answer, how come 80% of America still has back pain?”

Steven Sashen:

Right. I say the same thing, “If they’ve had 50 years to make these shoes better, why are 50% of runners and 80% of marathoner still getting injured every year?” and prior to 1970, you can’t find any medical literature about treating running injuries because they basically weren’t happening.

Turner Osler:

It’s so interesting that most of the diseases that we face are, as we say in the business, diseases of modernity. You couldn’t have these diseases without the superstructure that gives us what we call modern life. It’s taken a while to discover that the Frankenfood that people eat and the weirdo chairs that we sit on and the bizarre footwear that everybody thinks is normal, all have taken an incredible toll on what could have been a much more pleasant life.

Steven Sashen:

I met a podiatrist who told me the story of another podiatrist who went to Kenya. I’m going to guess some of the details wrong, let’s say in the ’60s and was studying the Kenyan army. Most people in the army grew up without shoes. And his report after studying the Kenyan army was, “A podiatrist will go broke in this country.” And I say that often, I go, “If you want to find people who have healthy feet, just go anywhere where they don’t have indoor plumbing.” And a little glib but trying to make the point that there’s a natural thing going on where people don’t have the same issues.

Irene Davis from Harvard had a line when I was just getting Xero shoes started. It was very encouraging. She said, “If we just got kids wearing your shoes, in 20 years, we wouldn’t be treating adults for the billions of dollars of problems they currently have.”

Turner Osler:

And we have this same idea about chairs that schools can’t afford glitter for their preschoolers art projects, so we came up with a design that we give away.

Steven Sashen:

I love that. So again, for people who aren’t watching, describe this thing that I am totally in love with right now.

Turner Osler:

Well, it’s four pieces of plywood that are cut with a CNC router. They fit together with self-locking joints that we invented and the seat top sits on top of … We started out using tennis balls, but kids wore them out within a month, so we had to switch the lacrosse balls because they can’t wear those out. When you look at it from above, it looks like a button, so we call it the Button Chair. Double entendre is intended, butt on the chair. We’ve got hundreds of these in the public schools here in Vermont and we have a website of buttonchairs.org where we give away to the CNC router plan, so anybody can make this. You stamp them out with a CNC router like you would with Christmas cookies and then it’s snapped together.

Steven Sashen:

Awesome. How many people have gotten those?

Turner Osler:

Well, there had been 1,000 downloads from our buttonchair.org website, so I don’t know how many. We get pictures from Taiwan and Singapore and Australia all over the place. I don’t really know how many are out there because we don’t require people to tell us anything. We just give away the design.

Steven Sashen:

I love it. Man, that is so, so brilliant. So sadly, we’re coming up on time, as they say, I don’t know who they are and I wish they would stop saying things like that. Regardless, is there anything that we left out just to talk about what humans have been doing, what they could be doing, your chair, you, anything that you can think of that we need to talk about?

Turner Osler:

Well, I think we pretty well covered the waterfront. Chairs are a problem. We think that we’ve got a good solution. It may not work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people.

Steven Sashen:

So you know one thing that we haven’t done during this entire conversation?

Turner Osler:

What’s that?

Steven Sashen:

Talk about the name of your chair.

Turner Osler:

Right. You can tell I’m not a marketing guy. We call the chair what we sent you, The Ariel. We named it after the wife of a medical student who just loved it. So we named it after her. And our company is QOR360 like QOR and 360 like your core. All the C words are taken. So we got Q. QOR360.com. And I wrote a book about this stuff that you can download for free from our website if it’s interesting to you.

Steven Sashen:

It should be interesting to you. This is super, super. I’m totally fascinated. The thing that I’m literally playing with in my head right now, we have a lot of people in our office who have standing desks and sometimes they’re using higher chairs because they want to switch to not standing and it’s not one of those adjustable things. And so I’m imagining and I haven’t looked and I should have if I was a smart, awesome, good podcast host instead of a lazy guy who just starts conversations with people that he likes, I would have looked to see if you made something to accommodate that, which all we’d need, would be a platform, an adjustable height platform.

Turner Osler:

It’s an easy thing to make. We made a couple for people who’ve requested them, but as a former trauma surgeon, the business of making a tippy chair and then just cranking it up to some brain injury height seemed like a bad idea. So we prefer for people to have their feet on the floor because they’re less likely to … And you don’t need a standing desk, you can have a variable height desk, so you can dial it in-

Steven Sashen:

“These things cost money. We’re a startup.”

Turner Osler:

But really, any desk is variable height. You just have to buy the right number of paper bags to put under it.

Steven Sashen:

Actually, it’s funny, most of our standing desks are regular desks with cinder blocks underneath them. We’re very classy over here. We don’t have any costs on cinder blocks in the front, but we do have desks on cinder blocks on the inside. We’re not one of those venture-backed companies where they get nothing but Herman Miller chairs and adjustable height desks. And everyone’s got a monitor that’s 48 inches wide. And we’re trying to try to get shoes on people’s feet and spend as much money as we can on inventory to do that to deal with the growth. And so how’s biz been going in short forms?

Turner Osler:

So we’ve shipped a bit we’ve shipped about 6,000 chairs in the last couple of years which seems like a pretty good pace for us because we’re making them here in Burlington, Vermont. Our supply chain, we have to keep building up the supply chain to keep up with orders. So we gross just over a million dollars last year. So we think we’re a real business. Nothing like you guys, of course, but we’re working on it.

Steven Sashen:

It’s just a matter of … Well, I like to say that what we’ve been able to accomplish is due to 90% luck and the other 10% is also luck. And then there’s a separate 100% or 90% of that is working your butt off and the other 10% is hopefully being smart enough to know how to put out the fire that started overnight despite nothing having changed since yesterday. So we’re doing the best we can. And then and then good for you that you’re able to make things locally because footwear doesn’t work that way. And of course, we, like many other people in the world right now, are dealing with the aftereffects of all that COVID-related things that created supply chain issues, but blah, blah, blah, business.

Turner Osler:

The supply chain issue is huge for everybody really, especially in the footwear world, I think.

Steven Sashen:

There’s a lot of companies or a lot of industries that have been dramatically affected. Footwear is a big one and people love to say, “Well, why don’t you just move somewhere else.” I said, “It doesn’t work that way.” We can’t just move to America because it’s literally not possible to make our products here in the same way it’s literally not possible to get a domestically made version of the devices we’re using for this conversation. And the industry experts say to move footwear manufacturing back to America would take at least 20 years and possibly $100 billion. And to move into different parts of the world, it doesn’t work that way because the supply chain is all still in China. If you move to Vietnam or wherever, you still have to get everything from China mostly. We’re all seeing the vulnerable aspect of that right now and who-

Turner Osler:

And it’s not just footwear, it’s also vaccines.

Steven Sashen:

Oh, really? That’s interesting. I’m going to have to talk to someone about that. My neighbor, we just moved into new house a few months ago, my neighbor is a big muckety-muck at a company that makes a lot of the vaccine, especially the COVID ones. And I have not talked to him about supply chain things or other vaccines. I’m going to have to have that conversation this weekend. That’s fascinating. I had no idea. It’s a-

Turner Osler:

It’s an interconnected world.

Steven Sashen:

That’s exactly what I was going to say. And people don’t like to think that it should be that way. Ultimately, when it works, that’s the best way, but when there’s a glitch in the system, it affects everybody.

Turner Osler:

And everything.

Steven Sashen:

And everything. And it’s not like you can avoid glitches in the system. Things happen. I’ve been told. Well, Turner, once again, this has been a total, total pleasure. And do me a favor, just because it’s fun to do this at the very end, remind people again where they can find you and/or everything about what we’ve been talking about.

Turner Osler:

So we have a website, qor360.com. You can download a book about this stuff. I write blog. There’s more stuff there than you care to read and videos. Videos-

Steven Sashen:

And videos too. I think you’re being hyper modest. So this has been a treat. Once again, for everyone, please do go check what we’ve been talking about. I would love to hear what your experience is and hear, well, what your experience is. That’s the bottom line. So let’s wrap it up and just remind everyone, if you want to find out more about what we’ve been doing, what Turner has been doing, you know where to go, qor360.com. If you want to find out what we’re doing, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. Again you’ll find all the previous episodes, ways you can interact with us. If you have any requests or questions, people you want to recommend that we should be chatting with or if you want to tell me, “I’ve got my head firmly at my butt,” or anything in between, I’m open to any conversation, drop me an email, [email protected].

Again if you want to be part of the movement, spreading the word, just subscribe, like, share, leave reviews, etcetera, but most importantly, go out, have fun and live life feet first.

 

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