The Taproot Podcast - 🪑 You May Address the Chair: What we sit in tells us what we stand for

Starting point is 00:00:00 That boy needs therapy. Psychosomatic. That boy needs therapy. You're psychosomatic. That boy needs therapy. Lie down on the couch. That boy needs therapy. Hi y'all, it's Joel Blackstock with the Taboo Therapy Collective podcast. We've been doing some articles and podcasts on the psychology of different parts of art and design. And then in July, we're going to sit down with Will Selman, who is a friend that's doing a book about Jungian psychology being fused with urban planning, which is a very taproot therapy type guest to have. So we'll sit down with him in July. And today I'm doing an article about chairs. So the article from the blog, and there's pictures of these chairs and

Starting point is 00:00:51 different, more information as always in the article than there is on the podcast and pictures. But if you want to look at the blog, you can, you can read that. And the article that we're going to read today is called, You May Address the Chair. What We Sit In Tells Us What We Stand For. So what do chairs say about culture, personality, and psychology? You might notice that you and your therapist both have to sit in a chair when you go into therapy. You know, we have internalized this visual language of therapy. You know, I don't have to tell people where they're supposed to sit when they come in. They understand.

Starting point is 00:01:28 When you think of therapy, you think of the couch. We know, even in a picture of people that we don't know, that the therapist sits on a chair and the patient sits on the couch. We upload pictures of our therapy offices for people to see them in therapy directories and websites because we know that the spaces that we design say something about us and we want to communicate that. So I've written a lot about how the he says a lot of things about that the chair is the fastest way to communicate character when you're writing and designing the visuals for a movie. So I'm fascinated with this intersection of design and psychology. You know, design is a powerful indicator of not only personality, but also of how a society sees itself and its future. And one of the reasons that many architects become furniture designers

Starting point is 00:02:26 is that both jobs require that someone have a vision of the future and a hypothesis about the way style, economy, and society are headed. Buildings and furniture, they're not sets for a play. We don't throw them away at the end of the night. We expect them to last often longer than us, and that means that someone must look into the future and make a guess about what kinds of styles and materials will last. And not just practically that you don't want to fall apart, but also stylistically that it still remains beautiful. And some of the largest fights in architecture come from the

Starting point is 00:03:02 competing visions of the world and what it could be or it should be. And one of the biggest divides between the schools of architecture and design has been between the classicists and the modernists. And the classicists prefer traditional structures and styles. And classicists believe that these methods evolved over time for a reason. So we shouldn't get rid of tradition. That classicism is an expensive way, you know, to build and it also was slow to change by its nature. So modernism prefers using technology and new materials to create structures that were previously impossible to build. So modernists, sometimes they throw the baby out with the bathwater and trying to discover new possibilities

Starting point is 00:03:42 and what we can do. And classicism is asking, you know, should we do it? And modernism is asking, can we do it? And both perspectives keep design grounded in both form and function. So the designers that I'm really interested in, I like, this is mainly about the modernist period of chairs, are Charles and Ray Eames. They were one of the most successful furniture designers of all time, worked for the Herman Miller Furniture Company. And Charles Eames was actually an architect who was kicked out of school for being too radical. They didn't like what he was doing. And you may know him from his iconic Eames chair, which was what I sit in in my office.

Starting point is 00:04:21 And Charles and his wife were very good at predicting the future. And they were so good, in fact, that the Ames chair is one of the longest manufactured and best-selling chairs of all time. And so even though, you know, even some of the work that Charles and Ames did wasn't really received within their life, with the context of history, we can see what they were seeing with their intuition. And we'll get to that. But, you know, even though it was not understood then, it was a warning to us about the risks of hyperconnection and consumption and information technology and a lot of things that we couldn't really hear in the 1980s at the end of their life.

Starting point is 00:04:56 And so their final works were glimpses of the future and what were considered failures. I don't think we should consider failures anymore. Some of their failures, I think, are actually prophecy. And so, you know, Ray Eames was always at the forefront of embracing new technology and pushing the boundaries of design. And so he recognized the power of interconnectedness and the exchange of information. And Ray set out to create an exhibit that would reflect these ideas. So Connections, the work of Ray Eames, was this exhibit that explored the concept of interconnectedness and the forms of design that she did at the end of her life when she was already a very famous designer, one of the

Starting point is 00:05:33 most famous in the world. And Ray saw the similarities between the way that information is organized and the interconnectedness of the design elements and she believed that design should be viewed as a network or a relation or an ideas about relationships between things and um responses and reflections things responding to and reflecting each other like in a neural network and so charles eames's last design was a celebration of the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And it was at the, this is the guy, this is not Ray, this is Charles Eames' last work. It was called, it was for the bicentennial of the country and it was at the Met. And it was called a celebration of the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And it was, he grouped, you know, these historic items, all these different artifacts and things from their life, you know, by their associations with each other, but not in these museum-like exhibits where all the items are placed together, you know, that are the same.

Starting point is 00:06:39 You go into one room that's all combs and another room that's all pots. That's not how he did it. And so visitors were encouraged to engage with the exhibits in a non-linear way. You didn't have to go through it only one way. So you could explore connections between different artworks or historical events and cultural phenomenon. And the exhibit employed these innovative techniques such as film projections and audio recordings and tactile displays, what you could touch to create this immersive and participatory experience. Everyone could get what they wanted out of it, not what the designer was wanting you to experience.

Starting point is 00:07:11 And so there were like lines where you could walk through it and see everything from their social life or from their political life or, you know, when they had parties and their friends and society. And you could follow, if you were interested in one thing, a line to another part of the exhibit. I promise this will get back to chairs, but this exhibit was roasted. Nobody got it. Nobody understood it. And the review that the New York Times published, this is an excerpt from that in 1976, said,

Starting point is 00:07:40 It is indeed precisely the kind of bicentennial show that so many of us have dreaded, an elaborate and expensive exercise in nostalgia, rich in picturesque effects, but devoid of anything resembling a serious idea. It is certainly not an exhibit that belongs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It belongs in the show windows of IBM. And, you know, I think that's funny because IBM goes on to, what, invent the computer. The internet is about to happen. It's 1970s. We don't know that that's going to happen, but that's what's coming. And so intuitives, they often feel things that can't be explained rationally or intellectually. It's more of somebody analyzing this broad series of patterns. So many of these things, their currents in society or culture and technology, and what some people

Starting point is 00:08:22 call being an empath is really just this deep attunement to systems and small changes in others and in our larger society and what charles and ray eames were feeling but they would never live to see when they did these things about connections and networks at the end of their life that were not very well received is they were intuiting the way that modern technology was about to hyper connect the world in a way that would necessitate the destruction and reinvention of many forms of political social and economic systems technology was about to hyper connect the world in a way that would necessitate the destruction and reinvention of many forms of political, social and economic systems. Ray Eames's exhibits were visions of something called hypertext.

Starting point is 00:08:54 He was trying to set this up like the internet, except the internet didn't exist. So when you're reading a Wikipedia article and you see Thomas Jefferson as a name and you're like, well, I want to find out more about that. You can click it in this nonlinear way. You don't have to click all the links. You click the one you want, you go to the next thing. And that's how the exhibit was trying to use what he thought future technology would be in a, in, in, in meat space, you know, in, in, in the real world. And people didn't understand it, but you can go back and see this. And it's almost a visual representation of this thing that would be there in four years so this interconnectedness you know it enables us to you know explore information in

Starting point is 00:09:31 a non-linear and dynamic manner and follow our own interests and make our own connections and create a personalized and associative way of accessing information that's what the exhibits were trying to do and that's what the internet is. You know, it's this nonlinear presentation of information that's personalized and associative. So why am I writing about chairs? It's minds like Charles and Ray Eames, who made the most famous chair of all time, that I find so interesting when you pull it back to psychology and then you, you, you, you know, so much of this podcast and, um, a lot of the way that I want us to revision psychology is to see it,

Starting point is 00:10:10 not just as this thing you go to, cause you're a hurt puppy and then you get better and you're sick, but it's a part of life and art and growth. And then the Z east of culture of myth of design of storytelling, you know, why the books that are on the New York times bestseller list are there that month, all of that is part of psychology.

Starting point is 00:10:24 And, you know, I'm looking for the keys to our psyche in all parts of culture. And chairs seem like one of the most interesting ways to do that. And that's why I love chairs so much. I always joked that I started a therapy practice in order to feed my lounge chair addiction, because we had to buy a lot of chairs that are very nice chairs. But if you look at chair design in any period in history, especially chair designers, you'll get some of the most relevant details of interesting people of that period. So, you know, chairs might seem like these innocuous necessities at first, but when you really sit with it, you know, the role that they play becomes much more important. I had a Latin professor tell me one time that the words that we never use don't change.

Starting point is 00:11:06 Those words stay the same for 100,000 years. The words that we use often, they change very quickly, so they don't last very long. So think about that. You know, the slang that was cool when you're in high school that's used a lot, you know, that's not copacetic anymore. It's not groovy. You know, those words lose their meaning or association pretty quickly. So, you know, words change because new generations, new social attitudes, new technologies and new kinds of experiences mean that the most frequently used words will be modified or replaced

Starting point is 00:11:34 first. And chairs are the same way. They're a piece of furniture that most people will be the most likely to use in most settings. You know, you don't always interact with a refrigerator. You don't always interact with a bed in every building that you go into. You usually interact with a chair. If you interact with any furniture anywhere that you go, it's most likely to be a chair. And because chairs are such a necessity, there are also these great barometers for style and culture. What ideas are timeless and what ideas are outdated by the end of the week? Chairs tell you what a place is, what it values, and the social worth of the posterior that they're holding up. The person sitting at the butt that is in that chair, how valuable is it? Is it a student in a school? Is it the pope? Is it the king? The

Starting point is 00:12:15 chair tells you that. Chairs are highly symbolic and influential in politics, in myth, in religion, film, storytelling. You know, what was the TV show that was so big? Game of Chairs, right? So, you know, Chairs gives you an immediate context in situations where you might not even realize that you're thinking about a chair. What's going on? You know, you know that this guy is the king because of where he sits. You know that this is the choir in the church and those are the parishioners because of

Starting point is 00:12:43 where they're seated. You know, the bishop sits here. You know, the chairman sits at the head of the table. If you went over to somebody's house for dinner, you wouldn't just be like, okay, there's six chairs here and sit at the head of the table. You would know that that chair is not for you. You know, the brand and the purpose of your business is communicated based on the chairs. And I know that something is out of date when I go somewhere and now the chairs don't look like they were made this era or they look like something that's not sold anymore. You know, design was always going to be an important part of taproot therapy when we were designing it because it's important to me. And so it was important to me that the style of our brand

Starting point is 00:13:18 communicated that we had ideological roots in both the cutting edge brain-based medicines of the future, as well as the holistic and ancient wisdom traditions of the past. And so our, our brand design was the, I joked with Bree that it was going to be, you know, Gandalf's wizard study meets an Apple store, the kind of minimalist modernism with this kind of eclectic old world things. And I told our web designer that our store, our website was going to be Falling Water by Franklin Wright meets a yurt in the Southwest. That was what I wanted it to look like, which confused him until he got what I meant. But not everyone will notice these details when they go into Taproot, but you still feel them. And the things that we don't notice, they often speak louder than the details that we're trying to listen to. So people feel the weight of furniture.

Starting point is 00:14:09 I mean, they feel if you sit down in it and your body weight makes the chair scoot across the floor or if it's rock solid because it's heavy and there's real wood in there, as opposed to plastic, even if you can't see it because your body feels the weight of that and it communicates something to you. I mean, you feel the way that light reflects off real wood grain versus laminated, you know, compressed sawdust that has wood printed on it. Your brain, even if you're not thinking about it, does not clock that the same way. It knows that that's not real. People know that, you know, if the same chair at Target that they've seen a whole lot is unique, or if there's kind of a weird piece of art that makes them slow down and think, you know, that space affects you. So you feel these details, even if you don't exactly know

Starting point is 00:14:53 what or why they are. And the spaces that we inhabit affect us unconsciously. And I wanted Taproot to feel different. I wanted it to be a liminal space that slowed you down and made you start to think and feel when you were in the waiting room before you even went into therapy. And that's why all the offices are so different, is they match the style and the personality and the perspective and the modality to a certain extent of each clinician there. You know, my office does not look like Christie's. And most of the styles of chair at Taproot, they come from this modern or mid-century period, which is the design period that we're talking about. That's interesting to me. And these periods, they're interesting to me because they were the celebration of like innovation in furniture design and manufacturing. Even if all the designers in the movement couldn't quite

Starting point is 00:15:35 agree on what that was or where it was going, it was this time of a whole lot of different reinvention. So, you know, how did the mid-century modern furniture movement come about? Well, in the beginning of the kind of mid-20th century, there was this big rise of consumer culture. You know, people weren't just living in the same farmhouse that their granddaddy had lived in and using the same table that he ate at, but they were moving to new cities and new houses, new areas, and buying new furniture. And so they were trying, there were these competing styles that were popping up. There was a lot of consumerism. And there was also this explosion of manufacturing processes that we could

Starting point is 00:16:16 build with new materials, things these different ways that you could mass manufacture. And so there's all this innovation going on. And so with the increasing availability of resources and this desire to figure out what the market wanted, the design became this mean of self-expression and a reflection of this individual taste and lifestyle. And the introduction of innovative materials and production techniques allowed for the creation of chairs that catered to different economic segments you didn't have to you could do fancy chairs not fancy chairs high priced you know all different kinds it didn't all have to just be the same european wooden kitchen chair that most you know houses probably had you know in the 20s um so and you're leaving this period of austerity of war. So there was, so taste is going, the modern era is moving away from the older, you know, very highly Baroque and ornamental styles

Starting point is 00:17:14 with gold leaf and carving. And it was moving more towards this minimalistic simplicity. So mid-century modern stuff doesn't have a lot of design. It's very, it looks aerodynamic. It looks like a fast car or fast plane. It has't have a lot of design. It looks aerodynamic. It looks like a fast car or a fast plane. It has the detail shaved off of it. It's very ergonomic.

Starting point is 00:17:34 It was like we had built chairs for 1,000 years. The Rococo or French New Empire style had to have all this elaborate ornamentation to show your social class. And now we don't really care about communicating our social class in that way by saying that we can afford the chair because everyone can afford it so we're trying to talk a different way and that became this style you know that was what was underneath the minimalism of mid-century modern furniture and so a lot of that mid-century modernist movement emerged as a response to the cultural landscape of the 19th century older styles were based on you know extravagant resources of european mobility or mimicking that and then now you know clients were starting to think of what a chair is and what it could be

Starting point is 00:18:17 and so french and english styles went out of favor and inspired by principles of simplicity and functionality and efficiency new designers champion this idea of honesty in materials, that you didn't do a facade. You didn't try and make it look old even though it was wood, or you didn't paint it to make it so you couldn't tell what kind of what it was. You're going to use wood. That was because you chose it and it was the best material. You're going to make it look as pretty as you could and really showcase the material.

Starting point is 00:18:42 You weren't going to cover something up and try and hide it in the way that other things used, other styles used those materials as a means to an end, but not as a celebration of the material. And so by showcasing materials in their true form, devoid of unnecessary ornamentation, designers, you know, they aim to reflect the spirit of evolving society. So, um, you know, things like gold or ornamentation and paint were not used to disguise wood. Instead, the wood was celebrated, um, as naturally as you can with an oil or wax. And, you know, this led to this clean stripped down archetypal design. Um, that's, I like archetypal finding archetypal patterns. And a ton of this was like like what do you have to have to

Starting point is 00:19:25 be a chair like what is the nature of a chair what can you get rid of and have it still be a chair um you know really trying to find the archetype of chair or the platonic form of chair and so designers like eames they understood the capa the capabilities and the limitations of manufacturing processes and that meant that they could create designs that were both efficient to make, which meant that people could afford them. Because if you make a $5,000 chair, it's not going to be the best selling chair of all time. Even though Herman Miller has jacked the price of the Eames chair up to $5,000, but that's not what it was built to be. It was built to be economic. So they wanted to do something that was both efficient and aesthetically pleasing. And so they use mass production, not to make more money, but to make a higher quality So they wanted to do something that was both efficient and aesthetically pleasing.

Starting point is 00:20:10 And so they used mass production not to make more money, but to make a higher quality product available to more people. And so this approach allowed them to create innovative and mass-produced furniture that was affordable and accessible to a wide audience. And so modern and postmodern design generally emphasized the importance of honesty in materials. And honesty in material means the material should be used in its truest form, like I'd said. And, you know, you don't paint plastic to look like wood, which we do now. I don't like that. You know, if you're going to do something with plastic, then do the coolest thing that you can do with plastic. Make a crazy shape. Don't try and make it look like something else. So, you know, during this Cold War era, game theory was really. Um, so, you know, doing the, during this cold war era,

Starting point is 00:20:45 their game theory was really big, which is, uh, you know, during the cold war, they were trying to figure out how to win the cold war basically. And so there's all this game calculation and ideological stuff. And so furniture, uh, and, and modern art was seen as this thing that showcased American individuality in a way that socialists, communists couldn't do that because they had to make everything the same. We were showcasing our individuality and they were trying to make everything the same. So a ton of this was very celebrated and very political at the time. It's come out now that the CIA actually was paying for a bunch of this stuff, like Jackson Pollock, a lot of these people that were these crazy modern artists, which is funny because you

Starting point is 00:21:24 see that a lot of conservative people now are like harking back to tradition, don't like modern art. But then it was all the, you know, buzz cutted military guys that were paying the modern artists in order to show that, you know, this thing was possible in America that was not possible somewhere else. My one, another one of my favorite designers of this period, I know you can't see the pictures because you're not on the blog, but is Adrian Pearsall. If you Google his couches, um, his, uh, I, I don't think they do anything with it. I know restoration hardware like owns the rights to his name. I've never seen them put it on anything.

Starting point is 00:21:58 So I don't, I don't know if it would be cool if they still did replicas of his things as I would actually buy something from restoration hardware or West Elm if that was what they did. But no. So yeah, he did couches though. And so he was like very influenced by water and boats. And so his couches looked like oceans that kind of rippled throughout the room. Or like some of them look like gondolas, like they're floating and um a lot of the design language of mazda mazda has all these ripply patterns in their cars it comes from him um the the mazda design language is called nagare

Starting point is 00:22:35 um but it has uh anyway he was very influential too if uh you want to google him he's his stuff is very pretty so there's this strong emphasis on individual expression and the celebration of uniqueness and some iconic modernist pieces you know achieve this delicate balance between form and function there's a ton of experimentation going on i don't like all of it i'm not a huge fan of the chrome and black leather and glass and like crazy mixed materials. There's an architect that I really don't like, Le Corbusier and Mize Vandero.

Starting point is 00:23:12 And they have this like almost HR Geiger, like cold machine-like thing. Because I think what they were thinking that the future was, was not what the Eames were looking at, which was, you know, this synthesis of the community of the office or the community of the home. And they thought it was going to be like technology and cold and machines. And so they like put Chrome on all this stuff. And I just,

Starting point is 00:23:30 I don't, you see that show up as mid-century modern furniture, but it just looks so dated and like eighties mod to me. Like I, I can't do it. So not all of this stuff I think is, it's good. Um,

Starting point is 00:23:41 but it is an interesting period just cause there's so much experimentation going on. So German, Hannah Arendt is a German philosopher and she argues that humans exist in this condition of what she calls natality, meaning that each person is born into a unique world and they have the capacity to initiate something new from their unique perspective. And for Arendt, the world is the space where individuals can create and establish their own identities and engage with others and participate in meaningful activities.

Starting point is 00:24:16 And culture is formed through human activities such as labor, work, and action. So those are sacred and important functions. And the environment plays a crucial role in shaping and influencing individuals' experiences. So Arendt recognized that the world is a dynamic and interactive space that individuals engage with. And the environment provides this context and conditions for human action and facilitates the development of individual and collective identities. So, I mean, one way of saying that is that the spaces we inhabit and work in, you know, need to be more than practical because they affect us and they're kind of the point of life to a certain extent. And they, they, what you, where you work affects how you live at home and how you live at home

Starting point is 00:24:59 affects how you work and vice versa. That all of these spaces are in communication with each other because they're part of our psychology, and we need to be mindful about them is maybe a way of making that sound a little bit less like a college essay. But, you know, another one of my favorite authors, Robert Pogue Harrison, he writes that, you know, design and architecture, they're not just merely utilitarian or functional, but they're imbued with a cultural and aesthetic significance. You know, he suggests that our living spaces reflect and shape our sense of belonging, our identity, our connection to the world. And he examines the ways in which architecture and design influence our experiences of being at home and the impact our surroundings have on

Starting point is 00:25:39 our well-being. And when he talks about chairs in a book on design, he says that, you know, they mediate between the body and the environment. You know, the chair is the thing that connects you to the room. You're not touching the wall. You're not touching the ceiling. You're intimately connected and supported by the chair. So it's connecting you to the building and it is an anchor between you and the building. And so the tools we use, especially the most essential ones, they're either successfully connecting you to growth and beauty or they're failing to. And we just say a chair is a chair. And I don't think that. I think we should bring some intentionality to our space. And many people make the case that these lounge chairs that I'm talking about, they cost exorbitant

Starting point is 00:26:18 sums of money. And the Eames chair, Herman Miller, because it's famous, they jacked the price way up. But the Eames is when they were alive. I would recommend getting one if you want one from another manufacturer. It's in the common domain. Someone else can make them. There's a lot of companies that make them just as good and for a lot less. There's some cheap versions, but that's kind of an aside. I mean, that point that this stuff is just for the ultra wealthy art guy to play around with, I would push back against that because some of these chairs are ostentatious or

Starting point is 00:26:47 they're stupid or the prices are stupid, but that's largely just because some of these are rare antiques or they're made by the few remaining companies that still employ people to build things. You know, again, we have forgotten what design means. I feel, you know, like most of the chairs that we have at Taproot, I didn't pay anything for, um, you know, they belong to family or friends who are moving out or, you know, people who donated them. And then they would say, Oh, you want this, this is all beaten up and old. And I was able to restore it and fix it. Um, a lot of it came from garage sales. You know, if you, if you learn about this stuff, you sort of know how to fix it

Starting point is 00:27:22 and what it's worth. And, uh, you know number 71 in the new neurostimulation and brain mapping room that we refinished, they needed work, but they were designed to be worked on because they weren't built to be thrown away. We build everything now. They were built to last forever. And things that we love, they need work. And things with no value, we throw away. We pretend that this thing that's disposable that I'm going to throw in the trash in a year is so important. with no value we throw away. You know, we pretend that like this

Starting point is 00:27:45 thing that's disposable that I'm going to throw in the trash in a year is so important. And no, it's not, you're going to chuck it. If it was important, it would be something that you would have with you for your life that your kids would have. And, you know, I have no problem disassembling these chairs and then reassembling them into pieces because they were designed to be timeless and not replace the next year. Um, you know, I think that they're, you know, close to a hundred years old. Like a lot of this stuff came from, um, a relative of mine who, who passed away and I had to buy them from her estate. Um, which, you know, I could have paid the same amount for a chair. They didn't need any work on, on waiver, but I'd be throwing it away because it would be impossible for me to fix it.

Starting point is 00:28:26 So, you know, I have tried and failed before to put together like a brand new $500 table from a modern furniture company that just breaks because it's crap. And you call the company and you're like, I paid $500. This doesn't work. Oh, that's fine. Throw it away. We'll give you another one because they know how much their stuff is worth. It's not worth anything. You know, I was able to take these things that are almost 100 years old and fix them. I can't even put together a brand new $500 table. And I paid $30, you know, for these chairs. And, you know, you see these on Etsy or whatever.

Starting point is 00:28:57 The Niles Moller go for a ton. Like, mine are not in great condition. And I refinished them, which probably I didn't do that in a historic way. But, like, I mean, some of them sell for over a thousand dollars and I could throw these on Etsy, but it's important to me that I bring them to Taproot and I share them with you. You know, I love my late godmother very much and I bought them from her estate and she loved Carl Jung. She loved labyrinths. She loved up psychology, a ton of the stuff that we do at Taproot. And when I see them there, I think of her and they're meaningful. It's a space that I want you to feel loved and I want people to feel

Starting point is 00:29:30 like it's liminal and numinous and real in a way that I don't feel when I go into a lot of spaces. So myself and other therapists that I've worked with and other practices, we threw out and replaced more money than I spent on everything that taproot has that we haven't thrown any of it away we won't but annually we were throwing away all the wayfair furniture or all the um west elm stuff just does not last they market it as higher end but i don't know why um you know it like they would buy all this stuff and then you would throw it away. And it was like, they really, we would spend like two or three times just a year where we spent total because I buy things that I don't want to ever throw away. And I think

Starting point is 00:30:17 that is a better way to think about consumption and a better way to think about design. And it's like a lot of people make fun of consumerism and consumption. Well, you know, that isn't inherently a bad thing. The Eames, when they were designing these things, they were trying to make them permanent and timeless. And they wanted to make them as efficient and inexpensive as possible so that people could afford them. And they were important to center their designs on the middle class, but they weren't willing to be so cheap that it was garbage and then it wouldn't be something that would last forever. You know, my kids will inherit that furniture. You know, those chairs connect me to you and one day my children to the beautiful person my godmother was.

Starting point is 00:30:59 And I get so much more pleasure out of that than if they were just kind of plastic folding chairs that you sat in while you did, you know, what I hope is one of the more important things you'll ever do, which is work on yourself therapeutically. So, you know, isn't it sad? It's fun to me to sit with these ideas for a minute and remember a time when people just made things out of love and for the sake of art and self-discovery, even if it's a chair, because what does it do to our mental health to live in a world where everything we eat, everything we watch, everything we put in our house has become dispensable, disposable garbage? We've forgotten what design means. People talk about a beautiful design of an iPhone, design is in quotes there, of their Apple, whatever.

Starting point is 00:31:40 And then they throw it away in a month. Because you don't glue glass that can't be removed to something that is designed well because you glue glass to something that can't be removed when you want someone to crack it and throw it away and get a new one. You know, good design is timeless, even if it is a timeless experience of remembering the way a meal was plated or something. I'm not saying timeless like everything has to last forever. You know, food doesn't. But I still remember eating at Sean Brock's restaurant because it was one of the best meals that I've ever had. And there was so much thought put into everything that he did. You know, it lasted. It was timeless. And, you know, some beautiful designs of software,

Starting point is 00:32:16 hardware come out of Silicon Valley. I'm not saying that a phone doesn't include design. Like I still think about my Sony Ericsson candy bar slider phone from college, but I'm weird, right? Most people are not doing that. Most people who said that their iPhone is beautiful and it's designed so well threw it away. You know, they're not saving it. Realistically, how many of you are framing photos and treasuring these memories of the things that you claim are designed so well? You know, please don't send me the email and be like, well, if you look at the screws on a Samsung phone, they're not in a line, but on Apple, they're all in a line because of design. That's not what design is. Okay. Like it's not, I don't care that the screws are in a line on your

Starting point is 00:32:54 iPhone. Like, um, you know, generally most high technology innovations are not really innovations. Like they're just disguises for triggering humanity's worst addictive and obsessive and competitive tendencies so that you buy a new phone next year because you've just been told that now the future is rounded corners and then next month it's less bezel or whatever. I mean, the design moves in one direction and then it moves back. It doesn't consistently move in a direction with a plan. It's just kind of creating something a little bit different so we can create this itch of I want to get this new thing. And, you know, there are companies that are better and worse at design and, you know, a phone I know is going to be more disposable than a chair. Um, but I hope you hear what I'm saying here. I mean, the reason I think some of this stuff happens is because we got rid of

Starting point is 00:33:39 manufacturing and we kept talking about design. It's not made here. You know, it says on the back of the phone designed by Apple in California, real big made here. You know, it says on the back of the phone, designed by Apple in California, real big, and then real tiny, it says made in China or made in Vietnam. But no, but somebody designed it in California. Well, no, that's not designed. You know, we think that design is something that we can dream up in a vacuum and then outsource all the nitty gritty details of realizing our vision to someone else. And if I tell you, hey, go paint this painting, I'm in California and then you go paint it in China. I'm not an artist. You're the artist. You did it. You know, as Charles and Ray Eames discovered when they built their first chair, you design it as you're manufacturing it.

Starting point is 00:34:19 You know, the first design that they made, it was too hard for them to build themselves. And so they started over with something that the two of them could build themselves before they sent it to a manufacturer. They drew this thing on paper and they were like, this chair is awesome. It's going to kill, it's going to sell these things. They took it to a manufacturer and they were like, you can't build this. So it wasn't a design, you know, it was a picture of something that they couldn't build. So they, they went back and they got plywood wet and they played with the plywood and they saw that when you got the plywood wet that you could bend it and then you could put it in a kiln and exactly how much could you bend it

Starting point is 00:34:53 and to what variance and what tolerance. And when you did it this way, maybe it looked better, but it didn't last as long. So we can't do it that way. And they figured out, and that's what the Eames chair came out of. There was another chair before the Eames chair. Eames chair was later career, but that's what the origin of their style was, was figuring out what these new processes could actually do. And then doing them, not just drawing something and then saying I'm an artist because they weren't design is part of making it. Um, and the, the And the takeaway here is like, they weren't trying to sell you an Eames chair every year. A lot of the changes on phones

Starting point is 00:35:30 are because they want you to buy a new phone every year. We really don't need to do that. We could replace batteries. We could replace these things. But the word design is used to make you throw something away by these companies. When somebody is using the word to make you put something in the trash and you're calling that design, it's not.

Starting point is 00:35:53 It isn't. Because the Eameses wanted to see a future for the beauty of what the future could be, not to sell it to you. And American brands used to not have planned obsolescence and we moved economy into this place where all all the companies that didn't like maytag the original maytag appliance company they went under because we were rewarding planned obsolescence and design which i think is getting rid of design. You know, Maytag, I don't know if you know, they were a company that built the best washing machine and they lasted forever.

Starting point is 00:36:32 I mean, they were built like a tank, but people were inheriting them from their grandparents. And so Maytag wasn't selling enough washing machines. And so they declared bankruptcy and they got bought. And now when you look at the companies that make Whirlpool, Maytag, Wolf, Viking, all of what's KitchenAid, all of those companies, there's only two companies in the world. Those brands are fake. They put the label on. It doesn't really matter. You know, Maytag is still made, but it's just a mark that's owned by one of these two giant planned obsolescent factories. I had a refrigerator broken. The repairman came and he was saying, you know, I could fix this, but they're telling you they make it cost slightly more to replace it than

Starting point is 00:37:11 they do slightly less to replace it than they do to fix it. Cause they don't want me to fix it. They want you to throw it away. And I was like, and he was interesting. And I was like, well, what's the best brand out there? And he was like, man, I've worked for 17. They're all owned by the same company and they do tests. They put grit in the oil and the hinges and they have machines that test hundreds and hundreds of times. How many times can you open this door before it breaks? And he said on these cheaper brands, they'll give it to you for less, but you're going to pay for it in parts and they make sure that their margin is the same. Or you can go out and you can buy the super fancy name brand, you know, Wolf or, uh, I think Viking

Starting point is 00:37:50 is up there was the sub zeros, the other one. And he was like, and that one will not have any issues, but you're giving them the money up front. They're going to get the money either way. So it doesn't really matter what you buy anymore, which is very sad. You know, to me, it's sad because this stuff started as this way to express individual identity through consumption in a free market. And now that same consumption and consumerism is, you know, on one level, just hyper out of control, but it's also kind of fake. I mean, it doesn't matter if you buy the Maytag or if you buy the Wolf or if you buy the Viking, they're either going to be fixing the cheap thing until they get the same amount of money as if you buy the Maytag or if you buy the Wolf or if you buy the Viking. They're either

Starting point is 00:38:25 going to be fixing the cheap thing until they get the same amount of money as if you buy the nice thing. You don't really have a choice. And, you know, being a prophet with, you know, P-H-E-T, like, you know, a prophet like Moses, like I think the Eem, I'm trying to say the spelling, you know, that's different from prophet like money. And I think the EEM, I'm trying to say the spelling, you know, that's different from prophet like money. And I think that these people who are trying to see into the future, it genuinely in the mid-century movement, it generally was to build something that was incredible and to try and see a beautiful future. And now we just pretend that the future is this thing so we can sell you something. But there's not any of that process of design really left.

Starting point is 00:39:05 And, you know, humans want to live in the ego alone. Like we're designed to kind of fall victim to our worst angels. We want to live in fads and trends and hyper consumption and free market capitalism. It exploits all that. And it's why consumerist capitalism will always eschew, it'll skew aesthetic taste towards thoughtlessly modernist design and planned obsolescence because people are threatened by things that take away their ego's control and point them back to a timeless reality and to our own personal significance and things in the face

Starting point is 00:39:36 of the numinous. You know, good design is challenging. Another way of saying that is good design is kind of threatening. So it's something that we need, but we don't want, you know, like we want to eat sugar and salt and fat because that's what felt good when we were trying not to starve and we're evolving, but it isn't what we need when we know that. Um, I think we should think of design in the same way that we think of diet. Um, you know, I like good design because it points us back to a greater psychological, spiritual, and transcendental reality. And I believe that we can build a better world than the one where all of our interactions with people and spaces that we inhabit are just transactions. I mean, I think we need to think where we assign value and where we place our identity. And we need to admit that the places that we live and work in affect us and are worth our mindful attention.

Starting point is 00:40:30 For us, for ourselves, and for others. And not just as practical considerations, but as intuitive, creative projects for us to find our own and our collective humanity's soul. You know, modernist designers sought to break away from tradition and form and create furniture that embodied their personal visions. And this approach resonated with the American spirit of individualism. Breaking old ideas is always a risk, but creation is a risky business. And good design is timeless because it comes from a timeless element and forms in the human psyche that we're making contact with. And it may take generations to map these unseen realms of our collective humanity through our intuition, but we don't always know good design when we see it. But I would argue that we know it when we feel it. And even more so, we know it when it sticks around. The Eames chair is

Starting point is 00:41:17 here. And I mean, I could throw out some brands from the 50s, but no one would know what they are. Those things are not around. There's a lot of stuff that just sucked and we got rid of it. But the things that stay generally are timeless. And, you know, when Hannah Arendt or Robert Pogue Harrison are talking about those quotes that I read, like they are correct. The changing ourself begins with changing our environment and vice versa. You have to work on your environment while you work on yourself, and changing yourself will also change your environment. But there's a relationship between them.

Starting point is 00:41:49 And if you want to start your life, if you want to change your life, start by changing your chair. All right, guys, that was the article on chairs. We've been doing some pieces on design. We'll probably get back to depth psychology and other stuff soon. If you'd like to see another topic, send me an email. And it was never my intention to monetize the podcast or anything. We can just kind of do it as a free resource.

Starting point is 00:42:22 That's fun but so total coincidence did not seek out to try and be a brand rep or an influencer but so many people bought the cardio k a rd IEL furniture that we have at taproot because they asked about the woodroo couch that's in my office and down also downstairs and a couple other offices and then some of the chairs. A lot of our furniture kind of came from them. And so anyway, enough people bought it that Cardio asked us if we wanted to be a brand rep, which, you know, I don't really know what we'll do with. Long story short, they gave our business an offer code, which is Taproot. So if you use

Starting point is 00:43:03 promo code Taproot, I never thought I would say anything like this on this podcast, but if you use offer code tap root, uh, at cardio.com K A R D I E L, then you get a discount. And we also get some compensation, which we put back towards the business. And that lets us continue to offer therapy at a sliding scale and grow and develop new programs like neuro STEM, which is, you know, a new thing, but, um, probably a risk. And also we're the first people in the state to, to be able to provide that, um, neurostimulation and brain mapping. So anyway, we're developing new programs, uh, and the, any money that we get goes back towards that. So it helps you. It can help us. If you want to buy some of this stuff, uh, I guess

Starting point is 00:43:45 use offer code, uh, taproot at cardio.com. And, um, that's the podcast for this week. I hope you're well, and we'll talk to you soon.

The Taproot Podcast - 🪑 You May Address the Chair: What we sit in tells us what we stand for

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