Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopolis. Last year for the first time ever,

the World Health Organization put out a report warning about the risks of being sedentary. The WHO said

hundreds of millions of people will develop heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases over the next 10 years because of how little we move.

And that makes sense because a lot of us get paid to sit in front of our computers and when we're off, we stare into the vortex of our phones.

But scientists are actually pretty sure they know the best way for us to deal with this.

And it's to get up and move. And not just at the

gym for an hour once a day, but to do it regularly throughout our day. Manus Samaroti is a long-time

technology journalist and podcast host who recently challenged thousands of her listeners to do this.

She partnered with Columbia University Medical School for a project called Body Electric

on her podcast, TED Radio Hour. And she's with me today to talk about it. Manus, hi. It's such a

pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, Lila, the pleasure is mine. I've been looking forward to

this. First, I would love to hear you tell us a little bit more about just big picture.

How did you go about setting up the experiment?

Yeah.

Where did the initial data come from?

Well, this goes way back to a revelation that I had that I feel like crap when I sit on my technology all day. And, you know, I mean, it just got

worse during the pandemic. I was like, I don't understand. All I'm doing is sitting here,

working. Why do I feel so bad? And it just made me want to understand a couple things, which was, you know, is my body adapting to my

technology? Like, will gamers have very long thumbs two generations from now? Weird questions

that go through my mind. Right, right. And as you're trying to answer that question,

you came across the study that actually said,

yes, this is affecting us, and yes, we can fix it. Yes. I came across a study in January,

...