How 28,000 Nintendo fans extended Reggie's lifespan

all right listen up the next time somebody tells you that online petitions don't work that they don't do anything that they're useless I want you to send them this video the one you're watching right now because this video proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that internet petitions can and do make a difference and in this case may have just extended the lifespan of one of gaming's greatest living legends [Music] let's rewind exactly one year ago Nintendo CEO Reggie fils-aime announced his retirement from Nintendo and alongside that announcement posted some photos taken around his office now these photos were meant to just show off some of the neat things Reggie had acquired over the years but inadvertently Reggie revealed that he'd been suffering through life with a mere 4-star chair when we all know the man was deserving of at least a 4.5 star chair namely the Herman Miller Aeron chair which is widely considered to be the greatest office chair of all time the person who first noticed Reggie's chair is a guy named Jason Cryer who set up a totally 100% serious definitely not a joke change.org petition outlining the various reasons why Reggie deserved an Aeron now when I came across Jason's petition it had started out at around 12 or so signatures falling far short of its initial goal of 100 and this didn't sit right with me surely if you ask any of Reggie's fans if he deserved the best chair money could buy they would agree right surely more than 12 people feel this way so I threw together a quick youtube video in an afternoon about the whole thing imploring people to sign the petition to get Reggie a better chair hoping that we could get more than a dozen signatures and spread awareness of this very serious issue and then I uploaded it but nothing could have prepared me for what happened next the video exploded in less than two weeks it had accumulated well over 1 million views and that's say nothing of the change.org petition practically overnight the petition spiked from 12 signatures to over 28,000 messages poured in from all over the world hundreds and hundreds of people expressing their collective desire for the god-king Reggie to be rightfully seated upon the greatest throne that money can buy and for most online petitions this is where the story would end a sweet but ultimately impotent gesture from a lot of very well-meaning fans and to be totally honest as nice as it was to watch those signatures pile up I too really believed that this was the end of the story fortunately I was wrong this time around fate had something else in store for our boy Reginald the first clue that this might be bigger than any of us thought came via the official Twitter account from Herman Miller themselves the creators of the Aeron chair it was about one week after the petitions huge explosion in popularity when the official Herman Miller Twitter account chimed in on Jason's original Twitter thread about chair gate and posted the following cryptic reply hey at Reggie we heard you're starting a new adventure it's dangerous to go alone take this now of course the it's dangerous to go alone take this bit is a cheeky reference to Reggie's background as president of Nintendo an obvious nod to a famous line from the original Legend of Zelda on the NES but what about the rest of the tweet what were they saying I mean in the tweet Herman Miller had even attached a photo of the infamous Aeron chair but what were they saying were they saying take this as an ha cute here's an image of our product or were they imploring Reggie to buy himself an Aeron chair a chair which I'll remind you once fully maxed out can cost upwards of 16 hundred dollars or in the absolute best case scenario was Herman Miller actually offering to give Reggie and Aeron chair of his own for nearly two weeks this was all we had to go on and for those of us following this story these two weeks were incredibly suspenseful the question remained was this tweet from Herman Miller just a cutesy throwaway Twitter joke or was the tweet portending something else something greater the momentum continued to build and a petition continued to grow but Reggie stayed utterly silent on the issue and personally I think that no matter what than no matter whether Reggie got the chair he deserved I believe that on some level those of us campaigning would have been satisfied by the knowledge that the campaign reached his eyes whether it was the petitions the signatures the video I posted the tweets I think many of us secretly hoped that these would somehow break through and reach Reggie and maybe make him crack a smile but the thing is Reggie fils-aime is not a very online dude keep in mind at the time when herman miller posted there ambiguous initial tweet Reggie himself had only ever tweeted a grand total of nine times in his short time on the Twitter platform the idea that Reggie was ever going to acknowledge or even see our effort was by any meaningful measure a total long shot [Music] that is until one fateful day it happened thanks to the team at Herman Miller and over 23,000 change.org petitioners I am getting a fully-loaded Aeron chair for my home office will send photos when it arrives now it goes without saying that this was absolutely nuts in the Reggie chair community this tweet unceremoniously posted at 7:00 a.m. on a random Monday morning was a bombshell not only had Reggie just acknowledged our efforts but he had just casually confirmed what we all hope was true Reggie was getting a Herman Miller Aeron chair this mission our mission a mission stemming from a small petition Jason had created to get a chuckle out of a few friends which then spiraled out of control into an honest-to-goodness grassroots campaign with participants numbering in the thousands this mission was an absolute undeniable success still I was left with a major question how did Herman Miller's official involvement in this whole affair come to be what were the particulars of this arrangement they had with Reggie so I reached out to Herman Miller's PR department asking them to clarify this whole thing and here's what Herman Miller told me quote when the change.org petition first started the team at Herman Miller saw it quickly pop on Twitter and as quickly as we had noticed it many fans and employees of Herman Miller started pointing it out to us too we reached out to Reggie on social media to congratulate him on his retirement and to see if he was interested in receiving a new chair for the next phase of his life he seemed very thankful and excited to see the gaming community celebrating his time at Nintendo in such a thoughtful way from there we were able to confirm the specific details of the chair with Reggie and reach out to the team leading the promotion effort of the petition to let everyone know that something was in the works at Herman Miller we loved seeing Reggie's excitement on Twitter and the excitement of everyone following and supporting the petition Reggie shared a post thanking everyone and posted again when his chair arrived sharing the Aeron in his home and indeed that's exactly what happened later that month Reggie received his chair and making good on his promise he shared with the world a photo of it [Music] and it was right then staring at this photo of this actual physical chair that I had helped manifest in Reggie fusing these actual physical house that I began to ask myself had we just changed the course of history it sounds like a silly question but think about it by taking this dumb internet joke as far as humanly possible we had significantly altered the timeline with the help of thousands of online strangers I had just summoned a brand new desk chair right smack in the middle of the home of a newly retired 59 year old man who used to work in intend Oh a desk chair famous for its posture enhancing capabilities now assuming Reggie's like most Americans that's roughly eight hours a day and one of the nicest chairs money can buy I had to ask would this chairs presence in Reggie's life have ripple effects it seemed insane to think otherwise but I needed to be sure so I called up dr. Steven Weinger one of the nation's leading posture experts and asked him directly posture expert dr. Steven winegar joins us with some advice today thanks for coming in posture expert dr. Steven winegar is the author of stand taller live longer dr. Steve winegar he's an international posture expert now when it comes to the subject of posture and longevity you literally could not find someone more qualified than dr. Weinger he is the lead instructor for the CPE P posture specialist certification program and was even a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in Washington DC here's what dr. Weinger told me on chairs there is some correlation with back pain which in turn becomes an issue because when people acting then you're less active when the less active less exercise weakened cardiovascular and that's probably a big chunk of the issue going on with Senator T hey but differently when Herman Miller tweeted it Reggie that it's quote dangerous to go alone it turns out that dangerous was the operative word there more the apostle rounds forward in slums the more quickly they die are there any particular chairs or brands of chairs that that you would point to as being pretty good for posture I mean things like Henry Miller Aaron is one of the classics and swapper the wobble chair that I'm like would you say that like giving posture related gifts is like a worthwhile endeavor and a good type of gift to give to say like the to get for like the CEO of your favorite company or yes yes yes I think I think posture gifts are cool and if someone wants to give me an at her no chair I'll say thank you I've got a bunch of chances don't have one of theirs and when I had him back in the office which was back a while ago I enjoyed it and I've seen they both pay attention to things now this sounds like an exaggeration to you dr. Wenger himself has even authored a book called stand taller live longer a book specifically about how good posture can improve and even extend lives I recently helped get a Herman Miller Aeron chair specifically for somebody who's really important to me in my life do you think that you could draw a correlation between giving someone a gift that improves and helps their posture and extending their lifespan that's and it that's a cool thing and I would say that as with a lot of tools it depends upon if they use it in a Havanese if they're not going to use it then if it's a great gesture Steve had raised an important question in order to be truly sure that I had extended Reggie's life I needed to know for a fact that Reggie was actually using this new arigon Amish air weed awarded him and honestly I felt pretty confident that Reggie was using the chair I mean look we already know Reggie spent over a decade at Nintendo suffering through a chair made out of literal garbage so we know that Reggie is not picky or wasteful when it comes to chairs and it would be extremely out of character for Reggie to not put this brand-new air on through its paces but I wanted proof I want a definitive proof that Reggie was using this chair so I looked and I looked and then finally I found it [Music] remember how Reggie only made two tweets about the chair one announcing that he was getting it and then another one announcing its arrival well upon researching for this video I actually discovered one more tweet from Reggie about the chair a tweet that had completely flown under my radar when this all went down last year see out of the hundreds of replies Reggie received in response to his chair photo he only Dame's to respond to one of them a tweet from legendary gaming presenter Jeff Keeley after seeing the image of Reggie's chair on his Twitter feed Jeff wrote and I quote here how does it fit your body and of course Reggie replied in perfect fashion this chair makes my body feel ready now of course that's a cute joke but it also means that in all likelihood Reggie has sat in this chair at least once and anybody who's sat in a Herman Miller Aeron before knows if you've sittin at once you're not sitting in another chair ever again now it would be all too easy for us to slip into self-congratulation here I mean after all without our efforts who knows what kind of crappy posture demolishing chair Reggie would have spent his golden years suffering in who knows how many more years of Reggie's glorious presence we've indirectly added to the world by doing this but for me personally it's actually the other way around I have to give Reggie my things let me explain and strap in because this is actually my favorite part of the story see not long after posting my video I got an interesting Instagram message from a guy we'll call John John is a father and John's son Zack had actually come across my video about Reggie's chair and decided to send it to his father who god bless him said he totally agreed with every word here's the shocking part see it turns out John is to use his words very fortunate to own one of the largest Herman Miller chair distributors and John offered to send me and Aeron chair of my own party we thought this seems too good to be true but sure enough just a few weeks later a Herman Miller delivery guy showed up at my apartment with a box and soon just like Reggie I was the proud owner of a brand-new fully-loaded Aeron chair so if what dr. Weinger posits about good posture is true that it can significantly extend one's life then not only have we helped Reggie live a little bit longer but Reggie's helped me live a little longer too and that to me is beautiful [Music] if you were paying close attention during this video you might have noticed that this and every other video I've posted this week has had full closed captioning available from the minute it was uploaded including during the premiere these captions were done for me by a really great service called Rev who I've used dozens of times before across all the biggest videos on this channel see anyone who's tried to manually add subtitles to a YouTube video knows that it's a really tedious and time sucking process for years I did all of my captions myself manually by hand and it was miserable then last year I decided a test out Reb using this $10 off coupon they had going at the time I placed my first order and was stunned when I came back a few hours later and my entire video had been captioned in its entirety by an actual human being after doing this myself for ages it literally seemed magical to me especially for just a dollar 25 per minute and I immediately dived in after that and hired Reb to caption all of my biggest videos for me the coolest part about Reb is how hands-off it is especially if you're a youtuber when you place an order you simply connect your YouTube channel select the videos you want captioned and then once the captions are done Rev automatically delivers those back to YouTube and if you wish automatically publishes them on your channel so all of the videos you ordered are instantly captioned right on YouTube without you having to juggle any SRT files or even lift a finger at all it's really cool anyways Rev is offering that same $10 off coupon that I used last year to all of my viewers and since the captioning service costs just a dollar 25 per minute that means you can get up to eight minutes of video captioned completely free to get your coupon go to Rev dot CM / Babylonian dash promo or click the link in the description to get $10 off your first order [Music]

Channel: Nick Robinson

Views: 1,048,627

Rating: 4.9283457 out of 5

Keywords: nintendo, reggie fils-aime, chair, herman miller, aeron, mirra 1, seat, nick robinson, petition, change.org, fully loaded aeron chair, president, COO, CEO, Reginald, Nintendo of America, geoff keighley, youtube, twitter, signature, posture, health

Id: 7VyEWlvLVYQ

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020