You are listening to the Darren Wilson Show, I'm Darren, I spent the last 20 years devoted to improving health, protecting the environment and finding ways to live a more sustainable life. In this podcast, I have honest conversations with people that inspire me. I hope that through their knowledge and unique perspectives, they'll inspire you, too. We talk about all kinds of topics from amping up your diets to improving your well-being to the mind blowing stories behind the human experience and the people that are striving to save us and our incredible planet.

We've investigated some of life's fatal conveniences. You know, those things that we are told might be good for us, but totally aren't. So here's to making better choices and the small tweaks in your life that amount to big changes for you and the people around you and the planet. Let's do this. This is my show, The Darren Olean Show. Hey, everybody, welcome to the show, The Daily Show, grateful to have you here tuning in for another installment in another episode.

I'm stoked about this one. Of course, I'm always excited about my guests because they have to excite me. If they're not excite me and I'm not curious about them, then they're not going to excite you at all and they're not going to inspire you. And so I love sitting down and consciously getting into it with a lot of people. And it's election season and I definitely believe in voting. So definitely vote. Don't think your voice and your vote does not matter.

In addition to that, voting with your actions, voting with your words in your home, with yourself, with people that are close to you, sharing love, connection, creating, moving forward, creating the life that you want is still something that is paramount to the life that you actually want. So at the same time, all of these politicians, all of this way of life that they live in, we do at some point get down and participate in that.

But I think the power comes by surrendering to the things that we can't control and also giving strength to where we absolutely can because we underestimate the power that we ultimately have. I think that is our greatest super power is to own the strength, the power, the conviction, the love, the ability for us to move forward and create change in our world and our life, both in our families, in our communities and the global world. We do have that power and community comes together to create change.

So absolutely keep kicking ass. You know, I love that there is an ass kicker that I got to talk to. And his name's Steven Sachsen. He started an incredible company and called Zero Shoes. And the funny thing is they reached out to me because they saw me wearing the shoes, his zero shoes on down to earth. Because if any of you know me or they're getting to know me, I hate putting shoes on. But when I do put my feet into shoes, it's zero shoes because I don't feel like I have shoes on.

My feet can spread, my toes can spread. And I still have the freedom that I've gotten so used to having. Steven created this thing literally just putting yarn together and creating sandals and kind of giving that away. And we're going to get into his foundation story. But it is him and his wife Lina, moved into this place of now creating a shoe, this shoe, essentially. So Steven, fun guy. We had a great conversation. He's a master's all-American sprinter, so he's super fast functional with his feet.

So he's one of the fastest men over 55 in our country. That's great. Former all-American gymnast. So obviously high functional training background as gymnasts are just incredible. And his wife, Lena Phoenix, co-founded the company with Steven and they're basically created a movement of movement and getting us back to the connectedness of how our feet should function. They've put their shoes around thousands of people's feet. I really love this guy. We talked about all things feet, how important the feet are, functional training and just a great fun conversation.

So you're going to want to check this out. I do have an affiliate link that we'll put in the show, notes zero shoes and get a pair of your no shoes shoes. Love you all. I hope nothing but happiness and health and sit back, go for a walk, whatever you want to do. Enjoy this next episode with Stephen Sachem. Welcome, man, so excited to have a chat with you about all things natural movement, even when I was digging into to a little bit, I love kind of the way from an entrepreneurial perspective.

You've taken your company the creative ways. You've kind of raised capital. And, you know, just as someone who kind of didn't come from this industry, you very much made it made your own mark in the industry, which was absolutely.

From my perspective, necessary and required because of our concrete shoe idea smashing our our feet in in this in these shoes forever, and it really doesn't make sense and causes people a lot of problems. So so just for the all the people that are aren't aware of the company and aren't aware of you because I really love you've got such an interesting background as it kind of perfectly comes into why you're doing this, because essentially I would I would call you a master of movement because you're you're a master sprinter.

Taiki, you know, to have even heard you taught tap dancing like this incredible, incredible kind of movement background.

Let's call it what it is. They didn't give me Ritalin as a kid. So because it didn't exist when I was a kid, I'm too old for that. Well, first of all, thank you for all of that. And secondly, yeah, this is kind of the perfect storm for both my wife and I like. Everything we've done has led up to this. And you nailed it. The reason that people think that what we're doing is so unusual is that we have 50 years of propaganda, from what I affectionately refer to as, quote, big shoe, telling you the opposite of what we all know, which is your body actually can function quite fine.

And so anyway, that's kind of the first response, what you're saying.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think I would love to just unpack the the aha. Moment of here's this movement, you know, this movement part of your life that was very necessary for you clearly. And it still is. And then that aha. Moment where you just kind of realize the disconnect between this big shoe slamming your feet in uncomfortable situation as it relates to what we really need is your feet to be free and to move properly and literally coming from the ground and going all the way up through the body.

Like, what was that bloody moment when you just said something's got to change?

Well, you alluded to it before. I mean, everything did lead up to your like as an undergraduate at Duke, I was doing primary research on cognitive aspects of motor skill acquisition. I've taught pretty much every physical thing that I've done, which includes crazy things like Zen, archery and gymnastics and running, of course. But what happened for me, the real aha moment was about 13 years ago when a little over 13 years ago I was forty five and I got back into sprinting after a thirty year break, which by the way, I don't necessarily recommend it was.

I really enjoyed it. I liked having my new sprinter identity. But for the first two years I was getting injured pretty much constantly. I mean every couple of weeks I was pulling something or straightening something. And one day after a couple of years of this, a good friend of mine who's a world champion cross-country runner said, why don't you try taking off your shoes and running barefoot and see if you learn anything. Now, A, he wasn't suggesting that I spend all my time running barefoot, and B, I'm not going to tell anybody here that they should be running barefoot, even though there's lots of reasons to do that.

I'm not going to try and make that an edict, but I decided to give it a whirl. And my first barefoot run, it was with a group actually a little barefoot running group, and we ran on trails and on the grass and on roads and pretty much every surface you could find in and around Boulder, Colorado. Now, again, I'm a sprinter, so I run one hundred meters outdoors. Indoors, I run the fifty or the sixty.

I don't even take one of those things to the end of the track called Turn's. Is that what they're called? I'm not I don't know how they work. I think I use those for slowing down. That's really about it. But I'd never run more than a mile in my life and did not enjoy one step of that. So I take off my shoes, I get out of the big, thick motion control padded shoes that everybody told me I had to wear that most people wear.

And I was so fascinated, so enthralled with the experience of feeling the ground under my feet on all these different surfaces. And I just decided to experiment as much as I could. I ran by moving my legs faster, running at the same speed, moving my legs at the same speed, but running faster, landing in different parts of my feet. I mean, just anything that I could think of just to explore this amazing new sensation of having my feet connect to the ground, which then changed the way the rest of my body responded as well.

Now, at the end of this run, somebody had a GPS watch on. And just out of curiosity, because I was not really thinking about anything other than how my body was moving, I said, how far was that? She was a little over five K. It's like, so what? I mean, I had no idea and couldn't believe it. So that in itself was amazing. Then when I'm getting my car, I noticed I had a big blister on the ball of my left foot and I also noticed my right foot was totally fine and I realized that my left leg got injured more often than my right leg.

And unlike many people who in a situation like that go, oh, look, I got a blister, this must be complete nonsense. My thought was, what am I doing correctly with my right leg that I'm doing incorrectly with my left leg? So we're almost at the moment, a week later, I go for my second barefoot run and I've got this gaping hole in the bottom of my foot. And I think, OK, I'll squat for about ten minutes.

And if I can find a way to run, that doesn't hurt the giant wound on the bottom of my foot that I'm probably not doing the thing that caused that problem to begin with. Give myself 10 minutes, see what happens. Nine minutes and 30 seconds of agony later. I'm just about to stop. And then in one step, everything changed by the pain went away. My running got easier. It got faster. I felt lighter on my feet.

My breathing was better. I mean, everything got better. It went from annoying to fun in a split second. Now, what happened, and I didn't realize it at the time, is that I was doing a thing called overtrading. I was reaching my foot out too far in front of my body and pointing my toes because Brynner's land on their ball of their foot and kind of dragging my foot back. And that was causing all the problems and what I did instead.

What changed naturally. And the keyword is naturally, because my brain was going, look, if you're going to keep doing this thing that's hurting, I'm going to find a way to try and avoid the pain. What I stopped doing was over striding. I started putting my feet underneath my body. My core got a little more engaged, so I wasn't quite so much like a floppy spring. I was kind of a tighter spring, which made everything work better.

And and that's what I just kept doing. And my injuries went away. I became a master's all American sprinter. So for men over the age of fifty five, I'm one of the fastest guys in the country. Arguably, maybe you might be talking to the fastest fifty five plus year old Jew in the world. I got a lot of competition for that. And so that's just that was the aha moment. And then I wanted that natural experience, that barefoot like experience as much as I could have it.

But I also wanted to be able to do things like get into restaurants and not have to argue with people. When I was walking around barefoot like a boulder hippie, and so I made a pair of sandals by just getting some rubber from a shoe repair place and called from Home Depot and a design based on a multi thousand year old idea, the way humans have been making footwear for a long time and made a pair for myself, for my wife, for a couple of their local runners.

And that's really that was just how it all began. And then the business happened as an accident. I'll stop ranting in two seconds where after making it know fifty pairs of shoes for people, someone said, I've got a book coming out about barefoot running. And if you treated the same bill making hobby like a business and had a website, I'd put you in the book. Now, I've been an Internet marketer for a long time, so this is a great opportunity.

I rush home and I pitched this brilliant idea to my wife, who assures me that I have my head firmly up my butt and that it's a bad idea, won't make any money, a waste of time, total distraction. And I said, yeah, you're probably right because I'm a good husband and like a typical husband, I then waited till my wife went to bed and built a website.

So and then it just took off. I mean, literally within two weeks. And this is the end of November in two thousand nine, like the first pair of sandals that we sold was to somebody in Minnesota where it was snowing. So we realized that Minnesota. Yeah, shout out to Minnesota. And so that's that was sort of the how it all began. And here we are almost eleven years later, where things have changed dramatically during that time.

Wow.

That's that's incredible. And and of course, based out of your own needs, your own needs to heal yourself. Your body started to figure that out. And that's a beautiful thing of the kind of stepping aside and allowing nature and our natural body to to inform us. And and the fact that that that occurred and that aha moment was based solely on you kind of letting go to this old way of of running and at birth. This new and necessary idea is is quite profound.

And then so so going back to the book to that person, ever put it in their book?

The book called Barefoot Running by Michael Sandler, we ended up just a brief little blurb in the book and it worked out well. I mean, if we think about it, human beings have been running, walking, hiking in the most nominal minimalist footwear you can think of for the history of human beings. And so that's all we're doing now. All we're doing in a way, is Zero Shoes is getting back to what people have been doing prior to the invention of the modern athletic shoe in the late 60s, early 70s, for which there is zero evidence that provides any benefit whatsoever.

But we can get into that. If you want kids running like little kids before they've been in regular shoes or what we now think of as regular shoes, it's amazing. They have perfect running form. They land with their feet underneath their body. They're not using too much energy. The. Ilene is just enough to move them forward, they have this they do one thing that's weird, that this expression on their face that you don't see most adult runners have, it's called smiling and they do it for fun.

They run till they're done and they stop and they'll sit down or lie down. Then they get up and they do it again and they're just having fun. We all remember that. And the thing that's so much fun about getting back to doing what's natural is you can have that experience now all the time, any time. We just forgot because we've been shoving our feet into things that squeeze your toes together and elevate your heel, which messes with your posture and are stiff enough that you can't really move and think enough that you can't feel anything.

And what most people don't know, and this kind of sounds crazy when I say it, a quarter of the bones and joints of your entire body are in your feet and ankles and you have more nerve endings on your soles than anywhere at your fingertips, in your lips. So clearly, you're supposed to use those things at the bottom of your legs. They're supposed to bend and flex and move and maybe most importantly, feel the world to send information to your brain about how to use the rest of your body enjoyably.

Because if you don't let your feet do their job, all that function, which is about balance and agility and mobility, it tries unsuccessfully to move into your ankle, your knee, your hip, your back all the way up to your neck. So what you said about when you move to California and we see this every day with people with our shoes, is once you have the experience, that feeling of getting back to letting your body do what's natural, it's just so pleasant and and frankly, addictive.

I mean, you after you do it for a while, you can't go back absolute dude.

I mean, you could have. That's exactly my experience. I can't I can't. When I have to put shoes on, I cannot put regular shoes on. It's just absolutely impossible. It's feeling over this dysfunction every time. And yeah. And that's the biggest thing. And once you kind of cross that threshold and really allowed your feet to breathe and move and stretch instead of this this club idea that you should put your foot into. And then, like you mentioned, most of the bones in your body or at least the majority of them are in your feet, your ankle, and of course, the reflexology points and the energy meridians.

And there's a reason why we're we're grounding now is is a term that we're coming back to. Right. And and so it's it's everything to do with what's going on in that first experience with your feet.

Why do you think like what what was it that was a light bulb where we said, you know, the feet are dysfunctional, we need lifts in our feet, your arches are falling. So you poor and your you need to shove your foot in here and you can't do anything like what happened and where was the genesis of that ridiculous idea.

Yeah, I started chuckling the moment you started that question because I knew where you were going. And this is one that when I when I heard a big shoe, this story will give you one of the reasons for why most people don't know this. There's a handful of us. Well, there's a handful of people, not us, because I like you said, I entered the footwear industry cold. I didn't have a history in this business. I got here eleven, twelve years ago.

But the people who've been it for forty or fifty years, they're they're the ones who told me the story. And they were and some of them were part of the story. They were in the places that I'm about to describe. So way back when Bill Berriman from Nike was in a building that they shared with some oh crap. I can't remember his orthopedic podiatrist or sports podiatrist or something like that. And Garamond said, I'm getting these new runners who are getting Achilles tendonitis.

What do you recommend? And these doctors said, well, clearly they've been wearing high heel dress shoes, so their Achilles must have shortened. So you need to give them like a higher yield running shoe to accommodate their Achilles. Now, I'm going to cut to the end of the story, then I want to come back. At the end of the story is like thirty years later, one of these doctors is at a track meet with a friend of mine, in fact, a guy who developed footwear at Nike for a long time and who I've developed a few shoes with that we have.

And he said your idea of this padded, elevated heel shoe has become the design that every modern athletic footwear shoe is based on. What do you think about that? And the doctor's answer was the biggest mistake we ever made. He said, you know, we we were we were making a lot of prosthetics and we saw everything as needing a prosthetic solution. So we came up with this idea. We didn't have any evidence for it. We didn't have any basis for it.

And and and the evidence is very clear. Running injuries have not gotten better over time. In fact, I'll come back to this thought, too, in a second. Blow your mind. But but in the 50 years in. The advent of the modern athletic shoe, 50 percent of runners get injured every year, 80 percent of marathoners get injured every year. That just hasn't changed, despite all the, quote, advances in modern athletic shoes. And all the advances are really just some new version of cushioning or padding.

It's kind of like the boy who cried wolf, except in that story, the villagers eventually get smart. But in the footwear world, every time a shoe company says new cushioning, new padding, everyone goes, oh, that's it. And then they rush to it. And the other companies just copy it because they're afraid that maybe it is something new, despite the fact that it isn't. So to answer your question a little more fully, once you put padding under your heel, Dan Lieberman at Harvard, Dr.

Lieberman showed that by taking runners in Africa who habitually run barefoot and land on the ball of their foot with their foot underneath their body, if you just put them in a padded shoe, the heel basically gets in the way and their foot ends up hitting the ground in front of their body because the shoe just again kind of gets in the way. And when they do that, a couple of things happen. One is it puts what he calls an impact transient force like spike of force right up through your joints because your leg is basically is much straighter, if not totally straight when you land with your heel way out in front of you.

So it sends this jolt of force up through your joints, your ankle, your knee, your hip and your back. Instead of using this built-In set of shock absorbers and springs that you have in your body called muscles, ligaments and tendons. The other thing that happens, if you think about your heel, it's a ball. Balls are unstable. So when you land on your heel, suddenly you have instability. So then they had to build in motion control.

Now, when you hit the ground, if you're a hundred and fifty pound runner and you're running at a normal pace, not a sprinter, for example, you're hitting the ground with three to four times the force of the weight of your body. So one hundred fifty pound runner like four hundred fifty six hundred pounds of force. There's no amount of foam or little bit of cushioning or orthotic. It's actually going to change or stabilize this ball that you're on.

It's just isn't going to happen. So now there's motion control. The next thing that happens when you land on your heel with your foot in front of your body, by the time your foot comes in contact with ground fully, you're it's like an outstretched position. It's essentially in a weak position where you're not able to engage your arch. So if you think about, like doing a bicep curl, you're weakest when your arm is straight and you're strongest when your arm is at approximately 90 degrees.

There's a similar thing that happens with your foot. If you land on your heel and your foot lands as flat as it can, that's like having your arm fully straight. It's weak when you need it to be strong. And the strong version is when you're engaging the arch and you engage the arch, when your toes are kind of pulled a little back towards your knee and you land on the ball of your foot or like midfoot or the ball your foot.

And so when you now have this elevated heel shoe with this padding that doesn't really work and you land with your foot in front of you, by the time your foot comes down, you're putting your arch in a weak position when it needs to be strong. And so then they started building an arch support. So you didn't have to use your arches to begin with and you wouldn't put it under that kind of strain. Now, last thought about this.

Think about what that means when you're not using a joint. Imagine for the fun of it. You've broken your arm. You put your arm in a cast. When you can't use a joint, it gets weaker over time. Same thing happens with your foot. There's a study coming out that shows if they took healthy athletes and put arch support in their shoes within 12 weeks, they lost up to 10 percent of the muscle mass in their feet. So imagine what that does over time.

So now but the biggest answer to your question, how did this happen? Is really simple money. So when Bowerman came up with this idea and developed this idea and by the way, if you go back to the history of Nike, the first waffle trainer was basically a flat shoe with just a small amount of cushioning. It was a wonderful shoe back in like seventy to seventy three. Somewhere in there, there was a one of the most successful running coaches in history.

Arthur Lydiard from New Zealand hit more world champions and Olympic medalist than any coach ever. And he's coming from this tiny little country. And Liddiard was making shoes that are a lot like ours that were low to the ground, really flexible. The toe box, let your feet move, move naturally. Liddiard argued with Bannermen and said, you know, these shoes are going to kill people. And Baramidze response was, Yeah, but we're selling a crap load of them.

So and the footwear industry, like I mentioned, is just a bunch of copycats who get afraid that if something new happens and it takes off, they're suddenly going to be out of business. So like when Barefoot Running became really kind of in vogue in late 2009 and 2010, the shoe companies were freaking out that people were never going to buy another shoe again. So there's always a race and they couldn't just say, hey, we're going to stop making shoes.

So they just tried to argue that natural movement wasn't, in fact, natural. So that's really how it happened. And now we're two generations in. We've had 50 years of people telling us you need motion control and our support and all these things that have never been proven to work. But it's been. But. You say a lie often enough and people eventually believe it, and then they teach it to their kids, and then you no longer have to say it anymore.

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Let's fix it. Yeah. Let's go back to the nature. Let the Achilles heel, let it let the heel drop the Achilles stretch back to its original place. Let's support the arch and its natural evolution over two hundred thousand years and perfect geometry and support from that architectural standpoint of the arch itself. But but no, we don't do that. We basically tape this whole thing together, club it together. And really the foundation then is your body's inferior, yet it needs support.

And that is the messaging that they're going to be telling you subliminally through all this stuff. Your your feet don't work. Right. And we have the best shoe to support you.

And look, it's a good story. Let's let's let's be clear about a thing about humans. We like we like stories and we like simple answers so somebody can tell you a story with a simple answer. We're all in and we really we love an answer where it's just try this product, buy this thing, eat this thing, do this whatever. And that's going to change your life and you'll be wonderful. We love that story. If you want to become wealthy, I have the secret to how to become wealthy.

The number of people who've made millions of dollars telling that story, who've never been right, don't even get me started. But but we do like simple stories. And if it's a really easy solution, we go there so we can't inherently fault people for doing what human beings naturally do, looking for solutions where we can get the thing that we think will make us happy in the easiest way possible. It's just that we're often really wrong about what it takes to do that.

And and I want to highlight two things that you said. It's kind of interesting when you said, you know, this idea of having a club at the end of your leg, there's a funny thing that happened. We we provide some footwear to a professional cycling team and they wear cycling shoes, stiff things with carbon fiber plates and speed clips to clip into their pedals to to, in theory, get the best energy transfer from their legs into the pedals.

OK, so these guys keep our shoes in their jersey when they're going for a ride. So when they're done with the ride, they can get out of their cleats, which are really stiff and squeeze their toes together. And they can't really walk so that they can go to the appropriate bar at the end of their ride or coffee shop depending on their mood. And one of the guys on his way home just didn't want to put his cleats back on.

So he rode home wearing one of our running fitness shoes. And he called us, went, dude, I'm putting out more power in your shoes than in my biking shoes. And I said, Yeah, I can tell you why he goes, why? I said it will, because you're actually engaging the arch in your foot and you're creating a very stable thing that then create stability in your ankle. So you're starting with something more stable all the way up the chain and it goes back down the chain as well.

But they can't wrap their brain around that. So we're trying to find a way to to accommodate that and show that by using your foot, even in a place where you think you're not using it, you can get benefits. And some people are, by the way, are going to think, yeah, but I have flat feet or I've high arches, arch height, mostly genetic. The rest of it is about strength. So I had and I'm not suggesting this will happen to other people, although I have heard this from hundreds of people.

I had lifelong comedy level, flat feet, I mean, family joke level, flat feet. And like I'd get out of the pool and it looked like I had an oval paddle with little dots at the end. And so when I started using my feet, naturally, I developed an arch. And when I get out of the pool now, it looks like a footprint. Now, it's not a huge thing, but it's super, super strong.

And that's the important part, is having something functionally good, not with some specific aesthetic thing. There's a researcher about natural movement at Harvard named Dr Irene Davis, and she had previously been teaching people how to make orthotics. And I asked her the same question. You asked me what was the aha moment? And she said, I realized that when someone comes into our physical therapy clinic with almost any problem, we try to get them moving as much as they're able to and building up strength and we're maintaining strength as much as they're able to giving given what they have going on, except that we're then immobilizing their feet.

Why? Why are we doing that? And that was her moment, the beginning of what then turned into her now becoming the preeminent researcher about natural movement on the planet.

Wow. You know, it's so even twenty five years ago when I was in my I was in physiology, kinesiology, athletic training, I studied a lot of stuff in my undergrad. And the first thing is taping ankles. And it's like we're literally creating clubs every every NFL player. Every basketball player to getting both of their ink, whether they're injured or not, they're getting all of this club idea and it's just a pattern that continues. But even in in the in the time that I studied till now, there is this idea and clearly a whole nother few generations ago when our parents were doing their thing, it was like hell at ACL surgery and you kept him in a frickin cast for three, four or five months.

And now we're encouraged to move. So. So, yeah. So my hope is that we get people to understand this. This is a there's a term, Stephen, that I come up with these with these ridiculous modern day ideas. And that's called a fatal convenience. Right. So it's convenient to just buy any shoe and throw your shoe in it and it's convenient to put your heel in. And initially, it feels good. Right. So you're like, oh, God, what's this is like this is like the five star hotel for my feet.

Right. But but when I then trained my feet from the core, that has to go up the chain, go up to the pelvis, go up to the spine, go up to the cranium, go go up all the way and and kind of. Start erasing primal information, or at least not even getting that primal right, not even getting it. Yeah, well, so look, lying down on a memory foam mattress feels great.

But if someone said, do you want to do push ups on it, you're going to go, what, are you crazy? And he said, well, why not take a you more force in the ground? You get better feedback from the ground, you get better forced production from the ground. Well, same thing when you're running. And again, you've got these or walking or hiking or whatever, you get these springs and shock absorbers that are built to handle that better than any amount of foam, which immediately starts breaking down the moment you start using it.

The other thing that happens if I say you want to do push ups on a memory foam mattress on the ground, if you drop and go to do push ups, you spread your fingers out. You don't squeeze them together because that gives you better balance, better coordination, more strength. Same thing with your toes. If your shoes squeeze your toes together, you're not able to to balance and move and have the agility that you're supposed to have. And to your point about a fatal convenience, I would say in this situation that's a literal thing.

And I know this is going to sound hyperbolic to some people because some people have accused me of that in the past when I want to bring up this example. But my dad is one of the millions of people every year who fell down, broke his hip and died two weeks later. And one of the reasons that it happened is he had crappy, crappy balance from being in shoes that didn't let his feet function naturally for a long time. And then he tripped over something that was like a half an inch high and didn't have any ability to deal with that.

That makes no sense. And, you know, and this happens over and over and over. So there's the issue with balance. And the elderly is a very big deal. It is a multibillion dollar fatal problem. And we there's a bunch of research coming out that shows how, again, using your body, naturally getting feedback from the ground so that your brain knows how to use your body so it can have better balance, can help with that.

And that's a really important part for us. And on the exact opposite end of that equation. Back to Irene Davis. She said to me one day, if we just had kids growing up wearing your shoes in 20 years, we wouldn't have to treat adults for the billions of dollars of problems that currently go and try and get help for with financial problems and knee problems and hip problems and back problems, et cetera.

And you bring up a really strong point. And that that proprioceptive sense of our body and space are our awareness of where we are at. You can just literally look at an elderly person and and the shuffling and the mobility that shut shut down and the and the lift one leg up and they'll fall over. So that that just has been kind of annihilated through this through this culture. And yeah. No one. Dude, I'm sorry to hear about your father.

And that way it's just it seems unnecessary that people are. Yeah. In these such compromised places. And think about that. They just have always I remember I was going for a walk with my mom and she's seventy eight. And literally it was that, it was, it was an inch of, of a change in elevation and she rolled her ankle in a nanosecond and then, and then luckily I was there and I grabbed her and she didn't fall down but she was out of it for two weeks.

Wow. So, so it's, it's, it's that descent. It's almost desensitized in that in that way.

It's in a way, it's more interesting. There's a book called The Brain that changes itself. And one of the people that's featured prominently in the book is a doctor named Mike Merzenich. And Mike talks about this phenomena in the brain called differentiation. So different parts of your brain control your different parts of your body. So for your fingers, for example, there's a slightly different part of your brain right next to other parts of your brain that control your thumb versus your first finger, your second figure, third finger, same thing happens with your feet.

Imagine if you tape your first two fingers together after a while. Your brain isn't getting separate information from each finger so that two steps separate. But nearby parts of the brain that were differentiated, one controlling first finger, the other controlling second figure, they differentiate. And basically your brain now, for all practical purposes, thinks you only have one finger there. And if you remove the tape, you won't be able to move them independently for a while.

But luckily, since the brain is wired to have to be differentiated, it'll eventually come back. If you get the right kind of stimulation, what same thing happens with your feet? If you don't use them, if you're not sending information to your brain, that part of your brain map differentiates and you lose the ability to function naturally until you start getting natural stimulation again and kind of reawaken the brain. And this is one of my favorite stories. One of the reasons I mean, running a business super, super hard, running a footwear business, unbelievably hard for a whole other set of reasons.

Early on, I wrote a blog post about something like every year to some researcher takes some sort of vibrating device and puts it on the feet or ankles of elderly people or people with Parkinson's, various mobility issues. And they find much to their amazement, when they vibrate people's feet and ankles, they're suddenly able to move better. They have better mobility. Well, I wrote my blog post was you don't need a magic vibrating insult. Just take off your damn shoes and go for a walk outside and get some food stimulation.

So I got an email from a eighty two year old guy who said I was looking for the magic vibrating insoles, but I couldn't find them. I only found your blog post, so I decided to put your theory to the test. And that was two weeks ago and I just threw away my walker. Wow.

Now, again, I'm not making medical claims or promises. We're just talking about what can happen if you let your body do what bodies are made to do. You go into tribal societies and elderly people aren't as immobile or dysfunctional as we find in the West.

And I was recently well, at least in the end of twenty eighteen, I was in Sardinia and Soileau, Sardinia, and we're around the blue zones. Hundred year old people. Right. And they're very much they're walking every day. They're functional, they're making food and they're getting outside. And it's that whole thing. And I love that idea or the the, the, the that example of tapping the fingers because think about that. That's like it's the same idea of pushing all of these toes and independent all these independent toes now become this one.

And now not only those toes, those metatarsals and is now immobilized and now all the way up to the ankle. So you've created, what, two hundred different bones into one like. Now how is that even good in.

Anyway, let's let's talk a little bit more about, about movement. Sure. Because I really love your your almost multi discipline that you have around movement. How do you obviously freeing up your feet. How now have you explored this natural movement as a way of life? Like describe to me your kind of a day in the life of what you think is important in order to to move properly?

Yeah, it's pretty simple. And I will argue that it's not what I'm living right now because we have this really rapidly growing company where a lot of my day is rolling out of bed, getting on a computer, going home, falling asleep, lather, rinse and repeat. But I do get on the track. I'm still competing. I'm still training. So the biggest thing is I don't want to describe this. You you just want to find as much variable stimulation as you possibly can with whatever you're doing.

So if you're running, for example, rather than just running on a road, find a way to mix it up, get on a trail, make sure you're on uneven surfaces or different kinds of surfaces. You want to give your your brain in your body as much stimulation as you can from other angles, from other speeds, other just whatever you can possibly find. I think the thing that we've lost, by and large, is this sense of experimentation, this willingness or encouragement to try things that we haven't tried before, not huge things.

It's not like going from being sedentary to being a professional skydiver or whatever you might think of. It's just even in your daily life, if you work like I do, I do weird little things. I put on my I notice that I was putting on my pants left leg first, so I started putting on my pants right leg first. I noticed that I crossed my arms with my right arm on top of my left arm. So I practiced doing it the other way until I literally can't remember which way is natural for me.

So I'm always looking for where the pattern is and then trying to find some way of breaking the pattern in either a small way or a big way just to see what happens. And this can be people will take this in the wrong way, which is fine. I had shoulder surgery three years ago, so my right shoulder and I'm right handed was immobile for like three months. I had to learn to do everything with my left hand. And yes, the answer is everything that my left hand.

And so so that was like really, really fascinating and very challenging. Now I am am but dexterous when I am in the bathroom. So it just depends on where the toilet paper is. I don't have a problem. Left hand. Right hand doesn't matter. And, but, but, but again, the key is just giving yourself that. I was looking for another word other than variable. Just you can probably find it just all these different ways of breaking out of patterns.

Our brain is wired to come up with patterns both physically and mentally. We we latch on to beliefs and we will hold onto them despite evidence to the. Where we find movement patterns, I mean, don't you find it weird how kids move like their parents? Absolutely. I find that really peculiar. And I was a I was an all-American gymnast way back when I stopped competing. When I was about 20, I stopped actually 19. I stopped practicing when I was 32.

And my joke is I spent the next, jeez, 20 years trying to get the gymnast out of my body. It took a long time to unwind those patterns in movement and just muscular tension. And that was a really important thing to do because, you know, again, we we're wired to not have to develop new patterns, did not have to think new thoughts, not to move new ways because it's energy inefficient to every time you see the grass waving in the distance to go, is that something I'm going to eat or something that's going to eat me?

We need to make a fast decision. It's life or death. The problem is we can make the wrong decision and still live, which means that many of us are the offspring of a bunch of really stupid people. And, you know, it worked out OK for them. So we think it works out OK for us, but it's certainly not optimal functioning.

So for years, maybe all most of my life, people have been asking me what kind of foods you eat, what kind of exercises do you do, what kind of water should I drink, all of these things and so much more we put into a 21 day program. So that can take you through a theme every day of knowledge, action, and then eating this delicious meals, working out, getting support, anchoring in these new habits. So you can do what?

So that you can kick ass. So you have the energy, the vitality to live the kind of life that you really want. That's what it's all about. So all in this app, we have grocery lists, we have education about real hydration and what greater oxygenation and the balance of organization. All of these things we are diving into as you're heading down this hero's journey of implementation into a new life to give you the kind of life that you actually want.

So join my tribe. All you have to do is go to one to one tribe, dotcom, sign up and you get three free days. Join me on this hero's journey. Join the tribe. Then I would love to explore this, I would love that there's a cognitive potentially neurodegenerative aspect to this because. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Because you wake up this awareness that is that is on some level unconscious because I can feel it acutely in the moment when you're challenged yourself from these what seems to be mundane exercises or patterns or habits.

But that alone is is so good to do. And there's there's plenty of people from juggling to bouncing a ball with the left hand and and all of this kind of thing to challenge yourself.

Yeah, there's an infinite number of things. And the one obstacle that I think people run into is they misrepresent what the feeling is when they're trying to do something new, because you literally are laying down new neural pathways, you're breaking out of old ones and laying down new ones. And we experience that when when we experience that, we often call that frustration. And we often think that it's a sign that there's something wrong or that we're not good enough or that we can't do it.

But what we forget is that that thing that we call frustration is just the physical feeling of laying down new neural pathways, of doing something different. And the really cool part that we then forget is that the learning happens in the resting period after you've given yourself a dose of trying something new before you then try it again. So like I remember I remember when I started training with this one sprinting coach, he was having me do these various sprinting up drills completely different than I had been taught them previously.

And I felt completely uncoordinated doing it. And I'm usually really good at picking up new physical things. So it was very annoying for me that I couldn't do this right away. But what amazed me was that I would try it and feel like a total moron. And then three days later I'd come back and I'd be better. And it was like, why am I better when I didn't do anything for the last three days, I gave myself one dose and then I somehow got better.

And within a month then it was totally, totally natural for me. And so we misrepresent that uncomfortable feeling and forget that the learning happens in the integration phase that occurs in the rest period in between bouts of trying this new thing.

Yeah, and that's it's a very strong point because the because that speed of neurology and it's so much faster than our brain trying to figure out the movement like consciously that have proprioceptive neurological neurogenesis side of ourselves, learning a skill is so deeply wired that but we have to expose ourselves to it. I mean, think of like when I first did a slack line, right. You put up a slot. I remember that frustrating thing.

I'm like, how can I not do this in this kid right next to me is walking up and down. This is crazy. But then you do it, you do it, you do it, you rest, you come back and you're very much correct. You come back to it over and over. Next thing you know, your your body is sorted it out and you're going up and down. And I want to challenge everyone thinking like right now, like it's as easy as taking these little habits.

Like we said, brush your teeth with your other hand, you know, stir your salads or your soups with your other hand. Put on put your put your one leg in in your pants, your shorts, the opposite leg. Put that. So it's these kind of things that break us out of these these monotonous. So I want to just because I'm fascinated and curious. Let's talk about how you started the company and you're kind of navigation through startup to success and the evolution of of how you raise the money and kind of what kind of partnerships you had along the way of like like unpack that a little bit.

I'm very curious. XLIX. All right.

Let's see. So two things. One, like I mentioned, I built a website because I had an opportunity much to the disgruntlement of my wife and I when she growled at me the next morning for having disobeyed her wishes, I said, look, the people who are ranking in the search engine results for the keywords that I care about. They're all there by accident. I think I can own this in about three months because, again, I've been an Internet marketer for a long time and I was wrong.

It only took me about six weeks. So what we thought was maybe going to be a car payment turned into our full time job very, very quickly. But I want to kind of paint a bigger picture around this. When people ask us how we got here, I flash back to when I have a graduate degree in film. I went to Columbia University Film School and one of our teachers was the director, Milos Forman. And somebody asked me once, how do you make a good movie?

And he says, well, you know. Central making movies is casting, and the other 10 percent is casting. And when you meet the actors that he is cast in his movies is totally right, like he picked the perfect people for those movies. It was really amazing. So I like to say that when it comes to business, 90 percent of it is luck and then the other 10 percent is also luck. And then there's a whole separate hundred percent where 90 percent of that is working your butt off and the other 10 percent is hopefully being smart enough to know how to put out the fires.

It started overnight, even though somehow nothing changed since yesterday. So the biggest, luckiest thing for me is that I'm married to my wife, Lena, who is just Whiz-Bang smart in a completely different way than I am. She's the operations management person. She's always thinking of every possible thing that could go wrong. And how do we take care of that? And I'm the product visionary marketing guy who's always thinking of all the cool things to do. And then she tells me we don't have the money to do that.

And I have learned to do the right. So the fact that we're and we had never worked together prior to this, we're basically retired prior to starting zero issues. So the other lucky thing is that we we just get along really, really well. Working in this business together has been the most satisfying thing I've ever experienced. I mean, it's just I could not be more grateful to the for the fact that somehow 20 something years ago, Laina decided that I was worthy of being her friend and then eventually decided that it was OK to date me.

And here we are. So that's one part. So, again, we started just with us doing selling a do it yourself sandal kit. And what happened from day one was people would give us ideas like, hey, I love this, do it yourself thing, but I'm not going to do it on my own. Can you do something ready to wear? And then we found a way to do that. And it's like, hey, I don't like this particular sandal design.

I want a different kind of design. Can you do that? We said we found a way to do that. Hey, the sandals are great, but I need some shoes for the office or for when it's cold. And we figured out a way to do that until we now have, again, almost 11 years later, a complete well, actually, really eight years later, because the first three years was just DIY sandals. We have a complete line of shoes, boots and sandals for casual performance that people use for everything from taking a walk to running ultramarathons.

So the evolution was really organic and it was in no small part fueled by the interest in barefoot running back in 2009 2010 and the book Born to Run, which if people haven't read it, it's a great book. Whether you're a runner or not. It's just a great adventure story. It's a great personal development story. It's a great science story. And it's brilliantly written by Chris McDougall. And we used to joke that Chris was our unofficial marketing department for the first year or two because people would find that book and then they look for what he was talking about and then they would find us because of my marketing skills.

So that's how it originally grew. And at a certain point, we we lucked out. We ended up on Shark Tank in twenty thirteen. You can find that she's got a shark tank, which was really, really helpful, not because of the reason one would think we turned down a four hundred thousand dollar offer from Kevin, a.k.a. Mr. Wonderful O'Leary. But what it did when when they told us they wanted us on the show is it gave Lane and I an opportunity to really get clear about what we were trying to do and how we wanted to do it.

We knew that we were doing things that were changing people's lives. Leanna's line is there's enough shoe companies in the world. You don't need another unless what you're doing changes people's lives. And happily, that's what we hear from people all day, every day, because there's no reason just to do another thing. Now, people might have different opinions about that. That's cool. People have made a lot of money copying other people or doing things just like everyone else.

But that doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. So. So this started out with credit cards. I mean, we took like I bought forty dollars with the materials and the couple of dollars that I made from that. Let me buy eighty dollars with materials and then one hundred and sixty dollars with the materials. And that's kind of how it grew organically. And then at one point we called the people who make the rubber that we were using and said, you know, we'd like to get a wholesale account.

And they said, well, the minimum order is twenty thousand dollars. And we said, well, we don't have that kind of money. We're going have to just keep ordering smaller batches from our local distributor. This will you'll be happy to know we just ordered five thousand sheets of this material from the manufacturer in Italy. We said, well, you're going to be less happy to know we just ordered six thousand sheets from our distributor. So we everything was really just very organic, which was challenging when we were growing as quickly as we were.

So at a certain point and this was three years ago, three and a half years ago, we decided to try and raise some money. Actually, four years ago we tried to raise money and it didn't work. People thought we were too small. They thought we were too weird. We were too Nichi. People didn't really they didn't get what we were doing. And so in twenty seventeen, we did an equity crowdfunding raise. We did what's called a reggae plus raise, which means that we could raise money from normal human beings instead of.

Accredited investors, and we we did it in part because we needed the cash to buy inventory and continue to grow, but also because from a marketing perspective, we knew that if we invited people who believed in us to participate in the company, that what we'd be putting together is a veritable army of people who wanted to help and support what we were doing. Word of mouth was already our number one growth factor. But then to get the people who are the most excited engaged even more, that's what really got us excited about the idea of crowdfunding.

So we did something crazy. We did it totally on our own. We didn't go through a registered broker dealer. We didn't use one of the crowdfunding services because they were super expensive. And we figured out we were the first company to figure out how to raise money from individuals in all 50 states without a registered broker dealer. We've since taught everyone else how to do that. I wouldn't recommend doing it that way. It was way harder and more time consuming and more expensive than we imagined.

But the end result was great. We had, I think, about eleven hundred people who ended up contributing over a million dollars, which was a huge, huge help. And beyond that, we've been really lucky. JPMorgan Chase gave us a significant loan back and actually before we did the crowdfunding raise this again, back to the luck thing, we were at a friend's seventieth birthday party. He's a crazy doctor who just whenever I meet him, I say, what illegal thing are you experimenting with it now?

And he's always got at least three answers. And on the on the way out of the party, he said, So what are you guys trying to do? We say, well, we're trying to raise money. And he said, oh, you need to talk to this guy who's standing right next to me, who manages money for a very high net worth family. And we just got along really well. We knew a lot of the same things.

He and the members of the family were also athletes. We knew a bunch about the kind of investing they were doing, and they gave us a very small line of credit that was pulling teeth for there for them for a while because it was totally different than anything they'd ever done. And that's turned into a larger and larger a lot of credit as we proved that we could do something really simple called paying it back. And that was unusual for them, apparently.

So we've we have just tried every possible thing we could think of to get to where we are right now. And it's all been driven by this simple idea called having a business that actually makes money. And I know that sounds crazy for some people because you hear about a lot of these tech companies and even some physical product companies who've been gotten venture capital financing, who in theory have a make a lot of cash, but they've never actually made a profit.

In fact, they lose money day after day after day. And then somehow some new round of investors gives them even more money, despite the fact that the odds of them actually ever making a profit gets smaller and smaller every time they do that. So we've been, again, really lucky that we've been able to put all these things together and actually run a profitable company in a time. And we believe in building a company that is a real thing, not just supported by venture capital financing.

And it's also really important for us to I like to say that all companies rise to the level of the neuroses of their founders. So one of my particular neurotic patterns, if you will, is I treat everyone like they're old friends of mine. I don't talk differently to one person rather than another. I don't think hierarchically so. And Lane is very much the same way. So we treat everybody in our company essentially equally from the people at the warehouse to the people at the executive level.

When we have our quarterly profit sharing inspired bonus plan, everybody gets the same amount. I mean, it's split evenly. And this is going to people, many of whom have worked for their whole life and never gotten any kind of bonus ever from anyone, never gotten any appreciation from anyone. We know that if the people at the warehouse can't get a product out the door, that's hurting the entire company. So we want to treat them well and help them and nurture them.

And same thing with our customer happiness team, our customer service team, our sales team, everybody. So it's one of my favorite things about our business is everybody gets along really well. There's no political infighting. We're all striving for the same thing, which is just helping more people experience the fun and benefits of natural movement. We're trying to help people rediscover that natural movement is the obvious, healthy, better choice the way they think of natural food, because it is.

So that's it. And back to the luck thing. I'm going to tell you my favorite lucky story other than having met my wife, we so one day there's a guy named Dennis who's walking his dog, and he normally doesn't do that when his wife walks the dog and his dogs started talking to these other dogs who were being walked by, a friend of ours who normally doesn't walk his dogs either. Normally his wife walks the dogs. So the two guys sort of talking and our friend says to Dennis, what do you do?

Dennis says, While I've been in a footwear designer for forty years, I've been working at Crock's, but I'm retiring from Crock's. Our friend says, oh, my friend Stephen Layna had a shoe company. Well, we didn't have a shoe company at that point. We had a we're selling sheets of rubber and string and how to make sandals based on a ten thousand year old idea company. So Dennis says, here's my phone number, pass it on.

And I sat on that phone number for months because I'm thinking, why would a guy who's been working at some of the biggest footwear companies in the world for his whole career had any interest in talking to me. And so eventually I was bored. I called him. We got together for lunch. And after, like a three or four hour lunch, I said, someday I would love to work with somebody like you, but probably younger, who's just getting his feet wet, but clearly shown that he knows what to do.

And Dennis says, well, what about me? I said, I don't think I can afford you because I'm retired and I believe in what you're doing. I said, bingo, you're hired. And so, Dennis, in addition to being our senior product developer, our chief product officer, has been our business mentor as well because he has lived through all of it. And, you know, what are the odds that dog's meeting led to this person who has been integral in the success of our company?

How what a I mean, you use luck and I think there's probably luck involved. But I also believe that there's a lot of serendipity around everything that you've shared and and call that the fabric of how this whole universe works. Who knows? But but you're doing something good and you're doing something that's beyond just footwear because your goals and vision to me feel infinitely bigger than what they're much bigger.

Steven, I got to say, I really enjoyed this conversation and I really applaud you and appreciate you and your wife doing things and doing things in an open, sustainable, connected way. And and I also appreciate the grind that you've done because it does it's not easy doing anything, even the greatest. You heard this a thousand times, the greatest ideas, but but sprinkled with the right intention, the collaboration. You've clearly amassed a great serendipity filled collaborative unit around you.

And and you are because again, I wasn't paid by you to wear the shoes. I wore those shoes because they feel good on my feet when I have to put when I have to.

Oh, that. When I have to put shoes on.

And so I just want to say thank you for everything that you've done. And you're also been kind to give the listeners a discount. So we'll put all of that in the show notes and and dare we say we just want people's feet to be happier than than they've been untrained in the in the way that they've been. So really appreciate everything that you've done.

Oh, no, it's a total pleasure. And of course, you know, the feeling is mutual. The work that you're doing is is helping innumerable people and changing lives in so many ways. And it's just a treat to watch how that's evolving too.

Well, it's only the beginning of our journey. And so let's just keep keep rockin and changing, changing, changing people's lives and freeing their feet as well as we like to say live life feetfirst awesome, man.

Thank you so much.

What a fantastic episode. So tell me, what is one thing you got out of today's conversation? If this episode struck a chord with you and you want to dive a little deeper into my other conversations with incredible guests, you can head over to my website, Darran Olean Dotcom, for more episodes and in-depth articles. Keep diving, my friends. Keep diving. This episode is produced by my team at Must Amplify, an audio marketing company that specializes in giving a voice to a brand and making sure the right people hear it.

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