Before Cushioned Shoes: The 1970s Style That Changed Footwear Forever

SPEAKER_00 0:00 For most of human history, people roamed the earth like this, barefoot. Then we started making footwear, simple coverings of plant fibers and animal hides, which was essential when we started migrating to colder climates. But shoes have changed dramatically since then and in a very short space of time. So how did we go from simple hide sandals and even the remarkably advanced leather and grass shoes worn by Ertzy the Iceman over 5,000 years ago, to thickly cushioned running shoes with raised heels and narrow toes? Well, to answer that, we only need to go back to 1970 and the birth of the modern running shoe.

SPEAKER_01 1:00 It's really weird how much human beings are into shoes and feet, both positive and negative. I mean, I always wear mismatch colors of my shoes when I'm out and about, or I'm barefoot. And if I'm wearing mismatched colors, people spot me from about 25 yards away, and then they always then they always think they're funny and they go, Oh, I bet you have another pair just like it at home. And I say, similar. But if I'm in bare feet out in public, people notice from like the moon and they think I'm crazy. Although my favorite, I got stopped on the way into Costco there was a kid uh and his mom, and the kid says to his mother, that man's not wearing shoes. And his mother brilliantly said, Why don't you ask him why? And so he asked me, and I said, Do you ever go to the beach? And he says, Yeah. I said, Do you wear shoes at the beach? He says, No. I said, How come? He goes, because it's really fun. I said, Yeah, it's just like that everywhere. And he goes, Oh, mommy, can I go barefoot?

SPEAKER_00 1:54 Well, it's amazing, you know, you got that story of the child asking, you know, why are you barefoot? We were barefoot for most of human evolution. And I I really want to get on to what our ancestors may have felt and maybe how we are replicating that in the modern day. But something I think that you're sort of particularly well versed on is kind of the modern history of shoes. And this is the modern running shoe, which is, you know, a bit of an icon of fashion. You know, it was a look kind of first established in the 1970s, but it it's become really dominant. Most running shoes have sort of gravitated towards this quite similar look. And actually, most people just wear these types of shoes sort of day-to-day now, since we don't have to dress so smart or wear smart shoes. So, you know, before we sort of get into exactly what shifted in the 70s to make them look a certain way, could you paint me a picture maybe of what walking into a running shop in 1965 would have been like before this boom really took off?

SPEAKER_01 2:54 I was born in 1962, so I can't give you 65, but I will tell you that by the time I was 10, when I was looking to buy, or 10 to 12, when I was looking to buy one of the first running shoes, which is the Nike Waffle Trainer, you would just go into a regular shoe store. I don't think there were running shoe specific stores back in the early 60s or mid-60s, um, or even into the early 70s. I think that's what like when when uh Jim Fix's book on running, when that came out, I think that's when things may have started. So I don't get me, I can't do the history of the retail, but I want to do the world's fastest history of footwear for the most of human history. It was something to protect your foot and something to possibly keep it warm or cool depending on where you were. That's it. So actually one thing something to protect your foot, something to hold that protection onto your foot, and then something to accommodate whatever temperature you're in. Um, there's a sandal that they unearthed. I think it's the oldest sandal that they've ever found in an archaeological dig. It came from Oregon, and it's basically made of uh just sinewid tree bark. Uh, and it looks a lot like one of our sandals that we've been selling for the last 17 years. So, because again, there's only so many ways you can hold something on your foot. The geometry of that, there's kind of a few ideal patterns. And then obviously things evolved with fashion over in as we evolved as well. But that was, you know, most of human history. Okay, so let's talk about the modern running shoe. Or even better, if we go prior to the early 70s, for there weren't a whole lot of people who were actually running running. Um, this was not like a big hobby. But the people who were doing this professionally, they were wearing a lot of things were kind of custom-made. They were, they were very much like what we do now. It was, again, something to protect your foot, something to hold that protection on your foot, and not much else. If you look at the shoes worn by like Jesse Owens or some of the Olympians, back then, it was a leather upper and whatever kind of outsole they could figure out that made sense. And if they're on the track, some big spikes because again, the track was then cinder. So there's just um it was just nothing really special. The first waffle trainer from Nike, in this about 72, 73, somewhere in there, don't hold me to dates. I'm really not good at dates, but I got the gist of it. It was also basically a minimalist shoe. Um, the special part was the tread, was this waffle tread. And the interesting thing about the tread and and the out the design of the outsole is it was a flat shoe, but the toe, if you imagine just a flat amount of foam underneath the uh underneath your foot, from the ball of your foot to the toe, it wasn't flat. It became triangular. So it was sort of a wedge coming up. So there was no such thing. I'm going to show you a modern shoe and we'll compare it to that in a sec. But it was maybe like eight to ten millimeters of foam. It had this thing where it kind of the toe was thinner than the rest of the shoe, where it was mostly flat. I remember trying them on in a regular shoe store, and they said, you can go outside and see how they feel. And I I've been a sprinter my whole life. I never knew what that was when I was 10 or 12 years old. I just knew I was the fastest kid in school. And so I leaned forward to start sprinting, and that shoe just rocked me onto my toes. And I remember thinking, oh my God, this is how I run. And it felt amazing. So that was kind of the new evolution of something was making a running shoe with this crazy waffle sole for traction, this look designed to get you on your toes. Then things evolved. Now I'm going to show you an example of something that has basically been the design of the modern shoe, the modern running shoe, for the last 50 years. And this is from a company, I don't even know where I got it, frankly. It's a generic thing. And so instead of having that flat sole where the foam underneath curved up around the toes, they instead have this thing called toe spring. So the whole shoe is made, so it pulls your toes towards your knees. And you really can't get it down without a whole lot of effort. That's one thing. But the biggest thing that you can identify with this shoe, actually, there's two. One is pointy toe box. So it squeezes your toes together into a point. Don't know why that, frankly, that's the one thing I don't have an explanation for at all.

SPEAKER_00 6:57 I was gonna say, why did that emerge?

SPEAKER_01 6:59 But you know what? I can take it back. I wonder, because um when I got back into sprinting, which is now uh 18 years ago, and I asked someone what kind of shoes I needed, they told me to go a size smaller than my normal shoe size to lock my foot in, especially for taking turns. So I can imagine that this pointy toe box thing on a running shoe was done for a similar reason to kind of try to lock you in place. It's not the best way to do it by a long shot, but again, I'm hypothesizing. But I do know something about the other biggest thing you see on a modern shoe is the elevated heel, basically a wedge of foam underneath your foot that elevates your heel. So here's the story about that. When Bill Bauman at Nike was sharing a building with some, I think they were sports podiatrists or orthopedic podiatrists, don't call me on that one because I can't remember one of those two. Well, anyways, one of those two. And he comes into those guys and says, I'm getting a bunch of new runners and they're getting Achilles tendonitis. Do you have any recommendations? And as the story goes, they said, Well, their Achilles have probably shortened from wearing higher-heeled running shoes, sorry, higher heeled uh dress shoes. And so what you're gonna want to do is accommodate that by putting a wedge of foam in there to accommodate their shortened Achilles, which they did. And that shoe, that design, just to make it long story short, became ubiquitous. Everyone started doing it. And the reason why is the food industry is fundamentally not massively creative. And there's only so many things you can do to a shoe. Again, protect your foot, hold it on your foot, and then accommodate different surfaces or different use cases. Okay, so um, this novel thing of this foam heel thing, which some people say, oh, it was designed also to help you run faster because you could lengthen your stride. I'm gonna have to pause and talk about the research from Dan Lieberman that happened about 17 years ago. So, what Dan Lieberman showed when he was in Africa is he took runners who were habitually barefoot and then he put a modern shoe on them with a big heel. And what happened is when they were running barefoot, you could see this in a slow motion video, their heel would barely miss the ground and then they would land on their midfoot of the ball of their foot. When he put the shoe with a big heel on it, their heel would hit the ground in front of where they would normally land because the shoe is getting in the way. So you've extended your stride, and some people would argue that that was making things better. Now here's another detour. What a professional runner does is meaningless if you are not a professional runner. These are people who are trying to make a career, frankly, pun intended, as quickly as possible. And if they are done running when they're done with their career and they've made a living, or they made a living for their village, depending on where they're from, that's okay. They're trying to win a race, not do what's necessarily best for the human body. All right, so let's come back. So they make this wedge heel shoe. It's a novel idea, and footwear companies who are, again, not particularly creative, start copying it. And suddenly everyone's got to do it because that's what people want. And now, um, and if you want to think about that context, that wedge heel shoe, again, the old people who are running the most were competitive runners. Running recreationally was not a big thing. Now, if you showed up at a race and the guy next to you has a brand new shoe with some crazy new design and he beats you in that race, what are you doing tomorrow?

SPEAKER_00 10:14 Yeah, you'll gain another you'll gain your own pants.

SPEAKER_01 10:17 Right. And so the other companies were like in cutting ahead. Again, I'm I'm gonna bounce back and forth because that's what my brain does. Sorry. Um, so when the whole barefoot running thing kind of started to become a thing, shoe companies were terrified that they were never gonna sell another shoe, and they were freaking out and putting out all this PR about how if you run barefoot, you're gonna step on hypodermic, and else you'll get Ebola, your kids won't get into college, you'll forget how to use the number five, your car won't start, whatever. So, same kind of thing happening back in the 70s. Like, we've got to make shoes like that. Okay, cut to maybe this is maybe 20 years ago, maybe a little less. A guy who worked directly with Bill Marr, Bill Barman, was at a track meet with one of the doctors who came up with this idea for the wedge teel shoe. And he said, You know that this idea has taken over. This is what everyone's doing. And he asked, What do you think about that? And this doctor says, Biggest mistake I ever made in my career. And my friend says, Why? And he knew the answer, but he was wanted to hear it. He said, Why? Well, we didn't have any evidence for this Achilles shortening idea that from wearing dress shoes, your Achilles are shortened. And we were just making a lot of prosthetics and orthotics, so we were seeing everything through a prosthetic and orthotic lens. We didn't have any idea what the impact of elevating your heel and changing your posture would be or changing your stride because of a new design and footwear, but it's just been bad. I mean, it's been horrible, and we just didn't know. I did some research with Dr. Bill Sands when he was out in Colorado. He used to work for the U.S. Olympic Committee. And in his lab, we would take runners of varying degrees of skill and just put different shoes on them and look at their gait. And what we saw was for almost every human being, whatever you put on your foot was going to change your gait. The only people for whom it didn't happen were like really, really accomplished professional runners, where they were just locked in and sprinters even more, because sprinters uh typically do land midfoot or on their fore, their forefoot, and you could put bricks on their feet, and they would still try to do that. But the average person, different shoe design, would change your gait. And more interestingly, almost never did they realize they were doing it. And let me again cut ahead. On the Nike website, it's not just changing your gait, because when you change the way your body is moving, it's impacting how your body can perform. It's impacting forces going through your joints, it's impacting activation of muscles, ligaments, and tendons. On the Nike website, and there's a page that we can you can link to if you like, I'll give it to you. They published a portion of an abstract of a study. In other words, they took a synopsis of a study and did a synopsis of the synopsis. And they were what they were doing, this is maybe six and a half years ago, they did this study. They took their best-selling running shoe, was then the Zoom structure 22, and they compared it to a new shoe they developed, the React Infinity Run, in a 12-week half-marathon training program. And they were looking at injury rates. The way they publicized the results and the way everybody published it, was a new shoe reduces injury rates by 52%. Amazing. But then you look at the numbers, and they have the numbers on their website. In the React Infinity, uh, sorry, in the Zoom structure, their best-selling running shoe at the time, the way they published it was it injured 30.3% of the people running in it in under 12 weeks. Wow. I think it might be a little higher because they define they defined an injury as anything kept you out that kept you out from three running sessions in a row. So if you got injured in the last week, you possibly wouldn't count. The new shoe, the React Infinity Run, it only, air quotes, only injured 14.5% of the people wearing it. So imagine if you go into this running shoe store, whether it was one of the early ones or one of the later ones, and you said, Hey, I'm looking for a great shoe. What's your best seller? And they go, Well, here's our best seller. And FYI, it injures approximately one out of three people wearing it in under 12 weeks. Um, can I get something that doesn't injure so many people? Well, here's a brand new one that only injures one out of seven people in 12 weeks. Can I get one that doesn't injure people? It's like, well, we're a running shoe store. So it's just crazy town. Now, by the way, this, you know, whole, these results should make you ask some questions like, is that the best you can do after 50 years of RD? Or why are you still selling that horrible one that is injuring almost one out of three people? And what did you do to make that other one injure fewer people? And the answer is, uh, and they didn't publish this one on the website. I have a copy of the study, though. It says we removed many of the protective features. They made it more minimalist. They got rid of the stuff that they that got put into the modern running shoes. Well, let's go back to the modern running shoe. I'm wondering how many times I can bounce around in time uh during just this one seemingly simple answer or long answer to simple question.

SPEAKER_00 14:56 Fortunately, and and surprisingly, this all happens in a quite a confined point of history, really. You know, in the past 50 years. So you're bouncing around, but not in sort of great depths of time. We've really changed a lot in a short period.

SPEAKER_01 15:09 Yes, we have changed um an exorbitant amount, and human beings have not. We're still basically the same. We have not evolved new muscles, new ligaments, new tendons, new bones and joints for locomotion, and yet, you know, we are doing these things that impact it. So let's talk about what happens when you now have something that because if you've been used to landing kind of midfoot, because if you're running, if you basically have nothing under your foot, if you're running barefoot or with very little cushioning under your foot, you're going to land uh not on your heel because landing on your heel, um, what's the technical term? Hurts. It's painful. Like I say about barefoot running, good form feels good, bad form hurts. It's as simple as that. Okay, so now you've got this elevated heel with a wedge of foam underneath it, and you're landing on your heel. Well, your heel is a ball. It's not perfectly circular, but it's a ball. It's unstable. You have nothing to control when you're landing on your heel. So the next thing they have to do is they build in motion control to accommodate the people who either pronate, so your heel, your foot kind of turns in, or supinate, your foot turns out. Well, let's think about this for a second. If you're a 150-pound runner and you're just you know a good, decent jogger, you're hitting the ground with about between four and six hundred pounds of force. There's no amount of foam of any kind that's gonna keep you from pronating or supinating once you land on your heel, which is rolling like a ball. It's just not gonna happen. Um, there may be a little impact, but not a whole lot. Then the other thing is once you then do land on this uh round thing and you're trying to control that at all, by the time your foot comes down to the ground, it's basically flat. So here's where things get really interesting. If you think about lifting weights, if you think about like a barbell curl, let's say you can curl 50 pounds. So your arm is straight, you're able to curl 50 pounds. If I had you bend your arms at a 90 degree angle, I could put anywhere between 80 and 150 pounds in your hands and you'd be able to hold it. You're stronger when you're in a strong position. The eccentric loading, the lowering phase of an exercise is where you're stronger. So a similar thing happens in your foot. If you're landing midfoot or on the ball of your foot, you're activating all of these muscles and they're rearranging the bones and joints in your foot to whatever your arch height is to have a good arch, which is the strongest architectural design human beings have ever found. And you have muscles and ligaments and tendons that are holding that in place and are stronger eccentrically than they are concentrically when they're trying to shorten. Well, if you're landing on your heel, your foot lands flat, your foot is extended, those muscles, ligaments, and tendons are extended, and you're gonna try to contract, which is where you are weaker, rather than when you're being supported and you're stronger in the eccentric. So this can lead to things like plantar fasciitis. So, what do the shoe companies do? They built in arch support so that you don't need to use your arch. Now, let's think about that for a second. I like to ask people, when people ask me what I do for a living, I go, I'm gonna ask you a stupid question to get to the answer. And it's a stupid question, I promise you, it's not a trick question. I say, which is better, weaker or stronger? And they still look at me like I'm trying to trick them. I go, it's not a trick question, it's really simple. They go, okay, stronger. I said, good. Let's talk about what you don't want weaker. If I wanted to make this joint, my elbow, weaker, how do I do that? And invariably they say, Don't use it. They go, yeah, use it or lose it. If you support this joint, if I put a cast on my arm so it can't move, it gets weaker. The muscles, ligaments, and tendons get weaker. Well, you've got like 26, or you have a quarter of the bones and joints of your whole body in your feet and ankles. You've got 110 muscles, ligaments, and tendons. If you're now supporting the arch or have a shoe that's stiff enough that it doesn't let your feet move, those bones and ligament, those bones and joints move, what's happening? And you can watch this look of terror cross their face where they go, uh, it's making things weaker. I go, what might happen if you take the foundation of your body and make it weaker over time? And I'll give you a hint, uh, an $80 billion medical problem every year is elderly people who can't walk well and don't have good balance, and they trip and they fall and they break their hip and they die. This happened to my father. My mother, who's just was an ox, she just tripped, fell, broke her hip, and lived for another 15 years and had no idea. But uh my dad, you know, lasted a week. So this is not good. And plantar fasciitis is one of the most common injuries for runners. So the design of the shoe impacts how you move. How you move impacts what happens to your body and leads to different injuries. Now, backing up a tiny bit, if we injured between 14.5 and 30.3% of the people wearing zero shoes in a year, in 12 months and not 12 weeks, we'd be having this conversation from my jail cell.

SPEAKER_00 19:51 Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:51 So, does that answer your very simple question of how do we get here?

SPEAKER_00 19:55 Well, so why did all other shoes uh beyond running shoes start adopting this method of adding extra padding to the heel, adding the sort of lip being confined with this very skinny toe space?

SPEAKER_01 20:09 So the simple answer is it's comfortable. It can make it so that it feels like you're having a better time when you're barreling down a hill or, you know, over striding and doing whatever it is, but it's eventually going to catch up to you. And what happened is in the shoe-fitting world, the heuristic for how do you decide if a shoe is good for you is does it feel comfortable when you're walking around in the shoe store? It's not a good, not a good barometer for whether that's going to be good for you. And of course, the people who get used to being in a minimalist, a truly minimalist shoe, we could talk about the difference between truly minimalist and not in some point, um, or even being barefoot, is eventually this feels more comfortable. It feels it just feels more natural because again, this is what human beings have been doing since the beginning of human beings. It's ironic that we're seen as the intervention because what we're doing is basically what footwear has been for at least 10,000 years. The modern running shoe is the intervention, but we don't have much of a sense of history. You don't see it that way.

SPEAKER_00 22:08 Is there any point in history where we can sort of pinpoint a specific marketing tactic, a gimmick, a sort of uh almost, you know, what your sound what you're describing sounds like some sort of historical propaganda for cushioned shoes. Yeah. Can we pinpoint where that really happened? Is it the beginning with the with the waffle shoe, or is there something which is more tangible than that?

SPEAKER_01 22:32 You know, when they first came out with a waffle, they weren't there wasn't much advertising. They were literally like you know throwing shoes in the back of a car and going to track meets. So I don't know when the first ad came out, but I I wish I brought it with me. I have it at home. I have a book called Sold Out, S O L E D. And it's the history of uh sneaker advertising. And I think, I mean, it starts in the early to mid 70s. Um, and the gist is essentially that it's gonna make you run better. I mean, all of it is gonna make you better in Some way. It's going to make you faster, it's going to be more comfortable, it's going to let you do whatever. And then the funny thing that you watch over time is how the messaging kind of changed with the times. So in the early 70s, as kind of science started booming, then it became all science-y. And what's really funny about this book is the guy loves the advertising, but he keeps pointing out that what they're doing is basically lying. It's like it's science-y language for something that's not a real thing, for example. I mean, I'm not quoting, but that's the gist of it. So once people realized, and and I wonder how coincident it was with the book running coming out, because that really did catapult the whole idea of running recreationally or running for health in a way that nothing else did. So that was 76-ish. And yeah, I don't know. But basically, the simple thing is once people realize there's money to be made, they're going to find ways to do advertising to make that money. And what's happened even more recently with some of the more modern technology, for lack of a better term, I don't like that term really, is that they're again telling the same story. This'll make you better. Look at this famous guy who, you know, 105-pound Kenyan who just ran a two-hour marathon. That's what he's wearing. Don't you want to be like him, even though you weigh 250 pounds and you can run a 5K in two hours? Um, and it'll be more comfortable and make you better be performant. And here's the science-y part.

SPEAKER_00 24:23 I want to sort of um mention this story which I find fascinating, which was, you know, quite a few years ago, many hundreds of years ago, people uh had actually been sort of squishing their feet into tighter and tighter shoes. So we're talking about this sort of recent 1970s phenomenon, but uh in the past you have poolanes, which are this type of really pointy shoe that was popular in Europe in the Middle Ages. Um, I don't know if you've seen pictures of these, but yeah. They're crazy. You've got winkle pickers today, and you've got poolanes, which were just like winkle pickers on steroids. Um, and they were hated so much that that kings imposed taxes on them. Uh, the church condemned them as demonic, and it turns out they were actually bad for foot health. So there's some archaeological evidence showing these shoes quadrupled the risk of bunions and broken bones from fools. Oh, absolutely. So we've been doing this, we've been going against the natural shape of our shoe and squishing them into tight shoes for a long time. And I I guess uh maybe you don't have an answer to this, but wh why do we like doing that?

SPEAKER_01 25:27 Um look at paintings from various eras and or look at look at the representation of women in various eras. Things come and go in and out of fashion. So, and I don't know how long, you know, these fashion I mean, lately fashion trends are moving more quickly. I mean, think about in the 70s, uh if you're old enough to remember the 70s, when Twiggy was in it, or even later when the kind of you know, um heroin chic was the look of just really, really skinny, and then it's gone to slightly more voluptuous. And so it's just you know, things go, things just happen. But yes, those things were demonic. I mean, that's simple. You put them on your feet and you you take a couple of steps and you just want to stop. Um, but we do stupid things to ourselves because we think it's be because at that time people think it's more attractive. It's just you know what we get used to.

SPEAKER_00 26:14 So as the founder of a Barefoot Shoes brand, uh, and and I'm gonna get into how that happened because there's a bit of history there as well, which is really fascinating. But um what you know, if we look back at how our ancient ancestors moved and walked barefoot, there is some evidence to suggest that um like these calluses would have formed on the sort of the feet of ancient people, but they they were like smooth, dense, and had a bit of a spring to them rather than um being blunt and sort of you know getting rid of tactile feedback. Um so that there would have been this sort of sensitivity maintained, uh, so they would have been able to feel the ground underneath them, but it still would have been protective. Um is that what happens? Like, do you is that what's happened to your feet?

SPEAKER_01 27:02 No. If you look at most barefoot runners that I know, we don't have calllous feet. The skin has over time gotten a little bit thicker, but um, so it feels a little more, slightly more leathery uh in a way that actually is kind of nice because it's it is kind of smooth. Because we're often wearing off what would be the callus layer with just that little bit of horizontal abrasion that we're getting. But if you're if you start doing this in hot enough places where you're stepping on things that are hot, that's another thing that's seemingly, I could be wrong about this, but it seems like that's also a callus generator.

SPEAKER_00 27:31 Yeah, I believe this was a 2019 Harvard study on modern-day barefoot communities. So we're talking uh potentially about sort of modern-day tribal communities. So that would make more sense where they're hot, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 27:42 Got it. And when you're when you're out in the environments that they're in, there's less opportunity to be really precious about where and how you're placing your feet. You're gonna be creating more horizontal force other, you know, in in every direction or every direction you can think of when you're just dealing with the terrain you're on, which by the way, um, there's a thing that I refer to as the inverse naturalistic fallacy. I don't know if it's a real thing. The naturalistic fallacy is whatever we did in the past is better because it's more natural. Not necessarily true. There's a version of this where people will say to me, Well, we didn't evolve to run barefoot or even to run in shoes for 26 miles on a road. And I say, we didn't evolve to do standing backflips or fight or fly fighter jets, but I'm gonna go do one of those in a couple of hours because I do one on my birthday every year. I'm not gonna do that second one, but I know people who do. How we evolved is more about what we're capable of doing than what we did. And so people like to, you know, it's a weird thing. People like to argue for their limitations. They'll say things like, well, that's, you know, we we aren't made for that, which is another way of them saying, I don't need to do that because fill in the blank. Or, you know, my knees hurt, so I can't run. Well, again, if you run properly, you might find that your knees don't hurt. But we have this thing. We even it's like if you go on a first date, within a few minutes you're gonna be talking about things that annoy you both. We have this weird thing of bonding over our limitations, which I find very unpleasant, which is another kind of uh way I just did it in a bizarre meta way.

SPEAKER_00 29:11 So do you think that you, as a barefoot runner, get an experience of what it may have been like to be our ancestors, or do you think the experience is quite different? Totally different.

SPEAKER_01 29:23 We the the worst surfaces we have are better than the best services they have. No, that's not true. The worst surfaces we had are way better than the worst surfaces they had. You know, people say, well, we we didn't uh like we can't run on concrete. It's like go to some of these places where it's hard-packed mud. It's just as hard as concrete. So there's just a lot of confusion about that. But there's also stuff poking out of the con of the hard-packed mud, and there's more variation in it that you know you could trip in some way. I mean, it's I don't think that we have a clue of how challenging it might have been back then.

SPEAKER_00 29:54 Yeah, because uh you mentioned right at the start that there's uh all this sort of demonizing the barefoot movement, talking about you might step on a syringe or you might, you know, you might impale your foot on you know a stone. But actually, what our ancestors would have had to deal with was way worse. You know, they didn't have paved ground, so they couldn't see all of the uh dangers before they stepped on them.

SPEAKER_01 30:19 No, even that, even that people say, oh, when you start running barefoot, run in the grass. Whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. First of all, if it's soft, it's kind of like taking the cushioning from your shoe and just putting it wherever you're moving. But you can't see if there's divots in there or something that you don't want to step on in there. Yeah, no, it's much harder. It's dangerous. But my favorite is someone says, What if you step in dog poo? I go, When's the last time you did that? They go, I don't know, 20 years ago. Well, then why are you going to start now?

SPEAKER_00 30:46 It's also bad if you do it in a shoe.

SPEAKER_01 30:48 Right. It's worse if you do it in a shoe. Easier to clean off your foot, clean your foot off than your shoe.

SPEAKER_00 30:53 It kind of feels like the barefoot movement, and to a lot of people is quite new. And it was to me when I sort of first got um indoctrinated by it a few years ago. And I've got my my zero shoes that I I've worn to death now uh at this point. But you're actually um a part of a piece of modern history, I would say. You know, you you got involved in the barefoot running movement very early on, and you've mentioned this book a few times. So you know, talk to me about that, those sort of early days.

SPEAKER_01 31:21 Well, let's be clear. Um, there were quite a few people who were doing this well before I was. I started, this was um 19 years ago. I was 45, whatever that is. I'm not even gonna try and do the math. Yes, 19 years ago. Holy crap. God, that's crazy. Anyway, but there were people who were doing it before that. I know some people here in Boulder who were running barefoot long before that. I know part of the part of what was happening even in the 60s and um, maybe earlier, there was a lot of like the Stanford uh track team, they did a lot of barefoot training because they knew that was gonna make their feet stronger, or at least that was their theory, and it's true. So there was, you know, a core group of real weirdos who were doing this. But then really what happened was around the time that the book Born to Run came out, that popular, and and also Dan Lieberman's research that was, oh, I can never remember if it was in nature or science. So my apologies. Looking at indigenous uh people in Africa and how they ran and et cetera, et cetera. Those two things really were a bit of a catalyst, along with, and it's interesting actually, because the book Born to Run doesn't really promote barefoot running. It there's it's a small piece of it, but everyone assumes that it's all about barefoot running. The Taramara Indians who are featured in that book, they they do some rare barefoot running, but they also were wearing sandals made out of scraps of tire with leather laces holding them onto their feet. Um, so it was a weird phenomenon. And also the five fingers, the VRM five fingers, that shoe came out a few years earlier. And again, you know, weirdos were wearing it. Had they fit my feet, but they don't fit the shape of my foot, I probably wouldn't have started zero shoes. But so there was, you know, a little bit of a combination of things. I won't say perfect storm, but there was just a number of things that all sort of coalesced around the same time in 2009. What happened for me was um around that time, coincidentally, I had gotten back into sprinting after a 30-year break and spent the next two years getting injured nonstop. And a friend of mine, who's a world champion runner, said, Why don't you try running barefoot to see what you learn? Like I mentioned, barefoot running, good form feels good, bad form hurts. Well, my first time out there, I was just transfixed. Like feeling my feet on the ground was miraculous. We were running, there's a group of us, we were running on different surfaces, on grass, on roads, on trails, on gravel, on anything. And I was just so curious. Like, what happens if I change my cadence, if I move my feet faster or slower? What happens if I land on this part of my foot or that part of my foot? What happens if I'm just like everything I could think of? And it was amazing. Now, again, I'm a sprinter. I had never run more than a mile in my life, and I hated everything after the first 150 yards of it. And at the end of this run, somebody had a GPS watch on, and I said, How far did we just go? And she said, It's a little over 5K. I'm like, what? I couldn't, and I could have kept going. Um, now, so that was the fun part. That was the feel good part. But I then noticed I had a big blister on the ball of my left foot. Now, many people in that situation would go, oh, see, this is all bullshit. I got a blister. My brain was like, how come my right foot's fine? And oh yeah, it's my left leg that seems to be getting injured more often. Huh. So my next barefoot run a week later, I figured I'll give it 10 minutes, and if I can't figure out how to make it not hurt, then I'll stop. Because if I can make it not hurt, I'm probably not doing the thing that caused that blister to begin with. Nine minutes of 30 seconds of agony later, the next step, everything changed. Literally, my running got faster, easier, lighter, my breathing relaxed. Everything was just it was just someone had flipped on the lights. And what it I realized, not immediately, is that I had been over striding. I'd been landing with my foot too far in front of my body. And as a sprinter, you're supposed to land on the ball of your foot. So I'm kind of pointing my toes, ball of my foot's hitting the ground as my foot is still moving forward. And like we talked about, that abrasion led to that blister. My form changed, my running got faster, easier, lighter consistently. My injuries went away. I've been a master's all-American sprinter for the last 17 years. And um, I wanted that barefoot experience as much as I could have it. I also wanted to be able to get into a restaurant without arguing about whether it was legal to be there with bare feet. And my wife wanted me to not walk it to stop walking into our white carpeted house with my dirty feet. So I made some sandals similar to the Tower Meyer sandals, and people kept asking me to make some for them, and they told two friends, and they told two friends. And eventually this guy who was had a contract for a book uh named Michael Sandler, the book is called Barefoot Running, said, if you had a website for your sandal making hobby, I could put you in the book. I've also been an internet marketer since 92, so I rushed home and I pitched this incredible opportunity to my wife, who assured me that if there was no opportunity, it was a waste of time, it was a waste of money. It's another one of your ADHD distractions. Do not build a website. And I told her that I wouldn't, and then she went to bed. So um, so that's how it all began back in November of 2009.

SPEAKER_00 36:09 That's amazing. I I would love to um see a museum of shoes. Um I don't know if one exists, but you know, somewhere along the chronology of that, um, we go from sort of Ertzy the Iceman's uh straw shoes through to cushioned shoes, and then suddenly your sandal appears there. Well, you know what?

SPEAKER_01 36:29 Well, well, first of all, um I think that does exist in Toronto. There is a footwear museum. I haven't been to it yet, but people keep mentioning it. There might be one other. And if you look at that shoe that I mentioned from Oregon from 10,000 years ago, the lacing system is very similar to one that I developed without knowing about that, um, that I happily have a patent on. But uh Otsy was a little different because he spent a lot of time in very cold climates. Yeah. So it's a slightly different product, and it was later, a little later. Uh, but yeah, those things exist. I would love for that exhibit to include one of my shoes at some point.

SPEAKER_00 37:02 Yeah, I think Ertzy as well um actually did want to be fashionable by the judging by the other clothes that he wore, like the bearskin coat and things, yeah. Um he was probably a slight victim of wanting to look cool.

SPEAKER_01 37:14 I think, I think humans have wanted to look, look, every animal the males try to attract females. Why why do we think we're any different?

SPEAKER_00 37:21 It's interesting, though, that there's also this sort of fast-moving evolution in the history of barefoot shoes, I think. Um, and it relates to this design, it in that most people will think you mentioned the vibrant five fingers. And for anyone who's sort of not who doesn't know about them, they are a barefoot shoe, but it's got finger holes, you know, like a glove does.

SPEAKER_01 37:40 So all your you're it's a glove it's a it's a glove for your foot, otherwise. Yes, otherwise what I I refer to it as birth control.

SPEAKER_00 37:47 Yeah, so so you have to stick each toe into the individual, and people are like so put off by that, they're like, no way. Uh and I don't think anyone a lot of people haven't moved past that, but the um, you know, in in the last sort of decade, a lot is a lot has changed, right?

SPEAKER_01 38:01 Yeah, yeah. Well, um, that was, you know, the first thing that was promoted as a barefoot shoe and then a barefoot running shoe, even though that's not what it was designed for. It was designed to be a boating deck shoe. And then in the Bookborn to Run, one of the people in that was wearing that shoe for running, and that made it uh more popular. The other thing about footwear advertising over the years is no different than almost any other kind of product. Get this new version of something, it'll change your life for the better. So suddenly here's this new shoe, and this whole idea of natural movement and barefoot, which kind of made sense to many people, not everyone, but a lot of people, then it's like, oh, all I need to do is put on that shoe and start running bare or start running barefoot, everything's gonna be great. Not the case. Because we're talking about form, not footwear. It's just that footwear informs the form. Just like having the elevated heel makes it almost impossible to not overstride. Or if you do, it's still the non-optimal use of your Achilles because your foot can't extend all the way to the your heel can't extend all the way to the ground and get the energy return that your Achilles is designed, designed to give you. Um but suffice it to say, this idea that all you need to do is switch to these shoes was a problem. And I even talked to the CEO of Vibram at that, or Vibram USA at that time and said, you guys are dropping the ball on education. He says, I know, it's just gotten away from us. So that was the first thing. And then there was a company that even before the barefoot thing took off, were making something that was supposed to be a little more barefoot-friendly. It still had toe spring, which I didn't like then. Uh, and it was a little thinner, but eventually, by the time I was in the business uh for a couple of years, they had gotten rid of the toe spring, made things a little wider and a little more foot-shaped. So there were some people thinking about footwear because they thought the idea of sandals or five-toe shoes was crazy. So there was an evolution there. But the other thing that happened in 2009, 2010 was the big shoe companies again saying, don't do this or you're gonna die. But by the end of 2010, there was things they were calling barefoot or minimalist shoes that weren't. They were either uh had too much cushioning, so you couldn't feel the ground properly, because the only way human beings make a change to their gait really is by getting that feedback. Good form feels good, bad form hurts. If you pay attention to trying, I like to say if you want to learn how to run barefoot, take off your shoes, find a good smooth, hard surface, go for a very short run, like 20 seconds, and if you're not having fun, do something different till you are, which is another way of saying if it hurts, do something to make it not hurt. Experiment till you find it. You're gonna end up finding the same thing. There's ways of shortcutting that and making it faster for people to learn, but that's the gist. So the feedback is important for making a gate change. And different people respond to that with uh more or less quickly, more or less time to take to do that, just a neurological thing. So the big shoe companies had either shoes they called barefoot that still had either too much cushioning or a little bit of heel lift or still too narrow or any of the things that make a truly barefoot shoe, they didn't have them all. And you need them all, especially the cushioning part. By the end of 2010, uh some companies had come up with the idea, oh, well, you need a transition shoe. Like if you've your heels been lifted like an inch off the, you know, off of flat, you got to go to three-quarters of an inch, then half an inch, then a quarter of an inch, then an eighth of an inch. Complete nonsense. Um, there's no evidence for that whatsoever. What you really want to do is just go flat, but just then start really, really small. If you're running, 20 seconds. If you're walking, maybe 20 minutes. If you're just standing, maybe 30 minutes. And you just build up as your body gets used to it, because you're gonna be using muscles, ligaments, and tendons that you might not have used for a while and in ways that you may not have used them for a while. So you just kind of go, whatever the opposite of cold turkey is, hot tofu, I guess. Um, and you go for something flat, wide, toe, you know, foot-shaped, et cetera. And then you just build up your the natural thing that you're gonna do if you take your time and use feeling good as your yardstick for how it's going. So they had the transition shoe idea, which didn't work. They had, quote, minimal, well, they were then they coined minimalists instead of barefoot. Dr. Irene Davis, uh, her research showed she called there was two kinds of shoes, uh, minimalist and partial minimalist. The partial is the ones that have extra cushioning to, you know, all those things that are not quite right. And she said, those are of course the worst for you, because if you can't feel how your form is wrong, you might still overstride and heel strike, but then you're not getting any cushioning, and now you're sending even more force straight into your body. So she referred to them as the worst of all possible worlds. And I, and and here's the crazy thing. Here we are, 16, 17 years later, it's happening again because now the movement is really taking off. It's been on a nice rise pretty much for the last, oh, well, there was the big bump and then kind of flattened out a little bit and then has been on a tear again for the last like seven or eight years. And there's more and more companies coming into this space, and many of them are saying, well, what people really need is a little more cushioning or a little more something. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. And so they're using all the same language, just like happened in 2010, 2011, for things that aren't giving those benefits. I've been at innumerable trade shows or at various places where somebody's wearing one of my quote competitor shoes that I know is not really a quote barefoot-inspired shoe. And I go, why don't you try on one of ours and see if you what you think? And they put it on and go, oh my God, that's a whole different thing. And I go, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:18 Could you show us a zero shoe just so that we can see where it's come?

SPEAKER_01 43:22 I have one nearby. So yeah. So I'm what I prepared earlier. I'm gonna show off my favorite shoe, and it's my favorite because I helped design it and it's what I train and race in. So the gist of what we're doing is pretty simple. It's the opposite of everything I showed before. A wider foot-shaped toe box. Now, to be clear, it's not gonna be wide enough for every human being on the planet because there's a lot of variation. It also is a little too wide for people who have really narrow feet. So, wider foot-shaped toe box so your toes can spread and relax, do what's natural, low to the ground for balance and agility, no toe spring, because that's screwing up the tendons of your foot, no heel lift, because that's messing with your posture. Um, super, super flexible, so all those bones and joints can do whatever they need. If they are doing what I'm showing now, which is rolled into a ball, please get to a hospital immediately. That's not what your foot is supposed to do. Um the we also make it so that you've got more or less barefoot feeling. The insole in this is removable. So if you want a little more protection, keep it in, a little more barefoot feel, take it out. The soles designed to give you traction and protection, of course. They're also really lightweight compared to whatever you else you've been wearing. So we've had in almost every shoe we made, we've heard stories of people forgetting to take them off when they get home, forgetting they were wearing them when they were somewhere else, forgetting that they had them on when they got into bed. I mean, like crazy, crazy funny stories.

SPEAKER_00 44:37 One other question I really wanted to ask, and it's going right back to the start where you said you said you wear two different shoes. And I don't know what the reason for that is, but during the Industrial Revolution, um, we had the sort finally had the ability to make identical pairs of shoes. But up until that point, you know, you had people making leather shoes, maybe working for a week to make a single pair of. Shoes that were making them specific and bespoke for people's differing foot sizes because, as we know, most people don't have an identical size left foot as right foot. Is is that partly do you like the feel of a slightly different sized foot too?

SPEAKER_01 45:16 Or well, no, and so when I was a kid, I grew up outside of Washington, DC. And one of the places we would vacation often was Williamsburg, Virginia. And what they showed in the shoemaking uh place where you can see how they were doing things when the settlers came over, not settlers, when the whatever they are came over. Um, and they were actually making shoes that were identical left and right. So that if you wore one out, you could just replace it with another one, it didn't make a difference. And since they were leather, the leather would mold to your feet, but they didn't make them different for different people unless you were really wealthy and asked for that. I do it because uh it attracts attention. I'm all about advertising. So, you know, I um there are people who've literally never seen me not wearing a zero shoes t-shirt. I do own other clothing, they just don't know it. So uh yeah, I'm I I always want to start the conversation whenever I can. So that's why.

SPEAKER_00 46:06 So finally, um well, maybe we can talk a little bit about health, because I think if we, you know, using sort of history as a a way into health, I think it's important to show that history isn't just what happened in the past, it has modern relevance. And we can discuss the health of ancient ancestors all we like. But what about the impact on modern health and the barefoot experience?

SPEAKER_01 46:30 The fundamental premise that I have is the modern athletic shoe and many casual shoes as well, are getting in the way of letting your body do what's natural, and that's causing problems. Again, look at the Nike study. They removed many protective features at reduced injury rates. So squeezing your toes, not good, can cause bunions. Elevating your heel messing with your posture, not being able to feel changes your gait. All these things are problematic. So, my favorite way of talking about the health benefits of natural movement, of movement. Again, use it or lose it is a critical thing. Feeling versus numbness. Feeling is better to be aware of what's going on than being unaware of what's going on. Proper alignment is better than having misalignment. Uh, you know, there's a number of things that are just screamingly, screamingly obvious. But my favorite way of saying this is a couple weeks ago, I got a call from an investment banker who wanted our business to help sell our company. And at one point he says, you know, and the category you're in. And I went, what category are we in? He went, What? I said, what category are we in? And he I see him look at his computer and look back at me and look at his computer and look back at me. He says, barefoot shoes. I went, okay. There's research that recently came out that showed that elderly people wearing our shoes, their foot strength improved, their balance improved, and their risk of falling was reduced. There's research showing that people with plantar fasciitis, if they wear our shoes, it can help with curing plantar fasciitis. There's research showing that wearing a barefoot shoe, if you have knee asteroarthritis, can make it much, much better or go away. There's research just showing that by walking in a barefoot shoe like zero shoes, your feet get stronger. And there's research showing that if your feet get stronger, your risk of running injuries, no matter what you're running in, is reduced by 250% over the course of a year. Now, this is anecdotal, but we have customers who have Parkinson's and MS who say they're functionally better wearing our shoes. We have parents of kids with ADD and ADHD who say they're functionally better and they only want to wear our shoes. And I have a neurological explanation for those last three that I would love to have someone research at some point. So I said to him, so what category are we in? He was just dumbstruck. I said, We're a health and wellness company disguised as a footwear brand. That's it. When people say, What are your goals? I say it's really simple. We're just here to change the world. And I know that sounds hyperbolic and grandiose, but I just mean whenever all we want to do is get shoes on people's feet so they can have the best experience they can health-wise. Again, you don't need to wear them 24-7, but there's always an opportunity, I would say, unless you have some significant deformity or some significant issue that you already know that you have to deal with that. And by and FYI, we have a lot of single-leg amputees who wear our shoes or who wear our shoe. And um, and they say they're functionally better because now they can feel the ground in the foot that's still there. And one of them said, it even makes it I can I can walk longer in my prosthetic because I can feel the ground and adapt better otherwise. So there's so many applications, and this is all we're really we care about. We hear from people all day, every day who say, This changed my life. This is what gets my wife and myself and 83 other people out of bed every morning because we hear these stories and we want to make that happen. And we think that things that get in the way of that, where people know they're getting in the way of that, that's morally reprehensible and not acceptable. And so that's what we're trying to do is in terms of changing the world, at least, at the very least, make this a viable option and even better, make it so that it's the preferred choice. I, Dr. Irene Davis, who I mentioned earlier, said if we just got kids wearing a truly barefoot-style shoe, in 20 years we wouldn't be treating people for the billions of dollars of lower extremity injuries they currently have. How can that not make you want to get out of bed? You know, some companies they have a mission. We're doing this so that we can do some other thing. Our mission is our mission. Our mission is helping people live life feet first.

SPEAKER_00 50:13 Well, Stephen Sashin, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you very much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 50:19 Always my pleasure. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 50:20 A massive thank you to Stephen Sashin from Zero for joining me on the podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please subscribe. It really helps us out. And I will see you next time.