Barefoot Shoes: Uncovering the Lies of Big Shoe Companies and the Future of Footwear. An Interview with Steven Sashen of Xero Shoes. EP 003

Are you tired of dealing with foot pain, poor posture, and limited mobility? It turns out, the culprit may be your shoes.

In this eye-opening podcast, we delve into the deceptive marketing tactics of big shoe companies and how they've been lying to you about their shoes being good for your feet. 

We explore the benefits of switching to barefoot shoes, including improved foot health, natural movement, better posture, and more. Join us as we uncover the truth about the footwear industry and help you take your first steps towards a healthier and more vibrant life.

Today's Guest

Steven Sashen

Steven is the visionary and marketer for Xero Shoes. He is a Masters All-American sprinter (one of the fastest men over the age of 50 in the US) and former All-American gymnast. He was also a professional stand-up comic, cognitive psychology researcher, and taught Tai Chi and Zen Archery. Steven is also the creator of Scriptware, the industry-standard word processor for film and TV writers.

• Learn more about Xero Shoes.
• Connect with Steven

You'll Learn

• The advantages of wearing barefoot shoes over regular shoes.
• The common lies and misconceptions perpetuated by big shoe companies in regards to footwear.
• The story behind the founding of Xero Shoes and its mission to promote healthy, natural footwear.
• The importance of proper foot health and how barefoot shoes can benefit overall foot health.
• The future of footwear and the potential for barefoot shoes to become more widely accepted and integrated into mainstream fashion.

Resources

• Xero Shoe website
• Speed Force shoe by Xero
• Irene Davis, PhD, PT
• Feldenkrais Method
• Trueform Treadmill
• Take the Xero Shoe Quiz to find the right shoe for you.

You can find the complete resources, including the video podcast & my review of the Speed Force

15% Discount On Premium Peptides
Take advantage of Stephen's partnership with Limitless Life Nootropics to get a 15% discount on therapeutic peptides. The industry’s only source for third-party tested peptides. Save 15% using code:  MCCAIN15

20% Discount On Thorne Supplements

Take advantage of Olympian Stephen McCain's partnership with Thorne to get a 20% discount on all Thorne supplements. Discount automatically applied to all orders. Plus free shipping! Go to ThorneDiscount.com

Before you go make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes when they're released. And, if you're enjoying the podcast, I'd love to ask you to leave me a review on Apple Podcasts and/or Spotify.

Thanks for listening! Follow me on:
Youtube
Twitter
Instagram
Facebook
Linkedin

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Steven McCain podcast, where every week I bring you people doing world-class things in the field of human performance and optimization. This week's guest is Steven Sashen. He is the founder of zero shoes. They are a barefoot minimalist shoe company. And you're going to find out why traditional shoes are destroying your feet, your posture, your movement patterns, and the science of why barefoot shoes are a better option for us. I'm a proud owner of zero shoes. And so that's why I wanted to do this podcast. So let's do this. 

[00:00:39] Stephen McCain: Steven, thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:00:42] Steven Sashen: This is the first time I've got to say Steven, right back when someone says Steven. So that was really fun.

[00:00:47] Stephen McCain: Yeah, I mean, mine's with a pH though, right?

[00:00:49] Steven Sashen: Yeah. I look, I'm still friends with you, even though you don't know how to spell your own name.

[00:00:54] Stephen McCain: Well, look, we met at the the biohacking conference in Los Angeles, and we hit it off immediately because I found out very quickly that you were a former gymnast, and so

[00:01:05] Steven Sashen: Well, it's because you made some comment about being a gymnast, and then I said something about it, and then we had a really good chat, and then on that was on day one. And on day two I said to you, Hey, look, I gotta apologize if I was making my All-American stories sound like they're in any way comparable to your multi Olympic stories.

[00:01:21] Steven Sashen: And you said, are you kidding? It's, it's so rare that I get to talk to someone who understands this stuff at all. This is a blast. It's and since then, it's all been fine.

[00:01:29] Stephen McCain: yeah, exactly. Because there's this thing that when you. Get to, connect with somebody, especially in this space. That was a gymnast. I know your history. I know at least something about you that is very specific, that is very similar to me, I'm happy to always meet a fellow gymnast and, you helped me pick out my first pair of Zero Barefoot shoes. And I'm happy to say I, I've got them on

[00:01:57] Steven Sashen: there they're,

[00:01:59] Stephen McCain: The Speed Force is I, the way I talk this shoe up. About how comfortable it is and how much I love it.

[00:02:07] Stephen McCain: I almost feel like people don't believe me. Please don't mess that shoe up. I'm begging you because

[00:02:12] Steven Sashen: Oh, we're actually, we're making it better. So we have version two coming out a little later. I don't have an exact date. We just made the upper a little more, well, a lot more elegant. We made it a little bit lighter. No, you're gonna love it. Soul stays the same. Other things get get upgraded, which you're gonna get a kick out of.

[00:02:29] Stephen McCain: Fantastic. What, what are the, what's the color scheme?

[00:02:31] Steven Sashen: That's, it's complicated because it's not a simple answer. So I can't, I can't tell you, not because I don't want to, but because I literally can't describe it well enough in words

[00:02:41] Stephen McCain: Got it. Got it. And what when is that coming out?

[00:02:44] Steven Sashen: sometime in the future is the only thing that I know. It's gonna be I, I'm not totally sure. I think at the latest this fall, which means August 23 ish, but I don't know, I haven't gotten an exact date from our, our product team yet.

[00:02:57] Stephen McCain: Okay. I, I, I'm absolutely ready. , I still, every now and now and then go to your site and I look at the other colors of the ones you have. I'm like, ah, should I just go ahead and just buy all of them?

[00:03:08] Steven Sashen: Well, I gotta tell you what I did with the new upper. There are a couple people who we, I, I know we know at least one of them in common. But I don't, I don't wanna mention their names cause I don't want to, they haven't given me permission to do that. But there are a couple people who are very well known, health and fitness people who own over 40 pairs of that shoe.

[00:03:25] Steven Sashen: So they just bought 'em one because, well, both for the same reason. They just wanted to make sure that they wouldn't change. They'd always have a pair. And so when we designed the new upper, I sent a photo to each of them and said, just curious what you think. And they both came back on, oh, I love this.

[00:03:40] Steven Sashen: It's who? Okay. Dodged bullet there. So that gave me the confidence to keep moving forward on that.

[00:03:46] Stephen McCain: Nice. Nice. Yeah. , it is, it's unbelievable When you put on a shoe, like the Speed Force, how comfortable it is, you, , it just feels like it's part of your foot. It, it's unbelievable.

[00:04:00] Steven Sashen: Well, let me highlight a couple reasons why, just for the fun of it. So all of our shoes, we start by making a wider foot shaped toe box so you're not squeezing your toes together. And then it's really low to the ground for balance and agility. We don't elevate your heel or el or elevate your toes.

[00:04:13] Steven Sashen: Crazy flex, flexible, crazy, crazy lightweight. So you get ground feeling your brain knows what you're stepping on or stepping in, but also protection and traction, et cetera, et cetera. And there was something I was gonna say about that. It's funny, we, way back when in 2017, we did an equity crowdfunding raise.

[00:04:29] Steven Sashen: So 1100 people invested in our company and we thought that they would be the perfect ambassadors. But what happens is people, they'll say, I got these shoes that are amazing. I gotta check 'em And I liked them so much. I invested in the company and then the people they're talking to kind of go, oh, is this like some multi-level marketing thing? 

[00:04:47] Stephen McCain: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:49] Steven Sashen: out the way we expected.

[00:04:50] Stephen McCain: Yeah, people , they have a, a radar for that stuff,

[00:04:53] Steven Sashen: Well, we're like that. Well, I mean, you gave me a flashback. I used to do a lot of long time, long meditation courses and I would tell people if they did one for their first time, they came back and they'd tell me how much their life had changed. And I would say to them, yeah, just shut up for two weeks.

[00:05:06] Steven Sashen: just wait and see how things settle in now that by the two week mark is when things settle down a little bit, maybe they're kind of back to their life. It didn't change as much as they thought. But the good news with what we're doing is it's the exact opposite. After two weeks, three, it just gets better and better and better.

[00:05:21] Steven Sashen: So, and the number one thing that has grown our business has been word of mouth. And we are in a very lucky situation. My wife says it best, she's my, our co-founder. She says, there's, there's enough shoe companies in the world. You don't need any more shoe companies unless your shoes change people's lives.

[00:05:36] Steven Sashen: And we just hear from people all day, every day who say that because of the comfort you described or because letting your body do what's natural. Cause it's not about the footwear, it's about form. It's about letting your body do it's natural. That can be life changing for people. They can do things they never did before or do things they haven't done for years.

[00:05:52] Steven Sashen: So it's, it's super, super fun to be on the other end of, of just hearing that.

[00:05:57] Stephen McCain: Yeah, well, when I just, I'm not, I'm not a barefoot shoe expert, but I wear them and I've wore them now for enough time to, to have an opinion, let's say. And I feel like, to have a shoe that doesn't box you in, in a way where you, you can't do anything that you would do barefoot practically, except, except stick something between your toes.

[00:06:20] Stephen McCain: . Cuz your toes are, are in a shoe. Right. But, for me, like I've studied a lot of stability, postural, like helping people fix their, their posture and , their movement patterns. And it just seems to me that when you are standing in a shoe that's anatomically more designed to be like, your foot is. That you are going to have better stability and better movement patterns, better ground connection. You're gonna have mo more mobility in the foot. And these things don't fix themselves. So if you get a muscle imbalance, like where you're standing in heels, your hips are jacked back, so you have an anterior pelvic tilt, your lower back is arching so you have lower back pain.

[00:07:05] Stephen McCain: Once those things go outta whack, it's not like a cut on your finger where it just heals in two weeks. You have to do something to fix that, or it just gets worse and worse and worse. And I think starting with the feet is a great strategy. I really do. And I think not standing on stilts all day.

[00:07:27] Steven Sashen: Yeah. I, I, I think of it this way. I've said to chiropractors, I go, you get someone on a table, you do some adjustment and everything looks good. Then they put on these shoes that jack up their heels and squeeze their toes together and don't let them feel anything. How can that possibly be good for them?

[00:07:40] Steven Sashen: Or like people doing a yoga class, you spend all this time in your bare feet connecting to the ground and then you go put on a thick pair of shoes where you lose that connection and can't actually use your feet. Your toes can't grip. You can't do any of that. I mean, you don't do pushups by squeezing your fingers together and, having your pinky in your first finger overlapping, that would make no sense.

[00:07:58] Steven Sashen: So, why are you wearing shoes? They could do that. And the simple thing I say to people, cause look, a lot of people argue like to argue with me because human beings don't like having their beliefs challenged. We don't handle that very well. And despite the fact that I'm one of the leading experts on this, on the planet now granted that's undermined by the way I look.

[00:08:14] Steven Sashen: But regardless I say, I just say, let me just ask you some simple questions. Is. Weaker better than stronger. and they go, no. I go, okay. If is, is immobilizing your body and your joints better than letting them move freely? And they go, no. I go Is making it so you can't feel anything with the nerve endings in your fingers or your lips or your soul.

[00:08:34] Steven Sashen: Is that better than so you know, not being able to feel anything, is that numb better than being able to get feedback? No. I go, well, look at your shoes. You can't feel anything through that cushioning. You can't move your foot properly cuz the soul's so thick. Your toes are all squeezed together. So that's not good.

[00:08:50] Steven Sashen: And then just add on it. If you're elevating your heel, just like you said, that messes with your posture. If you have a thing called toe springing where the shoe is, the toe is jacked up and you can't get your foot flat on the ground. That messes with your, the tendons and your foot when their dorsal flex like that.

[00:09:05] Steven Sashen: Foam by the way, just breaks down the moment you start to wear it. And so if you have some gait. Imbalance or some gate problem that'll get exacerbated as the foam breaks down. Oh, you're gonna love this. This tells a, a great story about social media. I'm in the airport and there's a guy in front of me on the little walkway who's wearing big, thick, padded shoes, but his feet are like way inverted.

[00:09:25] Steven Sashen: Massive pronation, cuz the foam was like a wedge sideways now it had worn out on the inside so fast. And so I took a video of this just showing how bad the foam was on his shoes. And I posted it on Instagram and on Facebook, on Facebook. Everyone's oh, shoes are gonna kill you on Instagram.

[00:09:41] Steven Sashen: Everyone's like, you're stop body shaming that guy . I was like, wait, first of all, I was body, I was shoe shaming. I wasn't body shaming and it was just a guy from the knees down. So,

[00:09:51] Stephen McCain: Oh my

[00:09:52] Steven Sashen: you think that was a guy with those big calves and hairy.

[00:09:55] Stephen McCain: Exactly. . Yeah, people are very sensitive right now. It's it's an interesting time, but I, look, if you go to the, the shoe store , I don't know what has happened, but in the last few years, I, I cannot get my head wrapped around what is style now with shoes. I mean, I be, cause they have these massive like things that are like, that are five to seven pounds.

[00:10:23] Steven Sashen: yeah, I can explain it to you. It's real easy. So there's two, there's two parts to it. The first is, well, big shoe companies are, and you'll have to please pardon me if your audience has an issue with language, but I can't say it other than they're lying sacks of shit

[00:10:38] Stephen McCain: Yeah, no, you can talk 

[00:10:39] Steven Sashen: okay, good.

[00:10:40] Steven Sashen: Okay. They're seriously lying sacks of shit, and I mean, what I mean here, I'm gonna do the

[00:10:44] Stephen McCain: they went from sex or shit to seriously leave.

[00:10:47] Steven Sashen: seriously. So, if you look in the research for information about the cause and cure of running injuries prior to about 1970, there's nothing in the research.

[00:10:56] Steven Sashen: But then once the advent of the modern athletic shoe came out, suddenly running injury rates spike and they have not gone down in the last 50 years, 50% of runners and 80% of marathoners get injured every year. And that hasn't changed in 50 years, despite all the quote advance. From the big shoe companies.

[00:11:14] Steven Sashen: So one shoe company that I would not name if I didn't know how to say the word Nike. They published the study on their website that they did well better. They call it an independent study. They designed it, they paid for it, somebody else did it comparing one of their best selling running shoes to a new shoe they developed.

[00:11:30] Steven Sashen: And the way the results were publicized was the new shoe reduced injuries by 52%. But if you look at the numbers on their website is a 12 week study in the best selling shoe. Over 30% of the people got injured in 12 weeks in the new improved shoe. Yeah, only 15% did. So if that's the best they can do after 50 years, something is wrong.

[00:11:55] Steven Sashen: I mean, that just doesn't add up. And what happened is that, So that's part one, is they don't really care about you is the best way I can put it. Part two, the idea of a big, thick padded shoe came out. Hoka was the first one to really do it about nine, 10 years ago. And if you don't know anything about physics or physiology, it just makes sense.

[00:12:14] Steven Sashen: More cushioning must be good. It's actually not. Research shows that cushioning just gets in the way. Again, cuz you can't feel anything through the cushioning and your brain will actually make your be your feet land harder because your brain is trying to get feedback and it can't get enough feedback through the soft souls.

[00:12:30] Steven Sashen: There's a woman named Dr. Christine Pollard who did research. On padded shoes and found that any amount of padding actually just gets in the way and does not reduce loading forces. , but intuitively, if you think about cushioning, you think, well, cushioning must be good more must be better.

[00:12:45] Steven Sashen: Just makes sense in our heads if you don't know anything about these other things and it feels really good when you put a shoe like that on, cuz it's cradling your foot nicely. Now we know there are things that we eat that we love that are not good for us. Well, there's things that we feel that we love that are not good for us.

[00:13:03] Steven Sashen: You lie on a memory foam mattress feels great, lie on it too long. You just get weaker and weaker and weaker and it's the reason why astronauts come back and they can't stand up for a little while because when you're not using your body, it just atrophies. It does not rocket science. We know this, we know you put your arm in a cast, it gets weaker.

[00:13:20] Steven Sashen: Same thing happens in a shoe that doesn't let your foot move. It gets weaker. But here's the set, the next part. Shoe companies, by and large are not very creative and very easy to scare, and the easiest way to scare them is by suggesting that there's a better shoe and they're not making it. So if you think back to the, when the Barefoot Running movement kicked in, in 2009, 2010, the big shoe companies were terrified.

[00:13:44] Steven Sashen: No one was ever gonna buy any one of their products ever again. And so they're putting out all this content about how if you go barefoot, you're gonna step on hypodermic needles, you're gonna get Ebola, your kids won't get into college, your car won't start, your mortgage rate's gonna go up. You won't remember how to use the number three.

[00:14:00] Steven Sashen: I mean, it was insane. But that was the best they could do. A year later, they're coming out with what they were calling minimalist or barefoot shoes that were nothing of the sort. And then two years later, they stopped selling those because they couldn't tell two stories. You need a lot of cushioning, you don't need any cushioning.

[00:14:15] Steven Sashen: So they just dumped the one that was kind of brand new that people were, freaking out about. But what happened with the big cushion shoes is that well, they could do that. All they have to do is add more cushioning to what they're already doing. So when Hocus started doing well, everyone's freaking out saying, we're never gonna sell anything unless we do the same thing.

[00:14:30] Steven Sashen: And if you go to a. Trade show like the one in December called The Running Event in Austin. . Every shoe in that sto in that show looked exactly the same. Big, thick, honking foam with carbon fiber in between. And here's my favorite part, people think the carbon fiber is doing something for performance.

[00:14:48] Steven Sashen: Oh, it acts like a spring. Nah, not a spring. Oh, it acts like a lever. Nope, not a lever. You don't know anything about physics. It's in there because the foam is so unstable that if they didn't put a carbon fiber layer in the middle and they could have used any other material, that carbon fiber's really light and strong.

[00:15:02] Steven Sashen: If they didn't put something in the middle, the, the shoe would just fall apart in five seconds. So totally structural, but they all look exactly the same now. So people go, oh, they must be good cuz everyone's wearing them. No, everyone's wearing them. Cuz that's the only thing you can find Practic. So it's a bit of a survivorship bias story.

[00:15:19] Steven Sashen: Now, the good news, and I'll stop this rant in a second, is when everything's on one side, that's kinda like a pendulum that's swinging and it's gone to this far as it can go. I mean, unless they're gonna make a foot full of, foot high of foam and then it's just gonna be like the princess and the pee.

[00:15:35] Steven Sashen: But maybe things are gonna swing the other way. And if you look at the Google Trends, search data on barefoot shoes, you can see the initial spike when the boom kicked in in 20 0 9, 20 10, but then it faded out cause it was a fad then. But what you see is organically, it's been going up and it's almost at the same level of, it was in 2009 now.

[00:15:55] Steven Sashen: So I say if the pendulum is gonna swing the other way, and it looks like it will because of what we're seeing with our company and some of our competitors. There's a really interesting opportunity here, and if someone decides to really help us out and, put a bunch of money behind what we're doing, someone's gonna have first mover advantage and authenticity advantage.

[00:16:14] Steven Sashen: And we're gonna be poised, well, let me, let me leave it on this one. There's a bunch of research, bunch of research coming out, and that is looking at minimalist footwear, using our shoes for a number of different interventions to help with a number of different things, balance in the elderly balance for people who are paraplegic.

[00:16:32] Steven Sashen: Improvements for people who are have single leg amputees for kids with a d d and autism for people with Parkinson's. And just, comfort and performance as well. And when those numbers come out, while most people are not swayed by data, there are certain people for whom that's really, I.

[00:16:48] Steven Sashen: like elder, my dad's one of those people who tripped, fell down, broke his hip and died. If people are looking to have better balance as they get older, and here's the C, d C saying, oh, these shoes will help, that's a different story than just walking up to your random runner and going, Hey, these shoes are better for you.

[00:17:02] Steven Sashen: And they won't, listen to that at all. So the next couple of years are gonna be very interesting.

[00:17:07] Stephen McCain: Yeah. Well I, I am rooting for you guys to, make a mark and really get the info out there. Tell me if you think this is correct, cuz I've had this this hypothesis that there was a l a lot of gymnasts that were popping their Achilles tendon , in the last few years it was like unheard of.

[00:17:26] Stephen McCain: Like I was Wow. And I thought, you know what? It's probably cuz they're standing in shoes all day long with heels because it's shortening the calf muscle and it's tightening it. And I thought if you are standing in a heel all day long and shortening that, and then you go and you do a round of back hand springing punch, whatever it is, and you, and you, ply all that force at that angle,

[00:17:50] Steven Sashen: Yeah.

[00:17:50] Stephen McCain: muscle is, it's just the, it's just gonna pop, is you think that there's something there?

[00:17:54] Steven Sashen: Well, interestingly that idea is what created the modern athletic shoe. So Bill Barman, in the early days of Nike, was sharing a building with some podiatrists. I can't remember if they were sports podiatrist, orthopedic podiatrist. And he came and said, we're getting all these runners who are getting Achilles tendonitis.

[00:18:09] Steven Sashen: What do you recommend? And they said, clearly, from standing in higher heeled shoes all day, these people have shortened their Achilles. So you need to make a wedged heel. Put a wedge of foam in there to accommodate their shortened Achilles. Cut to 30 years later, when one of these doctors was at a track meet with a guy that I am friends with who worked directly with Bill Bowerman for decades.

[00:18:27] Steven Sashen: And my friend said, your idea has become ubiquitous. Every modern athletic shoe has a wedge foam in it. What do you think about that? And the doctor says it was the biggest mistake we ever.

[00:18:36] Stephen McCain: Yeah.

[00:18:37] Steven Sashen: had no evidence for this Achilles shortening idea. We were just making a lot of prosthetics. So we were seeing everything that's needing a prosthetic solution, but we see the problems it's created, and now it's a big mistake.

[00:18:47] Steven Sashen: So the, I can say two things. One, I'm iffy about the Achilles shortening thing, or let me say it slightly differently. I don't think their Achilles has actually shortened, but I do think their brain is telling their Achilles, it can only stretch so far. So do you know anything about Felden Christ's work?

[00:19:05] Stephen McCain: Felden Christ.

[00:19:07] Steven Sashen: Christ? I'll describe it for you. So it's a, it's a body work system, let's say. That's a bad way of putting it. But there's a guy, Mosha Felden Christ came to America. And the whole, I, a couple of the ideas behind Feldon Christ, if you have if your right shoulder is bothering you, you'll go see a practitioner and they're gonna spend all this time working on your right shoulder.

[00:19:26] Steven Sashen: You go to a Feldon Christ guy and they're gonna bun spend a bunch of time just having you move your left shoulder. . It's like, why would you do that? It's my right shoulder that's had a whack. Well, let's just make sure your brain understands how to move your right arm correctly. And then we're gonna have you move your, or sorry, your I tell the story, your right arm's bad left arm's good.

[00:19:43] Steven Sashen: So we're gonna work on your left arm. So let's make sure your brain knows how to use your left arm correctly. And then we're gonna have it start moving your right arm and you're gonna feel the difference and your brain is gonna try and make up the difference and avoid the pain because it knows how to do it correctly from the other side.

[00:19:59] Steven Sashen: So I see this with people. So I had a, a session with a guy who brought motion phone in Christ to America and a as most gymnasts have shoulders that are messed up. And so he's working, I didn't realize this, to now on my right shoulder. And he has me do just like this contraction. He's not trying to stretch it out.

[00:20:17] Steven Sashen: He has me contract and every, and make everything as tight as I can on my right side. Then he gently pulls my right arm and it extends like six inches further than it ever had before. Cuz my brain just realized that it was safe to make that movement. And so I think what happens is when you get into a, into a truncated movement pattern, when you only allow yourself to move a little bit, whether the muscles change or not and I don't know, but your brain definitely gets the hand, oh, that's the range that we're supposed to work in.

[00:20:47] Steven Sashen: And so I think that could be part of that. And your brain is really, really heavily wired to protect you from what it thinks is dangerous. So there's an idea from Tim Nokes called the Central Governor Theory, that your brain is constantly trying to keep you from doing too much. And this shows up for endurance runners in particular where, know, you start getting signals like, oh, I gotta slow down.

[00:21:07] Steven Sashen: And what endurance runners often learn to do is reframe those messages as oh, this is when I gotta push. Or just ignore them or the, the central governor gets the hint that you can actually do more than it originally thought. So when I see people running in shoes with big high heels and they're landing on their midfoot underneath their center of mask just the way they could, but even with the big thick heel, they're not letting their heel come all the way to the ground, which makes no sense.

[00:21:33] Steven Sashen: I'm firmly convinced that if you put them on a table and checked the range of motion in their ankle, that it would be restricted. But if you did some little Feld in Christ thing and faked them out, they'd, you'd find that they actually still had full range of motion, but their brain just isn't letting them do it normally.

[00:21:48] Steven Sashen: That's my theory. Hasn't been proven yet.

[00:21:51] Stephen McCain: Interesting. So it's like you are artificially you know, handicapping your, your movement of extensibility, like the, the

[00:21:59] Steven Sashen: Well here. Well, here's a ver here's a variation on that that I just thought of. We know that doing isometrics can build strength, but especially in the play, in the range where you're doing the isometric, it doesn't necessarily translate to range of motion. So if someone is just standing in a limited range of motion, it could be something just like doing isometrics.

[00:22:18] Stephen McCain: Yeah. If you look at people that sit all day, your hip flexors, so your rectus femora, your tens of faci latte, your psoas.

[00:22:26] Steven Sashen: okay if I talk dirty. It's not okay if you say use words to direct us.

[00:22:31] Stephen McCain: I love it,

[00:22:32] Steven Sashen: I mean, we're friends, but we're not that close.

[00:22:35] Stephen McCain: Okay. But these, these things shorten and then the backside turns off. 

[00:22:40] Steven Sashen: Talking about my backside. My God, Steven, Jesus, the hell is going on here.

[00:22:45] Stephen McCain: let me ask you this. When somebody buys their first pair of barefoot shoes, they are probably going to experience the turning on or usage of a lot of muscles in their lower legs, like their interior tibialis and things like that, that they didn't, right? Like my, my, my legs got sore. Like I was like, wow, below my knees cuz I didn't realize how much more I'm using my foot in a barefoot.

[00:23:09] Steven Sashen: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So you're definitely gonna be using muscles that you haven't used the way they're supposed to be used in quite a while. And I like to say that calf pain is optional. So the pro, what I like to say is, if you haven't been to the gym for a long time, you don't go back and just do the same workout you did when you, were six months ago or a year ago, or 10 years ago.

[00:23:27] Steven Sashen: You start. You do one set with a weight that you're embarrassed to lift because it's so light, and then you see how you feel the next day and you're shocked that you're still sore, and then you wait till you're not sore, you go back and do it again. You just do that same set until you can do that comfortably until you feel fine the next day and the day after.

[00:23:43] Steven Sashen: And then you go and you add a rep, or you add a little weight, or you add a set, whatever's appropriate. Same thing if you haven't used the muscles in your feet and legs properly. You wanna start slowly, and it's different if you're walking or standing versus running. If you're just standing, you can probably go a little longer.

[00:23:57] Steven Sashen: If you're walking, you can go a little less than standing. If you're running, you wanna do much less than that, but you want to use your, you, you want to just use the feedback you're getting from your body to figure out how to move correctly. The the joke is you don't wanna do too much too soon, but the only way you know you've done too much too soon is by doing too much too soon.

[00:24:14] Steven Sashen: So I just tell people, start really, really slow if you're running. 30 seconds tops. If you're walking, maybe half an hour, hour if you're just standing, maybe an hour, hour and a half, and just see how you feel and just use that as a guide. The good news about this is that if you follow that idiosyncratic, totally personalized way of figuring out how to make the transition by listening to how you feel, you're becoming your own coach.

[00:24:38] Steven Sashen: My wife loves to say our shoes are not a medical device. Even though we have people who talk about medical improvements, they're a coach and they allow you to do what's natural and when you can listen to yourself. instead of looking to someone else for a cookie putter, cookie putter, cookie cutter method of doing whatever, I don't know where that goes.

[00:24:56] Steven Sashen: Then, that's a much better thing to be able to trust yourself than to look externally for something that it doesn't make sense. My favorite thing about that people will watch some race and they see Elliot Kipchoge, the guy that ran the sub two-hour marathon, he's wearing some particular pair of shoes and they go, Ooh, I gotta get those shoes.

[00:25:12] Steven Sashen: Well, guess what? You're not Elliot Kipchoge. You're not running a marathon at two hours or slightly more, slightly less. You're not a, 5, 200, 5 pound Kenyan running at that speed. So why are you paying any attention to what that guy does? It, it's sort of amazing. Like I was thinking about it this way, when Roger Banister broke the four hour mile, everyone's, and then a week later, everyone else is breaking the four hour mile.

[00:25:35] Steven Sashen: They're all saying, oh, it was all psychological. No one said it was because of his shoes. , but for the last 50 years it's always because of the shoes. It's not Kipchoge. After he ran the sub two marathon and Nike is PO promoting that, like it's the shoes he, he came out and said it was my legs,

[00:25:51] Stephen McCain: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let me, well, let me ask you this. I'm sure certain people are a little bit concerned runners when they are going to take the plunge and try to run in a barefoot shoe. Is it safe? Is it sort of like what you said, you gotta take it in a measured approach? Is there 

[00:26:13] Steven Sashen: Well, two, well, it kind of, it kind of depends. If you're a sprinter or a middle distance runner, you've basically been wearing a barefoot shoe already, a running sh running flat or racing flat. I is, pretty damn close. Not exactly the same, usually not foot shaped, usually has too much art support, usually has a little too much cushioning, but it's pretty damn close.

[00:26:29] Steven Sashen: But for runners, again, you want to just do one run 20 or 30 seconds, see, hey, you feel the next day, and then when you feel better, build up on that one run per week that you're doing until that feels comfortable and you're doing your normal mileage on that day. And then start adding some in for the rest of the week.

[00:26:44] Steven Sashen: Or once you start feeling comfortable, know, with some amount of time and distance in that first run, then add a little bit into your next run. So you want to titrate it, you want to just, there's no rush. Here's the analogy I like to use. If you've broken your arm and it's in a cast for eight weeks, Amazingly, it doesn't come out stronger, comes out pretty weak, and you need to do one of two things.

[00:27:03] Steven Sashen: Either keep it in a sling and never use it again, or do some PT and use your arm again, and in a little while you will built it back and you can use your arm for the rest of your life. Well, it's the same thing. If you haven't been using your feet, you wanna start slow. But if it takes you a few weeks, a couple months where's the downside for that?

[00:27:20] Steven Sashen: If building stronger feet that could improve your power, your performance, your balance, your agility, if that could keep your feet supporting you for the rest of your life, why wouldn't you do this effortless thing of building up some strength by wearing a shoe that lets your foot do it's natural. Now, related to that I've got an ebook coming out in hopefully a week that talks about two interesting pieces of.

[00:27:42] Steven Sashen: The first is from Dr. Sacko in Brazil, where in her lab they took a bunch of runners in regular shoes and they had them do an intervention. I'll mention it in a second. And they tracked the runners who did this intervention against the ones who didn't. And over the course of a year, the ones who did this intervention had 250% fewer injuries than the ones who did.

[00:28:02] Steven Sashen: Now, there was no no one had no injuries, so it's reducing your risk of injury by 250% over the course of a year, and it was pretty consistent throughout the entire year. Well, the intervention was a very simple foot exercise program. took about eight, took eight weeks, takes a few minutes a day. They did some of it with a physical therapist, some of it at home, but it pretty straightforward.

[00:28:22] Steven Sashen: It's building what many people refer to as your foot core. You've got your abs for your abs, your, that's your core, your foot core is all those muscles and intrinsic and extrinsic muscles around your foot and angle. So that's pit of research number one. But I know that if you tell that to most people, they're gonna go, yeah, I'm, I'm not gonna do an exercise program.

[00:28:38] Steven Sashen: Even if it takes five minutes a day, you can do it while you're watching tv. Well, the good news is there's another piece of research from Dr. Ridge who showed that just walking in a minimalist shoe and she used a different shoe that ours, but said that ours should give the same benefits just walking in a minimalist shoe built foot strength as much as doing the exercise program.

[00:28:56] Steven Sashen: So there isn't a study yet. , it shows that if you just walk in our shoes, you reduce your injury rate by 250% over the course of a year if you're running in whatever you want. But let's do the math. Walking in mineral shoes, build foot strength as much as doing an exercise program, the exercise program reduced injury risk by 250%.

[00:29:14] Steven Sashen: So that's another option that I say to people. Look, if you're happy in your shoes, great wear them. But then wear ours when you're done running so that you're building that strength and everything else to give to make you better. And here's my favorite example for that. We have a an Olympic ice hockey player who swears by our shoes, She doesn't skate in them.

[00:29:33] Steven Sashen: Obviously she's skating and skates, but she says, when I get outta my skates, when my feet have gotten weak by being in my skates for hours a day, I put on your shoes. That's helping me and it's actually making me skate better. I'm jumping better when I'm on my skates in particular. I'm just faster, when I'm getting started because her feet and ankles are working better.

[00:29:51] Steven Sashen: So that's like the most extreme example of wearing casts on your feet, but then having the benefit of using your feet naturally. Same thing. Actually, we had a A W N B A player who reached out to us saying, I've been wearing your sandals when I get off the court and my feet and ankles have become indestructible and so you guys should make a basketball shoe.

[00:30:08] Steven Sashen: I said, funny, you should mention that. Here's a basketball shoe. And we gave her something we had been testing and she came back and said yeah, they don't fit me quite right. But nonetheless, I couldn't sprain my ankle on these if you paid me. . So there's all, there's a time and place. I'm not gonna tell people that they should do only one thing all the time, even though they should only do one thing all the time,

[00:30:27] Steven Sashen: But I'm not gonna tell, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, I wanna meet people where they are. And it's easy to do that because, look, again, is weaker better than stronger? No. Is it mobilizing your body body better than moving it? No. Is not feeling anything better than feeling anything? No. So, give yourself the opportunity to let your body do what's natural as often as you can.

[00:30:45] Steven Sashen: As much as you can with the protection that you want, with the grip that you want. And then if you're gonna do some wacky other thing, if you're shoving your shoes into an ice skate, or a ski boot, or a climbing shoe, or whatever else it is, or a high heel, there's actually someone who did a course on how to wear high heels, and it was mostly a foot strengthening course.

[00:31:04] Steven Sashen: So it's like you strengthen your feet. So for those couple hours you need to wear heels. You can tolerate.

[00:31:09] Stephen McCain: interesting. Well, I mean, look, to have to wear a barefoot shoe and it to be the equivalent of a exercise program for your feet, I would just like to add that barefoot shoes are incredibly comfortable.

[00:31:24] Steven Sashen: Yeah.

[00:31:25] Stephen McCain: It's not like you're putting on this shoe that's oh my God, this is so painful and hard to walk.

[00:31:30] Stephen McCain: It is. I leave them on, you forget at least the speed Force. And I have a couple other pairs of your, your stuff you that I've tested out, which I love. But I'm always wearing my speed forces. And I'll be around the house late at night and I'll be like, oh, I haven't even taken off my shoes because

[00:31:48] Steven Sashen: Yeah.

[00:31:48] Stephen McCain: realize that I have shoes on,

[00:31:50] Steven Sashen: Yeah. We've had people, we've had people report that they accidentally went to bed, still wearing their shoes. Yeah.

[00:31:56] Stephen McCain: And that sounds ridiculous, but I

[00:31:58] Steven Sashen: I know. No, we, we've had we had one, a guy working for us, a sales guy. He's at a trade show and he takes a lunch break and he's finishing lunch and he's thinking, I better get back to the booth.

[00:32:06] Steven Sashen: I better put my shoes back on. And it looks down. They're still on.

[00:32:09] Stephen McCain: That's hilarious. I spoke at a conference I dressed up really nice. I had these boots. They were made by St. Laurant. They're like this French super highend boot that's got this really like prominent heel. It looks like a traditional European old world boot. Very nice, beautiful.

[00:32:30] Stephen McCain: And then after the conference, I'm going to this mixer event and I'm talking to people and I'm like, I can't stand on these things anymore. I literally took them off and had them in my hand and I'm standing in my socks at this event and , I can wear those shoes, but it's only for a measured amount of time.

[00:32:48] Stephen McCain: And it's not like I'm some weakling , it's just . After a while, you start to feel the damage that you're doing,

[00:32:56] Steven Sashen: Yeah. My wife used to said one day years ago, she said I'm really upset that we own this company. I said, why? And she goes, because I need like a nice pair of brown boots and I found one, but they have a quarter inch heel, and when I wear them, I feel like I'm gonna follow my face. So happily, we now have boots that she can happily wear.

[00:33:13] Steven Sashen: So, yeah, once you get used to doing what's natural, you can't go back. It, it's a funny thing, this happened at a trade show. I was getting interviewed by some guys for a big deal magazine, and I said, before we talk, put on our shoes so you have the experience as we're having this conversation.

[00:33:26] Steven Sashen: So we talked about half an hour, then they had to go, they, they start putting on their regular shoes. And I said, how do you feel? And they went, oh my God, these are horrible I said, and I said, and you didn't know before, did you? He goes, no, we had no.

[00:33:38] Stephen McCain: I talked to this guy a while ago and he had this device, I think it was called the Juvan, it's like a micro like a vibration plate. That's a micro one. And he said essentially when you walk, and he said, no one walks barefoot anymore. So they're all in these foam. This foam.

[00:33:54] Stephen McCain: But he said that low impact where your foot is striking the ground. Over like thousands of times a day actually kicks off a signal to produce stem cells. And so he said, you could stand on this plate and you could get that same, like you walked 15,000 steps in a matter of 10 minutes.

[00:34:14] Stephen McCain: And I thought that was really interesting. But then I also thought, what if I'm wearing barefoot shoes all day long?

[00:34:19] Steven Sashen: Exactly. Yeah, that's sort of like, way back when, and this happens every couple years, some researcher comes out with something where they're showing an improvement in mobility for people with Parkinson's or people with muscular dystrophy or muscu or, or multiple sclerosis or, various other things.

[00:34:33] Steven Sashen: And the devices are all the same. They're basically a vibration things. They vibrate your feet, they vibrate your ankles, but it's basically vibrating your feet. And the first time I saw one of these pieces of research, I wrote a blog post that was basically saying, you don't need the magic vibrating insoles.

[00:34:48] Steven Sashen: Just take it for shoes and go for a damn walk outside. This is before we actually had shoes. We were just making sandals at the time. Anyway, I got an email from a guy, he said, I'm 82 years old. I was looking for the magic vibrating insoles. I couldn't find them, but I found your blog post. And since I couldn't find the insoles, I thought I'd put your theory to the test.

[00:35:05] Steven Sashen: And that was two weeks ago. And I just threw away my walker. So,

[00:35:10] Stephen McCain: Oh.

[00:35:10] Steven Sashen: I don't know about the, this is just the same as getting 15,000 steps part that could be just a sales pitch. I have no idea. But yeah, to your point, just take off your damn shoes. You don't need to spend a whole bunch of money.

[00:35:20] Steven Sashen: My favorite version of this is a customer came, well, someone came in, became a customer, and put on our shoes and was walking around inside our office and outside our office and outside we got a little rock garden thing and he's saying, I can feel this crack in the sidewalk. I've been on this particular spot before and I can feel that rock.

[00:35:37] Steven Sashen: And it's like a foot massage. And he's going on and on about all the things that he could feel, which was a big deal cuz he's blind. And I, I apologized, I said I, I feel like an idiot. That it didn't occur to me that this would be really good for people who are blind. And so a a a lot can be addressed by just again, doing what's natural.

[00:35:58] Steven Sashen: You don't need a big, expensive high-tech intervention.

[00:36:02] Stephen McCain: Yeah, totally. Again, your. You're born with your foot the way it was supposed to be in order for the maximal functionability, if that's even a word. So why, why hamper yourself with cramming your foot in a cast?

[00:36:20] Steven Sashen: Well, let's back, let's back, let's back up though. So again, we have to, we have to think about these brilliant. And by brilliant, I was using the word brilliant as a euphemism for douche bag marketers. And what I, what I'm referring to specifically is something like arch support. Now there's time and a place for things, but.

[00:36:39] Steven Sashen: Art support in orthotics were never, never designed to be something you wear all day every day. They were designed to be like a cast that you would put on your arm if you break your arm. It's a cast for your foot. If your foot needs to not be using muscles, ligaments, and tendons while it recovers. While it heals.

[00:36:56] Steven Sashen: But then some doctors realize they could make a boatload of money by prescribing them for everything that ails you. And you would never if you had a whiplash accident or got whiplash from an accident, you would never think that you're supposed to wear that neck brace for the rest of your life.

[00:37:13] Steven Sashen: You'd think you wear it until you get healed. And when you go to the physical therapist, they have, you take it off and do as much motion as you can and as much strengthening as makes sense without being in pain. Why instead do you immobilize your foot for ankle, knee, hip, back, neck injuries? So that was actually the big realization.

[00:37:32] Steven Sashen: That Dr. Irene Davis, who's now the president of the American College of Sports Medicine, who was teaching physical therapists, she had that realization and from just thinking, when we, when someone comes into a physical therapy office, we try to get them moving and strengthening as much as they can given their condition, rather than continue to be immobile.

[00:37:49] Steven Sashen: Why are we immobilizing their feet? And from that, she started investigating more and she became one of the preeminent researchers on natural movement in the world. And her research is incredible and has inspired hundreds and hundreds of other people to look into this idea. Look, all the research that we're talking about, I call it the dumbest science ever done because all it's proving is something we all know.

[00:38:12] Steven Sashen: Use it or lose it. That's it.

[00:38:15] Stephen McCain: Yeah. It's fascinating that it's, it's really sometimes how we just overlook obvious things. Another example of something like that is the knees over toe guy. Nobody knows why. know, Everyone said, don't, don't ever put your knees over your toes. And he said, we've just been conditioned, but really we should be able to do that.

[00:38:35] Stephen McCain: I think it's the same thing with the shoes.

[00:38:37] Steven Sashen: It, it, it is. Here's one you're gonna and I'll see if you come up with the the analogy or the answer that I come up with, people love to say to me, yeah, but we didn't evolve to run on pavement for, hundreds of miles. How would you, I'll, I'll give you a hint. How would you as a gymnast respond to that?

[00:38:52] Stephen McCain: It's about, well, what gymnast all about technique.

[00:38:56] Steven Sashen: Yeah, I'll get, you're on the right track, but I'll make your life easier. I say we didn't evolve to do double twisting, double backs either.

[00:39:04] Stephen McCain: Yeah. That that's a great way. Yeah, that's right.

[00:39:06] Steven Sashen: Yeah. We, there's things

[00:39:07] Stephen McCain: I can still do those

[00:39:09] Steven Sashen: Exactly.

[00:39:10] Stephen McCain: can do double twisting, double A off

[00:39:12] Steven Sashen: Yeah, I can't do double doubles. But I did, but you know, you saw me do my 61 year old standing back.

[00:39:16] Stephen McCain: That's right. That's

[00:39:18] Steven Sashen: there, there is that, but you know, there's a lot of things that we can do that we're equipped to do totally fine, that we didn't learn to do when we were in the Savannah in Africa.

[00:39:29] Steven Sashen: The fact that we didn't, that we didn't evolve doing something doesn't mean we can't do it. But there are things that, are kind of dumb. We didn't evolve to, fly fighter jets. We didn't evolve to use cell phones. We didn't evolve to do many, many, many things that we just do on a. Regular basis without a problem.

[00:39:44] Steven Sashen: And besides, if you actually go to the places where we did evolve those surfaces, packed mud, it's as hard as concrete with a whole bunch of stuff sticking out of it that you wouldn't wanna step on or in. So, you would never if you go to a, to a place, like if you go to the Australian Outback and watch the Aboriginal running around and bare feet, you would never wanna do the same thing because you're not equipped to do that.

[00:40:05] Steven Sashen: And then people say, well, but that's the thing. They've been doing it since they were kids. It's yeah, but that doesn't mean you can't learn something new. That doesn't mean your body doesn't adapt. We know that 90 year olds who do strength training programs get stronger. So, a lot of people, people just clinging to what they believe very, very hard.

[00:40:20] Stephen McCain: yeah, and they won't know why they believe it. They just get bullheaded. And most people run in an oval, so they're like falling on their knees and, rather than running in a circle, your, your feet should be like road runner so that you're just striking the foot, striking the ground in a circle.

[00:40:35] Stephen McCain: Not, 

[00:40:36] Stephen McCain: landing on your foot.

[00:40:39] Steven Sashen: yeah, the image, that's exactly the image I use. Oh, you don't wanna land on your foot. You want your foot to touch the ground at the speed that you're moving across the ground. So, one image I gave is think about Fred Flinstone starting his car. His feet are behind him, just like spinning in a circle.

[00:40:51] Steven Sashen: Just try that. You can't actually do that. You can't run with your feet behind you, but sometimes you need to exaggerate the correct way of doing it. Sometimes you need to exaggerate the wrong way too. So I say over stride more, reach your feet out even more, do it wrong so you can feel what you're talking about cuz you've acclimated, you've habituated to the way you do it.

[00:41:11] Steven Sashen: You need just to get feedback about other options in order to make change.

[00:41:15] Stephen McCain: Yeah. I have a true form treadmill. You know those?

[00:41:18] Steven Sashen: Oh, I love those.

[00:41:19] Stephen McCain: Amazing. , it's a tank. We got it during, during the pandemic just to put some miles on. But it, it really retrained my gate because it's, it's a curve to treadmill and you, it forces you.

[00:41:32] Steven Sashen: Well, it's not motorized too. That's the other part.

[00:41:35] Stephen McCain: Yeah, it's, it's really hard.

[00:41:36] Stephen McCain: I mean, even just walking on that at a moderate pace is, will put you like in a zone two cardio , it's, it's awesome. And that thing running on that really fixed my gait. It, it, I activate my glutes more. My, my gait is more circular. They're amazing.

[00:41:53] Steven Sashen: there's a a doctor slash marathon runner, very comic marathoner named Mark Kuku, who's got a, who also, in addition to being a doctor and in the Air Force, he owns a running shoe store that focuses on minimalist footwear. And I said, how do you train people? And he goes, I put 'em on a true form and then I take 'em off the true form.

[00:42:11] Stephen McCain: Yeah.

[00:42:11] Stephen McCain: exactly. 

[00:42:12] Steven Sashen: It's you c you, you start to get, so the way we learn new movement patterns, this is my research when I was at Duke University, is you, you have to slowly do it so you get enough feedback that you can feel it, and you'll feel that you're incompetent and you're not doing it right and it's awkward and you get frustrated.

[00:42:29] Steven Sashen: Frustration is misinterpreted. That's just the feeling that comes along with trying to lay down new neural pathways and get out of old ones. Because you notice that you can try something and it's frustrating. Then you don't do it for a couple days and you come back and you're better. It's like, how did that happen?

[00:42:43] Steven Sashen: Well, it's cause your brain laid down some new neural pathways. It takes a little while. So you do it slowly and you get the feedback, and then slowly you're able to build up speed and you get more accurate until it, and then you're, you're, you're still thinking about it. But after a little while of doing it, when you've laid down those new neural pathways, it just becomes ingrained.

[00:43:00] Steven Sashen: And that's just the way you are. And you've got a new thing.

[00:43:03] Stephen McCain: Yeah, , that's exactly what gymnastics is like. I used to always tell people gymnastics is like learning a thousand golf swings. You know how much people put into a golf swing. I mean, you have so many different six apparatuses as a guy, and then you have all this technique and that you've gotta learn and it takes time.

[00:43:23] Stephen McCain: It, and you gotta train ridiculous hours , and deal with frustration in, in months and months of learning like a high level skill

[00:43:33] Steven Sashen: Oh, look. Even learning low level skills, I remember in junior high school doing the, junior high, compulsory, your floor routine. One part, you had to put your arms parallel to the ground, and it took us weeks to learn what parallel to the ground was. Because the way it felt and looked from your perspective is not the way it actually is.

[00:43:50] Steven Sashen: If you put your arm, most people you say, put your arm parallel to the ground and it's way up in the air. It's not even close to parallel. And then you move their arm parallel and they go, no, now I'm pointing to the ground. It's no, that's just the way it looks from your eyes, which are eight inches above your arm.

[00:44:02] Stephen McCain: yeah. And if you don't learn the basics, if you don't master them, you'll never be able to learn the high level stuff because everything stacks, all the technique just keeps building and building on itself.

[00:44:13] Steven Sashen: you just gave me a horrible memory. One summer. So, I'm winning every meet that I'm in from in junior high and I get into high school, I'm winning every meet, and my coach says, you got some, you got some issues that are gonna make it harder to keep progressing. So for this summer on floor, you're gonna do nothing but round offs until I'm happy with how you're doing them.

[00:44:31] Steven Sashen: And I was like, are you kidding me, man? I mean, I'm trying to become an all American. He goes, yeah, nothing but round offs all summer. And I did. And then the next season, my scores were two points higher.

[00:44:41] Stephen McCain: Yep. Yeah, even when I was the best gymnast I ever was at, living at the Olympic Training Center world class, competing all over the world, Olympian, I came in and did 10 round offs on a line into the mat in the pit where they kind of over-rotated. I started my workout with 10 round offs and I ended with 10 round offs.

[00:45:02] Stephen McCain: Cuz I, I was like, it has to be a laser. It's gotta be so precise.

[00:45:07] Steven Sashen: it's the gymnastics version of doing scales on the piano. Yeah.

[00:45:10] Stephen McCain: Yeah. And that, that's really kind of, I think when you, when you get to the highest level, it's, you've just conditioned your brain. Like people are like, what is it? How do you become an Olympian? It's well, you just become so fanatical about something that you have an, a mental architecture where you've sliced ice a, a sport up in so many ways, and you have these little drills and habits and everything that you've woven into your days, and you never take any days off.

[00:45:35] Stephen McCain: And you've done that for 20 something years. You're gonna be great at it. You know that, that's, you'll be good at anything if you do that.

[00:45:40] Steven Sashen: Did you have, did you have little things? This is a thing that we did while we're in class junior high and high school, is we would sit at our desks and point our toes and have our toes underneath. So, we're just getting into the habit of continually pointing our toes. Did you have, did you ever do anything like that?

[00:45:55] Stephen McCain: I've al I've done versions of something like that. Pointing your toes is one of those things when you actually. You learn how important it is when someone gives you a picture of you doing an amazing skill, you're flying in the air and you look like you have cowboy boots on because you didn't point your toes

[00:46:11] Stephen McCain: and you're like, God dang it, that picture would've been perfect.

[00:46:15] Steven Sashen: What? Wait, here's, here's another one. This is another one. During practice, if we're on any apparatus, didn't make a difference, and you miss a move, you crile out, you, fall on your face, whatever it is. We were not allowed to have any expression. We were not allowed to say anything.

[00:46:28] Steven Sashen: We're not allowed to do anything. It was like, just get back up. And it's how come man? So, because what's gonna happen is someday in competition you're gonna fall off the pom horse and without even knowing you're gonna go, ah, motherfucker. And so this is training you not to do shit like that.

[00:46:41] Stephen McCain: yeah, I you have to learn to manage your emotions. That is what separates the men from the boys in sports or the girls from the women, for me, when I was trying to make my first Olympic team, I literally, before the trials, I said to myself, if I fall on an event during the trials process, as long as I don't let it affect me emotionally, if I could just divorce myself from it, it is physically impossible for me to fall again.

[00:47:12] Stephen McCain: Is not in the mathematics, cuz I had, there's, there's no way I don't miss, there's no, for me to miss two times in a competition at the level I was at, was beyond three standard deviations beyond, you know what I mean? And so I, I, I just, I, it gave me a lot. Sometimes you have to just trick your mind into, not getting emotional cuz your emotions in the heat of the moment will just ruin you.

[00:47:39] Stephen McCain: They really.

[00:47:41] Steven Sashen: Here's a weird variation to that. So I didn't standup comedy for a living for 10 years. Same thing. So as a new standup comic, you just go on an emotional roller coaster from a gig that goes really well. And the worst thing that could happen is your first set goes really well, cuz then your next one's gonna bomb horribly and you want people to handle it.

[00:47:59] Steven Sashen: So you just go on this roller rollercoaster from, elation to bombing and, and just depression over and over and over. And you eventually, , you know what the difference is between when you are not funny or when the audience isn't the right audience. Cuz most comics, orig early on, they blame the audience, but it's you.

[00:48:15] Steven Sashen: And so there's a like comic early young comics, they like, they do a joke, it doesn't land, and they like to go woo. And they pass their hand over their head like it went over their head. And us older comics would go, no, it's more like this. It hit 'em right in the head and then it fell on the ground cause it wasn't funny.

[00:48:30] Steven Sashen: And so you eventually learn that and then you eventually just stop caring to try to make them like you and make them think you're funny. And that's when it gets better. And then when it doesn't go well and it doesn't go well for everybody, at some point it's oh, that was just one of those things where it bombed.

[00:48:46] Steven Sashen: And the other part that kind of makes it fun is, every other comic who's watching you is having the greatest time of their life watching you.

[00:48:52] Stephen McCain: Yeah. Yeah. I've done a lot of performing in my life and the one thing that would probably make me the most nervous would be to walk out and do standup comedy. Do you know Raj Bhavsar?

[00:49:05] Steven Sashen: Yeah.

[00:49:06] Stephen McCain: So he, if for all you listening, he, he was an Olympian. I mean, he and I traveled around the world together. He's an Olympic medalist, awesome gymnast, good friend of mine.

[00:49:14] Stephen McCain: He lives in LA and took a, a standup comedy class. And he invited me to his graduation thing where it's like, all the students are gonna do it. And I'm like, okay, I'll go watch this thing that sucks, but I'll go because I'll support you. And I went there and you forget living in Hollywood, Los Angeles, there are some amazing teachers there.

[00:49:36] Stephen McCain: They were all amazing. Ev they, they tructure down and they had drilled it so much that they all got out there and they kicked ass. And I was so impressed. And but I, I just, I still am like, that would be very nerve-wracking to go up and, and do standup. I think I would like it, but cuz then I get on stage I feel normal.

[00:49:58] Stephen McCain: Like I finally am like, oh, okay, here I am. I feel I'm never nervous anymore. But for comedy, that's different.

[00:50:04] Steven Sashen: Oh, that's f Well, it's just from, again, it's just experience. I mean, the thing that comedy engenders genders is a certain fearlessness because you basically know you can handle whatever happens. Not that you're gonna be perfect every time, but whatever happens, you'll be able to handle it. And that's a really enjoyable place to be.

[00:50:23] Steven Sashen: I'm, I'm kind of, unassailable cuz and, and even if someone's, being insulting, like when we are when we were in Shark Tank at one point Kevin says we had made an offer, he turned it down and made a stupid offer that we rejected. And he, and he says, ah, you're crazy. And my only response is something like, maybe, I mean, there's nothing you could say about me that's critical about me that I can't find that.

[00:50:45] Steven Sashen: I've thought that sometime. So we agree sometimes, if not all the time. So I'm not gonna argue with things like that. So you can't insult me personally. So that's, that's easy. And then if I, if I'm stumped by something, I'm gonna say something like, I don't know, cuz what do I care if I don't know, I'll go find out.

[00:51:03] Steven Sashen: There's just no reason. Yeah. It's just you become it's an improv thing. You're just willing to roll with it because you've experienced so many times that the worst that could happen is no big deal and almost never happens anyway.

[00:51:18] Stephen McCain: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that we all could use a little bit of some resiliency in our life, especially given the kind of air that we live in right now where everyone is, snapping back and forth at each other. I, I think it's a really good quality to have. So, if anybody's out there considering doing some standup comedy, go for it.

[00:51:38] Steven Sashen: have fun. What's the worst that can happen? A few people that you will never see again will have an unpleasant thought about you that they will. At some point, this is my, this is a Shark Tank lesson. I know people who've been on the show who bit it badly. And what happens after a couple years is people will say, Hey, weren't you on Shark Tank?

[00:51:56] Steven Sashen: And they go, yeah. And they go, ah, that's really cool. They have no memory of what they saw you do on the show. They don't remember that. You bit it. They don't remember that it didn't go well. They just remember that they saw you. And that's an, that's the way it is most of the time. More often than not, people don't, they're not paying attention to you.

[00:52:13] Steven Sashen: They don't know who you are. They're not gonna remember you. So it's no big deal. And it's fun to go experiment with that.

[00:52:19] Stephen McCain: Yeah, I've landed on my head in front of 10, 10,000 people in a major competition on a stage. I remember one time I went and saw some performer, really good guitarist and. And I was telling my girlfriend at the time, I said, I, amazing. Right?

[00:52:35] Stephen McCain: But that person has made every mistake possible. He's broken a string in front of people. His guitar's gone outta tune. He's screwed up. The sounded more that's how you get good. You make mistakes. You fall on your face over and over and over and over.

[00:52:49] Steven Sashen: it's more that you stand back up as fast as you can. So I guarantee that that guitarist, if you asked him about the set, he would tell you about all the mistakes he made that you did not even know happened.

[00:53:00] Stephen McCain: Exactly. Well, that's when you reach the elite status. Like when you do a routine that looks perfect and yet you were like, I made 10 mistakes in that, that no one knew about. 

[00:53:09] Steven Sashen: And here's a lesson for that. So in addition to standup comedy for a while I was a street performer for many years actually. And I was in a, so my senior year in college I took a, I was a psychology major. I took a class, it was group counseling. Now it wasn't a class about, it was a class about group counseling, but it was also just an excuse to get eight seniors into therapy.

[00:53:27] Steven Sashen: And it was super, super fun. And one day we're in class and a woman in the class says to me, Hey, I saw your street act at that street fair last weekend. And it was really great. And I said, oh, which show did you see? Cuz one of 'em was really good and the other, and the therapist stops me.

[00:53:40] Steven Sashen: He goes, ho, hold on. Do you always have a hard time taking a compliment? And I went, well, I, oh man. Yes,

[00:53:48] Stephen McCain: Yeah,

[00:53:49] Steven Sashen: He goes, try this one. Thanks

[00:53:51] Stephen McCain: yeah, exactly right. It didn't matter which one they saw. They enjoyed

[00:53:56] Steven Sashen: They liked it. Yeah.

[00:53:57] Steven Sashen: So, 

[00:53:58] Stephen McCain: I, took theater for three and a half years, and that was one of the lessons they said listen, if someone gives you a compliment, Don't be that person that's well, I, I, I, this or that.

[00:54:07] Stephen McCain: Just, just take it, just appreciate it. Yeah. I mean, you're, the better you are, the more critical you are of yourself anyways, because you have more of yourself invested in it, and so you're more critical, and so it, it's all part of learning how to be a, a top performer,

[00:54:21] Steven Sashen: Well, I think, to that point, I think there's a way of being aware of the problems or the errors or the whatever, without being critical, without having a derivative layer of beating yourself up. You can acknowledge, here, here, here's the way I do it on the track. So, show up at a track meet and at the end of a race, people come out, they, how'd you do?

[00:54:41] Steven Sashen: And my answer now is are you just looking for the number or can I give you the excuse first? And, and I say it mostly because that's what we all do because you ask any, any track athlete, how'd the race go? The first thing they're gonna say is, well, I didn't get outta the blocks really well, or my transition phase wasn't good.

[00:54:55] Steven Sashen: Or whatever. It's like, how'd you do? Well, I mean, I said an American record, but

[00:55:00] Stephen McCain: It's, it's hard not to be critical of yourself when you invest your time and effort and years into something and 

[00:55:07] Steven Sashen: well, but we are wired, we are literally wired to be critical. That's what kept us alive way back when, back in, you know, when we evolved to not do double twisting, double backs and and, and so we're, we're built to do that. We, you go on a first date with someone and what do you talk about? All the things that were screwed up in your previous relationships.

[00:55:24] Steven Sashen: We bond over problems. We're hypercritical because we can't look into a glass of water and see if there's bacteria that will kill us. So we have to be hypersensitive to our body. So, this is just the way we're built, but if you just investigate that, it doesn't have to become. A problem, it's a bug or it's a feature, not a bug.

[00:55:41] Steven Sashen: So yeah, I, I, I had someone make some comment to me once about oh, I know what it was. We're taking a walk. And she said, I'm just trying to listen to my body better so I know what to eat. And I just fell on the ground laughing. And, and she says, what? I said, well, first of all, I know what your body wants to eat.

[00:55:56] Steven Sashen: ice cream, french fries, chocolate cake. That's easy. I mean, we want calories. We want something that's enjoyable. That's, that's no big deal. You think you can do this thing called listening to your body. I dunno what the hell that means. And then it's gonna tell you to eat something that you probably don't want to eat right now, and you hope that you're gonna like it because now your body told you.

[00:56:13] Steven Sashen: But more importantly, you think that if you eat that, it's gonna change your body so that when you look in the mirror, you're gonna what you see. Well, I've got news for you. Go ask anybody in the world if they like what they see when they look in a mirror. And if you can find one, I'll give you a million dollars we're not wired for that. We're wired to look and even if we like parts, we're gonna go, that part's great, but there's this thing, if I could just do this thing and if you don't make a deal out of it, then that's just the thing you do. When I roll outta bed in the morning, the first thing I.

[00:56:43] Steven Sashen: is I check to see if, I check to see, what my abdominal fat is

[00:56:46] Stephen McCain: You

[00:56:47] Stephen McCain: do 

[00:56:47] Steven Sashen: ran a marathon while I was asleep and didn't know it. And I find it as funny as you do. I find it hysterical that that's this thing that I do. And I can't seem to stop it. And I just think it's a riot.

[00:56:57] Steven Sashen: That I'm a little hypersensitive. I'm not even hypersensitive. It's just like, cause I'm not doing anything about it. I'm not going on some diet and doing a whole bunch of working out, cuz I, I don't have time anyway. So why am I checking to see if my body composition changed in the last seven hours?

[00:57:10] Stephen McCain: That's hilarious. If I am really honest and I think about my day, I'm doing that stuff all the time. I mean, I'm constantly doing it because I do do a lot of stuff for my health and my, my vanity and things like that. So I try a lot of things and so I'm kind of always looking, is it having a result?

[00:57:29] Stephen McCain: And what is it doing and how do I feel? And oh, look at that, but you, you are right. Like you can have this beautiful person and they look in the mirror and all they see is that one thing about their nose or their hairline or something, and, and It's kind of a shame sometimes because really, when you look back on your life, you might have been so critical at a certain point, and then you look 20 years later, you look at a picture of yourself and go, oh my God, I was beautiful back then. Yeah, but you didn't think you were back then. You were sitting there talking about your nose the whole time. Or whatever. It's

[00:57:58] Steven Sashen: Yeah. I can tell you the, I can tell you, as I'm approaching 61 the aging thing and the way and perception, it's so weird. And, and one, I did something with my wife the other day that I'm not allowed to talk about, but I'm not talking about that. There are some, I did something where I I made some comment or I told her about, there's something that I noticed about, I don't know, my eye or my eye.

[00:58:17] Steven Sashen: So I had some eye surgery recently and I, there was something going on about with my eye afterwards that I was very aware of. And I mentioned it to her and she goes, what are you talking about? And it's it seemed so giant in my mind. She hadn't noticed it at all. And even after I pointed it out, she still was, I don't, I still dunno what you're talking about.

[00:58:34] Steven Sashen: I mean, I guess I see it, but who cares? And so it's funny how our perception of us is so different than other people's perception of us. Look, I'll, I'll say it this way there are some people. , my wife hopefully included, who for some reason like what they see when they look at me, I look in the mirror and I don't have any frame of reference for that.

[00:58:55] Steven Sashen: I don't think that I'm, ugly or, particularly unattractive. But I don't, but I just don't, I literally don't care. And, but I find it very, so I find it interesting when there's people who look and they like it cuz I look in the mirror and I don't see what they see. I'm not gonna argue with them,

[00:59:10] Stephen McCain: Yeah, but look at your beautiful hair. Just 

[00:59:12] Steven Sashen: oh well that's why, that's why Elena married me.

[00:59:14] Steven Sashen: It's, it's all about the hair.

[00:59:16] Stephen McCain: It's all about the hair.

[00:59:17] Steven Sashen: in fact, she has, she has very, she has similar hair and if we had children, they would've had the greatest hair in the history of humanity. But we, we did, we elected not to do that just because we knew it would be such a burden for them.

[00:59:29] Stephen McCain: That's great. I love it. We always have a great conversation and I have all the time in the world for you. I do wanna do this because your shoes are so phenomenal. If somebody, well, I mean, if somebody was listening to this podcast and they said, okay, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take a chance on these.

[00:59:48] Stephen McCain: I'm gonna buy myself a pair of zero shoes. What is the beginner, the first one you would recommend?

[00:59:56] Steven Sashen: Mm. I'd recommend you buy them all cuz you know, daddy's gotta feed people. I don't have a good answer, which is why we have a shoe finder quiz on our website. So it depends on what you're doing. If you're walking, that's different than running, that's different than lifting weights.

[01:00:08] Steven Sashen: That's different than casual wear. That's different than if you need something for winter versus summer. So I don't have a really good answer. I'll tell 

[01:00:16] Stephen McCain: quiz. That's, that's a good answer. You

[01:00:17] Steven Sashen: Yeah. So if you go to zero shoes.com, you will find X E R O shoes. Although if you type in Z E R O, it'll still get to us. Then you will find our shoe finder quiz in a number of places.

[01:00:27] Steven Sashen: We're redesigning the website to make that more visible. But regardless, you'll find it and gonna give that a whirl. I know the best selling shoes for different categories in terms of different use cases, but I don't wanna give one recommendation because fundamentally, all of our shoes are the same Lightweight, foot shaped, low to the ground, no heel lift, no whatever.

[01:00:45] Steven Sashen: Really flexible, really lightweight, and our souls are made to be. Both give you protection and traction, but also ground feedback. And they're backed with a 5,000 mile sole warranty. Most shoes, they say they wear out in two to 500 miles. When we designed the rubber for our shoes, we wanted to make something more durable.

[01:01:03] Steven Sashen: And interestingly, the, the shoe rubber manufacturer that we connected with said, but that's not how they make the outsole rubber for shoes. And I went, yeah, no shit. That's why we want, we are gonna do it this way. We're not gonna make something that's got planned obsolescence. Our, our sustainability story is that we're using fewer materials.

[01:01:20] Steven Sashen: and it takes less energy to put our shoes together. As a result, we make things last longer so they stand up landfills longer, and we're always looking for better materials. But there aren't really many that actually are carbon beneficial. In fact, there are pretty much none that are carbon beneficial.

[01:01:34] Steven Sashen: There are some that are trash beneficial. So like doing recycled plastic is great for the trash world, but it's really not doing much for the carbon world, if you will. And there's a lot of misunderstanding about that in the world right now. So we're always looking for better stuff, but we are never gonna do anything where we're saying that we're being more helpful to the planet than we actually are, unlike most companies in the world right now.

[01:01:59] Stephen McCain: I did have one more, one more question about cause I saw you mentioned something on your side about flat feet, people saying, oh, well, is it good for me to wear barefoot shoes if I have flat feet or,

[01:02:10] Steven Sashen: Mm-hmm. . So I had lifelong and comedy level flat. . I mean, literally I was the butt of jokes from, my family and I. Started going barefoot and wearing the sandals that we originally made in shoes eventually. But before I even got to the shoes, cuz that took us a few years, I noticed my foot changing shape.

[01:02:31] Steven Sashen: And arch height is predominantly genetic, like 90% genetic, but it'll be influenced by strength. And strength is more important than structure in this case. And now way again, you get strong is by using your feet. So my feet became a little shorter, a little wider, and when my feet were really flat on the inside part of my foot, near the heel, there was like a piece that kind of came out and made my, if I stepped out of a pool or a hot tub, made my footprint kind of oval looking.

[01:02:57] Steven Sashen: Now my footprint looks like a footprint. , but not with a massive arch cutout, but it looks like a foot instead of a oval with a couple of little ovals a around it. And so we've heard stories like that. We haven't, there's not a study that proves that that happens. So again, I say, but it doesn't really matter.

[01:03:15] Steven Sashen: Having higher arches is not magic. I don't know where the idea of. Flat feet being bad came from, I'd have to look into that. But on the contrary side and the flip side, people with high arches, strength is still important, but they're usually a little hypertonic. They're usually just str what's the word I'm looking for?

[01:03:30] Steven Sashen: How do you say hypertonic? Without saying hypertonic? They're usually contracted more than they need to be more, more habitually. And so what they need to do is work on a little bit of flexibility as well. Just get a little mobility in there. But strength is important, used when you need it. So you wanna be able to relax when you need to relax, be strong.

[01:03:48] Steven Sashen: When you need to be strong. So for people with high arches, hypertonic, they need to work on the relaxation part and the proper use of strength. That again comes from using your feet naturally.

[01:03:59] Stephen McCain: Interesting. They're like an adaptogen for your feet.

[01:04:02] Steven Sashen: Huh? I like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:04:03] Stephen McCain: yeah. It's so interesting. Is there any place that someone can go to to try on your shoes or is it all online?

[01:04:11] Steven Sashen: We are in oh boy, we're in about 500 stores worldwide. But the challenge there, if you go to our website up in the upper right hand corner is a store locator link. Click on that, see what you can do. We're opening up new accounts, literally multiple times a week. And the, the pro companies that we currently work with would include REI and a number of others.

[01:04:31] Steven Sashen: They're getting inventory now, so it's gonna be the next few weeks to a month as the stores bring in the spring and, and summer inventory.

[01:04:40] Stephen McCain: Fantastic. Did I miss anything? Is there anything about barefoot shoes that we didn't cover 

[01:04:46] Steven Sashen: the simplest thing I can say is that there are a lot of companies that are kind of jumping on the bandwagon and making shoes that they're calling minimalist or calling barefoot that aren't so, and. I was on, on a call yesterday with someone who's designed a new shoe, and he came up with a new language to describe why his shoes are still barefoot, even though they're nothing close to it.

[01:05:07] Steven Sashen: And so what you wanna look for, so back to Irene Davis, who when she was at Harvard, she Desi described something as minimalist and partial minimalist. And the partial minimal issues she discovered are worse for you than anything else you could wear because they're not giving you enough feedback to make you naturally adapt to a more natural gate.

[01:05:27] Steven Sashen: And because of that, you're putting yourself in mechanically unsound positions along the way. And so the difference, I, I'll have to talk about what makes a partial minimal issue, and I actually accused her of being politically correct. I said, if you weren't being politically correct, wouldn't you say real minimalist then fake minimalist?

[01:05:45] Steven Sashen: And she said, yeah. So that's on my podcast. So. , a partial minimal issue will not be wide enough for either your toes or maybe even your instep. There's a company I'll mention it. Merrill makes a number of shoes. They're calling barefoot. And while they are very low in the cushioning side I can't get them on my feet.

[01:06:03] Steven Sashen: They're too narrow around the mid the midfoot. So you want something that's wide enough to let your toes not get squeezed together wide enough so it's not squeezing your, your midfoot together. You don't need arch support. If you're wearing orthotics, our shoes are the best platform for it because they're totally flat and they're not getting in the way.

[01:06:19] Steven Sashen: But you'll find that you, that as you build up strength, you might be able to get rid of them entirely or. Most of the time. So, low to the ground, flat from ball to your foot, to your heel. No excessive cushioning. Doesn't squeeze your toes together. Flexible. So you can have something that's really thin, but still not flexible and still gives you some feedback when you put them on.

[01:06:38] Steven Sashen: If you walk on a mildly weird surface pea gravel, not like big, thick, rocks that are pointing out like crazy it should feel like a foot massage instead of feeling nothing. If it's something where it's, big sharp rocks, you're gonna feel that because they're big, sharp rocks.

[01:06:51] Steven Sashen: We amazingly have not figured out how to violate the laws of physics. Still working on it, but not there yet. So that's the, those are kind of the highlights for what you wanna look for. And other than that,

[01:07:03] Stephen McCain: and you've just covered all those with zero. If they go to zero, they're gonna get a real barefoot.

[01:07:08] Steven Sashen: Yeah, we're in Irene Davis' research. She listed three brands and one additional product. So it's us. There's a company outta the UK called Vivo Barefoot. Although, well anyway, we've had a lot of people who've been worn both and tend to prefer ours for various reasons. Sometimes prefer theirs for the look and feel mostly for the look.

[01:07:25] Steven Sashen: They make some really not inexpensive, more dressy shoes than what we're currently making. We're trying to keep things really affordable. And then Vibram, the Five Fingers, those tow shoes, but not all of them. I've seen people still have bad form in those cuz they're not getting enough feedback. And then one shoe from another company they stopped making five years ago, so it's not worth bringing up.

[01:07:43] Steven Sashen: And then everything else was on her partial minimalist list.

[01:07:47] Stephen McCain: Well, that's great. I'm sure people will appreciate your, openness to share that. And off the top of my head, I was always looking at the vivo barefoot, and then I found you at the conference, and then I. put on the speed force, and I'm like, that's my shoe.

[01:08:00] Stephen McCain: That's my, that's my damn shoe. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. 

[01:08:04] Steven Sashen: I just realized something funny, the, the speed force. I developed that with a guy that I mentioned, the guy who was at Nike who was talking to the doctor and said, Hey, what do you think that guy was? He had a 15 point treatise on how to make shoes that allowed human feet to function naturally.

[01:08:18] Steven Sashen: And he said, Nike has done one and a half of them, and they'll never do any more. Well, I'd bring that up because he and I designed the speed force together.

[01:08:25] Stephen McCain: Hmm.

[01:08:26] Steven Sashen: So it was really his idea. I've got the, I've got the pattern right over there on my table cuz I'm yeah, I'm gonna give away I'm gonna give away a joke cause I can't keep secrets.

[01:08:32] Steven Sashen: For April Fools I'm making the ultimate sustainable shoe. So it's a version of the Speed Force made out of fruit leather.

[01:08:39] Stephen McCain: Nice.

[01:08:40] Steven Sashen: you can run in it and then when you're done running, you can eat it.

[01:08:44] Stephen McCain: That's pretty good. Well, look, Steven, I am a fan of your shoes and I imagine that I will just always have pairs. I'm always like, I want a fresh backup pair when these get blown out. But they, they seem to be holding up really well for as much mileage as I'm putting on them.

[01:09:00] Stephen McCain: I go to the gym with them all the time. I always say this when I make any sort of review for you guys, I always say, your feet will, thank you. And I, I really mean that because there's no reason to have foot pain unless you walked 25,000 steps today.

[01:09:17] Steven Sashen: Even then, oh no. Even then I did, I did 15 miles in New York City in the Speed Force. Totally fine.

[01:09:24] Stephen McCain: Awesome. Well that's good cuz next time I'm in , New York, I tend to walk a ton. So I'm just gonna use the speed force, I love 'em man. I really do. I'm urging everyone to just give it a shot your feet deserve a better experience than people that are just feeding you these, these blocks and casts and creating hammer toes and shortening your Achilles and all that.

[01:09:46] Steven Sashen: look here, here, here. Here's the other thing that motivates me. The big shoe companies know what they do, doesn't work. They know it. I may have said it. We've had people say straight to our face, what you're doing is legit. We can't do it cuz it would be admitting we've been lying for 50 years.

[01:10:01] Steven Sashen: They know it, they just can't do anything else. And no one. And the reason that the, the stories they've been telling have caught on so well and stuck so well is there were no other real options for, the last well till 10 years ago. For, for 40 years before that. And that's two generations. That's enough where you don't need to keep advertising.

[01:10:21] Steven Sashen: Everyone believes you now. So, that it's a whole different world now and happily we're seeing that not just for us, more brands coming in, doing similar things, which we're ecstatic about. And again, if you just look at the data, more and more people getting interested in this, in an organic way because they're bumping into people who've had the experience that you're describing, and it doesn't feel like a fad at that point.

[01:10:43] Steven Sashen: It's oh, and again, it all makes sense. Stronger is better than weaker. Moving is better than a mobility feeling is better than numbness. Pop proper posture is better than jacking it up. I mean, none of this is complicated.

[01:10:55] Stephen McCain: That's perfect. I think that is a nice way. Put the cherry on this podcast, Stephen. It's, yeah, it's been, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. It's great to have met a fellow gymnast. 

[01:11:08] Stephen McCain: I, I look forward to seeing your, your shoe company, take off into the stratosphere and take advantage of the fact that these people have been lying to everybody. And, let's get that information out there. And for anyone listening, I'm telling you, you will not regret buying a pair of zero shoes x e r o.com.

[01:11:24] Stephen McCain: Take the quiz

[01:11:25] Steven Sashen: Well, X xc o shoes.com. Xc rro.com. That'll take you to an accounting software.

[01:11:31] Stephen McCain: Oh yeah. Forget

[01:11:32] Stephen McCain: that 

[01:11:32] Steven Sashen: x yeah, xc o shoes or at zero shoes or slash zero shoes, wherever you at or slash

[01:11:38] Stephen McCain: Okay, perfect. Well, thanks so much, Steven, for coming on and giving us the, the rundown on, on barefoot. I think people are armed. They know what to do now and thank you for listening and we will catch you on the next one. Have a good one, everybody.