The Japanese Walking Hack That REPLACES 10,000 Steps a Day
In this episode of the Human Upgrade podcast, Dave Asprey interviews long‑time health entrepreneur Mark Sisson. The conversation opens with a striking statistic from the American Podiatric Association that 83 % of people experience foot pain, leading into a discussion of how modern cushioned shoes have weakened the intrinsic foot muscles that evolved over two million years of barefoot living. Mark recounts his entrepreneurial path—from a 1980s frozen‑yogurt shop to founding Primal Kitchen—while emphasizing his anti‑conventional‑wisdom stance on diet, cardio, and supplementation. The core of the interview focuses on minimalist footwear (especially their own Paluva line), foot‑strengthening exercises, and the claim that walking, particularly interval walking (e.g., 3 min normal + 1 min fast), can replace the traditional 10,000‑step goal and deliver greater health benefits than chronic running. They argue that proper ground feel, toe splay, and barefoot‑style gait improve kinetic chain alignment, reduce injury rates (noting that 50 % of runners are injured annually), and may even support cognitive function via increased sensory input to the brain. The hosts also touch on nutrition, debating the “1 g protein per pound body weight” recommendation and proposing a lower, gender‑based minimum effective dose (~120 g/day for men) combined with a focus on protein quality and intuitive eating. Additional topics include earthing/grounding, the aesthetic challenges of minimalist shoes, and broader longevity strategies such as minimal effective dosing of exercise, food, and supplements. The episode ends with a promotion for Paluva shoes and a reminder that foot health is a low‑hanging fruit for extending healthspan.
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83% of people, according to the American Podiatric Associates, complain of foot pain in their lives. Like that makes the 17% of us who don't have foot pain. We spend a lifetime in these restrictive, cushioned, narrow, raised up shoes thinking we're protecting our arches and we're protecting our feet. There's a reason that we put something on the bottoms of our feet, but it doesn't have to be that thick. Even though you might be running 80 miles a week, the intrinsic muscles of your feet have atrophied. They don't know what to do.
Imagine a baby wore mittens all the time. How dysfunctional their hands would be.
For 2 million years, we were barefoot, and then for the last 4,000 years, we had minimalist footwear. It's only in the 1600s the notion of fashion footwear came in.
What are the best foot strengthening exercises that I could do? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Mark, you're one of the OGs in the nutrition field. We've known each other since, like, the very start of Bulletproof. And you started out with a yogurt shop in 1982, back when frozen yogurt was a health trend. And you've been just pushing the boundaries for how many years have. 80s, 90s?
Yeah, it's all 40 years. Whatever.
Yeah.
Thanks for coming back on the show, my friend.
No, great to be here, Dave. Yeah. No, it's interesting because the frozen yogurt business was nascent in those days and I had a business partner. I'd been a painting contractor for the prior 10 years and put myself through school and painting houses and whatnot.
Was that student painters?
No, it was. No, but similar. Okay, Similar to the same. Yeah, but I, you know, I wanted to, you know, I was an entrepreneur and I was into health. Health. And I was into, you know, trying to figure out a way to, to leverage my time because as a house painter, you, you know, you can only, you know, put in 40 hours a week of painting and getting X amount of for it. So. So my partner and I decided we would get into the frozen yogurt business. We built a. We bought a. We bought a. A barber shop in, in Palo Alto on, on Emerson right off of University. And we paid the proprietor, I think we paid him $17,000 for his entire business. And they took over the lease and then gutted it. And because we were, we were also contractors. I mean, we knew building at the time. We built out this amazing frozen yogurt emporium on Emerson.
I used to live in Palo Alto.
I remember it.
Yeah, yeah, it's called Cool Licks was the name of it. And it did really well. We did $375,000 in business the first year, which in 81 or 82 was. Was incredible.
So pre Biden dollars, that was worth a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, and we had. And it was. And it, you know, sort of. I mean, it was. That was the trend. And I didn't know then what I know now about what is healthy and what isn't, but.
Right.
The assumption was that frozen yogurt was a healthy form of ice cream. So, I mean, you could say that was kind of ground zero of my entrepreneurial ride through the health world.
Wow.
If you go back to when you first started and give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?
Keep doing what you're doing. I mean, really, the. I have no regrets of any choices I made in my career. You know, I. My whole word. My word is pivot. I mean, I. I pivoted a lot.
Yeah, you did.
In what I was doing. And, you know, we talked before we started recording about my vitamin business and my. I had started out as a. Making supplements for athletes to help them improve their performance and their recovery couldn't sell to athletes. They were just not buying in those days. So I pivoted and I went on a Christian health talk show called Know the Cause with our mutual friend, Doug Kaufman. Lo and behold, I've got little old ladies who are sitting in their homes watching television at 11 o' clock in the morning who are reading the anti aging, you know, Life Extension magazines and. And trying to figure out ways to, you know, improve their health. And they were the ones buying these high potency multivitamins for me. So that was. That was an early pivot, you know. And then years later, I started Mark Staley Apple to figure out a way to create a platform to sell those same supplements. Over the years, I built Mark's Daily Apple into a huge, very popular site, but nobody was buying vitamins, so I had to pivot and started making sauces and dressings and toppings. And that became the genesis of Primal Kitchen.
And you're one of the very few food entrepreneurs who had a successful exit a few years ago. Congratulations.
Thank you.
And you guys can go see Primal Kitchen. Stay in Whole Foods and Sprouts and all the places, right?
Pretty much everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
That's. That's got to feel good.
It is.
So for. If you're listening to this and you're a young entrepreneur or maybe a middle aged entrepreneur. Didn't come immediately, did it?
Dude, I was 61 when I started Primal Kitchen, so that's awesome. You know, people say, because we started in 2015 and I sold it by the end of 2018, it was a pretty quick ride. And people think of it as an overnight success story, but it's like a 40 year in the making overnight success story. At the very least.
It.
It was successful because of the years I spent building Mark's Daily Apple, which started in 2006. Wow.
Yeah.
So you were one of the very, very first very successful health bloggers back then. I didn't start blogging about health. Seriously. My first posts were in 99, but they weren't on Bulletproof. And then I really started bulletproof in 2011 with the posting. So you're five years ahead of that.
That's.
That's incredible.
I was just thinking on the, on the drive over here that I'm coming up on the 20th anniversary of my first blog post, which was a post I wrote for Art Devaney.
Oh, no kidding.
Yeah. So I wrote a guest post in 2005 called a case Against Cardio. And that, and that initial seminal blog post launched my career in the sort of alternative, you know, space of rethinking what we thought we knew about health and fitness, because everyone at the time assumed that cardio was great and the more you did, the better it was for you. And so my original Case Against Cardio was written in 2005. And then now I've got this book called Born to Walk, which, you know, just further takes us down that path of, like, chronic cardio is probably one of the worst things you can elect to take on.
And you're a triathlete.
Yeah, I was. I was a marathoner first. Got injured from that, largely from the shoes that I was wearing.
Yeah.
And. And so I switched over to triathlon because I had that, I had that jones. I had to. I had to like, beat myself up doing something every day. And when I got injured running and I couldn't run 100 miles a week anymore, I had to. I. I took on cycling and then swimming and did a stint as a triathlete, but eventually saw the folly of my ways.
Yeah, man. As a teenager I was obese and I tried running, but I had arthritis since I was 14, so I took up cycling, did all kinds of cycling. Same thing. I never lost weight on that stuff. And you were the first big voice I'm aware of. And I'm pretty well researched to just say this is dumb. And so thank you for that because that's a big societal shift to say, you know, something that everyone believes is wrong and provably wrong and just hold your guns against all the whatever, like unhealthy doctors saying that it doesn't work and all that.
I mean, that's been the nature of my hue and cry. And the banner I've carried for a long time is the anti conventional wisdom thing. Whether it's statins and heart disease and cholesterol and saturated fat, or whether it's too much exercise or staying out of the sun. All these things that we thought we had to do to be, you know, healthy and fit. And we find out now where the. Almost the exact wrong advice. I mean, high carbohydrate diet, you know, that was the, that was what I grew up on as an athlete, right? In the, in the 70s and 80s it was all about could you slam down 700 grams of carbs a day minimum to go out and run yourself ragged? And then, and then, you know, carboload that night so you could do it again the next day.
I remember my first 75 mile ride. It was a race, it was called the Turquoise Trail in New Mexico. And it is the most brutal hilly thing at a higher altitude. And carbs were the thing. So I went to Dunkin Donuts and had like three muffins because I knew that would fuel me and I hurled after three miles and then I bonked and I. It was the most horrible experience ever. I'm like, I must not eat enough carbs. Because we just believed it so much.
That's funny. I didn't eat enough carbs.
Right. Yeah.
You know, so again, back to another. The conventional wisdom was about carbs. And then, you know, Finney and Volek come along and they start doing all this work on ketogenic diets and how ketones are, you know, the brain operates very well on ketones and how the body can adapt to burning fat at very high rates of output. Like if you're an ultra marathoner, you could probably drive 90 to 95% of all your energy requirements from your own stored body fat and from the fat that you take in as fuel. This was even, even as recently as like 10 or 15 years ago, that was unheard of. So now we, we continue to, to kind of push the envelope there on what human performance is capable of given the right inputs.
Right. It's all about the inputs.
Yeah.
And we're going to talk about other environmental factors like how you connect to the earth. You guys might have noticed I'm wearing some cool shoes here that are a new kind of, of shoes that I'm used to seeing me wear. Some byroom five fingers long Tango, this Mark's new thing. But first we got to talk about inputs before we get into environmental inputs. And Mark, I have a grass fed bone to pick with you. Oh, I saw a post recently.
Yeah.
Where you were saying that you were choosing some grain fed ribeye because you like the taste better and you don't think there's a difference in fatty acids. What's up with that?
Yeah. So for the longest time, you know, I think again the, the, the community that I was involved with, going back to Paleo and going back to Lord Hordain and Rob Wolf and myself and you and you know, was grass fed has to be the ideal form of grass fed and grass finished. And we need to be clear that it's this, that distinction. Right. Because all, all beef is grass fed at some point and then much of it is grain finished. But there was, for the longest time it was like, oh, only eat grass finished. That's the only way to go. That's the animal's native diet. And if they don't, if they're, if not raised on grass, then you have to give them antibiotics and all sorts of other, you know, hormones to counteract the negative effects of this atypical diet that you're feeding them to fatten them up. Much of that is true. But when I buy my steaks, I'm looking for taste number one. I'm looking for sustainability, I'm looking for animal welfare standards. And if all of those are met, then the idea that a cow would be raised on grass and then finished for a couple of weeks on grain is not antithetical to my way of thinking. Because if what you're talking about is the fatty acid profile, the fats in that meat, you don't buy beef for its Omega 3 content. It's ridiculous. You can't get enough Omega 3 even from a grass finished animal. You can't get a lot of Omega 3. So, you know, now we're just arguing over minutiae. It's like you, I don't know, it's like trying to get, eat oranges for the iron content or something like that.
I, I do think you get higher steric acid, which is important when it's grass finished. But I guess my big concern is glyphosate. You feed them corn and soy and all that stuff.
Yeah.
That's a big contaminant and that goes into the collagen that's in the meat primarily.
Yeah. Again, I'm so, I be, I've become more. What's the word? Relaxed on some of these things over the years because I'm, I'm not sweating the minutia. Right. And I have bigger fish to fry, which is probably the wrong analogy. We're talking about fried and tallow.
Yeah. Yeah.
So at the end of the day, I'm not. Again, if I, if I'm looking at animal welfare standards primarily and, and by the way, included in that is how the animal is raised has a, has an, not just like, oh, I want to be like woo, woo. And hope the animal has a wonderful life. I hope they do. But not stressed out too much and not, you know, not creating a, an environment where that meat becomes, you know, tainted, if you will, or at least biased by the, by the hormonal changes.
In the animal cortisol and things like that. So you're not advocating industrial feedlot?
No, gosh, no.
Okay, so you're saying if it's organic but not grass finished, you just don't care.
Correct.
Okay, I can respect that.
We cleared that up, Dave.
You know, I still pals. My inner child is feeling happier now. My grass feder.
Yeah.
And I'm. When I'm on the road, I do my best.
Right.
And I don't.
Great examples, by the way. When you're on the road, you're on the road a lot.
Way too much.
How, how difficult is it to find a place where you can eat with somebody else who said, well, we can't eat there because Dave has to have grass finished.
Yeah.
You know, I used to make a joke that, you know, when I got a ribeye steak, I'd eat all the fat and throw lean parts in my dog. I don't do that anymore. No, I'm cutting back on the amount of saturated fat because I've adapted, I've evolved in my own way of thinking that maybe there is a point at which too much saturated fat is not a good thing. Now I can get away with it, but the fact that I can get away with it doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I look at each type of saturated fat as having a different effect and I look at my omega 6 to omega 3 ratios and, and mine dropped too low. So I'm at. I, I use olive oil. I just don't use only olive oil because I think that's the same as using only saturated fat, right?
Yeah.
I think you got to mix your fats up.
Yeah.
I've been recommending at least half of your fat calories come from saturated. But the other half, probably not soybean oil. Yeah, right, Soybean, Yeah. And you're totally down with avocados. I mean, that's what you use in Primal. Primal Kitchen.
Right? Yeah.
So I think that middle of the road approach makes sense.
You know, it's. And all these things, oils exist on a spectrum. They're not black and white, good or bad, horrible, wonderful. There's a spectrum and you kind of get to, you know, choose. If you know enough about them, you get to choose where you want to play. At the high end of the spectrum, you might find, you literally might find algae oil is the number one high in monounsaturates, lowest in saturates. But then you drop down to avocado oil, pretty close. But from there you maybe extra virgin olive oil. But high oleic sunflower oil is not a horrible oil. It's not. It's not on the same category as say, canola or soybean at the other end or corn oil. So.
And if it's organic, so it doesn't have all the residue from soy in it, it's not the end of the world. Especially if it's not deep fried for a long time.
Correct.
Yeah.
And I remember like you were at the airport in Austin, stuck on a flight, you gave me some peeling nuts a while ago and they're almost 100% monounsaturated, but try and find peeling nut oil. I don't know. But you can eat them, right?
Yeah.
So I don't know why that is. It's a rare, a rare nut, my friend. You know, Darren Olan was trying to build a business out of that.
Yeah.
I think he just given you some. And you get out of me. And there was. Because the flight was delayed. I ate them. I was like, these are pretty good.
Pretty damn right.
And so it's, it's one of those things where being relaxed, you do seem more relaxed over the years, just as you, you just. Okay, I'm going to do what works and it doesn't have to be perfect. And perfectionism in nutrition is super toxic.
Yeah.
It's like being afraid of a bad sleep score is worse than having a bad sleep score.
Right. Okay.
That's why I don't wear sleep devices.
Oh, no kidding.
Oh, I haven't won. I don't wear do wearables at all.
No. Kidding. Yeah. Yeah.
I would rather. My, My line is no data is worse than bad data. So, you know, I just. My whole thing is, how do you feel?
Well, that's the most important thing.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, you can have all the rate, the right scores and all the right blood work. And if you feel like crap, none of it matters.
Right.
How you feel is critically important. And for me, because I had chronic fatigue in my early 20s, I started realizing, okay, if there's a 10% difference how I feel, I can feel it because I'm just so bottomed out. And then I started saying, well, how do I know whether the things I'm testing are really helping me move little steps in the right direction? It's been helpful for me, but I don't look at my sleep score every morning unless I'm experimenting with something.
We have a sleep number bed. And, you know, my wife is on one side, I'm on the other, and she tracks it. And I, I have to ask her, how did I sleep last night? You know, I'm gonna guess, you know, I got a 92. She's. No, you got a 72. I'm like, no, that's not right. That's not accurate. I'm sure I slept better than that.
And you know your body better than most people. Yeah, that's part of it. That's, I think, wisdom.
No, no, that's. I mean, that's maybe the main skill I've taught over the last 25 or 30 years is this intuitive ability to understand your own body and how it works and. Yes. So you don't need to wear a CGM for two months to figure out that maybe rice at the end of a, you know, and a glass of orange juice is probably not a good way to start the day.
Sure.
You know, so it's all. It's just intuitive. It's. It's knowing when it's time to stop eating because you're no longer hungry, not because you're full, but because you're just no longer hungry for the next bite. You, you know, it's knowing in a, in a high intensity workout when the last interval happens so you don't hurt yourself on the next one because, damn it, my workout schedule said I had to do eight today.
Right.
And I've only done six.
Right.
You know, so it's. I try to really teach that. How do you feel? Be in touch, be in tune with your body, be sensitive to, you know, how much sleep you did get, but not with using devices and Numbers and tracking and HRV and all the other stuff. But just, you know, be intuitive. And if you feel in the middle of a workout like it's not happening, be okay with stopping. If you feel like, you know, today's the day, I'm going to hit that hard. Go ahead and hit it hard. I was out just walking around the lake with my co author Brad Kearns today, and we're talking about, you know, that sort of, that's kind of the new thing with elite athletes in the endurance world is 100% healthy, 80% fit.
Think about that.
That's how you go into a race, 100% healthy, 80% fit. Because if you're more than 80% fit, you might be pushing, you might be redlining too much in your training. And you want the event, you want the race, you want that to be the time where you put out a hundred percent.
Yes.
And you want the next event after that, because if you're at 95%, you're going to go over it and then you're not going to recover, you'll get sick and it's just not a good thing.
Yeah.
One of the things about your work, in addition to all the nutritional stuff that you've shared over the years, was your focus on functional movement, especially functional feet. And it's kind of personal for me because I was born duck footed. I have flat feet, so I used to walk like. And I had Asperger's syndrome. And I did, I would say, benefit greatly from using tech because I didn't. I needed a way to know what state my body was in so I could say, oh, that feeling equals this because I didn't have the wiring below the neck, so to speak. And even lately I've been doing a lot of work on functional movement. And you are one of the guys, in fact, probably the primary guy who inspired me to start wearing toe shoes and really focus on what's it like to be barefoot and to grow the flexibility and health of my feet. And my feet are in better shape than they've ever been. And so. Thank you.
You're welcome. And this is one of the great. I think it's the lowest hanging fruit in the longevity space is foot health. We have the devices, we have the, you know, first of all, we, we need to, we need to eat.
Right?
That's, you gotta dial that and you gotta dial in your, your, your, your workout schedule, your eating schedule and how you eat and how much you eat, your sleep, your play, your stress. But people overlook foot health and our Feet are our connection with the environment. They're our connection with the universe. This is how we, this is the contact that we have throughout the day that allows the rest of our body to perform whatever tasks we need to perform. The assumption has been, well, feeder feet. And I was born duck footed, and so that's my genetics. And I have flat footed and. No, you were born with perfect feet. You were born with a perfect kinetic chain. What that means is it doesn't mean it's the same as everyone. And your feet may have been splayed outward a little bit. Your arches may not have a perfect curvature to them, but the musculature, the joints, the ligaments, everything works perfectly, provided you have the input from the bottoms of your feet.
Yes.
And that's what gives the brain the information it needs to organize your perfect kinetic chain. Now, kids growing up barefoot and spending time barefoot, they, they learn how to squat, you know, ass to heels. They learn how to do all these perfect movements. They run perfectly because they're, when they're barefoot. I got a three and a three year old, that grandchild that I'm, you know, visiting in, in Tennessee on a frequent basis. He's running on the pavement, the concrete, all the time, barefoot, just light on his feet. Because the brain is getting exactly the signals it needs on the, on precisely how much to curl the toes, how much to arch the bend the arch, how much to roll the ankle outward a little bit to, to supinate or pronate, to accommodate the text, the texture of the ground or the tilt of the ground he's running on, how deeply to bend the knees to offset the forces that are generated from that run or that jump. Without that information, if you're wearing thick, padded cushioned shoes, the brain has to guess on exactly how to do this. And so you people, we spend a lifetime in these restrictive, cushioned, narrow, raised up shoes thinking we're protecting our arches and we're protecting our feet and we're, and that somehow assuming that everything starts from the ankle up through the neck, when in fact it has to start with the bottom of the feet.
Wow.
So barefoot is a way to go. We're born barefoot, obviously, we're born barefoot, but, you know, we don't, we don't clad our hands in, in devices all day long and then try to play the piano or try to, you know, work a keyboard.
Imagine a baby wore mittens all the time. How dysfunctional their hands would be.
And that's exactly what happens with the feet. So, you know, it's A societal thing. It's a. Look, we've created this environment where you have concrete and pavement and hardwood floors and marble floors and, and nails and glass and all kind rocks and stuff. So there's a, a reason that we put something on the bottoms of our feet, but it doesn't have to be that thick. It's it. So, so my, my take on this for the last 40 years has been. First of all, I hate shoes. I hated the running shoes that I had to train in. I got injured from the cushioning aspects of them and the raised heels. My kinetic chain didn't adjust the way it should have. And when the first thing started to go wrong, when my ankles and knees started to hurt, I was a miracle cure with orthotics. I was one of the 1976 Steven Sabotnik and Haven podiatrist. Gave me a set of rigid orthotics that took away my knee pain. And I ran for the next two years like crazy. Then I got hip pain because all it did was it bypassed the one weak point and fix that. But it kept going without, without fixing the, the origin of the problem, which was my foot's contact with the ground, my foot's ability to sense the ground and to pronate or supinate according to the, the dictates of the texture until to the ground. And my, my, the input that my brain gets the second I wait my forward foot. The brain has all the information it needs on exactly how to do this. So, so I, you know, I kept, I kept saying wedging, putting in wedges and all kinds of shims, you know, all the way up to the kinetic chain until finally my hips gave out. I just got it by the way. I just had a hip replaced.
Oh wow.
In December.
A lot of marathoners end up that way though.
Yeah.
And you know, for good reason. It's just, it's. The body is not designed to do that much running and especially not to do that much running in thick padded cushion shoes because you, you assume when you put on these hokas or these thick, you know, bouncy shoes, oh my God, it feels so good.
Some crocs.
Yeah. So all that's doing is taking about 10% of the, of the shock absorption which to your feet makes it feel like, oh my God, this is amazing. And just running it up the kinetic chain, up through the other joints, up through the knees, up through the hips. And so the, the irony here is that in the 50 years of the running boom and marathoning and this, this marketing machine that has told everybody that you got to go out there and just do it and run and, and, and, and run like you're on a cloud. The number of injuries has not decreased one single iota. 50% of all runners get injured every year. 50% of all people who claim to be runners get injured at any one point in time. 25% of all people who claim to be runners are injured right now. It's like worse than the NFL. And this is because we are overlooking the most important critical component of movement of gait, which is ground feel, contact with the ground. Toe splay. The abilities of toes to splay outwardly and articulate individually like your big toe is the most important aspect of your gait. So you're walking, you plant the heel, roll off the toe. Plant the heel, roll off the toe. You can't do that if the toe's squished over against the rest of the metatarsals. In, in the, in the, in a shoe, no matter how wide the shoe is at its widest point, still comes to a, you know, so people, you know, people can get away with it for a while and not get injured. But most people complain of, you know, 83% of people, according to the American Podiatric Associates, complain of foot pain in their lives. Like that makes the 17% of us who don't have foot pain the outliers. It's crazy. That's so, so that was sort of the impetus for writing a book, which is you don't need to run. Running is, is antithetical to health for most people. The only people who should be running, Dave, are runners. Now when I say that, it's like I'm talking about ectomorph, skinny, big lungs, big, great capacity for pain tolerance. And those are the only people who should be running. Everybody else should be walking. Sprinting for sure, once in a while. But sprinting, sprinting is different from metronomic running. At 8 minute miles or 10 minute miles or whatever it is, walking a lot, spring a little bit, and lifting weights, lifting heavy things and lifting over the course of, you know, maybe if you've got your diet dialed in and now your body composition, you're trending toward your ideal body composition as a result of your food choices and you're burning fat whether you're at rest or at work, then the irony here is you don't need to work out that much to be toned and fit.
20 minutes a week is where I am right now. I'm using AI. I'm kind of cheating. But like I'm doing all right.
Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm saying. So that's going to get you to 80, 80 or 85% of your genetic max potential. Now if you say, hey, Mark, I want to go do you know, MMA fighting or BJJ or I want to compete in a triathlon. Okay, now we're going to have to make some compromises. You're going to compromise your health in pursuit of this. Now we can amp your performance up, but it's going to take, you know, 3x or 5x the amount of time you're doing right now to achieve, you know, a great looking, healthy body that unless you're competing, why would you want to keep going harder and harder? You know, like, like I'm the minimum effective dose guy from day one. Amen. What's the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, calorie counting, portion control that I can undertake to get the body that I want? Not what's the most, but what's the least amount of this that I, that I have to do it?
It's so good because you're investing, not dollars, you're investing discipline.
Yeah.
In everything you do. And if it takes less discipline to do something that gets results, that means you have more discipline for something else.
Bingo.
Yeah, more, just more time, more energy. I mean, so many people, as we talk about in the book, you know, the sort of obligate runner who has to run 30 or 40 miles a week and doesn't feel like the day is worth anything if they haven't gotten their run, in fact, beat themselves up on, on days that they, you know, that they don't run. Those are the people who also maybe should be going to the gym but don't have the energy because the run was so hard and it was so valuable. And I, and I, I, I struggled and I suffered and I sweated. I'm going to sit and rest now and I can't go play with my kids for a while because I just got a daddy's just gotta, or mommy's just gotta, you know, re. Regroup after that hard run I did. And the irony is years and years of doing this and they don't get any faster. Their 10k time doesn't come down, their marathon time, because they're not training smart and they're not training, you know, in that, in that they're not training the different systems, they're not teasing out the aerobic system and saying, okay, 85% of my work should be done at max at a At a, at a heart rate of fat max or lower. Zone two, Zone one. Right. And then only a small amount of, amount of my work should be done at high intensity. Brief bouts of high intensity.
You know, you said that zone zero is the new Zone two. I kind of think zone two takes a lot of time compared to the results. Talk to me about that.
Well, zone, Zone one is like the new Zone two. I'd say that's the main. Yeah, Zone one is like, you know, a walking pace for most people. And what I tell people is the more you walk, the better off. Yeah, the better off you'll be. People say, well, I, you know, I don't have an hour a day that I can allocate to walking. I'm like, oh, can you find six times throughout the day where you can walk for 10 minutes? Whether it's, you know, dropping the kids off early to school and, and, you know, walking or walking them to school because you parked a half mile away, or, you know, is it walking to work? Is it walking while you're on the phone, on a phone call at work? Is it taking a lunch break with your, with your co workers? And you know, because it takes 20 minutes to eat lunch and then take 40 minutes, 40 minutes to walk, is it walking at the end of the day? Is it walking the dog in the morning? And if you can find six 10 minute segments throughout the day to walk, it's actually more valuable than one 60 minute segment. Here's why the body wants to move throughout the day. We are designed to move. We're upright, bipedal. We're not designed to sit all day on a sofa or sit at a desk. We're specifically genetically evolved or designed however you want to allocate that wisdom. We are evolved to be upright on two feet. Name four other animals that are, that are bipedal, that don't have a tail or things, right? So we sort of like have to move just so we don't fall over like a Segway parked at a, you know, at a stop sign. So we have to move all day long. And walking is the quintessential human movement. We populated the face of the earth by walking. Our ancestors got, you know, four to 5,000, maybe to 15,000 steps a day. So walking is, is the best thing you can do for longevity and it's also the greatest marker for longevity in that once you stop walking, you literally start dying.
Wow.
Think about that. I mean, when you stop moving, when you stop walking, you start dying because that's the beginning of this atrophy. Like I'm not strong enough to walk. So I can't even get my ass to the gym to do, you know, some resistance training to build muscle strength or to build bone density or to improve glucose clearance and all the things that we know that weight training does. So that's why in some of the, you know, Dan Buettner is my next door neighbor. He's a very good friend of mine. He's my downstairs neighbor.
He's a great guy.
He's a great guy. He lives like a couple floors down. We hang out all the time and, you know, we differ on beans versus beef, but so we really only differ on two letters. The A, N of bean and the ef.
You can go out to eat heats or side dishes you eat as main course.
Yeah, it's pretty funny. I always, I always eat at Steak when I'm with Dan. I have to order the biggest red steak I can get. But, but he'll, he'll say that, you know, walking and gardening, you know, moving, moving are probably. If you distilled everything down within the blue zones, it's that, it's, it's not the diets as much as it's the community and the walking and the activity and the low calories. Right. They're walking a lot and they don't consume a lot of calories, but it's the movement. Because again, once you stop moving and you start sitting, atrophy sets in so quickly. It's a very slippery slope, a very steep downhill decline from there.
Have you seen the research out of Japan on interval walking?
That's amazing. I love that. I've been talking about this for a long time. I mean, not in the same context, but I tell people when you walk because, because the research is like, you know, walk three minutes at a normal pace and then walk a minute as if you're late for an appointment. I love the way they, they put that out there and, you know, do that over time. That's sort of a walking interval thing.
And a half hour of that produces way more results than 10,000 steps a day exactly. Of reduction of risk. So now you're down to like a half hour. Yeah, I think.
Yeah. So if you're somebody who, who is time compressed and, you know, for whom you can't think, you don't think you can carve out a half an hour. That's the most important half hour of your day. Yeah, I mean, I tell people over the age of 40, your job, number one is to stay healthy. If you're not healthy, and you can't take of your care, of your family or your kids or yourself or whatever. You're going to drag everyone down with you. So job number one. Find in your list of priorities. Make. Make that job number one to get something. And walking is easy. You can do it anywhere in the world. You don't have to have a gym to do it.
It's free. But you do have to have shoes.
Yes.
And so we've got to talk about this. I have an absolute hatred of shoes. I've got size 16ft. I have a very wide toe box. And I just thought it was supposed to hurt when you walk all the time. And I got orthotics when I was in eighth grade. The first hard ones and the same thing. I get arthritis in my knees and knee surgery when I'm in my early 20s, and they just always hurt. And when I finally said, I'm going to wear some toe shoes, I mean, I just go barefoot. Based in part because you were talking about all the time, like, okay, I'm finally feeling like my toes work. I did yoga. I can spread my toes. I can curl. I've done all that stuff. And I've spent hundreds of hours just learning subtle neurological control of my toes. And it means you cannot pay me to wear shoes that are pretty but uncomfortable. I've gone on stages wearing toe shoes with a suit, and I'm like, this is how I'm going to do it. And you're the only guy I know who does it. But you have leather toe shoes, and they don't make them in my size. So you were kind enough to make some of your new Palova shoes.
Yeah, those are the. Those are the strand trainers. Those are the workout shoe. But a lot of people, I mean, I made those. To walk 10 or 15 miles on pavement without getting a bone bruise. You remember the old days of the vibrant five fingers. They were so thin. I, Mr. Barefoot, you know, Foot Guy couldn't walk more than two or three miles without hurting the metatarsal area, that metatarsal area of my feet because of the thinness of the shoes. So we had to throw in a little bit of extra cushion, 3 extra millimeters of soft EVA foam, which is tiny, tiny amount. I mean, our stack height is still less than 1cm in that shoe. And it's. There are zero drops. The heel is not raised up, but it's enough to feel like you're walking barefoot on a putting surface, on a putting green.
Yeah, I can feel the. The surface under me. It's not the same as being barefoot. But like you said, you know, if you're going to go hiking and there's a little bit of Scrabble, being barefoot hurts.
Yeah. You don't want to do that. Yeah, no. And, and so we've, you know, and we have a lot of other styles. We have a hiking shoe, the atr, which is specifically for off road. I've got guys who are big into rucking, who are wearing that and loving it. Because the thing here is we tell people, don't run in these shoes. Now, they're the best running shoe you'll ever put on if you know how to run. But if you don't know how to run, if you're not a midfoot striker who's trained barefoot or trained in minimalist footwear for a long time, you'll trash your Achilles, you'll trash your calf, you'll hurt yourself. So we say if you're not trained, but walk, walk, walk, walk as much as you can in these shoes because every step you take, you're relaxing, you're realigning, and you're strengthening your feet. And you're doing it without the dynamic, ballistic, stressful impact of running. So you're training your feet with every footfall. It's a passive way to train your feet to become stronger and more resilient. And we're seeing this across the board with women who have bunions who can't walk, and they're now walking eight miles a day in paluvas on pavement. And I have 15 or 20 women in Miami beach, where I live, who are just raving about the results they're getting. Again, I've got weightlifters in the gym who normally would like to go barefoot when they're doing heavy leg days. Because, you know, in the gym they say, great toe. The big toe is called the great toe. Great toe, great ass. Your glutes, your glutes are wired directly to your big toe, by the way. Your brain is, too.
So they're crosswired, right? Like your left glute goes with your right.
So. So when you can abduct, pull away the big toe and press it into the ground. When you're doing squats or deadlifts or lunges, you will engage the glutes far greater than if you're wearing shoes that are compressing your feet together. That's why so many of these serious bodybuilders do their leg days barefoot, right? Well, most gyms don't allow that. So now we have again, we have this five toed shoe that lets your toes articulate individually according to the top topography that you're walking on. So if you step in a divot or a pothole on that, you want your toes to accommodate differently, flex backward to be able to scrunch over a rock. If you step on a big rock, you want to be able to actually grab the rock with your feet.
Yes.
I get a lot of surfers and skateboarders who say, you know, they can, they can feel themselves grabbing the board, which you do. I mean, I'm, as a, as a, I'm not a surfer, but I'm a stand up paddler and I would, I rode a, a foil, an electric foil for a while. And you really want to grab the board.
I thought you and Laird were into surfing for a while, weren't you?
Well, Laird's into surfing. No, Laird's a buddy. I, I don't surf with Laird.
Okay.
Nobody starts with Laird. Laird surfs by himself or with, you know, one or two other, you know, big wave surfers. But he's out there doing his, doing his thing. You know, paddle with him and I'll do the easy stuff with it. But Laird's.
Laird, he's hardcore, right?
Yeah, he's hardcore.
Okay.
But Laird is a huge fan of paluvas too. And he wears. So there's an example of a guy who wants to go barefoot all the time and will all the time. And when he doesn't, he's got a full complement of palooz in his house. He. Yeah, he wore these ones that I'm wearing right now on I think one like Entertainment Tonight or one of the shows that he was.
Oh, cool.
So, yeah, and then so, so we've got ruckers, hikers, utmb, guys off trail runners who are training in Paluvas because they're doing mostly hiking and walking gym rats. Women who are just, you know, doing their regular workouts throughout the day. I mean, if you go to my gym in Miami beach, there'll be 15 people wearing paluvas on any one day. Trainers are forcing the women to wear the shoes because when you're doing any sort of balance work, you want your feet to splay outward. If you, if you're wearing a thick, padded cushioned shoe with a elevated heel, you're, you're giving up half the gains you're going to get from whatever work you're doing on a, on a leg day because it feels like you're standing on a Bosu ball and now your knees are tweaking side to side as opposed to being fully involved in this kinetic chain activity where the brain tells your, your entire kinetic chain from the bottom of your feet up to your brain exactly how to orchestrate for your perfect kinetic chain.
It makes, it makes so much sense. What do you say when people say those shoes aren't sexy?
Yeah, this is the, the, I think the biggest hurdle we have is the can you make them without five toes or you can you make them with you where you don't show the toes? I think, mark my words, in the next couple of years, you'll see millions of people wearing these shoes because it takes some time to overcome the initial and, but it's not even an ick factor. It's like most of the women who try the shoes on and wear them for a couple of days think I look cute in these shoes. Not like, oh, I can get away with wearing these while I'm in the gym. But they're wearing, you know, dropping the kids off at school when they're shopping in, you know, Whole Foods or wherever they are running around town, guys are wearing them to work. We make a leather, a Napa leather lace up shoe for the workplace.
Nice.
You know, we make the desert boot for travel. We make slippers and loafers and we have shoes for all occasions because we think that once you wear these shoes, it's going to be really difficult to go back to wearing regular footwear again.
I can't imagine wearing like cowboy boots. I live in Austin. I have $800 pair of ostrich leather. They look cool, but I would stand in them for a photo shoot. But I will not walk across the stage. Because they're dumb.
Yeah, no, they're literally dumb. And if you think what you're doing to your feet, these, these really important appendages. They're more than appendages. They're organs. They're like, they're like, they are your contact with the universe. They are what connects you to the world. And now you're negating it by binding it and raising it and, and, you know, constricting it and squishing all the toes together. I see so many horrible feet because of the business that I'm in now. You know, bunions is one thing. I see a lot of plantar fasciitis. I see a lot of Achilles problems. I see overlapping toes a lot. Overlapping toes where one toe is now overlapped the other and you can't get it back. So yeah, like millions of people are buying toe spacers now because they recognize how this is a problem. Women in particular who are wearing high heels and don't stop wearing your high heels. They look fabulous. But, but, but while you're not wearing your high heels, a lot of women are wearing toe spacers, but they wear them for, you know, 30 minutes or an hour while they're watching TV. This is a toe spacer you can wear all day and work your toes back into some strength and realignment while you're doing it.
I slept with toe spacers for two years because my feet did that. I had an overlapped toe on each side. And for me to go trek through the Himalayas and the Andes the way I did every morning, I had to wake up, wrap medical tape around three of my toes, cover them in Vaseline the way endurance athletes do, and put on socks. Just to walk.
Yeah. Just to walk.
Yeah.
I don't use any of that anymore.
How crazy is that?
Yeah.
And that was, you know, that's not genetics. That's not. That is not. All that is, is your footwear choice over a lifetime. It's not even diet. It's genetics. I mean, it's footwear. It's not genetics. It's not diet. It's just your footwear choice. And to think that we still cling to this notion that shoes are for fashion, footwear is for fashion. I have to tell you, I have some big names in our industry, some big names in orthopedics and podiatry.
Who.
Oh, my God, Mark, I love what you're doing. I'm 100% behind it. I understand all of the dynamics and the biokinetics, but I'm a shoe girl. I just can't do it.
Yeah.
I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, are you serious? Now, our good friend, for example, jj, virtual.
Oh, my God. I was gonna bring her up.
JJ loves the shoes. JJ's wearing them.
No.
Yes. JJ, when we got JJ, we. You know, that's the tipping point, right?
You think so? JJ and I have been friends, dear friends, for a long time. And she used to give me so much crap about my toe shoes that I actually went into Photoshop and online. I found like a five finger high heel and I cut it out. So I'm getting you some of these for Christmas. And she's like, ah. And you converted her, JJ.
So J. So JJ, she'll. We're very old friend. We go back to 1987. I mean, she was basically a teenager on a matter. And it's Sports Club LA in. In. In Los Angeles. And so I've known her for a long time, and when I first started doing this, she was like, you now, Mark. Nope, nope. We're not doing it. Not having it. I'll do anything. And then I got her trying to pair, and now she's all about them. Now she loves them.
You know, she said the same thing about going to Burning man, but I got her to do that, so.
Yeah.
So, all right, if you got jj, who's absolutely shoe girl. Here's the next question. So let's say that you're into high heels.
Yeah. Right.
And you're gonna go out on a hot date or whatever. You're gonna wear high heels for three or four hours. How long does it take for the foot to recover from?
Well, just now, at some point. You know, here's the example I'd use. You've cleaned up your diet. You've gotten rid of gluten. You don't have any gut issues. You're living life. You're not in pain. You're thankful for all the changes you've made. And now you go out one night and you have bread and pasta and pizza, and all of a sudden you're back to where you were. So you wake up the next morning, you go, jeez, I can't do that. I mean, when I used to eat bread and pasta and everything, it didn't hurt as much as it did this morning after one night, because I cleaned up my act. So now think about feet. Now you've. Now you've relaxed and realigned and strengthened and made your feet more mobile. And now you put on those. Those old shoes again, it's really gonna. You're really gonna notice it. Right.
Okay.
So are you gonna come back? Yeah, they're gonna come back after three hours, but you're. You're maybe not gonna wanna wear them for three hours. So we have a lot of people who. Like people in Manhattan who walk to work in their paluvas because they fit in a purse, get to work, put on their heels as they have to walk home with their paluvas on. So there are ways to do this.
And one of the things I do appreciate. I've got size 16ft, and that means that if I was to take a pair of cowboy boots or normal shoes, that's half my suitcase. I'm not even kidding. If it's a carry on, I can't do it. But the puluvas that I'm wearing, they. They mash up.
Yeah.
I mean, you do whatever you want to them, and they're very small.
Yeah.
So then I can have comfortable shoes. Like, I wear them in the airports anyway.
Yeah.
I'm. I'm just not going back to regular shoes.
I traveled light to get here because I'm here for three days, so I only brought six pair of palubas.
Yeah, but you're a fashion maven.
No, no, but I'm telling you, I got. I got one for every. I got one for the stage when I'm speaking at HOS this weekend. I got slippers for the. For the hotel room. I got ones to work out in the gym. I got these that I'm wearing today because they go with jeans. I got black leather lace UPS for the. You know, and. And I got, you know, 15 other ones at home that I rotate because I only wear these. Look, I started this company for me.
Oh, I know.
I'm like, just like primal kitchen. I like. Like, how. How come nobody's making a condiment that I can put on my food with reckless abandon and eat as much as I want, not feel bad about myself? How come nobody's making a shoe that's the most comfortable shoe you'll ever wear? And I guarantee that's one of our guarantees. This is the most comfortable shoe you'll ever wear. I mean, give it two or three days if you're not used to this, but you'll quickly see. Oh, my God, I see what he's talking about. This will strengthen your feet. This will rebuild the resilience and the strength in your feet. And, you know, and. And then you'll go, okay, I don't want to put on the narrow, pointed shoes. My. We had a. An issue. My wife and I went to a wedding in France, south of France, three years ago, and she said, you know, this is really a big deal. And this, you know, you're going to get a Tom Ford suit, you're going to wear Tom Ford shoes. And I'm like, okay. And we buy these freaking Tom Ford shoes. And. And they were so stiff and so uncomfortable that I literally walked away from. After the wedding, like, after the ceremony was over, I walked barefoot down to the car carrying the shoes with bloody feet from the heels and all this digging in and all that st stuff. So, you know, you cannot get me into regular shoes ever again. And so this is my. My goal is for. For this to be a thing. You say, what's the. What's the biggest hurt? The hurdle is the fashion aspect of it. And yet when people see my daughter in the gym at Lifetime Fitness yesterday in an all black outfit with, with our mesh sport, mesh shoes on. Training people go, oh, my God, that like, that is cute and hot and you know, whatever. When they see my wife training in the gym, it's, it's gonna be just. It's a matter of getting past the five toed nature of it. Do you know Shaleen Johnson?
Of course.
Yeah.
Okay, so Chalene's a convert. So Chalene, and she is a total girly girl. I mean, you got JJ Virgin, who's a shalene, and Shaleen is as she, she describes herself in a podcast we did. She says, well, I'm. My style is like housewife hooker and Dolly Parton and I love that. And she's. But she loves the heels and she looks great and she dresses up, she walks in paluvas. And she's a big fan of.
I think the shift is. Very few women are wearing strappy, sexy lingerie with garter belts and all that stuff on a daily basis because it's not that comfortable. But you put it on for a special occasion and then you take it off quickly.
Yeah.
High heels are more of a lingerie item.
Yeah.
Well put.
Right. And, and just looking at it that way, saying, I want to live for a very, very long time, which means walking for a long time and being comfortable and happy. So wear some cute shoes that allow your toes to spread. And this is a great way to do it with the paluva. So I'm, as you know, I remember maybe 10 years ago, I ran to you in San Francisco just randomly. We were walking like, what? And you were wearing some leather, five fingers. And you said, I bought five pairs of these because they're running out. They stopped making them. And I was jealous because they didn't make them in my size. And you know, here we are years later, like, I'm just going to do it for me, the best companies ever. Like, same thing when, when I started my old coffee company.
Yeah.
So I couldn't buy coffee. Didn't make me tweak.
Yeah.
So you did this. But I think you're, you're becoming successful at starting a movement of normalizing comfortable footwear.
Yeah.
What I want to do is normalize foot health. I want foot health to be right up there with like, I want, I want people in gym go to work, out in the gym to go. Yeah. Tuesdays is chess and tries, and Wednesdays is back and buys and Friday's foot day. You know, I really want to see something, some, some homage paid to the, to the sanctity of Foot health. It's. It's the new sleep. It's really the overlooked. It's the lowest hanging fruit on the longevity tree. And you know, Courtney Connolly, who's a chiropractor, she'll say that big toe strength is a better indicator of. Of risk for dying than grip strength or VO2 max. Like, wow.
Yeah. Don't tell Peter Atia. Yeah, he won't listen anyway. He's doing too much Zone two to have time.
Yeah.
Hey, guys, I'm breaking in here on my own podcast. Well, we weren't planning on doing any kind of a discount. Wait till the end. And Mark decided, and actually at the end of the episode, he's giving you a gift, so stay tuned. Now, what are the best foot strengthening exercises that I could do?
So here's the thing. Walking barefoot or in minimalist footwear is the single best foot strengthening thing you can do.
Walking on a poor form, though, right?
What? Yes. Well, so don't have poor form. And by the way, if you walk. By the way. No, if you walk. If you walk in paluvas, you'll automatically have better form. Now, we tell people, walk on uneven surfaces. Like walk on rocks, walk on cobblestones, you know, walk on this. We look for uneven surfaces. When I take people off on their first outing with. With polyvism. Okay, now dig what's happening to your feet. Your feet are accommodating the shift in the tilt, right? And you're stepping on the outside of this rock. But it's okay. Your ankle's rolling enough and it knows when to stop rolling, rather than if you're wearing a stiff hiking boot and you stepped on this the wrong way, your ankle wouldn't roll at all, but you'd tweak your knee because that was the next point of, you know, the next weak link in the kinetic chain that was not getting information from the bottoms of your feet. Like if you walk barefoot on. On boulders, if you're bouldering with bare feet, every footfall is different. Every foot. It doesn't matter. You're accommodating it. Your. Your kinetic chain is organizing itself. You do enough of this, and you rebuild healthy foot function. So I can give you all the foot circles you can do. I can give you all of the walking backwards on a treadmill, you know, uphill, a la, you know, Ben Patrick, knees over toes guy. I can give you the, you know, the. All of the stretches you can do with the different devices. Standing on a Bosu ball and rolling. Just walk barefoot as much as you Can. Or if you can't go barefoot, walk with paloofas on and you will strengthen your feet. There is. There is no way around that. You'll regain without compromising, you know, without twisting an ankle or all the things that might happen if you were, like, going to the track and doing, you know, drills for sprinting or something like that, which are foot strengthening, but. But have a little bit of a ballistic dynamic nature to them.
That.
That is not without risk.
I was.
Does that make sense?
It makes a lot of sense. And I'm. I'm just envisioning what is the best uneven surface to walk on. And it has to be the rubble of the pharmaceutical industry.
That's funny.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have. In my own foot recovery journey, I did a lot of functional movement work because I found out my brain wasn't addressing my toes. They were folded over because I didn't know how to straighten it. So I had a friend up on Vancouver Island. She would tap on my toes until somehow I reconnected it until I could finally spread them. And then my toes were always kind of jacked up, and now I have straight toes and I can spread them. And then I did have to go through almost like infant learning to learn.
How to flex a towel and. Yeah, grab a towel with your toes.
Like, flex both sides of the foot.
To, you know, lift my foot out wide.
Can you.
Can you can it?
Yeah, yeah.
My toes. My legs are crossed when they're not crossed. Yeah, there you go. It's spreading pretty, pretty well.
Yes. Not bad. Not bad for a guy who had crossed over toes. And.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And I think my other one spreads better in part because I just did it.
My feet are supposed to be wide. For 2 million years, we were barefoot. And then for the last 4,000 years, we had minimalist footwear. So we were wearing, you know, sandals made of skins or of reeds or whatever you know, cobbled together. And it's only in the last. Like, in the 1600s, the. The. The notion of fashion footwear came in, and the royalty and the nobility would wear these tight shoes that compress their feet, but had pointy, pointy toes, and they looked good almost to signify that they were not the working class. And then the working class had these wide, wide toe box shoes that accommodated a wide foot and were, you know, able to toil in the soil and do all the things that they had to do. That's. And then for the next several hundred years, fashion footwear became this thing, and pointy toes and to the point of stiletto heels. And then in the late middle 1970s, the. The athletic shoe market started with this thick cushion shoe, which began a whole, you know, whole generate several generations of injured runners as a result of. Of that. So minimalist footwear has only been around for a handful of years recently, but it's been around for 2 million years because we were minimalist footwear for the first, of course, for the first 2,000 years, and then for 4,000 years up to about, you know, the 17th century. And then we started wearing shoes. So most of our time has been spent with minimalist or barefoot. And now we're just reintroducing this. So now there's a whole resurgence of minimalist footwear. There's several companies making wide toe box shoes. You know, wide, thin, flat, flexible shoes. Our argument is, if you've screwed your feet up so badly over the decades wearing regular shoes and then you buy a pair of minimalist footwear that has a single, open, wide toe box, your feet don't automatically seek some beautiful, natural splay out. They retain their dysfunctional, misformed shape to train them. So you have to train them. And how you do that, now you can wear toe spreaders in a wide toe box regular shoe, or get a pair of paluvas and start to train your feet that way.
Got it. I will admit I'm a fan of both. When I went to the royal wedding in Norway recently, I didn't think I could quite get away with my tux walking down the red carpet.
Not yet.
Not yet. But I did wear some leather, wide toe box shoes. And online people roasted me for that, saying, oh, my God, you look so good, but your shoes are ugly. And I just responded and said, they're my male birthday.
So we have these in black. You could, you could have worn these.
I could have worn these with leather.
Yeah.
These are sweet.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's a, That's a working shoe.
I do not own a leather pair of.
Yes, well, because I don't make them in your size yet. But I mean, that's a, That's a workplace shoe. This is, you know, I would wear that. Yeah, no, and we. And in the black. It looks really good with a, with a, with a tux. I mean, I've worn it many times. Weddings and funerals and, you know, whatever. So again, a shoe for all occasions is what we were after here.
Okay. Well, I, I just appreciate it so much because there was really nothing before this that would be for all occasions. It was extreme workout stuff.
And that Was it ballet slippers for MMA fighters?
Yeah, like, bright yellow stuff and.
Yeah.
What about Special Forces and military people? Are they adopting Paluva?
Not yet, but that's mostly because it's a. You know, there's a lot of white space out there for us, and we haven't begun to approach that yet, but.
I imagine there's some guys who already want to.
Yeah, yeah, no, we'll find them or they'll find us, but right now we're. We're just, you know, we're. We're swimming as fast as we can, kind of upstream, trying to let the world know that we have this amazing shoe that is perfect for everyone. I mean, look, there are 340 million people in this country. Everybody needs shoes. Not everyone's going to be right for Paluva in terms of their. Their aesthetics, but, you know, a lot of people will and. And already have looked at this shoe and go, oh, my God, like, why didn't somebody think of this earlier?
Wow.
Do you know the history of Crocs?
Only. Only tangentially. Do you know it? Are you going to tell me?
It's hilarious.
And I think great example too, by the way of. Of. Of consumer acceptance eventually, or consumer acceptance.
Of shoes that are not good for your feet, though, Right there.
Yeah.
Formless and squishy.
Yeah.
They say they don't encourage good foot posture and they're full of plasticizers and things.
Yeah.
There's a great documentary called Idiocracy. You've probably seen it.
It's one of my favorite movies. I tell everyone to watch it. We're there. We're there.
We're totally there.
Look at the shoes.
The producers were trying to find the most ridiculous shoes that only stupid people would wear in the future, and they bought all of Croc's inventory for the movie, and that was what made Crocs take off.
Yeah.
So. And you know, my. My kids, when they first got Crocs, I was like, oh, my God, don't do this. But, you know, it didn't have agreement in the house about that, so I watched them wear it and watch their gate go the wrong direction. And, you know, you do what you can.
No, you do what you can. And again, there's so that when I say there's no accounting for. For people's aesthetics. That's an example of a billion dollar company.
Yeah.
That, you know, I'm not while about the aesthetics. I got a friend who has 300 pair because he collects them.
So.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah.
I think Corn flakes. You know, it's also a massive company's. Good for you. Yeah, right. So I. There's that. And do you know about the excavation of the Tim river with shoes?
No.
Oh my gosh.
You'll want to know about this because it, it helps to explain how we got to where we are. So there's this place where people would throw their shoes in for, I don't know, unrequited love or something. I don't remember what. But because layers of sediment preserve things without spoiling, they excavated it and they basically got the, the evolution of footwear over time, which is like the nerdiest thing ever. But what they found was that shoes got longer and pointier and then it was correlated with wealth because if you had like a two foot long clown shoe that curled up in front and they excavated those, that meant you were so rich they had servants to do everything. And the less, less poignant, less short then the more you were a physical.
Yeah, right.
And so they have this whole like graph of the shaping of footwear over time from an archaeological dig. I have to check it out in Britain and there's probably room on your website somewhere. Like, this is the stupidity that got us here. It was just arrogance.
Crazy, right?
It drives me nuts.
Okay.
Talk to me about the cognitive benefits of walking.
A lot of people will say, mark, I don't want to give up running because it's my meditation, you know, masochist. It's, you know, it's my. Yeah, it's, you know, it's my time where I'm alone and most of those people are, are playing heavy metal headbanging music to, to overcome the, the monotony of the running or whatever. They're not really sorry to any of those people. I would say. And by the way, I, I was, I was a runner for a long time and I would go off. I never wore headphones when I ever, ever, ever. I've never worn any headphones working out. It just, it's antithetical to the experience of working out, particularly if you're out in nature cycling or if you're in.
The gym to block out whatever they're.
Playing is okay, Yes, I guess, sure, that's fine.
Yeah.
But so, so what's the, you know, what's the benefit of running? For me, I wrote a lot of good pieces on the run out in the, in the hills behind Santa Monica. But walking's better. I mean, walking is not as. Because it's not as difficult as running when you're walking you can get in that meditative state a lot easier. It's so, so the benefits of walking, the meditative benefits of walking, the cognitive benefits of walking, which is just, you know, the circulation being out in nature, breathing the air. The fact that again, if you do it with minimalist footwear, particularly paluvas or barefoot, the fact that the big toe, in addition to being wired to the glute, the big toe is wired directly to the brain. And I'm, I talked, I just had a conversation this morning, an email conversation with somebody this morning about putting together a study on cognitive decline and barefoot and minimalist footwear. The fact that people who are experiencing cognitive decline may benefit from having toes splayed outward and engaging the big toe in a walking, you know, walking with a, with a perfect gait that is, with a gait that is plant the heel, roll off the big toe. Plant the heel, roll off the big toe versus plant the heel and then over pronate because your feet are all squished together because you're duck footed, because you've, you've adapted your gait that way because of the shoes you're wearing. So it'll be interesting to see. I feel like there's going to be a strong correlation. I get, I get a regular foot massage. Once a week I get a reflexologist come in and she's amazing and she is really huge fan of Paluviza. That's all she wears. And, and she teaches reflexology to other massage therapists and reflexologists. And she's always, you know, she's always working on my, on my big big toe, great toe. And you know, it's the, it's that brain connection. So even in Chinese medicine going back thousands of years, there is this connection between brain and the big toe. So the fact you could, through walking you can ignite that, you can engage that connection passively without thinking about it. I think there's a lot of promise here. We'll see. I mean, you know, it's just one of those things I'm looking at doing that among many other experiments that I want to, studies that I want to engage in.
But you're constantly a curious guy and there's patterns, you can predict outcomes. And what we do know with things like Alzheimer's and dementia, having cataract surgery so that you can see with more neurological information reduces Alzheimer's. Getting a hearing aid so you can hear with more fidelity reduces Alzheimer's. It would stand to reason and we can prove it. But I would bet on the results of this that having more neurological input, input through the third most nerve dense part of the body, the first being hands reproduction and then feet. Actually, lips might be up there too, but. Okay. If you get a lot more bandwidth coming in, the brain will adapt to it. And if, in fact, there's also a study that shows overusing noise canceling headphones, especially when it's not noisy, also can lead to cognitive declines. So it only makes sense that having sensory input through your feet is going to work and being able to bend your toes independently is sensory input.
Yeah.
So it's just the groundfield part. Just the fact that, that I tell people when you put on paluvas, you can feel everything you walk on. And that's a good thing. Right. So you feel every stone, every stick, every hole, every divot, every crack, every dimple on a met, a metal grate. I joke that I can read the manufacturer of a manhole cover from my bottoms of my feet, but not really, but, you know, but you feel. And it feels good. That's the thing I want to, like I really need to impress upon people, is it feeling stuff underneath your feet without, you know, sharp puncture or whatever is a good thing? It's what you're, you're, you're, you crave it. And to your point, the more amount of that sort of ground feel input you can give to your brain, it's got to be better for you.
I felt the neurological changes and you know, I run a neuroscience company. I. I've measured everything and just learned how to feel it. When I switched to things, tissues that let me spread my toes and had very little padding. Less than these, but probably too little. Yes, I would get bruises on my feet from stumps, but. Or from roots, usually on Vancouver Island. But I did feel cognitive shifts because when I would go for a walk, I felt like I was connected. And there is something to that.
Well, I mean, the best example is pretty simple. Anybody who walks outside with shoes on and then goes over to a grassy field, takes their shoes off and stands barefoot in the grass. You can't help but have a smile on your face. It's an automatic mood elevator. There's something going on there. And part of that is the ground feel. Part of that is grounding. Part of that is the. Is the negative ion transfer. There's a lot of stuff going on there. But the bottom line is the feet want to be naked against the ground.
Let's talk about earthing for a minute. Clint Ober was just over here. Who's the grandfather Founder of the earthing movement. And over the years, I've had a couple different companies send me earthing sandals or something with a big copper nut in the middle. It's the only way to do it. It proves me.
It's the only. So people have asked us this great question and I've talked to Clint about this because Clint's got some patents that he's, he's working on.
I'm familiar.
Yeah.
But you know, our number one thing is ground feel, toe articulation and comfort. If we can get to the point where we can provide grounding as well will do that. But you think about what you just said. A metal plug in the middle of the shoe, that could feel good, which doesn't feel good and is only in that part of the foot. You really want the entire foot to be grounded. It's, it's not like you just want one little wire stuck into your foot that's going to ground the entire body. So they're. We, we talked about infusing the, the sole with copper wire. A mesh. A copper mesh. But now you wear it down and you, you have. The copper has to be exposed to the ground in order for it to conduct. And then you wear it down. Now you go shred your carpet when you walk into your house or you scratch your hardwood floor. So the, the practical implications, you can't just, you can't just create. You sort of give up one for the other. So, you know, best grounding shoes are the leather, the leather moccasins that you can find.
Yeah.
That are the most minimal shoe you could ever. I think you could ever find.
And they don't last very long.
And they don't last very long for the very reason that they're what makes them good grounding shoes also makes them horrible for wear resistance. So, you know, you might get 600 miles or 700 miles on a pair of paluvas if you're walking, you might get 40 miles on a pair of those grounding moccasins.
Yep. It's a conundrum. And maybe there'll be some materials engineering thing where we can have a long lasting, flexible, slightly padded and conductive material. But right now I haven't found it.
Yeah. Okay.
Thanks for answering that. And I've thought about this for years. I think Clint's other technology may be the solution.
But.
Well, these are talked about on the show. He actually gave me one of his new devices and it fell out of my sock. I'm still sad. So, Mark, we've talked about all kinds of stuff. Exercise, timing, walking versus running. We've just talked a lot about footwear and spreading toes where you and I are so aligned on this. You also follow all the research on protein and nutrition and it's a 40 year lifelong obsession for you. New research on protein timing and amount. What's your take?
God, I just get so flustered at what they call new research. Yeah, because new research means one more study that looked at a granular aspect of whether it was digestibility or absorption or utilization or marked protein uptake or whatever it is. But the latest seems to be, and what our world is touting is 1 gram per pound of body weight in terms of protein as a minimum.
Probably depends on what kind of protein though, right?
I, I hope it does. But, but you know, that's, that's, for me even, that's too much protein. I weigh, I weigh 172, I don't, I never get 172 grams of protein in a day. I, I, I've tried and it makes me uncomfortable. And I'm the guy, as we said earlier, I, I look at what's the minimum effective dose, right, of anything that I need? What's the minimum effective dose of exercise I need to be strong and fit and lean and not get sick. What's the minimum effective dose of food I need? And I've talked about this in the past because most people look at the opposite. They will, they will say, what's the most amount of food I can eat and you know, cram down my pie hole and not feel like a glutton and not gain weight and not, you know, feel, you know, distended or whatever the opposite of that is. What's the least amount of food I can eat, have all the energy I want, maintain or build lean muscle mass, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. Hunger. Yeah, hunger destroys everything. So hungry. So you got to overcome that. But what is the least amount of that food? And in my case, you know, the latest, my latest is with regard to protein. I think 120 grams per day for a man on average. Plus or minus 20.
Based on body weight?
No, just based on being a man. Because if you, other than massive bodybuilders.
Like a Peruvian five foot tall guy versus a six foot four Norwegian, there's gonna be a pretty big difference, right?
Yeah, but not that, but still not, but not gonna be twice, it's not even going to be twice the muscle mass and, and the active, you know, thermic effect and everything else. So with regard to that generic 120 plus or minus. So that gets me to 100 for the Peruvian guy and 140 for the Norwegian guy. But if you do the DEXA scan on, on Americans in general, forget, let's forget other countries and other, okay. Other, you know, cultures in the US if you've got the average guy being between, you know, 5 6, 57 and 626 3, you don't get twice the body mass of, of actual lean tissue.
Yeah.
So you would need twice the protein.
So you wouldn't need twice a protein. So now protein also is, it's, you know, because we don't combust protein. We're not supposed to. One of my early posts 2008, I wrote people talk about it all the time now, but I wrote a post called the Context of Calories in which I said, why are we even assigning a caloric value to protein?
Yes. Because it takes so much just to burn it.
And the first 40 or 50 grams of protein goes to construction. You're not going to combust it. You're going to, you're going to use it the way it was intended as a construction material. You're going to burn fat, you're going to burn carbohydrate, you're going to burn ketones as a result of the fat. You might burn the protein, but only in a scenario where you're starving. So why do we even assign a caloric value to protein? Given that and given the fact that we have these protein sinks, that muscle is a protein sink, it stores protein, we have protein resistance, some of the liver. So we don't need to be getting 30 grams every meal, four meals a day, you know, every day. And if we miss a meal, we're gonna go into cannibal mode and cannibalize our tissue. No, we have this reserve that I look back and I go, if on average over the past four days I've consumed 100 to 120 grams of protein on a daily basis, I'm good. If one day was 80 and one day was 140 and one day was 150, it doesn't matter because the body is so adept at adjusting to the minute to minute, hour to hour requirements that it has. If you had to adjust for that by tightering your intake of protein based on your activity levels or your sickness or whatever it is, you'd go crazy just trying to keep up with yourself. And if it really had an effect, then you'd either wither away or you blow up like a balloon. Okay, so Long winded answer to your question. But I don't think a gram per pound of body weight for a 200 pound man, probably too much. For 150 pound woman trying to lose weight, probably too much.
Oh, most definitely there. Because what I've seen is at your ideal body weight, it's that number of grams. So I did a lot of research on this, and when I wrote my longevity book, there's a, a sweet spot around 0.6 grams and some good longevity studies on that body weight or per.
Or ideal body weight.
Per. Ideal body weight.
Right.
And then a bunch of the, the carnivore people were like, that's, that's offensive. How dare you? You're not one of us. And I'm like, tribal much. And I also think that the quality of the protein matters. And I also see that there's a lot of research around 1 to 1.2 grams. So I said, all right, I'm gonna see if I'm wrong about the 0.6. And I went and I like actually measured and I did 200 grams. And I just kept getting leaner and leaner to the point that I'm at 5% body fat. And I also, and I think this is very important, I said, well, I'm doing two meals a day. I mean, you and I are both into that. And If I'm doing two meals a day, I have to get 100 grams per meal. And all the science I'd read said 30 to 50 grams, all you can absorb. And I thought, well, that seems stupid because if I can't absorb it, I'll get bodybuilder farts. So I'll just take my enzymes. And I ate 100 grams per meal and my health got profoundly better.
Right.
And I'm like, this, this is kind of crazy. And lately I backed off from that because I'm too lean. So I'm like, I actually made sourdough bread from French wheat with no glyphosate. And I've not eaten gluten in the US in many years, but I fermented it myself. I'm doing that because I'm trying to get fatter, because I would like to be at 7% instead of 5% body fat.
Right? Yeah. So.
So what do you think about this large protein bolus once a day?
I just, it doesn't make sense to me. But you know, everybody, to your point, everyone's different. And I would say it also depends on what the other macros are in your diet. Right? If you're just, if you're somebody who's just going to eat 200 grams of protein a day. That's 800 calories. And then, you know what, make it up with, with a hundred grams of, of green leafy vegetables, carbs in the form of, you know, green leafy vegetables. That's. Now you're 1200 a day. And then when the rest is fat, I mean, it's. You, you're going to lose weight on that. And to the extent that your body doesn't assimilate it. Look, you, there's a point at which you also have to do a lot of work to add the, the, the, the protein that you're taking in as a building block to build muscle or to build enzymes. So I would argue that people are taking in 200 grams of protein a day and losing weight are. They're combusting the protein. Just like I said, you're not, you're not adding that on. So it's not like you're. Now, you're using an inappropriate form of energy now. Now the 200 grams that you're taking in, of which your body only needs, I'm going to argue your body only needs 100 to 120. So now you're combusting the rest, but you're also, because it's got a high thermic effect to digest it. You're, you're spending energy digesting the original protein and then you're combusting the other stuff through gluconeogenesis. And you're actually. So, you know, it doesn't mean you need 200 grams a day. It means you need 100 grams. I'm going to say you need 100 grams a day, maybe 120, and you need 300 grams of carbs and you need 150 grams of fat. And that would be my prescription for you to gain weight, but it wouldn't be to add protein because you're not gonna, you're not gonna build more muscle just because you're taking in more protein.
You're not. There's an upper limit. And what did come out last year was a research, it was pretty good research that said that there's no upper limit to the amount of protein you can consume. That if you eat a hundred grams in a meal, your muscle building will last for a longer period of time. And I've long believed that gluconeogenesis is a metabolically expensive and difficult and not necessarily ideal way to get your carbs. So last year I said, all right, let's see what happens. I added 400 grams of white rice and honey every day and did not gain a single pound.
400 grams in the. In 400 carb grams or 400 grams?
400 carb grams?
Yeah.
I mean I was eating buckets of cooked and cooled white rice, honey and unlimited butter.
Yeah.
Not. Didn't gain any weight.
Yeah.
And what I discovered. And again, I'm not trying to disprove anything you're saying. I'm asking. I'm asking because you know a lot.
Right.
What I discovered is when you're getting those higher doses of protein, it has a very strong effect on GLP1.
Right.
Almost like taking Ozempic. So what I'm doing just as of last month is I backed my protein off very substantially because I realized I was protein deficient because I traveled too much and what am I going to eat? Sushi. So I started bringing protein with me all the time and I solved the protein problem. And so now I'm like, all right, I'll have moderate carbs. And I cut my protein basically in half to around 100, maybe 120 to see.
And you're not withering away.
Not withering away. I did put on 1% body fat. So last I was like 6 and a half, almost 7. And I'm still very lean and ripped but not quite as shredded like the COVID of my book. I don't have one here. I look like I play water polo and I fasted for a week and I didn't. It's just I got off an airplane that is un. Airbrushed and like there you go. What the heck? This is better than I was 10 years ago.
Right.
So there you go, guys. But I'm. I think that the, the answer isn't out. And then we have like perfect aminos is something I'm a big fan of. Just getting aminos that, you know, get in.
Yeah.
What's your take on targeted amino acid supplements?
Yeah, I mean that's fine. I, I think, you know, branch chain or essential amino wet. That's probably a, A legitimate supplement to take if you're. Especially if you're a vegetarian or. God.
Yeah, you're gonna.
I've got. But you know, I. Again, minimum effective dose. I eat, eat meat a lot. I don't feel like I need to supplement with BCAAs or essential Aminos. So, you know, mostly because it's just too much of a, you know, a calendared ritual for me to think about. So I just don't even bother anymore. I mean I had a supplement company for 35 years. I pretty much don't take supplements now. I take vitamin D, vitamin C, I take collagen, which I consider a important.
Wow. Yeah.
But I don't take multivitamins. I don't take, you know, any of the, you know, the CoQ10, the Resveratrol, the NCAA, all the stuff that I put in my original supplements. Minimum effective dose. What's my minimum effective dose of everything, which includes supplementation. So if I feel good, back to that original premise about. Really, it's about how you feel. If I feel good, why would I. And you want to throw the balance of something off. That's the other thing. Is it?
Wow.
I started when I started taking. The first supplementation I did was in 1987. 1980. I was training for Ironman and I was taking 25 grams of calcium ascorbate a day. Oh yeah, because that's what Linus Paul. Linus Pauling said to take. Right. And. And I got sick. I got. It was. And I didn't. I just gave you oxalate.
Probably.
Yeah. I mean, I mean he said take it to bowel. Bowel tolerance. Well, Jesus. Who know that 25 grams a day was bowel tolerance. But you know, it's like that was stupid. Or in the years later, I was taking, you know, 400iu of alpha tocopherol.
A day, the synthetic vitamin E. Turns.
Out it's one of the worst things you can do. It's an antioxidant. Okay. But you got to take it with a full spectrum of other tocopherols and tocotrienols. So I think we're sometimes in this biohacking world, we're going down these paths of like, we don't even know what the long term effects of these are. And if they're not demonstrably better, why would you even, you know, begin to. To engage in that?
I am 100% with you on that. Where we probably differ on the value of some of the lab testing where I used to do a lot of things I believed worked like chronic cardio, 90 minutes of gym A day, low fats in my vegetarian diet. And I wrecked my health. And I'm all be a vegan and they'll be a raw vegan. That wrecked my healthy even worse. So I'm gonna get the. The data to see if the needle's moving in the right direction so I can adjust my behavior. Because I realized my belief that something will work was going to overshadow my intuition. Especially early on. I think my Intuition's pretty good now, just like yours is. So I'm still offense. All right, let me try this stack of whatever. And if I feel noticeably better and my labs show that numbers are improving, I'm okay with it. But if they don't, then I'm not going to do it anymore. And is that that piece around. Some things work, some things don't. Some things work for you and not for me because of all the different reasons.
Yeah.
So the personalization. But it's taking me 25 years to get there.
Yeah.
Well, the other difference is. And don't take me wrong, but you. You want to live to 160.
180.
Sorry, you upped.
It's always been 180.
Okay, well, it's been 180. You know, I'm gonna be fine with, like, 90 or 95.
Yeah.
And as long as it's, you know, quality of life the whole way in. And, like, I look at Brian Johnson, I'm like, dude, don't die. Like, that is such a horrible way to look at life. I want. You know, I want to. As they say, I want to, you know, slide in, you know, sideways screaming and whatever.
Yelling at the very end.
Yeah, it.
It's funny. Some people were skeptical when I said, I don't live to at least 180 when I came out with the big thing. And my guys, the real reason I want to die at a time and buy a method of my choosing. Yeah, right. That's the ultimate freedom. And same, by the way.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that. That's something that would be. Imagine creating an app where you got to. You got to legally. You got to legally create a test that you had to pass.
Right.
And if you didn't pass it, your heirs would have a shot at. You know, they'd say, okay, we can. You know, we can inject the cocktail now or whatever. Give them the cocktail.
Oh, my gosh. That's so dark. And also enlightened.
No, it's just. I. This is stuff I think about later tonight.
But they had this back in the Viking times. You can't carry the bucket of water. They push you off the family cliff.
Or Little Big man, where Chief Dan George goes up on the rock, and he says, today is a good day to die. He lies down to die. It starts raining. He's there for, like, 15 minutes, and he goes, no, today's not a good day to die. He gets up and walks back to the camp.
That's brilliant.
Yeah.
And ultimately, it comes down to if your quality of Life is really good. You'll probably want to live longer and you'll probably want to become more peaceful, more conscious. And I really think anyone who starts biohacking for a certain reason, eventually you'll become a longevity person, which is kind of why I started. And you're also going to get into meditation and breath work and the things that make you able to choose your state, which includes a vibrantly healthy, high energy state, but also a state where other people can't get out of your skin. And those are the two big areas of focus for me now know, and I'd rather not.
You figure out that latter one, let me know where other people can't get under your skin.
We're getting there. That's heavily meditated. I mean, we, we all have our, our times and we're reactive and I have a lot less of them now than I used to, that's for sure.
Cool.
Mark, thanks for your 40 years of service to humanity. And I mean that very truthfully.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for the impact you've had on me.
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Dave. Good to see you again, man.
And thanks for making shoes I can wear. Yeah, truly appreciate it. And guys, it's paluva.com.
Yeah.
P-E-L-U-V-A.com. use code, Dave. And Mark's gonna give you 15 off. And you can tell we planned that, right? Thanks for the gift.
Yeah, my pleasure.
See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast. Stupidity that got us here. It was just arrogance.
Crazy, right?
It drives me nuts.
Okay.
Talk to me about the cognitive benefits of walking.
A lot of people will say, mark, I don't want to give up running because it's my meditation.
It's a masochist.
Right? It's, you know, it's my. Yeah, it's, you know, it's my time where I'm alone and most of those people are playing heavy metal head banging music to overcome the monotony of the running or whatever. They're not really to any of those people, I would say, and by the way, I, I was, I was a runner for a long time and I would go off. I never wore headphones when I ran. Ever, ever, ever. I've never worn any headphones working out. It just, it's antithetical to the experience of working out, particularly if you're out in nature cycling or if you're in.
The gym to block out whatever they're playing. It's okay.
Yes, I guess, sure, that's fine.
Yeah.
But so, so what's the, you know, what's the benefit of running? For me, I wrote a lot of good pieces on the run out in the, in the hills behind Santa Monica. But walking's better. I mean, walking is not as, because it's not as difficult as running. When you're walking, you can get in that meditative state a lot easier. It's so, so the benefits of walking, the meditative benefits of walking, the cognitive benefits of walking, which is just, you know, the circulation being out in nature, breathing the air. The fact that again, if you do it with minimalist footwear, particularly paluvas or barefoot, the fact that the big toe, in addition to being wired to the glute, the big toe is wired directly to the brain. And I'm, I talked, I just had a conversation this morning, an email conversation with somebody this morning about putting together a study on cognitive decline and barefoot and minimalist footwear. The fact that people who are experiencing cognitive decline may benefit from having toes splayed outward and engaging the big toe in a walking, you know, walking with a, with a perfect gait that is, with a gait that is plant the heel, roll off the big toe. Plant the heel, roll off the big toe versus plant the heel and then over pronate because your feet are all squished together, because you're duck footed, because, because you've, you've adapted your gait that way because of the shoes you're wearing. So it'll be interesting to see. I feel like there's going to be a strong correlation. I get, I get a regular foot massage once a week. I get a reflexologist coming in and she's amazing and she is really huge fan of Paluis. That's all she wears. And, and she teaches reflexology to other massage therapists and reflexologists. And she's always, you know, she's always working on my, on my big big toe, great toe. And you know, it's the, it's that brain connection. So even in Chinese medicine going back thousands of years, there was this connection between brain and the big toe. So the, the fact that you could, through walking you can ignite that, you can engage that connection passively without thinking about it. I, I think there's a lot of promise here. We'll see. I mean it, you know, it's just one of those things I'm looking at doing that among many other experiments that I want to, studies that I want to engage in.
Well, you're constantly a curious guy and there's patterns, you can predict outcomes and what we do Know, with things like Alzheimer's and dementia, having cataract surgery so that you can see with more neurological information reduces Alzheimer's. Getting a hearing aid so you can hear with more fidelity reduces Alzheimer's. It would stand to reason, and we can prove it. But I would bet on the results of this, that having more neurological input through the third most nerve dense part of the body, the first being hands reproduction, and then feet. Actually, lips might be up there too, but. Okay. If you get a lot more bandwidth coming in, the brain will adapt to it. And if, in fact, there's also a study that shows overusing noise canceling headphones, especially when it's not noisy, also can lead to cognitive declines. So it only makes sense that having sensory input through your feet is going to work and being able to bend your toes independently is a sensory input.
Yeah.
So it's just the groundfield part. Just the fact that I tell people when you put on paluvas, you can feel everything you walk on. And that's a good thing, right? So you feel every stone, every stick, every hole, every divot, every crack, every dimple on a metal grate. I joke that I can read the manufacturer of a manhole cover from bottoms of my feet, but, no, not really. But, you know, but you feel. And it feels good. That's the thing I want to, like, I really need to impress upon people is that feeling stuff underneath your feet without, you know, sharp puncture or whatever is a good thing. It's what you're, You're, You're. You crave it. And to your point, the more amount of that sort of ground feel input you can give to your brain, it's got to be better for you.
I felt the neurological changes. And, you know, I run a neuroscience company. I. I've measured everything and just learned how to feel it. When I switched to things to shoes that let me spread my toes and had very little padding, less than these, but probably too little. Yes, I would get bruised on my feet from stumps, but. Or from roots, usually on Vancouver Island. But I did feel cognitive shifts because when I would go for a walk, I felt like I was connected. And there is something to that.
Well, the best example is pretty simple. Anybody who walks outside with shoes on and then goes over to a grassy field, takes their shoes off and stands barefoot in the grass. You can't help but have a smile on your face. It's an automatic mood elevator. There's something going on there. And part of that is the ground field. Part of that is grounding part of that is the negative ion transfer. There's a lot of stuff going on there. But the bottom line is the feet want to be naked against the ground.
Let's talk about earthing for a minute. Clint Ober was just over here, who's the grandfather founder of the earthing movement. And over the years I've had a couple different companies send me earthing sandals or something with a big copper nut in the middle of.
The only way you can do it. That proves me it's the only. So people have asked us this great question and I've talked to Clint about this because Clint's got some patents that he's working on.
I'm familiar.
Yeah.
But our number one thing is ground feel, toe articulation and comfort. If we can get to the point where we can provide grounding as well, will do that. But you think about what you just said. A metal plug in the middle of the shoe that could feel good, which doesn't feel good and is only in that part of the foot. You really want the entire foot to be grounded. It's, it's not like you just want one little wire stuck into your foot that's going to ground the entire body. So they're. We, we talked about infusing the, the sole with copper wire. A mesh. A copper mesh. But now you wear it down and you, you have. The copper has to be exposed to the ground in order for it to conduct. And then you wear it down. Now you go shred your carpet when you walk into your house or you scratch your hardwood floor. So the, the practical implications, you can't just, you can't just create. You sort of give up one for the other. So.
Yeah.
You know, best grounding shoes are the leather, the leather moccasins that you can find.
Yeah.
That are the most minimal shoe you could ever. I think you could ever.
And they don't last very long.
And they don't last very long for the very reason that they're what makes them good. Grounding shoes also makes them horrible for wear resistance. So, you know, you might get 600 miles or 700 miles on a pair of palubas if you're walking. You might get 40 miles on a pair of those grounding moccasins.
Yep. It's a, it's a conundrum. And maybe there'll be some materials engineering thing where we can have a long lasting, flexible, slightly padded and conductive material. But right now I haven't found it.
Yeah. Okay.
Thanks for answering that. And I've Thought about this for years. I think Clint's other technology may be the solution. But we'll, these are talked about on the show. He actually gave me one of his new devices and it fell on my sock. I'm still sad. So, Mark, we've talked about all kinds of stuff. Exercise, timing, walking versus running. We've just talked a lot about footwear and spreading toes, where you and I are so aligned on this. You also follow all the research on protein and nutrition, and it's a 40 year, lifelong, say, obsession for you. New research on protein timing and amount. What's your take?
God, I just get so flustered at what they call new research. Yeah, because new research means one more study that looked at a granular aspect of whether it was digestibility or absorption or utilization or marked protein uptake or whatever it is. But the latest seems to be, and what our world is touting is 1 gram per pound of body weight in terms of protein as a minimum.
Probably depends on what kind of protein though, right?
I, I hope it does. But, but you know, that's, that's, for me even, that's too much protein. I weigh, I weigh 172. I don't, I never get 172 grams of protein in a day. I, I, I, I've tried and it makes me uncomfortable. And I'm the guy, as we said earlier, I, I look at what's the minimum effective dose, right, of anything that I need? What's the minimum effective dose of exercise I need to be strong and fit and lean and not get sick? What's the minimum effective dose of food I need? And I've talked about this in the past because most people look at the opposite. They will, they will say, what's the most amount of food I can eat and, you know, cram down my pie hole and not feel like a glutton and not gain weight and not, you know, feel, you know, distended or whatever the opposite of that is. What's the least amount of food I can eat, have all the energy I want, maintain or build lean muscle mass, never get sick, and most importantly, not be hungry. Hunger. Yeah, hunger destroys everything. So hungry. So you got to overcome that. But what is the least amount of that food? And in my case, you know, the latest, my latest is with regard to protein. I think 120 grams per day for a man on average. Plus or minus 20.
Based on body weight?
No, just based on being a man. Because if you, other than massive bodybuilders.
Like a Peruvian five foot tall guy versus a six foot four Norwegian, there's gonna be a pretty big difference, right?
Yeah, but not that. But still not. But not gonna be twice. It's not even gonna be twice the muscle mass and, and the active, you know, thermic effect and everything else. So with regard to that generic 120 plus or minus. So that gets me to 100 for the Peruvian guy and 140 for the Norwegian guy. But if you do the DEXA scan on, on Americans in general, forget. Let's forget other countries and other. Okay. Other, you know, cultures in the US if you've got the average guy being between, you know, five, six, five, seven and six two, six, three, you don't get twice the body mass.
