Nick St. Louis is the founder and Lead Foot Nerd at TFC. He obtained a Masters of Physical Therapy from Western University and his current obsession is with researching every pillar of health to discover the truths that science has to offer. He now spends less time in clinic and has devoted his days to weaving together a global tribe of people on a mission to collectively solve the health crisis by inspiring and empowering the individual to take back control of their bodies.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Nick St. Louis about the impact of modern athletic footwear marketing claims.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How marketing claims in the fitness industry often lack scientific evidence, creating a challenge in discerning between legitimate research and marketing ploys.
– Why you should embrace natural movement for optimal foot health and well-being
– How many shoe designs are promoted despite lacking evidence of their effectiveness in enhancing performance or preventing injury.
– Why embracing discomfort and risk can lead to growth and resilience in pursuing goals.
– How the human body’s adaptability and resilience allow for achieving physical feats beyond evolutionary expectations.
Connect with Nick:
Guest Contact Info
Instagram
@thefootcollective
Facebook
facebook.com/thefootcollective
Links Mentioned:
thefootcollective.com
Connect with Steven:
Website
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
What is the most important part of your body that you need to develop to be able to run, walk, hike, do yoga, CrossFit, whatever it is you do, and do that enjoyably and healthily? Is it your abs? Is it your hamstrings? Is it your glutes? Is it something completely different? You’re going to find out on today’s episode of the Movement Movement Podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, typically starting feet first. And by the way, it’s not even your feet, because those things are your foundation, by the way. And we break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the outright lies you’ve been told about what it does take to run, walk, hike, yoga, CrossFit, et cetera, et cetera, and to do that enjoyably, and effectively, and efficiently. And did I mention enjoyably?
I know I did, because that’s the most important thing. If you’re not having fun, please do something different till you are. I’m Steven Sashen, your host for the Movement Movement podcast and the CEO of Xeroshoes.com. And we call this the Movement Movement if you’re new to us, because we’re creating a movement about natural movement. We want to make natural movement the obvious, better, healthy choice, the way people think that natural food is right now, and we need your help to do that. So you are part of the movement about natural movement. So to be part of the movement, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find previous episodes and all the different places you can interact with this podcast, and content on YouTube and Facebook, and et cetera, et cetera. And that’ll, then you can like and share, and give a thumbs up and hit the bell on YouTube, all those things that you know how to do to spread the word, and to hear about what we’re doing next.
In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please do subscribe. So this is a recording that I’m going to put on in a second, that was done with my friend Nick from the Foot Collective, Thefootcollective.com, where frankly, we’ve just been chatting and decided to rant a little bit. And in it you’re going to learn about maybe the most important thing that you need to know, the most important part of your body you need to develop in order to, well, like I said, have a healthy, happy, strong body. So let’s dive in, shall we?
Nick St. Louis:
Welcome to the episode of, I don’t know what this is, but it’s going to be fun. I’m chatting with Steve Sashen today, who is the founder and director at Xero Shoes, one of the favorite brands that we have at TFC Shop. And we wanted to do this because Steven is always a treat to talk to, because I love that you just tell it like it is. So let’s just dive into things that we feel need to be talked about.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, hold on. This phrase, tell it like it is, has a whole different connotation here in America, because some people like to say, “Tell it like it is,” and all they mean is that that person has no filter. Hopefully tell it like it is, means that you’re telling the truth. And I would hope that that’s what I’m doing, because I think that I am and I’m willing to be proven wrong, and then change what I’m doing, which is actually one of the things that we are going to rant about, is people who get… So let’s set the context. You and I were chatting, we were both ranting about something. I don’t know what, perhaps customer behavior, something like when people want to get your attention, they will talk about you on Facebook, but not tag you, and then complain that you didn’t respond to their post, even though there was no literal way you could find it.
Nick St. Louis:
Oh, that’s probably happening right now, but I don’t even know about it. So you know what? Joy is missing out.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. So I like that one. My other favorite one that’s related to that is someone emails us and they use the wrong email address, and then complain that we don’t respond. I love that one too. That’s a good one.
Nick St. Louis:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I love getting PayPal disputes where people are like, “Yeah, I bought something and it didn’t get sent to me.”
And then we look and it’s like, “You didn’t even enter your correct email.”
Steven Sashen:
Oh no, sorry.
Nick St. Louis:
We’ll fix it for you and pretend like it was our mistake.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. Here’s my favorite. Why did you send the package to my childhood home address? Well, funny you should ask. It’s because for every one of the thousand plus orders we get every day, we check every one of them and do a search to find someone’s childhood address, and randomly select a customer to ship that package to the wrong place. It’s like, what? Anyway, so those were some of our customer rants. Then we have product rants and industry rants as well.
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah. Well, I wanted to talk about, okay, so I think junk science or junk that people are calling science, is something that is coloring many domains of life right now. And I would love to break that down, because I think even we can even take the subdomain of natural footwear. The question that I get, which I find hilarious is, where is the science and the research to show that wearing shoes that let your feet move feet, is better than shoes that don’t let your feet move naturally? Please show me that research. And it’s like, I don’t even know how to respond to this anymore. It’s so crazy.
Steven Sashen:
Then, I’ll tell you how I respond. I say two things, maybe three things. Thing number one, we’re not the intervention. For the thousands of years that humans have been wearing footwear, up until the early ’70s, it mostly looked like ours. In fact, if you look, there was a, archeological dig in Oregon, and they found a sandal that looks remarkably like this. This is our Genesis sandal. I mean, it’s a very similar. Now, the sole is not made of, what’s the word I’m looking for? Rubber. There was another word I couldn’t find. Compression molded rubber. It’s made out of sage bark, but same basic idea. So up until the early ’70s, this is what we doing. So the intervention is the new modern athletic shoe. So the question there is, where’s the evidence for that? And the evidence for that is injuries have not been reduced at all, and performance has not been improved, because of the shoes during that entire time.
And there’s actually hundreds of studies demonstrating that letting your feet move naturally is better than not. So Sarah Ridge at BYU showed that just walking in a pair of minimalist shoes gives you the same strength benefits or increases in strength that you would get if you did an actual foot exercise program. And on the flip side, there’s research, I don’t remember who did it, and I’m not even sure if it’s been published yet. I heard about this from Irene Davis at Harvard, showing that they took orthotics and put them in the shoes of healthy runners, and within 10 weeks they had lost up to 10% of the muscle mass in their feet. That’s not good. And then the third thing I point out-
Nick St. Louis:
So I mean, that’s not a surprise. If you use a crutch-
Steven Sashen:
Of course not.
Nick St. Louis:
… and you don’t use your leg for a month, it’s like you’re probably going to have a weak leg. I think most people would be like, “That makes sense.”
Steven Sashen:
Right, same idea. And a version of that is why is it that people think that feet are somehow horribly designed and they can’t support you? You go to Third World countries and you just don’t find podiatrists treating people or things, where they put them in arch support of any sort.
Nick St. Louis:
They’re not required.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s like if you went to the doctor and said, “My wrist is bothering me.”
And the doctor says, “Oh, we’re going to have to immobilize your neck for the rest of your life.”
You’d go…
Nick St. Louis:
“What? What do you say?”
Yeah, I know. But we applied different logic to a different body part for some reason. And it’s like the whole system abides by the same principles. And I remember, well, when I did a podcast with Golden from Altra, he talked about, I looked up one of his talks from 2013, and he gave stats on rates of foot problems in shod versus un-shod populations. And it was so interesting, because even the superficial stat with that much description is stunning. It’s like 78% of people in shod cultures will develop foot pain at some point. 3% of people in un-shod cultures will develop a foot issue at some point. And then if you put a little asterisk beside that 3%, it’s like by the way, those people step on a tree root or stub their toe, it hurts for a week. And then they’re like, “Yeah, my feet are fine.”
The other people are like, “My feet hurt all the time.” And big surprise, you’re wearing foot casts.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Look, I’ve been predominantly barefoot for the last 12, 13 years. I can’t even do the math anymore. And not that that’s math, that’s just called memory, which I don’t have anymore. I’ve had two injuries.
Nick St. Louis:
Hard drive’s out of space, right?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. I’ve got no CPU cycles to spare. I’ve had two injuries in that time, same injury twice. I stubbed my toe. I just wasn’t paying attention. One time walking up my sister’s driveway and the garage pad was like three inches high. I didn’t know that. And I slammed into it. And then a couple of months ago, I’m taking a walk with a friend and we’re walking down the sidewalk, and there was a rock that somehow had gotten moved from being around a tree to the middle of the sidewalk. I wasn’t paying attention.
Nick St. Louis:
And it’s like a little reminder to be a bit more mindful. It’s like that’s literally, that’s what I get when I stub my toe. I’m like, okay, I got to pay attention a little bit more, or it just happens sometimes.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I go for that one. I don’t really care. It’s sort of like I was hanging out with a bunch of psychiatrists and physical therapists, and healers of varying kinds. They were all talking about the different diets they were on, and there’s a pause in the conversation and I said, “I’m on the, I don’t know when I’m going to get hit by a bus diet.”
Nick St. Louis:
I like that one. Give us some more details of what that diet consists of.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s pretty much what I’m in the mood to eat, and that’s about it, because I’m not going to sacrifice something that I enjoy, because I have this imagined scenario of if I eat a certain way, my body will change shape in a particular way, and then I’ll finally be happy. I don’t have that one. So not saying that I love this thing. I’ll tell you a weird personal thing. As I roll out of bed every morning I pinch a little bit of right around my abdomen area to see what my body fat feels like, as if somehow overnight I magically drop 5% body count.
Nick St. Louis:
Has that ever happened?
Steven Sashen:
No. I have had times where I’ve gone to the bathroom and had to take my belt in a notch, but that’s a whole different story. But the whole point is, I mean, I’m not someone who overindulges, I don’t binge on things, but a good piece of chocolate cake. Back in the days when I was a diehard vegan, a friend of mine said, “One of my favorite things about you is you’re a diehard vegan, but if you see a piece of chocolate cake and it’s not vegan, you will eat that cake.”
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah, there’s an exception. A little window that’s personal to everyone. Actually, out of curiosity, what made you want to be a vegan and what made you get out of being a vegan? Cole’s Notes.
Steven Sashen:
I have a genetic disorder, I found out about 10 years ago. I was at the first Paleo Conference, Paleo FX all these people talking about paleo this, paleo that. And of course it was very entertaining, because A, none of the paleo experts could agree on what paleo was or wasn’t. And B, out of the 10 sort of most famous people in that group, five of them were morbidly obese, and four of them had just gotten C-reactive protein scores that were through the roof, because they were eating so much meat.
Nick St. Louis:
Oh, great role models. Great, let’s listen to these people for sure.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. So there is that dilemma. And besides, back to your point about the truth, the more research that comes out about our paleolithic ancestors, the more we find that what people say, what paleo people say those people ate is not true. They say they never ate grains, and there’s actually evidence they ate tons of grains. They said they never ate basically sugar. They ate tons of sugar. So anyway, whole other story.
Nick St. Louis:
Well, that’s too inconvenient to talk about, Steven. We’ve already created the brand Paleo, people are already drinking the juice, so let’s not talk about that, please.
Steven Sashen:
You’re right. I said to one of the doctors, “This idea that you each have that there’s an ideal diet for all human beings, even though you can’t agree on what that diet is, it’s kind of silly. Because,” I said, “I’m a genetic freak.”
And the guy says, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Well, I’m a sprinter and I’m a Jewish sprinter, so not a whole lot of us. In fact-”
Nick St. Louis:
Oh, interesting.
Steven Sashen:
“… you may be talking to the fastest Jew in the world, but that’s a whole other story.” That’s the issue of a world over 55. Anyway, but I said to this guy, “You guys all talk about eating a lot of meat. I’ve never liked meat since the day I was born.” I remember vividly, my mom would make pork chops. I would chew it up and stuff it in my cheek, and then make an excuse to go to the bathroom and spit it in the toilet. My dad, I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight, and my dad-
Nick St. Louis:
What turned you off from it? Was it the texture or the taste, or just weren’t a fan?
Steven Sashen:
Well, I’ll get there. So here we go. So I got to tell you this one, that one day my dad said, “You’re going to sit under the table until you finish that whatever piece of meat it was.”
And I stayed there for three hours, until he said, “Go to bed.”
So I said to this doctor, “I’ve never liked meat.”
And he says, “Well, do you like coffee?”
I said, “No.”
He says, “Do you like tea?”
I said, “If I never drank another cup, I wouldn’t miss it.”
He said, “Do you like red wine?”
I said, “No.”
And he goes down this list of foods that I either aggressively don’t like or would never miss if I never had another taste of them again.
Nick St. Louis:
He said chocolate?
Steven Sashen:
He said, “You don’t taste…”
Chocolate was a whole different game. He says, “You have a genetic disorder. You don’t taste savory flavors.”
So I look it up and I had my genome sequenced, and in fact, I have a known genetic disorder. It’s kind of rare, where I just don’t taste savory flavors, the umami flavor. And so, meat just tastes like slightly irony, slightly metallic mush.
Nick St. Louis:
Wow, that’s very interesting.
Steven Sashen:
It’s like being colorblind. I was at a dinner party, someone brought in some raised by virgins, massaged by nuns, blessed by the Dalai Lama beef. And so, I like to try things. I’m always curious. So I tried a bite and I said to this whole room full of people, and I was genuinely curious. I said, “So this has a flavor that you actually can taste and enjoy?”
And everyone looked at me like I was crazy. And my wife says, “You made everyone so self-conscious, you ruined the meal for them.”
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah, it just destroyed it. They were like, “Well, now it doesn’t taste as good anymore.”
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah. It wasn’t my intention. I mean, I was genuinely curious, because I couldn’t taste it. So what made me be a vegan was just let’s just drop dairy for the fun of it and see what happens. And I didn’t notice it and didn’t miss it. And what got me out of being a vegan, this is going to sound crazy. I’m walking by, I’m walking along a sidewalk by Whole Foods. This is 15 years ago maybe. And literally the thought popped in my head, a thought that I hadn’t had in ages, and the thought was sushi. And I went, “Okay.” And so, I went in and got a little thing of sushi and that was the end of my veganness. And so, I eat some dairy. I have some kind of fishy something two or three times a week. That’s about it.
Nick St. Louis:
I like it. Yeah. I love Joel Furman’s approach of just being a nutritarian. It’s like, just eat things high in nutrients. And it turns out if you do that and you eliminate a lot of the unnatural stuff, it doesn’t really matter what you eat, how much you eat of it, you’re going to do okay.
Steven Sashen:
Takes care of most of it. I was taking a walk with a friend of mine and she said, “I wish I would just, I’m trying to listen to my body to know what I need to eat.”
And I literally fell on the ground laughing. I said, “Well, first of all, I’m laughing because I used to have thoughts like that. And what’s so funny is I can answer your question and address the question underneath your question. So your question is, I know what your body wants to eat, ice cream, french fries, chocolate cake. I mean, basically as many calories as fast as you can get. So that’s what we know. But you have this idea that you could quote, ‘listen to your body.’ I don’t know what that means. And that if you did, it would ask you to eat things that you think would change your body in such a way that you would eventually like it and be happy. But that’s just silly. If you walk around and ask a million people, do you like the way this thing looks or functions? You will not find anybody who says yes, everyone’s going to have a thing they don’t like, a thing that doesn’t work the way they want. This is just a concept that we have. And you’re making yourself crazy.”
Nick St. Louis:
Because we’re told all day that you’re not the way you should be or that you could be better, literally surrounded by messaging all day long. How could people not feel that?
Steven Sashen:
Well, this is one of my rants, is that especially in the West, we have this idea that there’s a certain collection of thoughts that we have that are personal and that need to be resolved. And most of them are just proof that we’re human beings. So I don’t like my body and I should like it. Why do you think that you should? None of us do mostly, because we never developed the skill to look in one of these and determine whether there was bacteria in it.
What we developed is the skill of taking a sip and then checking to see how it feels, and then knowing if we need to throw up as quickly as possible, if it doesn’t do it automatically. So we’ve developed this hypersensitivity to internal sensations that we now just have no reason to use them, and so we just turn it internally forever. So there’s all these things that are just proof of this is the way human beings work, and we take it as a sign of a personal problem, which is fundamentally wrong. But anyway, this a tangent from, this was a tangent about science and telling it like it is. I’m going to give you a science one. Here’s one of my science rants.
How do I want to do this one? Nike has a new shoe, new issue called the React Infinity Run. And the way they advertise it, you go to a store, if anyone remembers what stores are, you go to a store and there’s a little sign underneath the shelf with the shoe that says, “Designed to reduce injury,” which I think is hysterical.
Nick St. Louis:
I know, that is so disturbing. How does Vibram get in trouble to say, “You wear shoes with less support, your feet are going to get stronger.”
And then Nike says, “These will prevent injury,” and it’s like-
Steven Sashen:
It doesn’t say it’s better. It doesn’t say, “We’ll prevent injury.” It says, “Designed to reduce injury.” Who designed shoes to increase injury?
Nick St. Louis:
All of our other shoes are designed to increase them, but these ones aren’t.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Well, it’s like Cheerios. It says supports heart health. It’s a meaningless phrase. I mean, heart health is meaningless and supports is meaningless in that sentence. But here’s the kicker. This study-
Nick St. Louis:
Avoid any foods that make health claims. That’s a good heuristic that I share with people. It’s like, if it makes health claims, it’s probably not something that’s tremendous for you.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t know. There’s a new super food that I heard about that comes out of the Amazon, that the three guys who ate it are 3000 years old, and how can you argue with those facts?
Nick St. Louis:
I want to talk to those guys. If it’s true then. But they’re not advertising on their boxes though. That’s the difference.
Steven Sashen:
No, but if you do advertise with them, you’re exploiting tribal populations, and that’s not good either. But so, Nike does this thing. They say it’s an independent study that they designed and that they paid for, and they had a third-party perform. And in fact, the Nike, the React Infinity Run did reduce injuries by 50% compared to the other shoe that they used, which was their best-selling motion control running shoe. I don’t remember what it’s called unfortunately, in a 12-week study.
And the way they defined injuries was that whatever happens puts you out for at least three running sessions. So really it’s like a 10-week study. In that first 10 weeks, they’re looking to injury rates. Their best-selling motion control shoe, over 30% of the people got injured. In the new designed to reduce injury, only 14.5% got injured. Now, on the one hand you would go, “Hey, that’s great. It actually did reduce injury by 50%.”
On the other hand, the way I like to frame it is, I’m going to buy you dinner tonight. Which restaurant do you want to go to? The one where you’re going to get food poisoning, one out of seven meals or one out of three meals?
Nick St. Louis:
That’s a great way of putting it.
Steven Sashen:
Because that’s basically what they’re saying, you’re going to get injured. I mean, one out of seven people who wear this shoe is still going to get injured within the first 10 weeks.
Nick St. Louis:
I know. It’s crazy. So that’s the manipulation of, you’re basically just manipulating people with what you’re telling them about what you did, with no reference to the actual details, nor is the average person interested. They’re just like, “Tell me something’s good and I want to buy it. Here’s my money.” It’s crazy.
Steven Sashen:
But here’s what’s worse. It’s worse than not only is the average person not interested. The people who reprint this press release in the media, they’re not interested. They were reprinting this before the actual study was released. So Nike put out a press release saying reduces injury by 50%. It gets reprinted basically verbatim. No one looked into it. I tracked down the guy who did the study and said, “Can you show me the study?”
And amazingly, he sent it to me before it was even published. That’s how I found out the numbers, which weren’t being mentioned at all.
Nick St. Louis:
I love that.
Steven Sashen:
When Adidas came out with, and for the snobs in the room or Europeans, Adidas, when Adi came out with their boost foam. And yes, if you want to be a real snob, you call it Adi. And for people who wonder why it’s Adi Dassler, Adidas. Anyway, they took this two pound, roughly two pound steel ball, bounced it off the boost foam, showed how bouncy it was compared to the other company’s foam, which wasn’t very bouncy. Of course, no other company uses this foam ever. But more importantly-
Nick St. Louis:
You don’t tell people that, that’s fine.
Steven Sashen:
Not important. Other company. Some other company. But here’s the kicker, you’re not a two pound steel ball.
Nick St. Louis:
What, you mean those results aren’t going to accurately carry over to my body? No, that can’t be right, Steven.
Steven Sashen:
I would never say anything like that. I’m just saying you’re not a two pound steel ball.
Nick St. Louis:
Okay. We can agree on that.
Steven Sashen:
Telling it like it is. And it’s one of these things that the fact that we don’t have good science education and people aren’t good at critical thinking, makes people susceptible to admittedly brilliant marketing. I mean, look, here’s the best one ever. You go into a running shoe store and they’ll have a treadmill, and they’ll put you on that treadmill and evaluate you in some way, and then recommend a shoe. Two things. You go to different shoe stores, you’re going to recommend different shoes. So that calls it into question to begin with. Second thing is, this whole idea, I don’t know if Brooks invented it, but it’s part of their run signature program, where they put little dots on your knees too and watch you squat a few times. Then have you run, oh, in socks on the treadmill. They won’t tell you to run barefoot, because they don’t want to give you the idea that you can do that, but just get more information.
Nick St. Louis:
Cannot slip any notion that being barefoot is good for people.
Steven Sashen:
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Definitely can’t do that. So then they have you run and then they make some diagnosis about which Brooks shoe is right for you. Well, this is based on an idea that there are different kinds of feet and different kinds of movement that correlate to certain shoes you’re supposed to wear. Well, the Army, who gets a lot of people injured when they’re training, because they’re running in these big stiff boots, but they don’t think that’s why they, decided to do a test. And they took, I think it was maybe 900 people, split them into two groups. And one group was divided into three groups. Actually it was divided into three groups, split in half, however you want to think about that. And one half of the half got the shoes that were recommended for one of those three groups they were in. Neutral shoe, a motion control shoe, whatever.
Nick St. Louis:
For their foot type.
Steven Sashen:
For their foot type. And the other group was just given a random shoe, the difference in injury rates? Zero.
Nick St. Louis:
Big donut.
Steven Sashen:
So this whole idea of-
Nick St. Louis:
I wonder who didn’t tell Brooks that?
Steven Sashen:
I’ve told the CEO of Brooks that. He knows.
Nick St. Louis:
I’m guessing not a lot was done about that, because yeah, it is marketing. The problem is marketing is being sold as science. That is the core of the problem.
Steven Sashen:
Correct. There’s another version. I was on this panel discussion at the American College of Sports Medicine, and both Brooks and Adidas, sorry, Adidas, Adi, they were both there. And when they were asked, “What’s the future of footwear?”
They both said the same thing, which is basically individual differences, accommodating what’s unique to you. So Brooks, their idea was they were going to change the outsole and maybe put something a little thicker here or a little thicker here, depending on how you ran. And for Adi, it was changing the midsole to do something similar. Well, Adi’s project for doing that has been suspended, because I asked the obvious question, “Where’s the proof that this improves in performance or reduces injury?”
To which they had no answer. Adi is currently not going on this project, because it was based on a custom-made 3D printed midsole, and they essentially found that it’s just not tenable. I don’t know what Brooks is doing, but Brooks practically admitted that they want to give you a different shoe for everything you could possibly do. One shoe for walking into the bathroom, one shoe for walking out of the bathroom, because you weigh less. I mean, just crazy stuff.
Nick St. Louis:
I wonder why. It’s almost like they make more money than more shoes they sell you.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. We’ve had people tell us we have a 5,000-mile sole warranty on our shoes, and we’ve had business advisors say, “You need to make shoes that don’t last as long.”
And I go, “No.”
Nick St. Louis:
I love that. I love your, so the three hours under the table, that stubbornness clearly has permeated through your whole life, which is probably why you make shoes, because it seems like the craziest thing to embark on. But when no one else is doing it, it’s like, yeah, I’m just going to sit under the table for three hours. I’m just going to chew glass and go through the process of making shoes.
Steven Sashen:
I don’t think of myself as stubborn. I think of myself as committed to truth. And the truth is, I did want to swallow that chewed up stuff in my cheek. And the truth is that the benefits that my wife and I discovered when we got out of shoes were so demonstrable. And then people kept asking me to make barefoot style sandals for them, and they had the same kind of benefits. And then, while we were just in the process of doing that, we met some guys who, they’d been in footwear for like 35 years. They all started at Reebok actually, and then moved around. It’s very incestuous business. And they recently went out on their own and they said, “We believe natural movement’s the most important thing there is. We believe in you guys and what you’re doing, and we would start this business with you. But we’ve been in footwear so long that we’re not stupid enough to try and start a shoe company.”
And Lena and I said, “Yeah, we know we’re hyper optimistic and naive. That’s how things get done. So away we go.”
Nick St. Louis:
Exactly. The dreamers are the ones who make the change. And sometimes you got to learn as you go, but yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s the people who have a very bizarre misunderstanding of risk tolerance.
Nick St. Louis:
That’s a polite way of saying naive.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. For me, the worst thing that happens is I go broke. All right, whatever. If I have to go to Baja, California, live on the beach, I can do that. I know how to spearfish.
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah. Doesn’t sound too bad.
Steven Sashen:
No. I met somebody is a homeless woman, actually, sorry. It was a friend of mine who met this woman on Venice Beach, and she was just sitting there with her shopping cart full of stuff on this one bench. And my friend struck up a conversation with her and she said, “Yeah, I just stay here in front of this house every day.”
And my friend says, “Oh, is it to inspire you to get off the street?”
She goes, “No, that used to be my house. It’s to remind me how miserable I was when I lived in it.”
Nick St. Louis:
Wow, mic drop. That is powerful.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a stunner. I really like that one a lot.
Nick St. Louis:
That’s great.
Steven Sashen:
All right, so science masquerading. What’s happened? Look, here’s Science 101, the Vibram lawsuit.
Nick St. Louis:
We have to rescue science, by the way, because people are starting to get a really shitty perspective of science, but it’s not fair, because science is this beautiful mindset of constantly trying to prove yourself wrong, to figure out the truth. And we can’t let the word get bastardized by all these people that are messing it up. So how do we rescue science and reclaim its true essence? It’s really frustrating.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, I’m sure you and I can do that on our own. That’s a piece of cake. I think it’s a really good question actually. And I’m going to talk completely out of my butt and make things up for the next 30 seconds, because I don’t know. But thing that occurs to me is that we are no longer, or I don’t know if we ever were educating children on how to think clearly, on how to assess information accurately, how to look for counterfactuals, how to look. This is a thing that I do all the time. Wait, I’m going to find something to draw on.
Whenever someone tells me something that just has the ring of not true, I do this thing. This is like statistics 101. I didn’t know that. I just, again, if you learn to think, you start figuring these things out. So people say A, look at that, I’m writing upside down. They go, A leads to B. Here, wait, I’ll draw an arrow. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that A leads to B. Now, what I then say is how many times does A lead to C? Which is the opposite of B, and how many times does D maybe lead to B? And if D and C are bigger than A, A is probably not right. That’s-
Nick St. Louis:
That’s very elegant. I like that.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a really simple thing and it’s kind of an Occam’s razor thing. Look here, I’m going to step on a bunch of toes right now, pun intended. Let’s talk about grounding and earthing, shall we?
Nick St. Louis:
Oh, I would love to. And just as a side note for that, what I always come back to if we want to rescue science is improve public science literacy at a very basic level, like what you just did. And only the people who are willing to actually listen are going to be the ones you give a shit about anyway, because they’re the only ones that matter. The people who don’t care to want to learn, you almost have to wait until you get more people on your ship before you can then start to invite other people that aren’t ready.
Steven Sashen:
I think, look, kids are naturally curious, but what they’re up against is evolutionary biology. These things inside of our skulls are not wired to think critically. They’re wired to come to very quick decisions and stick to them ,because it’s not energy efficient to every time you’re in the savanna and the grass is doing this, to figure out if hiding behind the grass is something that you’re going to eat or something that wants to eat you. You need to make a snap decision and react fast. Now, you can make the wrong decision. You can decide that that’s saber-toothed lion, and it’s a saber-toothed bunny, and you run away, and you’re passing your genes on to a bunch of other scared idiots. So that’s the thing. But kids are naturally curious, and if you give them the ability to investigate things, many of them are really, really into it. I mean, there’s a reason why this is not, I’m not trying to make a gender-specific thing, but boys more than girls are super interested in watching construction projects.
Nick St. Louis:
Yes, I-
Steven Sashen:
They like seeing how things work.
Nick St. Louis:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
A friend of mine made a bajillion dollars once he had a son, and he noticed this. He just took a camera out to construction sites and shot 30 minutes of video, and sold those videos, made millions.
Nick St. Louis:
Genius.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So again, we’re not wired to do this, because the energy and efficiency of it. And in fact, when you create a new belief and someone challenges it, the research is very clear. You actually use that contrary information to hold onto your belief even more firmly. And when you really challenge somebody on it, they react like you’re trying to kill them. And I think that’s a neurological phenomenon, where the way we store certain kind of beliefs is very similar to the way we store our very sense of identity. And so, they’re very tightly, tightly wound.
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah. So you got to decouple those. And I mean, I learned, I think that’s one of the biggest things you see is, people take attacks on their concept. They’re not even attacks. But trying to give someone a different perspective and challenging the one they hold is like you’re challenging their entire existence.
Steven Sashen:
Even just asking them questions. A friend of mine used to bring people that he knew to a brunch that we had every Sunday, just to get them to argue with me about things. Did we land on the moon?
Nick St. Louis:
It’s like speed chess, you’re just there. No, yes, no,
Steven Sashen:
No. What I would do, I would ask them questions about the arguments they were presenting and they wouldn’t be able to answer the questions. And I never made one comment about my position.
Nick St. Louis:
Right. You just went straight up Socratic on them.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. When someone talked about the moon landing being fake, I said, “Do you know what kind of computers were being used at the time to display information?”
Because in the ’60s, human beings didn’t have computers. I remember the first computer that I ever saw was not something, in fact, ironically was playing Lunar Lander, the first little game on a 300 baud modem in junior high school or high school. And even that wasn’t a good simulation. So what kind of computer does it take to do a simulation that’s good enough to fool the hundred thousand people that were involved in that project, and did that computer exist at that time? And their brains would start to fry. And the answer is no. Those things didn’t exist at this time. I mean, they were doing this stuff on slide rules, figuring out how to get people to the moon. So anyway, there was a tangent about teaching people and there was something else. I don’t remember.
Nick St. Louis:
The solution to taking back science. And then we got into, yeah, I think the Socratic method of just asking people who get upset when you ask them questions, it’s very telling. And sometimes that is my deep participation in the conversation where it’s like, I just asked you a question and you got upset. I don’t know if I want to pursue more energy in it.
Steven Sashen:
Well, here’s another variation of that, and this will be a rant of mine. So I’ve been living and breathing this stuff for more than a decade. People will challenge me with their opinions about things for which they have little to no information. And when I present the data that I’ve collected over the years, not my personal opinions, but actual information, they don’t handle it very well.
Nick St. Louis:
Why do you think they don’t handle it very well?
Steven Sashen:
I have two favorites. One is someone who didn’t like that we weren’t a 100% vegan company and said, “Well, why don’t you use these other vegan leathers?”
I said, “Because there aren’t any that perform well enough for what we’re trying to do.”
And he said, “What about this pineapple leather?”
And I said, without having to look it up, because I already knew about it, “Oh, the one that explicitly says it’s not for use in footwear?”
And he said, “What about the mushroom leather at the time?”
I said, “Oh,” and again, I knew about it already. I said, “At the time, they’d only made one yard of it.” I said, “So it doesn’t exist and it’s super expensive. Now by the way, they’re using it for things and it also says not for use for footwear.”
And he says, “What about,” he mentioned one or two other things, and I knew about them already and responded already, because I’ve looked into it already. Until finally his only response to me is, “Well, what makes you such an expert?”
Nick St. Louis:
It’s your job.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it’s exactly what I said. It’s because I am one of the experts on the planet about this. I mean, it’s what I do all day every day. So that’s a favorite. My other favorite is humans didn’t evolve to run on hard surfaces. So this is a naturalistic fallacy that there was some Edenic time where we were all just swimming in chocolate rivers and having grapes fed to us by angels.
Nick St. Louis:
And running on trampolines, everywhere we go.
Steven Sashen:
And running on trampolines. And I say, “Well, dude, have you ever been to the places that you think we evolved in?”
I mean, it’s worse than running on any road. Hard packed mud, just like cement, but with prickly stickly things and hot things in a way that you’ve never experienced. Go down to the Copper Canyon and run with the Tarahumara. I mean, what they’re running on is like what we all ran on for thousands of years. And boy, you will pick a paved road any day of the week.
But the other interesting part is, even if we didn’t, “evolve to run on those surfaces,” that doesn’t mean we’re not able to. If we grew up on a different surface, that doesn’t mean we’re not adaptable to other things.
Nick St. Louis:
And I think some people actually make the slippery, they lose the distinguish between concrete. Maybe we weren’t supposed to run, we didn’t evolve to run on asphalt, but that doesn’t say that we’re unable, like you’re saying. But they immediately take that and then they kind of sneak in hard surfaces as a replacement for that, thinking they’re synonymous. And if you agree that okay, asphalt didn’t exist a thousand years ago, I agree with that, and we didn’t run on that, but that doesn’t mean we can’t run on hard surfaces or that we didn’t run on hard surfaces. So it’s like these little tricks that people don’t really, I’d even think notice, but they just say, and they’re like, “See, that’s the truth.”
Steven Sashen:
Well, and again, it goes back to this whole, it goes back to this thing, it goes back to counterfactuals. It’s like, okay, if you believe we didn’t evolve to run on a hard surface, can you look for an opposite case? Can you look for a case where we did run on surfaces that are hard or difficult, or dangerous in some way? And see if there’s examples. Here’s a fun example, back to Paleo. There’s a woman named Denise Minger, M-I-N-G-E-R, whom I totally adore. She’s brilliant and smart, and just absolutely wonderful, and very funny. And she became the belle of the Paleo ball, because she had been a diehard raw food vegan and then started having a bunch of health problems, and then switched to being like, “I’m just going to go kill my own cow and eat it raw,” practically.
Nick St. Louis:
Good for her.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. So she got totally, totally into paleo things, and the paleo people loved her, because she was a former vegan. Well, she’s also a smart researcher, so she decided to research some of the things that the paleo people were saying, and look for counterfactuals. So refined carbohydrates are bad for you. Well, let’s check. And she found some tribes, some parts of the world, where people eat like 80% of their calories come from refined carbohydrates, and they do not have the health problems that the paleo community was saying that you would get if you ate refined carbohydrates.
There are other people who don’t eat refined carbohydrates, but just get the majority of their dietary calorie intake through other forms of carbohydrate, including sugar, just plain straight sugar or honey. Again, they don’t have the health problems that the paleo community suggested. What they do is they don’t eat too many calories and they’re relatively active. So the whole thing of looking for an-
Nick St. Louis:
And their lifestyle reflects what our biology is built for, even external to that. There’s so many little things that we do that are so countered to what our biology is built for. We discount all the other things sometimes.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and back to your point about what our biology is built for. Again, the idea that there’s a one size fits all is something that we all love the idea of, and sometimes it’s true, and I’ll say that about that in a second, and sometimes it’s not. So there’s this idea that there’s a diet that’s the best diet. Well, Denise, oh, she also looked at the rice diet. The rice diet was something that was done at Duke University, which is where I went, and there was a guy who took morbidly obese people and put them on a diet of basically just fruit juice and raw white sugar. Not only did they lose, I mean, they were eating as much as they could eat all day every day. Now, the challenge with this diet is he literally whipped people into eating, because it’s so unpalatable to eat like that, and he was just trying to force them to get calories in their body, and they could eat as-
Nick St. Louis:
Like with a whip, a literal physical whip?
Steven Sashen:
Literally.
Nick St. Louis:
That’s great. That seems, how did you get that one by ethical review board?
Steven Sashen:
Once they found out, the whole thing disappeared. And when I was at Duke, I knew people who delivered for Domino’s who got paid a thousand dollars a pizza to sneak pizzas in to some of the people who were on the rice diet.
Nick St. Louis:
That’s great. A thousand dollars. Wow.
Steven Sashen:
Thousand dollars.
Nick St. Louis:
Those guys hit the jackpot.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, it was a good one. So I was like, I got to start delivering pizza. But anyway, not only did it bring their weight down to normal, it eliminated permanently their diabetes. And so again, a massive counterfactual. So the idea that there’s a single diet for everyone, so certain things about our biology are probably unique to us for various reasons. Our gut microbiome, our ancestry, a number of things, but certain things are not unique to us.
What makes efficient running? What’s the best way? Look, what’s the best way to get the most foot? Let’s just use something simple, push-ups. What’s the best way to orient your body and do push-ups? You might have some arguments about whether where you position your elbows and how wide your hands are, but there’s one thing you’re never going to disagree about. Do you do this with your fingers or do you do this with your fingers? There’s no one who’s ever going to do a push-up like this, because this is more stable, similar idea with your feet. So there’s certain things-
Nick St. Louis:
Those biomechanical principles that apply regardless of how special you think you are.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. Moment arms are moment arms, doesn’t make a difference who you are. You might be better or worse at certain things based on your muscle belly and the length of your femur, various things, but fundamentally, it’s still going to be the same, that if you land with your foot in front of your body, you’re applying breaking forces, which you then put additional stress on the body, and then you have to reaccelerate and do that in a place where you prime movers, your glutes and hamstrings, are not being used optimally and under stress. When you’re pulling instead of pushing, that’s problematic.
Nick St. Louis:
Well, what about runner X who runs ultra marathons all the time, whereas extremely cushioned shoes, heel strikes. They do it, so it must be okay.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, there’s a couple of things for that. One is how long are they able to continue doing that enjoyably and healthily? And some people, maybe they can because look, here’s, well, this is another thing about science. And even I will argue the minimalist community misrepresents science very frequently or misrepresents what they think of science very frequently, and so they’ll show pictures of people landing with their heel first and say, see their heel striking. That’s bad. I go, “Whoa, you don’t know how fast that person moving across the ground. For all you know, their foot’s coming in contact with the ground-”
Nick St. Louis:
Maybe they’re walking also.
Steven Sashen:
Well, they’re clearly running in this case, but they could be walking. But even still, the fact that your heel comes in contact with the ground first, the more important thing is the force application. So if you’re moving fast enough-
Nick St. Louis:
Right, the rate of loading.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. Your heel might touch the ground first, but by the time, the split second that it takes to end up sort of flat-footed, for example, could be so fast that for all practical purposes, you’re a mid-foot lander, it just doesn’t really matter. And there are some people who are just better able to tolerate certain things than others. There are some people who, I mean for whatever reason, but you can’t use the exception to try and prove the rule in this case.
Nick St. Louis:
You can’t use one snapshot to say, do you know anything about that person’s injury history? Do you know anything about, have you tested… What about runners that don’t run that way and that run with less injuries? There’s so many variables missing, and it’s really easy to simplify it to the point where it proves what you’re trying to prove, but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually true.
Steven Sashen:
Right. Human beings, again, another things we want to do is try and simplify things as much as possible, and we usually go way too far and oversimplify things. So look, the whole barefoot thing when people say this is partly what got Vibram in trouble, is that the way the five fingers was positioned and the way barefoot running was positioned in 2009, was just take off your shoes or put on a pair of five fingers, and everything’s going to be great. It just wasn’t true, and I’m the first one to say it’s not about the footwear, it’s about the form. It’s just that certain footwear makes it easier or less easy to get enough feedback to notice your shitty form and to adapt to a better form, and it’s all about the feedback. This is why Irene Davis breaks things down in what she calls minimalist and partial minimalist shoes. I accused her of being politically correct and that if she weren’t, she would say true minimalist and fake minimalist, and the fake minimalist are the ones put out by pretty much every major shoe company. Which A, are typically-
Nick St. Louis:
They have less of the crap, but they don’t have no crap.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, exactly. Usually they’re too narrow in the mid-foot, they’re often not wide enough in the forefoot, and they have too much padding. And it’s the padding, because then you can’t feel enough to get the information that you need, that that’s the real biggest problem.
Nick St. Louis:
It’s like Steven, you can either swallow this much mercury or we’ll give you a little bit less. What would you rather? It’s like, I don’t want any mercury. Actually, I’m good.
Steven Sashen:
Well, the mercury is the dessert they give you with that restaurant where it’s either one of the seven meals that gives you food poisoning, or one of three meals. So they have this amazing Mercury flambé just, oh man.
Nick St. Louis:
It’s to die for.
Steven Sashen:
It’s to die for.
Nick St. Louis:
Okay, two things and then we’ll wrap up, and I think we should just, I was like, oh yeah, we’ll do half an hour. It is what it is, but we’ve already gotten 45 minutes, so maybe we should just do these once a month and just have a release valve for talking about shit that we don’t talk about otherwise, maybe. Two things. Number one, I had this kind of thought in my head, when someone the other day is like, “I found a research study that I think is pretty good, that shows orthotics help reduce foot pain.”
And I was like, okay, let’s play. If someone comes up to you and says, “Steven, what color is the sky?” Let’s just go real time. Let’s just pretend this is real. Steven, what color is the sky?
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to say blue, but only because I’m giving a colloquially correct answer.
Nick St. Louis:
Okay, perfect. Well, what if I told you I have research to show that the sky’s black? What would you say about that? I have a thousand pictures. I have a lot of data, a thousand pictures that show that the sky is black, so I don’t know if the sky is blue and I’d like you to prove me otherwise, because I have research. Do you have research to show that the sky is blue?
Steven Sashen:
I don’t actually. In fact, yeah, in fact there’s some… Well, anyway, no, I don’t.
Nick St. Louis:
What I would say is, do you have eyeballs? Yes. Go outside and see what color the sky is and then we can both. Let’s just go look together and it’s like people forget that you can figure shit out yourself. Scientists don’t have to tell you everything.
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, hold on. This is going to sound paradoxical and absurd, then this next thing I’m going to say. I have a friend who’s one of the smartest people I know. That’s not the absurd part. Here it is. Who thinks the earth might be flat. Now, I have said to him exactly what you just said. There are from the flat earth model, there are comments about where the sun and the moon should be seen at certain places at certain times of the year. The best thing to do is go down to the bottom of South America and then take a look and see what you see. I said, “I will pay you to get on an airplane and go check, and see if the sun is in fact where the flat earth model says it should be,” when like the solstice for example. He won’t do it. He won’t do it. He refuses-
Nick St. Louis:
He doesn’t want to change his mind.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, he refuses to use his own experience. Now, but here’s the problem with what you said. It’s really-
Nick St. Louis:
Well, what if you’re colorblind? That could be a problem.
Steven Sashen:
Well, what if you’re colorblind and you don’t have the ability to perceive the information correctly, and we are really not good at looking at information correctly or accurately. So there’s certain kinds of things that to measure them or to understand them requires an understanding of chemistry, biology, physics, usually physics, that if you don’t have it just doesn’t seem to make sense.
Nick St. Louis:
Right.
Steven Sashen:
I mean, look, let’s do a simple thing. Is there a divine creator being? I’m not going to take a position on this, but I will say when you just think about what a human body does, how a human body works, it is so literally unbelievably complex and amazing that I can understand why people would come to a conclusion that there is a divine creator being.
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Again, I’m not saying there is or there isn’t, but it makes sense. When you look out at this stuff-
Nick St. Louis:
But I get it.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. When you look out at the sky at night, especially if you’re somewhere where there’s not a lot of ambient light and you just see all the stars, and you contemplate how far away they are, how vast what you can see is, knowing that you can’t, that all you need is a small telescope to see 10 times more. It’s so literally awesome and overwhelming that there’s this interesting phenomenon that I experience, of an almost innate urge to find a parental figure that makes it all seem okay, because it is literally awesome and overwhelming.
Nick St. Louis:
Right, and it’s comfortable to have an explanation that gives you a rationalization to make sense of things regardless of how actually rational that explanation is.
Steven Sashen:
Correct, and there are certain things where you can get the data really easily, but you need to know more stuff to understand-
Nick St. Louis:
To make meaning of it.
Steven Sashen:
… to what the data is really telling you. So like with the flat earth guys, there’s some really, really easy data that you can show them to prove that the earth is curved, but you need to know a couple of other things about, gosh, how light bends when it goes through different surfaces. And if you don’t want to get into that, again, it goes back to what you were saying before. There’s a, people are distrusting of anyone who knows more than them. Didn’t used to be that way. It used to be that you respected people who had spent time to learn more, but now there’s a distrust of people who seem to know more.
Nick St. Louis:
But they trust Nike, which is weird.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and that’s the thing. Over time, they do trust whatever someone… Look, say a lie, often enough people believe it’s the truth. And then believe it’s the truth often enough, and everyone starts to agree, because the person who originally said it doesn’t need to say it anymore. It becomes part of the cultural-
Nick St. Louis:
Called propaganda.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. Parents now teach their kids they need arch support and motion control. Nike doesn’t have to say that anymore. They don’t. Now they just say, “Don’t you want to be like this genetic freak who you will never be like?”
Nick St. Louis:
Right, and know nothing about the shoes that person’s actually wearing. I spoke to a designer for Jordan brand and he’s like, the shoe that LeBron’s wearing, you might think it’s the same one you buy off the shelf that is basically a steel cast put perfectly in an orientation to think that it’s helping his foot.
Steven Sashen:
Correct.
Nick St. Louis:
Very weird.
Steven Sashen:
Correct. Yeah, it’s really funny. LeBron, wait. No, no. Kobe, obviously before he died, did a video about what he thought a perfect basketball shoe would be. First of all, it was a low top. Secondly, it looked a lot like our stuff. And then, what they actually made is-
Nick St. Louis:
Do you know where that video is? Is that out in the interwebs?
Steven Sashen:
It is. I’ll send you a link and you can post it. It’s a two part interview, because the second part you’ll see is really fun. It’s the shoe they made, which is not what he asked for.
Nick St. Louis:
Big surprise.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah. It’s like there some researchers who went to the Adi lab and they analyzed his gait, and said, “Well, you’re an overstriding heel striker, so we have to make a shoe for you that has extra cushioning in the heel.”
So if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They believe that that’s a fine thing to do, that you need to accommodate for. Despite all the research showing you can’t accommodate for it. There’s no amount of cushioning that accommodates for that.
Nick St. Louis:
And like you said, if you’re not, the light bending part is knowing the intense complexity of the human body and how adaptable and resilient it is. If you don’t know that, then you need to take some sort of technology and use that to do that job. And that’s like, they’re not willing to see how good the body is a self organizing and adapting to be efficient. And that’s the problem.
Steven Sashen:
Well, here, let’s talk about what bodies naturally do. I’m a former all-American gymnast. Bodies, we did not evolve to do double twisting, double backflips.
Nick St. Louis:
Right, but we can.
Steven Sashen:
I did one. I did it.
Nick St. Louis:
There you go. Well, you just proved evolution wrong, I guess. Anyway, I think that’s a good place to leave it.
Steven Sashen:
No, no. Wait. Here. I’m going to prove something else wrong really quickly. One of my best friends became a best friend. He’s a world champion cross country runner, master’s world champion. And one day at practice, he finishes a run. He goes, “I just said a personal best on one of these runs, and I wasn’t even going to come out this morning, because I just felt like crap.”
I said, “Do you ever have races where you feel like crap and you win?”
He goes, “Yeah.”
And by the way, I’ve asked this to a couple of Olympians, and they give the exact same answers. Do you ever have races where you felt like crap and you win? Yes. Have you ever had races where you felt great and you couldn’t make it work? He goes, “Yeah.”
I said, “Well, you just disproved sports psychology.”
Nick St. Louis:
Or you just created a different realm of sports psychology, which is the total opposite of sports psychology.
Steven Sashen:
Well, no. Well, possibly, I’ve had the same experiences, where both as an athlete and as a performer, times that I felt the worst I did the best, and vice versa. But it’s not that it’s not a hundred percent correlated that way or causal that way. But suffice it to say the idea that there’s a particular way you need to think, because it’s thinking that determines who wins. It’s effortless to demonstrate that that’s not true, by just people’s actual experience, the actual data, and yet people still hold onto it. The whole 10,000-hour idea that you can become an expert, takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in things. The moment I heard that, I knew it was wrong, because as a gymnast and as a sprinter, there’s no gymnast or sprinter in history who’s ever put in 10,000 hours. You just can’t.
Nick St. Louis:
It’s not physically possible.
Steven Sashen:
Right. And the question that immediately occurred to me or that immediately hit me is the kind of person who’s willing and wants to spend 10,000 hours on something is different than the person who doesn’t. And you can’t force someone to spend 10,000 hours and turn them into, fill in the blank. Les Paul, Michelangelo, Michael Jordan, pick your favorite Michael. Doesn’t really matter.
Nick St. Louis:
I agree.
Steven Sashen:
Anyway, this all goes back to our fundamental thing of if people learn to think more clearly, their lives could be so much better in certain ways, but admittedly not in others. I mean, finding these comforting thoughts, like there is someone looking out for me. It’s a really comforting thought if you can maintain it.
Nick St. Louis:
But in the end, it’s better. Once you learn to see discomfort as not necessarily a bad thing and something that is kind of an internal signal to be like, okay, I have work to do. Guess what? The work never ends, and you have to find joy in the work instead of trying to think that everything’s rainbows, because it ends up not being the case.
Steven Sashen:
Somebody said to the physicist, Richard Feynman, “I’d hate to be you, because you just see everything as just like atoms and molecules. There’s no amazement.”
He says, “Are you kidding? I can’t look at one of these and still take a drink out of it, because it’s so unbelievably incredible.” Let’s start with a simple thing. These are solid things that you can see through. What?
Nick St. Louis:
Yeah, I know. The world is incredible and you can drive yourself crazy trying to make sense of it, or you can just embrace that it’s a form of magic, and just embrace the fact that you’re in a magical world and it’s great.
Steven Sashen:
The very fact… Look, I’m going to start crying. The very fact that we can have a conversation with another human being, whether it’s over a computer or not, I mean, this is an amazing, amazing world. Even if it didn’t have chocolate in, it would be a very amazing place.
Nick St. Louis:
I’m going to bring you some good chocolate next time I see you, because clearly I got to make sure I got the right kind, so I might have to do some research.
Steven Sashen:
As long as it doesn’t have the word milk in it, you got a good start.
Nick St. Louis:
Okay, that’s good. I can handle that. So Steven, thank you for doing this. I look forward to the next one. People listening, whether you enjoyed it or not, thanks for listening if you got to hear, and you’ll see us again at some point. And yeah, have a good week, Steven.
Steven Sashen:
Cheers. Live life feet first.
Nick St. Louis:
See you. Will do.
Steven Sashen:
I hope you enjoyed my little rant with Nick and probably to be doing more of those. Go visit Nick at www.thefootcollective.com and of course, come visit us at www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find previous episodes and ways to interact with us. As always, please like and share, and review and give us a thumbs up as appropriate, and follow us in all the various places you can, because we are creating this movement about natural movement and you are the one who makes it move. Oh, and if you have any questions or suggestions, people you think should be on the show, whatever you can think of, drop me an email, [email protected]. So until our next episode, go out. Have fun and live life feet first.
Intro/Outro:
You’ve been listening to the Movement Movement Podcast with host Steven Sashen. Remember to join the tribe and subscribe at Jointhemovementmovement.com.