Barbell Shrugged - Barefoot Revolution w/ Mark Sisson, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #796

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

Mark Sisson, widely regarded as the forefather of the Primal/Paleo lifestyle movement, is an innovator and trendsetter in the health and fitness world. He has written several best-selling books and a number-one-ranked blog promoting ancestral living. Mark founded Primal Kitchen foods to introduce healthful options for condiments and sauces to the marketplace for the first time. The brand grew quickly, was acquired by the Kraft-Heinz corporation in 2018, and today is a dominant player in the "better for you" food revolution. As a lifelong athlete and former elite level marathoner and ironman triathlete, Mark has long been obsessed with optimizing foot functionality and minimizing the chronic pain, injury, and dysfunction caused by traditional athletic and active lifestyle footwear. Mark was one of the earliest proponents of barefoot-inspired living and the minimalist shoe movement. Alas, despite owning dozens of pairs of minimalist shoes, his frustration grew at the industry’s inability to produce a functional, comfortable, good-looking minimalist shoe… Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Peluva Shoe Company Mark Sisson on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

My family this week on barbell shrug mark Sisson is back on the show It's been too long since we've had him on and actually since we've had him on he has exited out of his Condiment business Primal Kitchen and is into brand new Venture Paloova shoes in the barefoot revolution. We're gonna be digging into all of it today as always friends Make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can check that out over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Marble Shrugged. I'm Anders Warnor. Doug Larsen, Coach Travis Smash. Sisson, Mark Sisson. The legend, man. It's been, we just calculated seven years since we've had you on the show. Yeah, that's a long time. Too long. And you sold your company. Yeah. I mean- You know what it's like,

one thing that's super cool, I do this to my kids all the time just so they think I'm cool. Like when I go to like Barnes and Noble and we go to the fitness book section, I'm like, I know these people. These are daddy's friends. And when I go to the like Barnes and Noble and we go to the fitness book section, I'm like, I know these people. These are daddy's friends. And when I go to the grocery store, I find your products in there and I go, daddy's friend. I do the same thing. I love it.

I know them. Yeah. So that now, but yeah, when did you exit from the last company? Like, this is crazy. But I am now in my, it's over six years that I sold Primal Kitchen. So the good news is- So when we were talking to you seven years ago,

you were like in the middle of diligence and that whole deep dive. Exactly, yeah. I sold it toward the end of 2018. We were really involved in the process of selling and then we closed on January 3rd of 2019. So it's been it's been six years and it's been great. I mean, you know, Kraft did a great job. They've literally a great job of leaving us alone and letting our team stay as was keeping us where we were based out of Oxnard, using a lot of the same co-packers, not having any influence on ingredient choices, but really offering up support in

the terms of R&D, in terms of manufacturing opportunities, distribution, and lots of cash that I was running out of at the time. So it's been a great, I say partnership, I mean, they own it now, but I'm still the face of the brand. I'm still involved on a semi-regular basis. Yeah. I imagine when you were partners, you were very firm about the quality of the products

and the ingredients and all the things, or you wouldn't have sold in the first place. Oh yeah, and look, I mean, people have the really interesting idea of big food as these, you know, conniving, you know, ogres who are like, how can we mess up the health of America? How do we destroy his legacy? Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, to their credit, look, these are guys who, you know, they are not a food company, they're a portfolio company. They own 50 different food brands. So there's Kraft Mac and Cheese, Velveta, there's Folgers Coffee, Planters Peanuts, O'Riota Potatoes, Crystal Light, Kool-Aid, you name it. And none of those brands have anything to do with each other. So at the end of the day, there's no real corporate DNA.

They're just silos of these different, there's no real corporate DNA. They're just silos of these different companies that they're trying to manage from the top. And so when they acquired us, they're like, these guys know what they're doing. These guys look like they're headed in the right direction. This is where food should be headed. So we're just going to sit back, give them the opportunities,

and watch what they do. And that's what they've done for six years. And the company's grown tremendously since then. We're on virtually all the store shelves in the country. And we're in a lot of homes that I never thought we'd be in, people who otherwise would not have had access to better for you healthy foods. So I'm very happy with the way things turned out. That's awesome.

I'm actually happy with the way things turned out. Hmm, that's awesome. I'm actually super curious. You, you're like a fitness junkie and then you start playing business and then you go and have this big exit and is there like a time right after that we go, what do I do now? Like I've done it all. And you obviously have it because you have a new company

and you're still here, you're still in the game, but what is that transition from going and building this very successful company to restarting the engines? You know, it's really interesting because, you know, we talk a lot about enjoying the process, enjoying the journey, have the goal, right? And if you achieve the goal, that's great. But I was an endurance athlete. I trained my ass off for decades to compete in these sort of one-off events, a marathon, a triathlon. And you train, train, train, train, train, and then you race. And maybe if you trained well, you rested well, and you're lucky, you win. And that win, that goal, lasts about a minute and 45 seconds. Yeah.

It's literally like almost, it's almost depressing. Oh shit, I got there, what's next? Now what do I do? How do I follow that up? And so often I see this, for instance, with Olympic athletes who are like, the peak of their life happens when they're 21 or 23 years old.

And I have to put myself in their head and go, what, like, dude, I don't know how you reconfigure your life to start over and something new. But in my case, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So once I sold Primal Kitchen, I tried to be retired for about three weeks and I tried to play some golf, realized I sucked at golf, was never going to get better. So I really set my sights on this challenge that had been facing me the last 40 years,

which is I hate shoes. I hate footwear. I hate wearing street shoes or fashion wear or even, you know, the highest tech running shoes. I hated them all they met they messed my feet up In fact, I had to retire from running because of because of the thick cushioned shoes so I Tried to buy an existing five-toed shoe company and they weren't selling so I thought Yes, that's the V. Yeah. Oh, I own their first one You know, start with a V. Yeah, start with a V. Yeah.

Oh, I own their first ones. Oh. Yeah. That was the fastest way to get like made fun of. Of course. I actually have a great story about them. I lived in San Francisco for three months when Vibram came out with those,

not that they're the company. And the only place that you could buy them was in the Castro at a sex toy shop. Oh God. If you know about Castro, maybe, but it is, it was, I had to like, I didn't have a car so I had to walk all day because I thought these things were like the greatest things ever and I had to have them and I had to go into Castro district district in a sex toy shop and they had no time from sitting around the wall.

Why? Why were they in there? For having like... Well there was a lot of leather and they didn't even have leather but I don't know. It was where I had to go. They looked good with vinyl. Yeah. Alright. If you're going to be into S&M you might as well wear shoes that make you look ridiculous. Yeah.

There was a time, look, I'm trying to think what year it was, maybe 2011, when I went to the CrossFit Games and there were 15,000 people and 14,500 were wearing those shoes. Yeah. And then, you know, a bad series of events happened. They, you know, they fell out of fortune. And then two years later, I was the only one wearing at that same CrossFit event years later. But anyway, what I recognized was that there's really something there, that the whole minimalist shoe movement is a real thing and it should have

been executed a lot better than it was. There are lots of brands out there right now. There's Zero Shoes, my friend Stephen Sashin, there's Vivo Barefoot, there's Altra Running Shoes. There are a lot of these minimalist shoes, but no other five-toed shoes. And I really was quite clear that I wanted to develop a comfortable, attractive shoe that was functional. So this became my Paloova shoe

and spent two years in R&D. So my son is my co-founder, so we started the company and we did a bunch of R&D and wear testing. So we launched about two years ago and the response has been amazing. I mean, we've got, you know, tens and tens of thousands of customers who are just really digging the shoes and we get the kind of feedback like, you know, you ruined me because I'll never want to wear another shoe again because I can feel my feet. I can feel my, I can feel the ground I'm walking on,

which is a good thing. I'm using all of my toes. Lots of people in the gym. And this is, you know, this is apropos of you guys, you know, great toe, great ass, right? And so you gotta get that big toe engaged, abducted and pressed down to engage the glute. So we got a lot of people who are lifting heavy

with our shoes on in the gym and going, look, I feel like I'm engaging 15 or 20% more of my entire leg when I'm doing squats or hack squats or dead lifts or whatever it is they're doing. So we're really, really pleased with the, let me just, I gotta show you a pair of, if you. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna send you my address after this,

cause I'm in a shoe wearing phase right now, which was actually like the sunshine, the surfing, and being shoeless and shirtless all the time, were my favorite things about San Diego. And then I moved to North Carolina where like shoeless is a lot harder. You can't just like go out and eat dinner without shoes on like Cannon when you live at the beach.

So now I'm in shoes. Oh, those are sick. So check this out. So that's this is our sport, right? Five-toed, five-toed articulation, you know, still very, very pliable. Looks like a quote regular shoe, except it's only got nine millimeters of stack height total from the heel to the ground. This is an early version, one of my favorite ones. This is the strand, regular strand. As you hold that up, you can't even tell that it's a five-toed shoe until you turn to the side.

It looks like a dress shoe. This is a desert boot. It's not quite a dress shoe. We make dress shoes. We make patent leather dress shoes for the workplace. This is a five-toed. This is a desert boot. Goes great with jeans or khakis or whatever. We've got seven styles for men right now and six for women. But the whole idea is toe freedom. Get your toes articulated. You feel the ground you walk on,

and you want to make every change in terrain or texture of the earth, you wanna conform your foot to that. So you want the brain to feel, to sense what you're walking on, cobblestones, or a divot, or a stick, or whatever. The brain feels it, the arch knows exactly how much to scrunch, the toes know exactly how much to bend,

to conform, maybe roll the ankle out a little bit because that's what it's supposed to do to offset the pressure on the knee, otherwise you'll tweak a knee. And with this concept of enhanced ground feel, plus a little bit more cushion than the original five-toed shoes. We have about three meters of cushion because my biggest complaint with those guys was I love to walk. That's the other thing we're going to talk about today. My new book, Born to Walk. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned

over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. Arte is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. Arate is something completely different. Arate is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arate isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes.

It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit aratelab.com. That's a-r-e-t-e lab dot com. Now back to the highest. To learn more, visit arietelab.com. That's a-r-e-t-e lab.com. Now back to the show. I couldn't walk more than three or four miles, two or three miles on pavement or concrete without getting metatarsal bone bruising because it just wasn't enough cushion there. So we've we've accommodated that. So we've kind of created what I think is the ideal minimalist shoe for just about everything. And we've got a golf shoe coming out in June

that's gonna take the storm, yeah. That's awesome. The barefoot thing, I love any change that you can make where within like a week, you can actually feel the adaptation and your body feels healthier about it. And going barefoot is probably like at the top of that list. If you start walking around without shoes on and then the the opposite to that is like having

to put shoes on and you realize how incredibly uncomfortable and not actually like ergonomically correct or just there. It's like walking in this cat that doesn't work. That's it. I mean, most people's injuries, whether it's walking injuries or standing around injuries or running injuries are caused by their shoe, which is encouraging bad form

and forcing them into bad position. The foot, the unshod foot, and the bare foot knows exactly what to do. It knows, you know, if you close your eyes The foot, the unshod foot, the bare foot, knows exactly what to do. If you close your eyes and run outside on a field of grass, it's got some divots and some gopher holes, you'll still be able to run easily because your feet will adapt immediately, your brain will know immediately, again, as I say,

how much to roll the ankle a little bit to offset the change in this. All that goes away when you put on stiff shoes and you've now compressed the big toe against the other toes. Now you've negated all of this ground feel, all of the sensation, and you've raised the heel, 20 millimeters. And now, so you've shortened the calf, put more pressure on the Achilles.

It's ridiculous what regular shoes do. And to your point, when you go outside, if you take your shoes off and go outside and walk around in the grass, you can't help but smile. There's something going on there. The minute you're around barefoot in grass, it just evokes this sort of natural antidepressant in people.

Yeah. On the R&D side of this, I remember having the Vibrams. And I don't know if it was too much of the cloth in between the toes but that part always felt very unnatural to me. Did you guys, was there like a focus on that piece of it where the toes are supposed to like naturally kind of like grab the ground as you as. And when I put those on, that was the most uncomfortable part of all of them. It wasn't really like the barefoot part.

It was that, there was this like cloth in between my toes that was either just felt not right. Well, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of that with these. But- Yeah. Well, I was more just wondering about the R&D side. Did you guys look into that? Oh yeah, we looked into what is the sort of most common foot shape,

because people have different shaped feet. So some people have a longer second toe, and so we have to accommodate that. So when you buy our shoes, we tell you to buy based on where the second toe will hit the end of the shoe. It doesn't matter that there's a little bit of space left here, the rest of these will fill up.

It's not about everything fitting perfectly into the ends. It's about having the ability to articulate those toes and conform to the surface that you're walking on. Some people have a problem with their toes being separated by cloth. That's just a thing. They're just not used to it. But those same, I'm asked those same people,

okay, do you prefer mittens or gloves when you go snowboarding or skiing? I mean, I guess some people prefer mittens, but I'm a glove guy myself, so. By the way, the name of the company is Peluva, P-E-L-U-V-A, and it's a made up name. And in Portuguese of all languages, P-E means foot and Lua means glove.

So it's foot glove in Portuguese. Amazing. Wait, so you're onto your next book, which how many books have you put out at this point? It's gotta be, you gotta have a dozen books under you. Yeah, 12, yeah. There you go. Well, nailed the numbers.

Not counting cookbooks. Oh yeah, there. There always has to be a cookbook to accompany the new diet book that I put out, right? Whether it was keto or intermittent fasting or even the Primal Blueprint. Always had to have at least one cookbook behind it. Sure. And it's a tangent just for a moment. Are you still writing Mark's Daily Apple? Are you still like on the article train, so to speak? Well, so I post, I have an Instagram site,

Mark Sisson Primal, and I post there. We have a team that still posts at Mark's Daily Apple, but Mark's Daily Apple, dude, it got hacked about a year and a half ago. It's owned by Kraft, and they were so hesitant to bring it back online in terms of act because it uses WordPress. And I don't know the thing, but WordPress is open access and they didn't want people to get it. Anyway, that was one of the issues with corporate, the legal and tech said we don't dare bring it back online.

And so it sort of, you know, it died an ignominious death. I mean, it's horrible for me because I've been writing since 2006 to around 19 years of writing every day. And then all that stuff is now lost in the, it's all, you know, you could get some of it on the way back machine, but anyway, it's a horrible story. I feel like that was the most wisdom I've heard in an enormously long time. Like, hey, Mark, how'd you do that?

I wrote a daily blog every day for 19 years. You got, Oh, so I should do a little more. So there's that. Yeah. I'd imagine you just have a love for writing in general to do something that consistently for that long. Well, I hate writing, but I'm good at it. So this is one of those things that, and I say hate with a wink,

you know, I force myself to do the work and I do feel like I'm pretty good at it. And if you listen to any of the latest pundits, you know, the Scott Galways, you know, Professor Galway and all those guys, they'll say, find something you're good at that people want, that provides value, and, you know, that's where you'll make the most impact and ultimately build a career. So, you don't have, it doesn't have to be your passion. It's not my passion, right? But it is probably my purpose. My purpose is to educate the world with regard to

Primal Blueprint and even with Primal Kitchen, the purpose was to change the way the world eats. And I think we did a great job of accomplishing that. With Paluva, it's to change the way the world walks. And along with that, there's a lot of requisite education that I have to do. So I have to spend a lot of time educating people on how their shoes are screwing their feet up and

how there's a way to do this better and how, I mean, I can't, I can't, I talked to one of the more preeminent anti-aging docs, a female, about a month ago, and she loves the concept of paloovas and she will not bring herself to wear them because she's a shoe girl. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? I mean, you understand everything about it. But, you know, the sort of ick factor of five toes is enough for you to not partake in this thing that would fix your bunions. But I guess, you know, so that's an educational thing. It's going to have to take time.

And that's what I've invested. I've invested in the time it's going to take to educate the population on how foot health is really the new sleep. It's the lowest hanging fruit in the longevity space. Guys, if you think about what a long life looks like, and you talk to the Dave Aspreys of the world who want to live to 160, or the Brian Johnsons who want to live forever. Forever.

You have to kind of come back and go, okay, well, why you get out of bed in the morning? What is your purpose every day to go do this again and again and again so it doesn't turn out like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. And, and the, the idea behind the, the purpose of this, just lost my train of thought, where was it going boys? Uh, it's on my long city and Brian Johnson. Yeah. So these guys, right. So these guys want to live forever. So I would say the real, it's the quality of your life.

That's really going to be the thing you're trying to address with all of the other things. That's what we talked about when we had a longevity podcast, yes, about the quality. Like the quality of life, and it's defined with two things. Mobility, like I wanna be able to walk through this world, whether it's get on a plane and fly to Italy and take a walking tour, or whether it's a walk next door,

chat with my neighbors, or go out for a walk on the beach because I'm right here in South Beach. But it's the ability to move mobility, mostly walking and cognition, access to memory. So if I have those two things going for me, then I'm way ahead of the game of all of these other people that are just tracking the macros and tracking their steps and tracking their sleep and wearing their CGMs and all this other shit.

So movement becomes super critical to longevity. Like walking is the single best thing you can do for longevity. Whether you're talking to Peter Atiyah or whether you're talking to Dan Butiner, who wrote the Blue Zones. And with whom I disagree on the diet part of things, but everything else, the walking,

the gardening, the lifestyle. Walking is the single greatest thing a human being can do. I wrote this book called Born to Walk because we're not born to run. That was a acute story that Christopher McDougall wrote about persistence hunters. We're born to walk. We're born to be able to run a little bit once in a while, but not metronomically every day, seven minute mile. Yeah. Can you think about the science of the shoe? I've heard, you know, I understand that there's, you know, what, 33 joints in the foot. And so, and then we're trying to compact all, you know, make it into one with the shoe. Yeah. But and I've heard you talk so far about, you know, the importance of the big toe being

placed into the grounds. But see, can you just give us the quick like what is what is the science? Well, first of all, the science is has been backed up in the last 10 years by 20 or 30 studies that have looked at shod versus unshod or shod traditional conventional running shoes versus minimalist footwear. And every single one of them shows a greater improvement in strength, mobility, and resilience when wearing minimalist shoes or going barefoot. So that's part of the proof. Now what's going on at the level of science is that the foot is, because of its unique structure, it's an architectural marvel. Yeah. And you know, so the foot wants to land,

when you're walking, you want to land on all five metatarsals that are just behind these toes. Well, what a regular traditional shoe does is it rolls your foot up like this. So you now focused on the three because you're pushing these squishing these together, right? Focusing on the three metatarsals, the middle three metatarsals, which is over stressful to the plantar fascia region to all of the muscles that are involved in whether it's walking or jogging or dancing or jumping or lifting. So, the foot also has a it's it's sort of a twisted plane. So it it needs it needs to twist in different angles to utilize the forces appropriately and is built to do that. So when you're walking, you land on a heel and you twist on your roll off.

So it's it starts with a heel, it rockers through the ankle and then it rockers through the ankle, and then it rockers through the great toe. A lot of people are compromised in this perfect gait because their shoe forces their feet outward because it constrains their big toe to the point that now, because you're supposed to roll off the big toe when you walk,

your walking gait rolls off the big toe, but if you squish the big toe over there, now you gotta go to, in order to do that, you gotta roll off the side. So people become knock-kneed and duck-footed and web, you know, it's like a crazy biomechanical Rube Goldberg device created by shoes. And if you take those same people and you make them spend

some time barefoot, consciously barefoot on a decent surface like grass or gravel, they'll ultimately rediscover the perfect kinetic chain. Everyone's born with a perfect kinetic chain. Everyone's born with, again, whether you have knees that go in, hips that go out, feet that are whatever shape, you're born with a perfect kinetic chain, provided your brain gets the information it needs on exactly how to orchestrate and organize the joints and the muscles and ligaments and tendons and all this stuff

in your perfect kinetic chain. Now you wrap your feet in casts, put them in shoes, raise the heel up, offset the center of gravity so your hips are tilted forward because you raised the heel up, scrunch the toes together, create bunions in the big toe. Yeah, you're going to mess up that perfect kinetic chain. So the science is, and again, this is the dilemma I have in educating people, especially on Instagram and Facebook, where you got eight seconds to make your point, you know, and then they scroll.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. As I've gotten older, all the running and walking that I prefer to do is generally done like in the woods, like trail running, hiking, hiking in the mountains. If I step on a sharp rock as an example, is there enough cushioning or padding on those where if I was to hike for many hours

and I'm walking on sticks and rocks and all the things where they're protecting my feet and then they need to? Absolutely. Let me see, I've got another version here. This one, there's a, I don't know if you know Dan over at Wild Gym Co, He's the rucking guy. So this is our ATR. This is our trail shoe. And it has a substantial, it's got some

tread on it there. Again, it's still a very pliable shoe and it's still only one centimeter stack height, but it's much more robust. I do a lot of trails. I do go to Europe every summer and I spend an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes two hours every day hiking. And I hike on really gnarly, craggy, pointy rocks and with angles that shift. So if I were wearing hiking boots, I'd roll my ankle or I'd twist a knee or something like that. But because I've got the Palubis on, I just conform. I can jog over these really unnatural surfaces. And the pointy rocks are nothing.

Now, will this take a massive Amazon thorn? No, it won't take, you know, then you're on your own now. But in terms of rocks, I haven't take, you know, that's, then you're, then you're on your own now, but, but in terms of rocks, I haven't met a rock that I couldn't step on comfortably, even, even lightly jog on and, and not feel better for having done that. Yeah. Sure. Do you make them for kids?

Cause adults are hard to fix. Kids are easy to fix. The problem is it's tough enough for an adult to get his toes into these things the first time. Oh yeah. The first time. Try getting a eight year an adult to get his toes into these things the first time. Oh yeah. Try getting an eight-year-old or a four-year-old into these. So the best thing for kids, before you screw them up with the cute little Mary Janes and all the other stuff they wear, make them go barefoot as often as they can. Barefoot in the house, barefoot outside as often as they can. And then buy, there's a number of companies that make really wide

toe box shoes for kids and because kids feet aren't yet screwed up by the narrow shoes, they'll naturally display in a wide toe box shoe. One of the problems with adults is that by the time we get to them, their feet are messed up from decades of stuff. So even if you put them in a wide toe box, regular wide toe box shoe, their toes don't like automatically find this beautiful wide split. They're still messed up in inside the wide toe box. So, you know, what we say about Paluvus is if you're if you're if your feet slide right into these shoes, you want these shoes. If your feet don't slide right into these shoes, you want these shoes. If your feet don't slide right into these shoes,

you need these shoes. Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna counteract all the problems you've created for yourself. Yeah. You're talking about me right now. My third, my middle toe steps on top of my fourth toe. Like all the time.

I've done the toe spacers. Like I've done Jiu Jitsu and wrestling my entire life. Like all the time. I've done the toe spacers. Like I've done jujitsu and wrestling my entire life. Like wrestling had shoes on, but jujitsu for the last 20 years is barefoot. So I'm doing a barefoot real activity that's contorting my foot in many ways, but still my toes kind of overlap. So I've been in shoes for the longest time. I got ultras on right now that have a wide toe box and they're very comfortable. But having fabric in between all my toes where I have these like these toe spacers on everywhere I go would be very helpful.

Now, that's the thing. I mean, and by the way, toe space is a big industry. It's been tens of millions, you know, have been sold over the last bunch of years. So people recognize that their toes are messed up, their feet are messed up. So they're buying toe spacers, but, you know, they're wearing them for an hour at the house while they watch TV or they're buying toe spacers, but they're wearing them for an hour at the house while they watch TV. Some companies make toe spacers that you can wear and then put them inside your ultras, which is a legit solution. But what we've done is we've said, okay, let's put you in these toe sockets, which are neutral.

They're aligning your feet the way they should be. And then every step you take, you are passively training your feet to become what we call the intrinsic, the small muscles of the feet, to become more pliable, flexible, more relaxed, realigned and strengthened, so that over time, you won't have that crossover effect. But if you don't, like your perfect example, what I'm talking about, the fact that you don't do anything to fix that means that when you put on a wide toe box shoe,

you're still suffering from the same crossover effect. You gotta kind of do something about that. Yeah. And if you wanna add extra material, like toe socks, would that even add a little bit extra material, would that be helpful? Yeah, no, that's a great one. Yeah, toe socks would be good for you.

And we make toe socks along with, cause some people want to wear socks with their shoes. We made these shoes for me. I don't like wearing socks. So all of our models are like, I'm the primary customer, but then we do make a five-toed sock. And for a lot of people who aren't yet ready to go to a five-toed shoe, a five-toed sock is a good intro into that concept.

You've got to put them on and just that amount of fabric. You're right. Just the amount of fabric between the toes can be enough to get that process started. Yeah. I've been doing that lately and it has been helpful. What do you think happened to the whole, I had some five toes shoes and I loved them and like all of a sudden there was like a little bleep where people thought they weren't cool. Now yours look way cooler like Doug said. You can barely tell you know what I mean like yeah what happened like well why did all of

a sudden they go through the whole little phase where people you know. When I write the when I write the book about Paloova, I'm going to tell the story of what happened in those early days of the five-toed shoe. The company that we all know, the other five-toed shoe, they hit the market big time. The book Born to Run came out, and lots of people said, hey, that's a good idea. Barefoot running, minimalist shoes. I'm a runner. I run 60 miles a week. I think I'll go run seven miles the first

day in these minimalist shoes. Lots of people got injured because they didn't transition. I mean, this was more of an indictment of the shoes they'd been running in their whole career, right? If you've run in these thick cushioned, padded shoes- Yeah, your body's adapted to that, yeah. You know, your body's adapted to the mileage. You're able to do the mile, so your heart can do it, but your feet have not adapted the way- Yeah. Like I started running in the 60s. I ran in Chuck Taylor's, and then there was an early running shoe called the Onitsuka Tiger. It was a quarter-inch thick. It was your feet that told you that's enough miles for the week.

It was your feet that said, dude, you know, you can't run more than 40 miles a week or 50 miles a week. Well, when Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman at Nike came along and they said, I got all these runners up at the Oregon Track Club. They're great world-class runners. And they can't do much mileage because their shoes suck. They have good form, so it's not about adding cushion for the form, but I just like to put some cushioning in these shoes so that they can run 90 miles a week or 100 miles a week and keep up with the Europeans. And so that was the origin of the thick padded cushioned running shoe, which was designed initially for great runners like myself. And I was an early Nike athlete.

But over the next decade, as running became a thing and it got promoted, now you've got people who should not be running, overweight or trying to do it for weight loss, cardiovascular health, because that became a thing, with shitty form. But now these cushioned shoes allow them to run a thing with shitty form. But now these cushioned shoes allow them to run the miles with shitty form. If they were running in the old school shoes that I

ran in, they'd have gotten 200 yards down the road and said, screw it, I'm walking home. So the shoes became a big issue for enabling people to get to this point where they got injured, they got more and more injured. So when the minimalist footwear came around in 2007, 2008, and Christopher McDougall said, you're all running with shitty form because the shoes are bad and the shoes are encouraging bad form. He was right. But so many people got injured doing, running untrained. They just didn't train themselves.

It's like, you know, you don't go to the gym after you haven't worked out for, you know, six years and go to the gym and do 300 curls, repetitions of curl the biceps the first day. Well, this is what they were doing. So that happened. And then the company got sued for false advertising and it really wasn't their fault. They would have won that lawsuit,

but because they backed down and settled, it made it look like they lost the lawsuit. So those two bad events, the company went from way up here to like, people said, wow, not only are these shoes not good for you, they're bad for you. And so people, and that's where Hoka came in, right? And all the sketchers and Messiah Basic and that's where Hoka came in, right? And all the

Skechers and Messiah Basic Training and all these shoe companies came in with these thick, thick, maximal shoes. Yeah. The Skechers is terrifying the shoes they put out. Yeah. No doubt. Those, the ones that look like a rocking chair. Terrifying, terrifying doesn't begin to describe it. I mean, I go to the

shoe stores now and I put on a pair of the blades, the rockers, and I started, I ran down the aisle of the shoe store and I started laughing. It's like I'm wearing those, remember the old kangaroo boots from the old days with the springs in them? Yeah. How about the ones that everybody

from their East Bay catalog used to try and dunk. Yeah. We walked around. What were those things called? They were so good. I never. Yeah. There was no shoe in the world was going to get me to dunk, but. Yeah.

No, but anyway, so I just I laugh. I'm like, these are like fucking trampolines and I don't know. So two things. First of all, they're not designed for training. They're designed for racing and you have to know how to run well. So people who are like nine minute milers and put these shoes on run slower because it takes away from the natural force production from the healthy, strong, trained foot. So it takes the Achilles and with a great runner who's trained well, that shoe combined with a carbon plate combined with a four-foot landing and a stiff Achilles, they run, you know, four minutes and 38 seconds a mile for 26 miles.

But this for runners, because they don't have good form, it dampens all of that and it makes them slower. Hmm. But at this stage of the game, I mean, you were competing in marathons and triathlons back 40, 50 years ago at this point. What do you do these days as far as actually running? Is it just walking these days or did you still run anywhere close to like you used to or does it cut way down?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I haven't run a mile in 30 years. I decided once I hung up my running shoes that it was too much pain management, too much discomfort. I want to do stuff that's fun. So I sprint, I do sprint training. And so part of my book, Born to Walk, talks about zone two training, a lot of zone two, high level walking, low level walking, hiking, rocking trails, off-road stuff as the primary driver

of a strong aerobic base. And then you fill it in with some sprinting. It doesn't have to be running sprinting. It could be a salt bike. It could be rope poles. It could be a rowing machine. It could be whatever. But some kind of high-level, high heart rate stuff

to build the VO2 max up. So I do some of that. I play Ultimate Frisbee. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that game. Yeah. It's an amazing game. That's a great game. It has all of the characteristics of being very healthy.

No, no, I said a long time ago that if schools, if they had to get rid of their PE programs and have one thing invested in it would be a $9 disc and some cones and set up an ultimate Prisby. Yeah. Two sides. We used to play in high school. It's awesome.

Yeah. It's a great game. So that's my favorite game. I just had a Hipper place. So I haven't played for about six months. Welcome to club man. But I'm a second one. I'm a hundred percent back. So I recovered early. I had it done in December and by end of February, I was able to sprint a little bit and much to my doctor's chagrin. But, um, so I'm getting ready. I had my done in January, January 7th. All right. Yeah. Could you have an anterior?

Yep. Oh yeah. Both times. This is my second one, but had my right done in 2018. I had my left now. Yeah. It's good. And what's that from? What? From lifting? Oh, lifting life, you know, like, yeah, like, World champion anything, you're getting a hip at some point. Yeah.

Oh no. Yeah. Especially powerlifting. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've done all my sports, you know, college football, then powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, like I was asking for it. Yeah. Well, mine was just, you know, 10, 10, 10 too many years of running a hundred miles

a week. Yeah, man. Yeah, it, my mom was just, you know, 10, 10 too many years of running a hundred miles a week. Yeah, man. Yeah, I'll do it. So anyway, but I'm, I feel like I've got a new lease on life. I feel great about it. What else do I do? I do stand up paddling. So I, I, I'm out in the bays here of Miami paddling for an hour once a week. That's a great core workout and enough of a cardio workout. And then I just fill the blanks and, oh, I ride a fat bike, a fat tire bike, pretty hard on the sand. So we'll go 12 miles on soft sand. And yeah, I got a lot of different things that I mix it up with that are in my,

in my mind, much more appealing than running. Yeah. How much sprinting, can you tell me about your sprinting? I'm just curious, like, how much of that is your base? Oh, no, no. So literally it's once a week. So when I'm when I'm fit

and when I say fit, like not having a hip replacement. Yeah. No, no. But the funny thing about the hip replacement was I sprinted the first time about a month ago and I had to stop not because of my hip, but because I hadn't sprinted for two years because of my hip before that, right? Because they had been hugging me for two years.

Yeah. So I lost the tensile strength in my feet, right? I lost that ability to land hard on the forefoot, push off, the propulsion of the Achilles, all that stuff. So I had to be very careful about rebuilding that, plus the fact I'm freaking 71. So you lose that. There's a decrement that happens naturally in addition

to the atrophy of not doing that. Right. But I'm coming back. I mean, I feel strong. Every once in a while, I'll be out on a walk, but I'm coming back. I mean, I feel strong there. Every once in a while I'll be out on a walk and I'll just break into a little high, high leg lift sprint drill and feel great. So. Right. What about doing like hill sprints that are, you know, I feel like the older I get like hill sprints feel less risk, you know, less, less risk of that whole hamstring thing. Yeah, no, hill sprints. And again, like when you do a hill sprint or when you even when you do stairs, you land from here to here. Yeah. You're not landing on your heels. Not at all, yeah. And so you've got that and that's where the toe wants to splay out at its

greatest width. Right. So when you're running up a hill, you don't want to be wearing those shitty little narrow cushioned shoes to run up. You want to either do it barefoot or even better with Paloobas where you got that splay is forced. Now, and like you know, you can do a 40 yard hill sprint can be a ball buster. You do 10 of those and do one, walk it down, walk it off, go again. In 20 minutes, you've done a hell of a workout. No doubt.

In weightlifting, there's a shoe, TYR, and they widened the base. So it was a huge difference for me because anything that can make the movement of a back squat easier, like for someone my age, it was a definite thing. It felt like number one, my body was more comfortable and it released more versus tightening up. So it's definitely a thing in all things.

So he's something to shoot. No, no, that's a great point. It's a thing in all things. Like everything, everything you do in life, but especially in sports requires strong feet. Your connection with the earth is where every movement that you do in sports begins, whether it's jujitsu or wrestling or boxing, or whether it's running or jumping or sprinting, or whether it's planning your feet to hit a home run

or slap shot or hit a golf ball, it all starts with the feet. And it just blows my mind that every athlete doesn't go, oh dude, I can't, today's foot day. You know what I mean? Like nobody says they got foot day. They got, I got back to the thighs, I got chest to tris, today's cardio. What day is your foot day. You know, I mean, like nobody says they got foot day. They got, I got, I got chest and tris today's, you know, cardio,

what day is your foot day pal? You know? Yeah. Yeah. I'm buying this book right now, the Born to Walk. I want to talk about the book. I was about to know, uh, outside of just the kind of the, the science of walking, but, um, what are kind of the general recommendations, protocols that you have in there? Obviously, we live in a very static, desk-bound, that's Kelly's book, like

culture, but I'd love to hear just kind of what are the recommendations? Yeah, the first 80 or 90 pages are dedicated to trashing the running boom. It's literally calling out the running boom as having been inappropriate for all, but maybe 3 or 4% of the population. The only people who should be running are runners. And runners are ectomorphic, skinny shits with big lung capacity and a high pain tolerance. Full stop. The only people who should be running are those people. And they should probably all be competing. Anyone else shouldn't be running. Like if you talk to any elite athlete

in any walk of life right now, they don't run. Boxers don't run anymore. Soccer players don't run. Nobody runs because they do drills, they do sprints, and they do other stuff, but they don't run. They don't run 30 miles a week as part of their training program. It's antithetical to power and speed

and all of this other stuff. So we trashed the running boom and we talk about the history of it and how it came to be, and it's this perfect storm of bad events that got people into running and then caused, you know, 50% of all runners get injured every year. 50% of all runners get injured every year. I mean, the NFL does not have that high an injury rate.

Yeah. An injury is your body's way of telling you, you're doing it wrong. So we trashed the running, but we want to sort of get running off the table and say running is not the be all and the end all that people think it is. Running is not the ideal-all and the end-all that people think it is.

Running is not the ideal way to lose weight. It's like a horrible way to lose weight. It's not the ideal way to build muscle. It's horrible. It's catabolic. Not even the best way to build aerobic capacity because most people, they train at a heart rate that's too high for them to build capillaries and zone two cardio base, but too low to build power and strength and speed.

So they're in this no man's land of training where they're just beating themselves up every day, feeling good about sweating and suffering and groaning and coming home and slumping in a chair, but wondering why they don't get any better. And they don't get any better because they're beating themselves up. They're not training the different systems of the body. So cut to walking. We are born to walk. We've populated the face of the earth walking.

The human body is designed to walk. It expects us to walk. Our digestive process expects us to be walking. Our lymphatic system expects us to be walking all the time, to pump lymph fluid. We're on two feet. I mean, we're not among the few bipeds, animal species on the planet. So, like, we either have to move or we fall over. We stand still for a long period of ideal gate that we talked about this balanced ideal symmetrical gate. But you got to do it in either bare feet or minimalist shoes. I don't necessarily we don't talk about about Paluvis much, if at all, in the book, but you gotta combine

a lot of walking with walking in the appropriate shoes. Because if you walk in the Hopas and other types that are like BOSU balls, you'll whack your knees. I've been walking, the last 30 years I walk a lot. Some of my friends own the largest intro running shoe company in the world the last decade on. And I can't walk more than two miles in those things without my knees, my knees, which are generally pretty strong,

they start to hurt when I wear cushioned shoes and I walk long distances. It's because I need, my kinetic chain needs the input of feeling the ground underneath in order to adapt to the temperature, the texture of the tilt of the surface I'm walking on. So walking, the more you walk in the context of appropriate footwear or barefoot, every step reinforces a positive gait, a positive kinetic chain, every step. So don't run, and don't even run in these. I mean, they're the best running shoe ever designed, but you have to know how to run. But every step you take, walking is passively training your feet, the small muscles of your feet, building your arch up the way it's supposed to be built up, abducting the great toe the way it's supposed to be the main propulsive last part of the foot

to propel the body forward. So walking is like the idea, we'll go back to the original statement in this podcast about longevity and walking being the quintessential human movement, the best thing you can do. Walking is the best thing you can do for your life, for longevity, for building aerobic base,

for mental health. People come and tell me, don't take running away from me, Mark. I love to run. It's my mental release. I'm like, dude, walking is a better mental release. Walking is serotonin. Running is dopamine.

Okay, you get the difference, right? Dopamine is that quick hit, that instant gratification that, okay, I did something really hard, really tough, it's, you know, but followed by a release of cortisol because it was hard and tough and now I've got cortisol stress hormones floating through me. Walking is anabolic, or at the very least, it's anti-catabolic. Walking is anabolic. It is serotonin. So I get some of my best work done while I'm walking. I'm thinking about a podcast or I'm thinking about a post or I'm thinking about an infomercial I want to do or something. I agree totally. There is no good reason for everyone not to walk a minimum of 5,000 steps a day.

Yeah. Three to five. I mean, some people just can't do it. Now, one of the protocols, but people ask me, well, I don't have 50 minutes to walk that much, Mark. So I'm screwed, right? I'm like, no. Actually, research shows that five 10-minute walking sessions is actually better than one compressed 50

minute session. And the reason is the body wants to move throughout the day. And if you compress all of this into 50 minutes, and then you go, oh, work's done, I'm done, check that off, don't have to do any more movement today. And then you sit at your desk and do all that stuff that you do, that's not optimal for your body. Your body would rather you put in these little breaks of walking throughout the day than cram it all into one session.

Is this all in your book? I hope so. Yeah, it's all in the book. Yeah. Good. Good. I know with my own children, I try to do as much as I can, they go barefoot. You know, I mean, the entire time I'm training them, they'll train downstairs. They'll do barefoot, you know, as the majority of the time, at least 90% of the time. And like, it's allowed them to move so well.

Like, they, you know, like, even my six-year year old daughter can do snatches and squats perfectly and all the way up to my 10 year old son. Yeah, no, you watch their feet. And so I have a three year old grandchild. He has the most perfect feet I've ever seen in my life. They're just, you know, they're V shaped. They're like, that's the heel. And they go all the way out naturally.

My son, yeah, my son Bear. And you go all the way out naturally. My son. Yeah. My son, Bear. And you look at it and it's strong and it's, yeah. And it's, and it's just a perfect foot. I'm like, and he goes barefoot all the time. He hates shoes. Yeah. I said my eight year old son, his name's Bear and his feet look like they're so thick. It's not just they're big and wide, but they're so big, wide and thick and strong. And like his toes are like out, like it looks like his claws.

Yes. And now you think when he gets to high school, are they going to, you know, and he plays football, they're going to wrap him up in tape every every game. You know, terror to kill. Actually, when you take a strong look in these sports like football, where, you know, you where you're exploding off the line and the foot should be absorbing 20 or 30% of that force, the foot should, if it's strong enough and it's capable. But what they do is they wrap that bitch up in tape up to

the ankle and then they wonder why they snap an Achilles or they get a high ankle sprain. It blows my mind that we're doing this archaic procedure with these athletes. I mean, I guarantee you that's what happened to Aaron Rodgers a couple of years ago. I guarantee you it happens to a lot of these guys that have these spontaneous tendon ruptures

because they've taped their feet. Well, if you train the foot and if you train it well and it became stronger and then you wore a wider cleat, and that's one of the... there's a company making wide football cleats right now. Smart. I want to desire, yeah. You know, then you get to benefit from that full width and the full power of the foot, which is a very strong component of of of what you're doing. And again, and yet everybody in the sports world thinks,

oh, feet or feet, I'm going to whatever is I hope I don't sprain an ankle. But they don't train them the way they should. Yeah. Mass weightlifting shows. Yes. You can actually feel the floor. Yeah, yeah. So I know I wish you would make, I know I wish you would make like, like, you know, like a little bit of a heel, but like, that's it, you know. We, we patented, we patented a little heel wedge that we were going to sell for the gym

that you could stick, stick under here for, for, for those days. Yeah. It just came like that with the heel, like a small, most great weightlifters don't, I don't feel, like a lot of the Asian athletes, some of them will not even use weightlifting shoes anymore, because they don't need to. They have massive, it almost makes it too much,

because like, because if they got the ankle mobility, when they get in the bottom, they're stable. But if you add that heel, now they're not stable. Yeah. Yeah. Cause he got more to go. Now you, you know, you want to be just optimal. You want to get, when you're in the bottom, you'd rather your ankles be just perfect. Yep. I have extra to go. Mark, as we wrap here on a, on a personal note, I'd love to understand what it feels like to be in business with your son after all these years of- Yeah, that's gonna be cool.

Playing business in front of him on a daily basis, and now you get to play on the same team. Exactly right, it's exactly right. It's amazing. I mean, my son's a very, you know, he's unique. Every son is, right? But he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. He's one of the best athletes I've ever met. Every sport he does, he picks up. He started playing golf about three years ago. He plays with two handicap now. I mean, he's just amazing. And so he's the CEO of the company and watching. I'm sort of mentoring him,

but mostly by giving him a long leash, which I'm enjoying. And because I'm the sole source of financing for this company. So he doesn't have to spend his time out on the road trying to raise money, you know, for whatever. And so that's allowed him to focus on the business. And it's also given us, we have always been close, but we have to spend an hour or two a week just talking philosophically about the company, about life and how what we're doing and what we're doing in our own lives that's sort of enhancing that. So it's a great, it's a really good experience. Isn't always the case with family businesses as you probably heard.

But in our case, it's really good. I'm very, very happy. I mean, businesses have you owned. I mean, it's just amazing that you just sold that last one. It was only what, six years ago and like. I only had it for three and a half years So jealous yeah I started it in 2015 and I sold it by the end of 2018 Actually, I was a home run right there. Yeah, that was a big home. Yeah. Yeah, by the way, and you know

it's been great to have to have like I could have kept it and Grown it myself But I've had access to a pad load of money for the last six years, been able to travel, do the things I wanna do. So this is, everything worked out perfectly. You know, before that I had a supplement company for 30 years and I could have,

like I almost retired in 19, when I was 52, because I was making enough money off the supplement company to go, you know, I could live easily this way, but I couldn't retire. So this got me back in. And, you know, then before that, I've been publishing books. I had book publishing company. You know, I've always been an entrepreneur from 12.

So it's in my DNA. I see that. Yes. Yeah, I don't want to retire either. Go ahead. No, what don't want to retire either, but. No, what would you do, Mash? That's the whole point of it. What would you do? You go three weeks, Mark, before you went crazy and you had to go start something new.

And it also plays into the larger theme of all of this of optimizing your life. Every time I think about people retiring and they're like, well, what are you gonna do? Like, oh, I'm gonna sit in this recliner. And you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on then. You're gonna, as soon as you've stopped playing, then you're not needed.

And your brain just goes, oh, the goal is to stop. And if you play that to the end, it's the end. Yeah, I mean, I live in Miami Beach. I'm looking out my window right now to the nicest stretch of beach in probably all of Florida. And there's, you know, 1000 people out there. And in my building, there's probably 30 of them that are retired to go to the beach every day and read a book. I'm like, shoot me. And I mean, yeah, no, maybe go to the beach and write a book. But I just sit there and watch life go by. No way. Yeah. Where can people learn more about the shoes, the book,

everything you have going on? Yeah, so the shoes, our Instagram handle is wearpaloova, W-A-A-R, paloova. The actual site, the e-comm site is paloova.com, P-E-L-U-V-A, paloova.com. I'm Mark Sisson Primal on Instagram. I post a couple times a week, some little tidbit. And I'm on Twitter, so I'm kind of all over the place. But would love to have your audience check out the Paloovas. I think it would be a major lifestyle upgrade for everybody. I love it. Travis Mash. MashLee.com, we have a brand new website dropping this week. lifestyle upgrade for everybody. I love it. Travis Mash.

Mashlead.com, we have a brand new website dropping this week. Any minute, I'm just waiting on it. But then, anyone out there listening, you can go to Soar Next Spring Cleaning and join my program we're doing. Go to Instagram at Soar Next Spring Cleaning. I'm doing a free program every single day,

trying to get you better at the clean. But we'll also get you jacked. We're gonna squat, pull, bench, all the things. You got me excited about racing you to a 300 pound clean. And then I started chopping trees down in my backyard, dude. And I can't stop. I'm chopping giant trees down all the way into firewood with just an axe. Like my new thing. Like all I want to do is be in the woods chopping trees down.

Are you going to name Rocky Balboa? I just bought a farm in Tennessee. How much you charge for that shit? Yeah. I just bought a farm in Tennessee. How much you charge for that? Oh, you want to come clear it? I just got a farm in North Carolina and it's free if you're doing on your own

property, I'll come out, I'm ready. It's yeah, we're in Tennessee. Yeah. Franklin. Oh, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. That's the spot. Everybody loves Franklin. Are you getting animals? What are you going to do with it? So we got a piece of land. Yeah. So we're so my daughter's house in the palisades burned in the fires last two months ago. And then we had it within the house that we lived in that we rented there. Bat burn in the Palisades, we're like, we're out of California for good now. Yeah. Yeah.

So we've always wanted to get a multi-generational family compound going. So we looked around the country and we found this place in Franklin. So we bought up, I mean, I'm ashamed to say it's only 22 acres, but it's a big, big 10,000 square foot house. So we're gonna build, we're gonna keep,

my wife and myself are gonna live in the main house and we're gonna build a house for my daughter and her kids to live in and then another house on the property for my son and his wife and their kids to live in. So, you know, we'll have this dream of a multi-generational family. Ah, dude, I wanna hang out with you.

Everything you said is like, I wanna be like you when I grow up. Yeah. That's awesome. I jumped at the front of the line on the farm thing, but yeah, that's, it's awesome. I just sit out there in the morning, try and wake my neighbors up and just bang away on trees.

It's like, it feels so healthy waking up, getting all the fresh air. Are you ambidextrous? I can be. I choose to hit the trees as hard as I possibly can. Yeah. And then about halfway through, I go, I should probably do this with my left hand too. Just alone, like a crooked human.

But then I'd go for like 30 swings or something like that. And I'm like, I want to hit it hard again. Like, don't lose your, don't lose your form doing that shit either. Yeah. Are you going to, are you you gonna have multi-generational like compound as well I have all your kids build on your land the the younger part of my family is much more challenging than the older part of my family and which they likely some of them will at some point move into something out here

yeah just older people just want to be closer to grandkids and all that word. Younger kids want to get away from their family as fast as they can until they come back later. Um, I'm saying your own kids. I've got a long time before that. Yeah. Before your kids grow up and decide. Yeah. There's plenty of, there's plenty of room. It's 17 acres. So I'm close to 22.

I would love my kids to just build right beside me. There's plenty of room. They could put like a tiny house for old people and never see them. Yeah. But Mark, we bought two cows, a Texas Longhorn. Two Texas Longhorns in North Carolina. Of course. Oh Jesus, man.

Now I'm jumping. Yeah. Yeah, you, I don't know, when are. Yeah, you are. I don't know. Are you guys when are you officially moving there? So by setting up my daughter, my daughter lives here, so she moved because she didn't have a place to live. So yeah, the daughter and the grandchildren are there. My wife just headed up this afternoon.

She's she's going to be there for a week. I'm speaking in Austin next week at the Health Optimization Summit. So I'm going to stop on the way there for a couple of days and then go off to Austin. But we're we're basically moved in. I mean, we bought this house and it's ready to go. But I'm still a Miami beach. Yeah, you don't wanna leave Miami. Miami, that sunshine.

That's your next book, man, sunshine. That's my other full addiction is how much can I get my son like linked to the, or skin, can I get my sun linked to the skin? Can I get my body sunshine on it is very important. Fresh air, go barefoot. That's it. Get some sunshine. That's it. Doug Larson.

You bet. I'm on Instagram, Doug C. Larson. Mark, appreciate you coming on the show. Got a lot of respect for you. You've made an enormous impact in the industry over many decades now, so I appreciate your time. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner,

and we are Barbell Shrugged, the Barbell underscore shrugged, and make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galvin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis, and you can access all of that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.