Mark Bell's Power Project - Modern Footwear Is Slowly Destroying Your Body - Mark Sisson || MBPP Ep. 987

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

In episode 987, Mark Sisson, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how narrow toe box, high heeled and extra soft modern footwear is the root cause of many chronic pain issues for people. Visit https://Peluva.com/PowerProject and use code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off the Peluva shoes mentioned on air! Follow Mark Sisson on IG: https://www.instagram.com/marksissonprimal/ Check out the full episode:   [PUT VIDEO TITLE HERE]   Official Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below!   ➢https://drinkag1.com/powerproject Receive a year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 & 5 Travel Packs!   ➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!   ➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!   ➢ https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off Mind Bullet!   ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save up to 25% off your Build a Box   ➢ Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢ https://hostagetape.com/powerproject to receive a year supply of Hostage Tape and Nose Strips for less than $1 a night!   ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢ https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢ https://vuori.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢ https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel!   ➢ Piedmontese Beef: https://www.CPBeef.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Modern shoes have really messed up men more than women. Men's shoes are like 20% more narrow. Something like 77% of people experience foot pain in their lives. You started running in like the 60s, right? Yeah. What kind of shoes were available? Chuck Taylors. Footwear hasn't changed much in the last several decades.

It was your feet that told you when it was time to stop running. If you start to put more cushioning in shoes, people get out there and they're running 40, 50, 60 miles a week when they have no business doing that. We're born barefoot and we evolved barefoot and we evolved to walk and do all the things that we do without shoes on. How close can we come to approximating a barefoot lifestyle utilizing modern technology? And did you have to travel far for the hair plugs? Did's, who's, who's, did you ask for write-in questions before the show? I just think it's awesome, man. You're, you know, you were kind of making fun of yourself last night, but you were,

like, it's amazing you've been able to hold it together. Like there's so many people talk about longevity. Yeah. And then they're usually like my age or younger. Yeah. No, I know. I'm like, why are these guys in their 30s and 40s talking about longevity? I mean, it's a cool topic. No, no, no. You've got to start sometime.

I've been talking about it since I was in my 40s. But now I'm doing it. Now I'm like, okay. I mean, I said in my 40s, I want to show people what 70 is supposed to look like. So that was sort of a goal I've had for a long time. We'll see. I mean, so far, so good. But the last couple of years, the decline is becoming obvious.

That didn't sound good. What are some of the first things that maybe you started to notice? Was it eyes or was it strength? No, that's really interesting because my eyes are starting – they've been going for a while. And I've always had distance vision but haven't been able to read a newspaper without glasses for 10 years. And then recently I noticed I was on a – I think I told you last night I was on a hike and I was feeling my oats and I just set a record for

the first pitch of this hike that I've done probably 20 or 30 times so I'm feeling really good I just turned 70 the day before and then I guess I wasn't paying attention I'm walking straight ahead and I misstepped on a rock and fell off and crunched my leg.

I thought I'd broken a bone in my leg. And the guy behind me said, this looks really bad. So I was five minutes into the next pitch. I had to take about like 45 minutes to get myself back off that trail. And it took about six weeks to heal. But I started to realize that was my peripheral vision. That was not – so I think my periphery is coming in now. So little things that you notice or maybe don't notice while they're happening

until something bad happens and then you go, well, that explains that. What ended up leading you to shift gears and get out of triathlons and running and stuff like that? Well, you know, I – we could go through a whole therapy session about why I started running in the first place. Like I think there's a sort of a feeling among the endurance community that you're trying to prove something, right? Because I became a runner in my teens. I became a good distance runner. When I got injured doing that, I shifted over to triathlon. It was still always about managing discomfort. Like it was never fun. I mean, there are times when you're out on the road and you're training and you're in the zone and you

feel good, but it was never like, oh shit, this is fun. I'm going to do, I want to do this a lot. Yeah. You know, I had friends playing football, basketball, baseball, hockey, having fun. And even when they were working hard, they were having fun. There was camaraderie. When you're doing an endurance activity, it's just about managing discomfort. And the better you get, the more willing you have to be to dig a hole for yourself, that discomfort has to become, you know, more and more uncomfortable because you're trying to improve performance. And the

only way to do that is to hurt. So, you know, people talk about managing the pain. It's not about managing pain. I mean, pain is clearly from, you know, an accident, from breaking something, from tearing something, but discomfort, the willingness to be uncomfortable every day during your workouts and then even more so in a race. So after 20 or 30 years of that, I'm like, I'm over this shit. I want to start having fun. So part of it was forced upon me. I had to retire from elite competition because of injuries, because of inflammation, because of a lot of things that were going on in my life. Do you think some of that was because of the shoes as we were talking a little bit last night?

Absolutely. dissertation on how the shoes encouraged an improper gait, which then ultimately manifested itself in an overuse injury, a repetitive use injury that was as a result of this inappropriate gait. But over the years, as I got more and more injured and I had to stop competing – and look, I mean I had a – I was jonesing for that discomfort. I was jonesing for the endorphin rush, for the runner's high. But at some point I had to say I can't do this anymore. It's not worth the pain and the suffering and the sacrifice and all the things that I used to brag about as an endurance athlete. the sacrifice and all the things that I used to brag about as an endurance athlete. How can I be strong and lean and fit and happy and healthy with the least amount of pain, suffering, sacrifice, discipline, and all the other stuff? And so I started shifting away from those sorts of endurance

activities and cardio to strength and power and brief explosive activities that tended to have a much greater short-term benefit, noticeable improvements in power and strength and body composition, by the way, which was really interesting to me. And ultimately, as you find out over a lifetime of doing this, also contribute to your longevity in a way that cardio never would. Would you say that in your 60s you probably looked better and kind of more jacked than you did maybe in like your 30s? Yeah, for sure. I mean, somebody sent me –

Like an extra 20 pounds of muscle or something. Extra 30 pounds of muscle, yeah. I raced at 142 as a marathoner, sometimes 138. Ironically, and I was 5'10", and ironically, I raced really well. I mean, that's in my 60s. I raced really well for my genetic composition. As I went and did my analysis years later, I found out I'm really like 57% endurance athlete, 43% strength. So I would have been better off doing parkour or Spartan races maybe later on.

Maybe a shorter distance run of some kind. Yeah, but I became a marathoner. And so even at 138, I weighed probably 15 pounds more than I should have as an elite marathoner. And you look at these guys now, the best in the world, you know, the East Africans and North Africans, they're like – They look snappable. And they are snappable. They're like 5'7", 105 pounds. Wow.

And, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, dynamic analyses you can do about even just the amount of weight that they have to bear when they're running is so much less than somebody who weighs 30 pounds more or 40 pounds more. So, yeah, so I wound up putting on muscle not so much from lifting because I'd always lifted weights but from being able to keep it on because I wasn't catabolic all the time running. And running is the most catabolic, endurance running is the most catabolic thing you can do. I agree with that statement too. And people, I think, get confused and like, how are some of these guys holding muscle? I mean, first of all, people know my story. I've been on performance enhancing drugs for quite some time. So I think that is helpful for me. And there's other people I do

think that can navigate some of this maybe without losing muscle. But I think most of them would agree that if they stopped running so much, they would get bigger. Yes. I mean, that is my secret. I haven't run a mile in 25 years. And I ran 100 miles a week for seven years toward the end of my elite career and then and then you know when i shifted over to triathlon and i i was riding a bike 200 miles a week plus running only only 40 miles a week i want to back it up just a minute because you started running in like the 60s right yeah and in the 60s what kind of shoes were available chuck taylor's low you used to run? I ran in Chuck Taylors.

They were like 10 pounds easy. They were heavy too? No, they weren't that heavy. Yeah, rubber sole. They had a rubber sole. They were certainly heavier than a comparable, but they were a low profile. And they didn't have a huge cushion. And they didn't have a big arch.

They were minimalist shoes, if you will. And ultimately, some Japanese companies introduced running flats. So prior to that- Were those kind of good? They were great. And so if you've read Shoe Dog, Phil Knight's book, he was a representative. He got the rights to sell Onitsuka tigers in the US, which I wore. They were very thin. They were like, again, a quarter inch or a half inch max. Onitsuka tigers.

Yeah, yeah, Onitsuka. And that's what everybody ran in. And it was self-limiting and it was your feet that told you when it was time to stop running, your feet and your calf muscles because you couldn't heel run. You couldn't heel strike without a lot of pain and suffering and you'd say, this isn't working for me. That's not how humans are designed. We're designed to walk heel, toe, heel, toe, but we're designed to sprint. There you go. We're designed to sprint on the midfoot. And any amount of increase in running activity beyond fast walking,

we are supposed to land midfoot and utilize this amazing Achilles tendon that we have. And the problem is if you start to put more cushioning in shoes, it encourages a heel strike. It says you tend to get sloppy with your running. So in the early days of running, it was the feet that told you or the calf muscles that said, okay, you've had enough running. That's enough for the week. Forty miles is a good week. Maybe 60. That's enough for the week.

40 miles is a good week. Maybe 60. Well, along come Kenny Moore, who was one of the top runners in the country at the time, and his coach, Bill Bowerman, and they had this discussion. Kenny's like, I got to run more miles. These guys are at a world-class level. They're putting in more miles. How do we do this? And that sort of became this genesis of a thick cushioned running shoe that Nike developed and then

other shoe companies took on. And what it did was it allowed guys who were good runners to run more miles because it was a little bit cushiony. That's fine. It had its own set of problems. But what was more problematic was all the citizen runners who weren't that good. They could run more miles now. And those are the people, again, who should have learned how to run with a proper gait, a proper stride first.

But because you bypass all that important information to the feet and you give it the – you put in these forefoot motion control, rearfoot stabilizers, big, thick cushions. You put in these forefoot motion control, rear foot stabilizers, big, thick cushions. People get out there and they're running 40, 50, 60 miles a week when they have no business, should have had no business doing that. So one of the ironies of the running shoe industry is that over 50 years, there's been no decrease in running injuries. People still get injured. It's not – the high-tech shoes have nothing positive, no positive benefits to apply to that. All it does is bypass that information in the feet, let people run longer distances, and then put all of the strain up the kinetic chain. So now it's the ankles that tend to roll a little bit because the small muscles of the feet aren't working. Or maybe it's the knee that doesn't quite know how to bend even torque side to side,

or the hip. So you see a lot of my generation, the runners from my generation having hip replacements. Only because where does all the shock energy stop? It stops at the hip, right? So that's the, that's sort of where the buck stops when you're running. And if you haven't learned how to land appropriately and adjust, flex the foot, bend the knee, torque the hip, absorb the shock through the muscles because your brain knows all that information. By the time you, if you're running barefoot, by the time you land and weight your forefoot, the brain has already given all the information to the rest of the body exactly how to land. Like if you tried to – if somebody said you got to run across a carpet with Legos in the dark, you'd know how to – your brain would tell your body how to adjust to every footfall. put it in thick, sold shoes, and it just, again, bypasses all that and puts the strain further up the kinetic chain so people have knee problems

or they have lower back problems. So where am I going with this? Well, and quick question, Mark, before you do get there, because we've had people come onto the podcast that have been, let's say, proponents of heel striking. There's some coaches who are like of heel striking there's some like coaches right yeah who are like oh you know there's a way you can do this and it's safe you don't jogging and kind of rolling yeah right well what was the name of the better

you remember learn to run i think learn to run yeah yeah so we had him on um and some people so but you think and you're talking and you're saying that that there's no way to do that in a good fashion. Like you do not want to build the mechanics of heel striking when running. Yeah. I mean I guess you can because we can also point to millions of runners who heel strike, don't get injured and have a decent time. But last night I was giving Mark a little math lesson in like walking versus running. And if you take any runner who's doing 20 or 30 or 40 miles a week and you say, how fast can you walk? I'll ask you this.

How fast can you walk? I don't know. Okay. Can you walk – most people would say 14, 15-minute miles is probably the fastest I can walk, right? Can you walk – can you run more than twice as fast as that? Can you run for an hour at seven-minute miles? Probably not. Most people can't.

I'll tell you, when I say most people can't, the average finishing time for a marathon in this country – Let these guys guess. Yeah, really. The average finishing time? Average finishing time of all the marathon experiences, millions of marathon experiences, some people doing 10 a year, some people doing one. Four hours and 10 minutes.

Pretty close, 440. Oh, damn. And it's like 12-minute miles. So people are – if you're running – That's a jog, a very modest slow jog. A jog, a very modest slow jog. And where I'm at with this is if I can walk with basically no chance of injury, I can walk hours with no chance of injury. Walking is a perfectly normal human experience.

We're designed to walk. We're born to walk. We're not born to run, I would argue. We're born to walk. Then why would you not run, I would argue. We're born to walk. Then why would you not walk as much as you can and why do you need to run? What's the need to jog or need to run if what it's doing is increasing perhaps your tendency toward injury? And I have to say, like I've seen people who've run for 15 or 20 years. And no offense, all that happens is they get saggier and saggier.

Because if they're running and they're not lifting weights, that's a bad choice as you get older. You know, you need to lift more weights and run less. So is it about, you know, being able to enter a marathon and get a finisher's medal? That's great. And, you know, if you want to do that once or twice in your lifetime. But I think people, there are a lot of people who are running to lose weight, for example. Like I'm going to enter the LA Marathon. I'm 40 pounds overweight. I'm going to use this as my training platform to lose weight. Almost all those people don't lose weight running.

They lose it through diet, right? We've said – we've talked on this show before about 80% of your body composition results happen because of your dietary choices. Yeah, running in most cases is going to make people really hungry. Makes you really hungry. So if you've got an amazing ability to overcome that, maybe it'll work in time. But most people, it isn't that way. And if you're running, if you're training for any sort of marathon, you keep thinking, okay, today I ran, you know, eight miles or whatever I did. Tomorrow I'm going to run six or 10. So I have to fuel up for tomorrow's run. I have to carbo load for tomorrow's run. And it

becomes a vicious cycle that never really manifests itself in a weight loss or a body composition change the way a program of lifting weights and walking would. So I would tell people if you want to change your body composition, if you want to lose weight, if you want to look great naked, walk a lot and lift heavy or lift at least to the extent that you can do resistance training at least twice a week and then sprint once in a while. There we go. I was going going to ask where do you speed it up so you speed it up for sprinting because sprinting is again a perfectly natural human movement and let me ask you this when you say sprinting because like a full-out sprint for

someone who's never sprinted before it's like it's chaos so yeah it's like ramping up your sprint for as like where you can handle the intensity no no and sprinting could be um it could be literally on the assault bike it could be on a on a versing could be, it could be literally on the assault bike. It could be on a VersaClimber. It could be on a regular bike. It's literally getting max heart rate for 20 seconds or 30 seconds, chilling down, giving it a two minute rest,

doing it, ramping up and doing it again. Always with some level of ground training to get to the next level. So you don't just automatically take your first client to the track and go, okay, we're doing 200s today. Good luck. Because sprinting, in terms of running, if you haven't trained in that, you can get injured.

Even if you're well-trained, you can get injured. You have to be very careful when you're running sprinting. We've talked to countless guests on the podcast about the importance of strong, functional feet. And most people's feet don't function the way they should because of years of wearing narrow toe box shoes that over time weaken the feet and then actually don't allow the toes to function the way they should. Most shoes are casts and the toes don't move. That's why I've partnered with Paloova. Now, Paloovas are flat, wide, and have a five-finger design so that whenever you wear the shoes, you're now getting the benefit of toe space. And that space that's being created through your toes is going to allow

your feet to begin to function the way they should, literally all day long. You can wear these shoes while running. You can wear the shoes in the gym. You can wear the shoes while relaxing. Anywhere you want, you can wear Paloovas while getting the benefit of toe space. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at paloova.com slash power project. That's P-E-L-U-V-A dot com slash power project. And at checkout, enter promo code power project 15 to save 15% off your order. Again, paloova.com slash power project. Links in the description, as well as the podcast show notes below. You were mentioning how competitive it was, that there really didn't seem to be, at least in your circle, didn't seem to be a lot of people jogging back in the day. There's like more like people are out there really running and people were super fast.

And it really wasn't, I guess in the sixt, running wasn't like a fitness craze just yet, right? Yeah. So the fitness craze, the running boom happened largely in the 70s after Frank Shorter won a gold medal in the Olympics in 72. And that in conjunction with the book Aerobics coming out and Jim Fix starting to write about it later on. There was a movement that would suggest that running was like – that cardio activity was better for your heart. You'd live longer if you did cardio. I mean eventually that became aerobics classes and all sorts of other cardio interventions.

But in the early days, it was just running. sorts of other cardio interventions. But in the early days, it was just running. And what I was saying the other day was, or the other night was, running was sort of self-selected with skinny people who couldn't play, didn't play other sports, got last picks, right? I mean, I was, I never got chosen for football, basketball, baseball, hockey, or any of the fun sports. And so I ran. I ran track. And that's how a lot of us got into this. We were just cast aside. And that's what we were good at. And one of the reasons we were good at it was because we were thin. We had the body type to be able to handle it. So in the early days of running, there were a lot of people that ran quite well. And I think because of the minimalist shoes, it also promoted a better running stride. And later on, as you got more and more people into the running craze and they became

the average weight crept up to the point where you could go to the starting line of a major race with 25,000 people. And only a few thousand, maybe a few hundred, but a few thousand were pure runners, and the rest were sort of probably had no business running a marathon other than, again, as a life experience, as a bucket list item. And I don't want to cast aspersions too much on this, but where I'm getting at is like in those days, the runners were much better in the US than they are today. I mean, I ran a race in Oregon, the Nike OTC marathon in 1978, maybe it was 79. And I ran 221.38, which I was pleased with. It was enough to get me a qualifying spot in the Olympic trials. It's absolutely flying, by the way.

People that follow Nick Baer, Nick Baer did it under a three-hour marathon, and it's a big deal to get under three hours. So running 221 is absolutely just murdering it. What is it, a six-something-minute mile probably? No, it's five. There you go. What is it, a six-something minute mile probably? No, it's five. There you go. No, 237 is six minute miles. And then 211 is five minute miles.

So you're in between. But my point was that I finished 38th in that race. Running 221, I finished 38th. I don't think you're going to find many marathons in this country, in the US, where you'd have – even with the influx of foreign runners and particularly Kenyans, Ethiopians, North Africans, you still won't find many people – you won't find a race where there are 22 people finishing under 221 or let alone 38 people. So anyway, so in those days, if you weren't able to run faster than say three hours for a marathon, you were a jogger. And that's fine, but you don't really call yourself a runner. you were a jogger. And that's fine, but you don't really call yourself a runner.

I mean, Seema, like somebody comes in and tells you, I'm a weightlifter. Oh, what's your bench best? Oh, 175. You're not a weightlifter. You're a guy who goes to the gym and lifts weights, and that's fine, but you're not a lifter. You're a gym rat,

and I'm not saying anything's wrong with lifting, benching 175. I'm just saying there's these different categories. People do jujitsu quite differently too, right? There's some people that are real proficient at it. They're real competitive. And there's other people that have just, they enjoy it and they go twice a week and they've been doing so for 15 years or so. Yeah. And they're a little older and – right? There's different skill levels to all of them. Yeah, yes. So anyway, back to where that puts me in the category of running versus walking these days is I'm just – I'm still the biggest fan of walking because if you do the math, what are the potential benefits of somebody running 60 miles a week or 80 miles a week and running – having a 345 marathon PR? It's not – it just doesn't have that kind of health benefits that used to be associated with that amount of work.

I think you're touching upon something really interesting. This is something I've thought about quite a bit. So somebody builds up to a 705 deadlift and they're 30 years old. And you're like, hey, that's awesome. What are the odds they're going to be able to do that five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? The act of deadlifting, there's nothing wrong with. It's a great exercise. But maybe we'd be better off doing a lot of other things so that we're not sacrificing too much by putting all of our eggs in one basket. 60 miles a week and when they start to improve their times and get all these PRs and they get excited about running further and further and further, this original health quest is turning into something quite different. And it would be great to kind of think about this is cool. This

is my peak shape now. And this is what I enjoy and it's what I love. But I think in the back of your head, just like in business, you should have a little bit of an exit strategy. It's just going to look like, how do I kind of maneuver my way into getting into some other things? For myself, part of the reasons why I chose to mess around with some distance running was that every time I went to do a sprint, I would get hurt. And I was like, maybe I just need to go like the complete opposite direction. I need to not try to produce a lot of force. I need to slow the to produce a lot of force. I need to slow the hell down. And so it kind of became this thing that's given me some goals.

But as I get older, I actually want to get more into jumping and sprinting and med ball tosses and those kinds of things. Right. Yeah. You can teach yourself to jog and you can teach yourself to have experienced the discomfort of a long running session. And that has a life lesson attached to it to a lot of people. But at what point does it become, you know, a head game with you where you say, I don't know why I'm doing this, but I feel like I need to do it. And if I don't do it, I beat myself up. I feel like a piece of shit because I didn't go run my workout. You know, I'm not doing that much miles. And a lot of the running community, a piece of shit because I didn't go run my workout. You know, I'm not doing that

much miles. And a lot of the running community, a lot of the endurance community suffers from this kind of mindset where if I don't do it, I'm a bad person because I know how to do it and I can do it. And it's, you could even make an analogy. It's like, it's their form of hormetic stress, the way a cold plunge is a hormetic stress to other people. Like I got to do something every day that is either painful or uncomfortable. You know, as one of the mantras says, do something every day that makes you uncomfortable, right? So for some people, it's that run. For some people, it's... And look, I ran for a long time, and I wrote some of my best books out on the run, so I'm meditative about it. I'm back to walking is a much better choice for most people. If you're going to run and you're great at it and you keep improving, go for it. But if you've stopped improving and you keep running without improving, it's a different, you know,

you have a different kind of mindset to overcome now. It's almost like you're going to run into an injury or something like that. When you were running, you did marathons, you did Ironmans. These are inherently competitive. You weren't just running miles to run miles. Maybe there was a point where you were, but there was a competition aspect to that. It does seem that like for some people, running gives them that feeling and that ability to get better.

It gives them an ability to compete. Now, I'm curious, you started playing different types of sports as you've gotten older, where you're still on your feet, you're still moving fast. Like, I think you play pickleball, right? I've played pickleball. Yeah, yeah've played yeah is there anything that um you do or you've done that kind of you're like you competed in that gave you that feeling

okay i'm doing something competitive that you didn't feel like now you needed to just run miles and miles and yeah no i i get what you're saying and It's a good question. The main thing that I would say about competition in games, and my favorite game is Ultimate. Ultimate Frisbee. Yeah, okay. Ultimate Frisbee. And it's the most fun I have every week. Don't tell my wife.

Don't tell my wife clips because probably a lot of people aren't super familiar. Go to AUDL and get highlights or something like that. But it's the American Ultimate Disc League, and it's a professional league, and it's pretty amazing. Yeah. But it's so much fun, and it's invigorating, and there's all of the elements of game, camaraderie, strategy, certainly aerobic endurance but also sprint and power and jumping. So it's combining a lot of these things that you never got by just slogging through five-minute miles.

And you don't get a lot of this in the gym either. I mean there's a lot of reaction and a lot of quickness and agility when you're doing a sport like this. Yeah. This looks extremely physical. Oh, yeah. We had Joel Jameson on the podcast. He's brilliant when it comes to strength and conditioning. And he said he worked with Mighty Mouse Johnson, one of the all-time great UFC fighters.

And he said the person that scored the craziest score he's ever seen on this conditioning test that he had was an Ultimate Frisbee guy. And then it was a few years later where he ended up testing another Ultimate Frisbee guy and that guy broke the other guy's record. But out of all the NFL, UFC, didn't matter what it was, these guys were in just tremendous shape. Yeah. And again, what's funny, the genesis of this sport, it started in the 70s, and it started with stoners. It literally started with guys, you know, frisbee. You'd throw a frisbee. You'd get high.

You'd throw a frisbee, and you'd be in the hippie days of the 70s. That's a good impersonation. Pretty good. And then they started organizing it into a game. And then they started organizing it into a game. But it was always the guys who didn't play the other sports, whether they chose not to because of political reasons or whatever in the days of the – in the war protest days or whatever. But it became a real – like a legitimate sport. I mean it's crazy and you have to be very fit to play it.

So anyway, so I have fun doing that and I – and it's – yeah, it's competitive. But as an endurance athlete, it's you. It's not a team. So if you're having a bad day, that's all on you, right? And if – on a team, if you're having a bad day, your teammates lift you up and everybody – Blame them. Or you're having a bad day and you still win the game, right? So there's that. Yeah, so I don't know that I missed the competition with other people as much as the competition with myself.

And that gets back to what's going on in your mind that a scrawny little kid that got beat up in school, got bullied, became an Ironman. You know, there's a whole, again, many therapy sessions behind that. You found anything similar from a mental perspective in business? Because you've navigated those waters extremely well also. Oh my on business and relationships. I mean, I think in relationships, my ability to withstand discomfort for long periods of time literally prevented me from getting into it with my wife about what's really going on. I would just revel in the discomfort for a long period of time.

So you could argue that that did not serve me well in my marriage. I mean we've been together 35 years. So don't worry about us. But it was just interesting and it took me a while to actually recognize that it was my lifetime of training at discomfort that enabled me – that sort of allowed me to sit in the silence rather than deal with the issue. On the other hand, in business, I mean, business is all about discomfort. I mean, you know, there's the roller coaster in business is incredible. You know, that one day, you know, you get record sales. The next day you find out you can't, you know, you can't fulfill the purchase order or whatever, and it goes up and down and up and down. And so you have to be really resilient to withstand that sort of stuff.

Or just don't look at it. Yeah. Or hire people that worry about it for you. And in endurance racing, same thing. Look, everybody who lines up in a competitive race that day has the same – pretty much the same training. They've pretty much got the same genetics that will allow them to be elite. They've probably trained as hard. They've probably trained as long. They've probably wanted as much. And what the race comes down to that day is who's willing on that day to dig the deepest hole for himself, drag everyone else into it, and then spit people out the back. So all of endurance competition is basically a race of attrition. And even if you're 12 minutes behind going into the marathon on the Ironman,

it's still a race of attrition because if you're 12 behind and you're feeling good, it's the other person who's starting to fall off the pace who maybe couldn't manage the pain cave as well as the guy in second. It's just all about managing discomfort. I think you mentioned you were there and you saw Mark Allen, the grip who we've had on the podcast before, you saw him dig deep like that, right? I was just sort of coincidentally, I was the executive director of the U.S. Federation in 1989 when Dave Scott and Mark Allen had their epic Iron War. And so I watched it in real time. It was as impressive in real time as people will talk about,

even in going back 35 or 40 years. It was 35 years ago. It was an incredible, and it was a turning point for the sport because it was the changing of the guard. You know, David Ben, the man, and then that's it right there. That's not, yeah, that's, who's that? They said this one was in Hawaii. That's it. That's it right there.

That's the one. And that's pretty much, I was right – I saw that – I had that view. I was on a motorcycle at the time. And again, talking about willingness to dig a hole and to be uncomfortable and have it be a race of attrition. And what happened was in this particular race, Mark hadn't won the Iron Man yet. He had been second a couple of times. He dropped out a couple of times.

He was clearly talented enough and on that particular race, he had – he found one like 10 seconds of extra gear that allowed him to accelerate away from him and that's I think where it happened. What do you think that – like is that – like is it – I guess it's got to be a combination, right? It's got to be a combination of training and your mental strategy as well, right? So it's got to be – like you can't just like be mentally tough and pull on a reserve that's not there. For sure. You have to be – but and I think being – you have to be well-trained.

That goes without saying. I think being – you have to be well-trained. That goes without saying. And there are days when a well-trained athlete will get crunched by somebody who maybe isn't even as well-trained but is willing to dig deep. I mean Steve Prefontaine, who was arguably one of the best middle distance runners. I mean he ran everything from the 1500 up to the 10K. everything from the 1500 up to the 10K. And he was notorious for saying, look, going to the starting line going, I'm, you know, I may not be as well trained as you are. I may not be as talented as you are, but I'm willing to die today. Are you? And he would, you know, he would really intimidate. And he'd take the race out faster than he should have and hope that, again, hope that

people would fall off the back. That was just – that was the ability to summon up that mental effort to do that. When it comes to Primal Kitchen and being able to sell that, I think you sold it to Kraft, right? Yeah. I mean that just seems like such a huge thing. And then now you're diving into Paloova with these shoes. a huge thing and then now you're diving into uh paloova with these shoes um when you started primal kitchen was that as much of a reach of an idea as what you're doing with paloova you think um i mean it's different it's just no no it's different i mean i i have been fascinated by footwear and uh and the um a marketplace that does does not represent what I would say is modern

science and technology the way it should. So footwear hasn't changed much in the last several decades. The only changes have been like these carbon fiber blade shoes that people are running faster in. But what's interesting about those shoes, for instance, is that if you're not well-trained, you run slower in them because you have to be able to develop the spring. You have to develop the power to load the springs in them and to be able to run faster. So I was fascinated with shoes that made my feet uncomfortable. I've never been comfortable wearing regular tennies or – my feet aren't that wide, but they're wide enough that I recognize that my toes need to splay out. So I was a big fan of the minimalist footwear movement when it started in 2005 and 2006. I was an early adopter of another five-toed shoe company, wore them everywhere, loved them, but I just was not happy with some of the design updates that they had.

So I, I said, I'm going to really take this on and I'm going to reinvent minimalist footwear, which allows for a, um, certainly for comfort because comfort was my number one thing. I want a comfortable shoe. Number two, I want it to be functional. So I want it to be wide, thin, flat, flexible. I want to be able to work out in it. I want to be able to run in it. I want to be able to work out in it. I want to be able to run in it. I want to be able to sprint in it. I want to be able to walk long distances in it on pavement without having my feet

suffer from it being too thin. So we put a little bit more cushion in it than you would say in most, many of the minimalist shoes. Still not much. It's still less than one centimeter of total drop. And I want to be stylish. And that was one of the biggest issues I had with other companies was I didn't think they were stylish enough that I would put on nice clothing and go out to dinner with them or go to weddings and funerals or business meetings. And it kind of make you look like a weirdo, the other shoes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, a great example is last night, you and I went out to dinner and I didn't know you were wearing my paloovas because I didn't look for the first like 10 minutes of our talking.

And then I looked down. Oh, he's got the nappies on. They look snappy. It's the least I could do if you're going to pay for dinner, you know? That's right. That's right. Yeah, so this has been a passion of mine. This footwear thing has been a passion of mine.

He was telling me about like some relatives like wearing the shoes on like vacation. And he's like, well, I did pay for the vacation. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been a, it's been a passion of mine for a long time and I never got around to doing anything about it until I was, I had the means until I sold Primal Kitchen. And then I just set about to say, okay, what, what is it that I can do to change the way the world looks at foot health, foot comfort, the way the world walks? So that's where we're up to now. Power Project family, if you're trying to increase your muscle mass, if you're trying to lose body fat, if you're trying to stick to your nutrition plan, if you're trying to get fit,

pretty much if there's anything you're trying to do for your health, we know that sleep is the biggest determining factor to help you get from point A to point B. That's why we've been sleeping on eight sleep mattresses for probably more than two years now. And the main reason is the technology behind the Pod Pro. Now the Pod Pro is like the Tesla of beds. It will change its temperature based off of how you're sleeping during the night. And if you have a partner that's sleeping on the other side, they can have their own temperature settings. We all sleep hot here and I used to wake up in a puddle of my own sweat. That doesn't happen anymore because of the Eight Sleep mattress. And I've been getting the best sleep of my life. Now, if you don't want to replace your mattress, you can just get the

Pod Pro cover and you can put that over your current mattress to get all the benefits of Eight Sleep. But if you also need to replace your old nasty mattress, you can get the Pod Pro Cover and the Eight Sleep mattress. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to eightsleep.com slash powerproject, and you guys will automatically receive $150 off of your order. Again, eightsleep.com slash powerproject, links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. What have you noticed? Because for you, you've been paying attention to this for a very long time. So has there been any change in your feet for the past few years or since you've been someone who's been paying attention, your feet have just kind of been great. So my feet

have been great for a long time because I've been aware of being barefoot as much as I could. I've worn other five-toed shoes. They serve me well. What I've noticed is how now the next level for me is I feel like walking. I want to walk because every step I take, it feels like a massage in my foot, especially if I'm walking on uneven surfaces. And you don't get that with running shoes. You don't get that with – certainly with hiking boots. I mean hiking boots, I would say, are ridiculous. You want to feel every rock that you step on, every root that you step on. You want to feel it.

You want your foot to adjust. You want your toes to literally curl around it. So you can't even get that toe articulation in a regular single wide boxed minimalist shoe. You need to have that toe articulation, those individual five-toe compartments. When you have that, you start to realize how important every toe digit is to your foot health and to your balance and to your power that you can generate. Yeah. That's one thing that I've really liked about the Pluvas is because like, we've been doing foot stuff for a while. Um, but one of the things like we wore toe spacers, I've had other five finger shoes, but the thing I like about Pluvas is like, yeah, they're casual,

but at the same time, over time you will start to feel in between your toes more. Like I know you've been doing this for a while and thinking about this for a long time, but like I grew up playing soccer, narrow cleats. I had surgery on my foot in college because of that. But the difference in just my ability now to like just articulate my toes because they've been in those types of shoes and I've been focusing on toe spread, it makes a difference with a lot of things. And it also makes a difference with how connected I am to my feet because now whether I'm just standing here while podcasting or chilling at home or doing anything, my toes are now usually there's something going on, whereas my feet used to just be like stiff. And I never realized they were stiff because it's never something I paid

attention to. Well, and you were a customer of 40 years of shoe design, soccer being a great example. Why would you do that to feet? And for you to be a 23-year-old or whatever it was getting surgery on your feet because of the shoes you were wearing, 100% due to the shoes you were wearing. And if you've seen the feet of LeBron James or Usain Bolt, they're gnarled. How do you even stand on those, let alone do what you're doing? People always reference those feet too to kind of talk about how this stuff doesn't matter. Like I've seen – because like there does seem to be a bit of a resurgence in terms of the foot health, which is a good thing. But then you have coaches that are like, oh, well, look at these high-level athletes.

They don't do anything for their feet. But what if they did? What if they did? What if they did? What if they did? What if they did? What if they did? And, you know, it's like Lamar Odom famously, you know, the sixth man for the Lakers famously ate four pounds of candy before every game.

Well, what if he ate, you know, grass-fed beef? You know, so see, it doesn't even matter what you eat. No, it does, and eventually, you know, it bites you in the ass. But for most people, I think something like 77 percent of people experience foot pain in their lives. And that's critical because like this is your contact with the ground, people. You stand. You walk. You do all these things that require you to have strong, supple feet that are interacting with the surface so that you have balance, so that you don't fall over, so that you are strong enough to jump and play sports and do all the things that you want to do.

And if you encase your feet in restrictive shoes that scrunch the big toe and the little toe toward the middle, and they all do it. So even a wide toe box. I had no idea his feet were that bad. Yikes. Damn. Zoom in on that bad. Yikes. Zoom in on that left foot, bro. Try to... Yo!

Wow. You're going to say, okay, that's a benefit of wearing shoes? Right. No. No, man. Anyway, so you look at that, and again, you say, well,

he's still a pretty good player. Well, what if he had wider toe stance? Maybe it's another year of his career, right? I mean I look at Aaron Rodgers who yanked an Achilles tendon the other day. from the astroturf and how much of that is from tightly, tightly restricting the feet and then putting all of the onus, the pressure on that area between the calf and the Achilles. So, you know, coulda, woulda, shoulda, but I look at those things and I say, I mean, I look at foot injuries and rolled ankles. I play in chuck holes on dirt fields with palovas on, have been doing it prior for 15 years.

Never rolled an ankle. I'm running fast down a field. I'll step in a hole the wrong way. If I was wearing cleats, I'd twist my ankle. But because I have such great contact with the ground and immediate proprioception and immediate ability to adjust my footfall. You know, knock what? I don't get those sorts of injuries. People might not like these shoes when they first try them, right?

Well, they might not, but I'm looking at people who are interested in improving their foot health over the long run. Because if your feet are stuck together and then now you're in kind of a toe space, it takes some getting used to. I can mention Jennifer Cohen. Do you know her? I'm not sure. Oh, anyway, I was on her show the other day, and we had to put her on for the first time into some Paloovas, pink ones,

and she loved them. She thought they were adorable. It took 10 minutes to get her feet in the first time. No, 10 minutes. No, I think the first time. No, 10 minutes. I think they're in. No, this one's I got two in this one. But once she got

them on, I had to leave and go home. She said I walked 35 minutes to Beverly Hills and I had dinner with friends. My feet feel amazing. It was exactly what I needed. I understand now that the reason I couldn't get my toes into the It was exactly what I needed. I understand now that the reason I couldn't get my toes into the shoes is exactly why I need these, and I need to work on this. And people commented on how cute the shoes were, and they were obviously unique and different looking.

And I've had a number of people who will struggle to get them on the first time. It's one of the things on our site we have to do a better job of saying, look, just take the time to put them on the first time. It's one of the things on our site we have to do a better job of saying, look, just take the time to put them on the first time, walk around in them, and eventually after a couple of wearings, your feet just automatically splay. They slide right in, and you get that. I'm sure that's what you got. You don't have to work to get them on now, do you? No, no.

That's the thing. I don't think people think about the fact that, yeah, to get these on, you should be able to spread your toes to get in there. Yes. But the fact that you do not have the ability to do that is an actual foot problem. That's an indication that you need this. Yeah. Yeah.

And then what happens is as you're able to do that and you start to use the toes individually, you start to use the small muscles of the feet, your feet get stronger, your ankles get stronger. You start to work on a little bit more mobility. Your agility gets better. Your balance gets better. And ultimately, that's really what we're trying to do. I'm not trying to necessarily change the fashion of footwear. I want these to be stylish and fashionable enough to where people go, oh, those are cool. What are those?

Not, ew, what are those? Right? What were a few things that made Primal Kitchen just pop? What were some things that really moved the needle and increased sales? And what do you think that thing will be for Palooza? That's great. Well, I think it's going to be somewhat similar in that when we started Primal Kitchen, nobody really knew in the food industry what the response would be to a mayonnaise that costs $9.95 for a 12-ounce jar because people were used to paying $2.95, $3.95, whatever. And so a lot of my early mentors in the food space, don't do that. It's not going to work.

It's going to be – you'll fail. going to work. It's going to be, you know, you'll fail. And I said, no, I think there are people out there like me who have been waiting for this to come along for a long time, and no one's filled that space. They don't want the seed oils. They don't want the seed oils. Now, if I'd started Paramount Kitchen 10 years earlier, it might have failed because there was not enough knowledge and sort of a common knowledge about how inflammatory seed oils are and how dangerous they are. We're just starting to promote on Mark's Daily Apple this notion of healthy fats versus unhealthy fats. What's Mark's Daily Apple? Mark's Daily Apple is my blog.

I don't know what – I forget what day today is, but in about a week or two, it's going to be the 17th anniversary of the launch of Mark's Daily Apple. Wow. But it was a blog. It is a blog that was one of the first in the ancestral health space. Kind of launched everything. Kind of launched everything. A lot of – yeah. You were saying primals long before the liver came.

Don't get me started. Brian Johnson. Primal blueprint. Brian Johnson was an active participant in our forums going way, way back. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah, that's Mark's Daily Apple. So I was betting that there were going to be enough people who were willing to say, look, I want the best of the best of the best.

I want mayonnaise. I'm paleo. I'm primal. I'm keto. I'm CrossFit and I gave up mayonnaise five years ago because I can't find any mayonnaise that I can make tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, coleslaw with. Now along comes Primal Kitchen and there were – I had a famous story about – I went to my manufacturer when we first were going to do the first run. I said, what's the smallest batch we can do? He said, well, we can do 12,000 jars. I'm like, Jesus.

Like, A, I don't have enough warehouse space for that, and B, it only has a one-year shelf life. If I don't sell this, we're going to have to get rid of it. We sold out in two weeks. Wow. So that was where I really said, okay, we're on to something here. This is amazing. My business advisor, when I told him we were doing mayonnaise, had said, well, let's plan the revenue for this year. Let's do the business plan and the budget.

And I said, well, I think we're going to do a half million. He goes, you're crazy. I said, you won't do 200,000. I said, all right, let's put $300,000 in for the revenue side. We did $1.7 million the first year. And then the next year we're like, $1.7 million, that's a pretty good number. Can we do six next year? And by June we'd done $6 million the next year.

Oh, my God. Yeah, so it grew. And that's – again, that was validation that there are a lot of people out there who want to access better health and have been waiting for the right product to come along. So that's where I'm at with Paloova. I think there are a lot of people who would like to have healthier shoes, healthier feet and want better shoes to accommodate that. You look at the tens of millions of toe spacers that have been sold in the last couple of years. There's an indication that there's a market out there for people who want to work on their foot health and are taking action toward

that end. One of the really cool things about this, is that like it leads, it weeds itself into all other aspects of your athleticism. You're starting to see a lot of power lifters, whatever brand shoe they're wearing, they're starting to wear wide toe box, flat shoes. being used as hands when I'm doing certain things, when I'm grabbing on a certain people, my toes now have the natural tendency of grabbing and curling onto somebody. And even the meat on my feet has increased in the past few years. It's like all of these things will help you be a better athlete because it literally does start with the way that you strike the ground or use the ground with your feet. And if your feet are weak, you're inherently going to be a weaker athlete. A hundred percent. And you know, we're born barefoot and we evolved barefoot and we evolved to walk and do all the things that we do without shoes on. The fact that we wear shoes now is, you know, we can't get around that.

So the idea is how close can we come to approximating a barefoot lifestyle utilizing, you know, sort of modern technology? Because so many of the surfaces that we walk on are concrete, pavement, hardwood floors, tile, marble. That's not how we evolved. We didn't evolve to walk barefoot on those for long periods of time. So anybody who – most people who are not well-trained for that are going to encounter problems if they say, well, I'm just going to go barefoot.

Why would I even wear shoes? Why not go barefoot if that's the best thing? It isn't because if you're on these surfaces all the time, you're going to have compromises that our ancestors never even faced. So we said, let's develop a shoe that feels, when you're walking on concrete, feels like you're walking on a putting green, right? You're walking on a putting surface, barefoot on a putting surface. So that was the impetus behind the choice of a little bit of padding, a little bit of cushioning, but not too much that you can't feel everything that's going on underneath the feet. But again, I love the fact that you now are

feeling like you're grabbing things. I mean, if you've ever surfed or done anything that requires being barefoot on a board, you do – you need that articulation. You need to literally grab the board with your feet to make some of the moves that you have to make. If you think about our feet in the context of like they're basically just like our hands, and some people who have no – unfortunately born with no arms or hands do a lot of things with their feet. The dexterity is there. It's just that we, you know, we sort of give it up early on and wear shoes and say, well, I don't need any dexterity there. But imagine doing a handstand with oven mitts on, right? Or imagine somebody says, well, I want you to play this, you know, this Bach piano concerto, you know, with your ski mittens on. It's just – you can't do it.

The fact that we have this ability to articulate our toes and to use them to our advantage all day long, we should not be overlooking that and just casting them in stiff shoes. And if we start thinking about fashion and pointed – the pointed Italian-style shoes or the great high heels that the women are wearing. Don't stop wearing the high heels. I'm just saying. Stop wearing the high heels. Stop it. But we were thinking about making a five-toed high heel. I'm just wearing them to bed.

Yeah. It's not even weight-bearing at that time. That's right. Look into my eyes. Now, I know that you want to bed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not even weight-bearing at that time. That's right. Look into my eyes. Now, I know that you want to be looking better. You want to be going walking the streets being like, damn, I look and feel good because then everyone's going to be looking at you. That's why we've partnered with Viore clothing. So you can stop wearing your ripped-up tank and your long shorts and step your athleisure game up.

Viore has clothes that you can wear to dinner with a date or you can wear it in the gym. Personally, some of our favorites are the Ponto Performance line. And it has this dream knit fabric, trademarked, that literally feels like baby skin on your skin. It sounds kind of weird, but when you put it on and feel it, my God, that will change your life. Right here, this is the Boulevard shirt jacket. You guys are always wondering what kind of long sleeves we're wearing. It stretches. It feels good.

Oh, Andrew, where can they step their game up? Absolutely. You guys got to head over to Viori.com slash Power Project. That's V-U-O-R-I.com slash Power Project. And you'll automatically receive 20% off your order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Mark, actually, Mark, this is a question for you,

but Mark had a theory, and it seems to be something that I've noticed too. It seems like modern shoes have really messed up men more than women because a lot of women that I've met, especially if they're not on the bigger foot side, they seem to have really healthy looking feet, even if they don't really wear heels, like they seem to have good toe spread

and benefit to their feet. And I think you mentioned it's because women's shoes, what, what. Yeah. Men's shoes are like 20% more narrow in comparison to a similar size woman. Yeah. So it doesn't seem that. Because it's trying to look aesthetic and you don't want it to be this big ski shoe looking thing. Right. I'm just wondering if you've noticed that since you've been looking through all the shoes. I see, I just see a lot of women with, with pretty,

for lack of a better term, ugly feet, you know, like, like women who don't want to show their bare feet much. Yeah. I see, you know,

mostly athletic women who are wearing the wider shoes that, that athletic shoe companies make for women or women in, you know, Miami wear sandals a lot, thongs for the feet. Miami. Yeah. So – and women do yoga, and yoga forces good foot health, good toe separation. Yeah. So I think there are other reasons there, but I think a lot of, again, a lot of men, to your point,

are suffering from cramped feet and bunions and neuropathies. And, you know, a recent study came out that indicated that most of, like one of the biggest complaints people have with their feet is plantar fasciitis. Yeah. Okay? And for the longest time, it was either you rolled it out vigorously or you stretched it vigorously. And if that didn't work, you had surgery. came out recently, looked at a surgeon who took his different surgery patients and realized that it wasn't so much plantar fasciitis that they had, it's plantar fasciosis. And fasciosis is the death of a tissue. And the underlying cause was the plantar fascia area needs circulation, and it comes down the foot and circulates. And if you scrunch the

big toe over, it cuts off the circulation. And so if you're hoping to get circulation to some dead tissue, the worst thing you can do is scrunch the toe over. So that sort of prompted some people in the foot medicine industry to go, okay, we got to just widen the space up. We got to open – bring that big toe articulation out. And it's the hallucis muscle. It's the abductor that is being forced in and if you take it out, you improve that circulation tremendously. That's wild though because if you think about that with any other tissue on your body, if you had something around your neck that was just extra tight all the time,

or if you had something around your dick that was just super tight all the time, how uncomfortable and how weird your dick would probably be, right? But we don't think about that with the feet. It's just funny. I think it's weird that you went there. I mean, once you mentioned the tissues, I'm like, what if that was my dick? You know, like that would not be good. I mean, can we use the tissues, I'm like, what if that was my dick? That would not be good. Can we use that in a commercial or something?

We'll have to use a drawing, I think. But that's typically what people do, though, right? If something hurts, they're like, oh, don't move it. Take care of it. Extra cushiony. Put a neck brace on. And there you go. That's been the foot care industry for the longest time is I have – people say I have bad arches.

Okay, you have bad arches. We'll give you an arch support. We'll give you an orthotic. Well, that's like saying I have bad biceps. Well, there's no way we're going in the gym and lifting then. We have to support your biceps with something else. We can't let you be lifting. If you put an orthotic under an arch, that arch is now atrophying. It has no reason to work. So people are born with perfect feet. And even if you have flat arches, it doesn't mean they don't work. It means they're just a different shape. They don't have the convex, concave arch thing that some people have. But flat feet can be trained, flat arches can be trained just as much or more than what we call regular arches. It's a matter of doing the work, of doing stair climbing and jumps and all of the things without support underneath.

Once you support it, once you brace it, you lose the range of motion. You lose the ability to strengthen it. So that's – and so it's bizarre to me that you would fix – well, but that's medicine in the US today, right? It's taking the symptom and saying how do we alleviate the symptom rather than fix the problem. Yeah, they say that the support from your arch comes from the same area that the support for a bridge comes from. It's up top. So your support for your foot, you just need to strengthen some of the areas of the foot

and you'll be able to maybe not have an arch, but you won't feel like you need support in that area when you strengthen it. What was it like for you when you sold Primal Kitchen and how much did you end up selling it for? What was it like? It was pretty amazing. You've been doing well for a long time. You told me last night, you were, you know, you, when you were young, you were a contractor and you've always been busting your ass. You've always been making money, but this was like a different amount of money. Yeah, yeah. So we sold it ultimately for $210 million. $210 million.

And what it was like was incredible. I mean I'd spent – I'd only spent three and a half – Isn't that crazy to hear? Like when you started to – I'd imagine there was a process. You probably shopped it around, right? And as you're doing that, as you're starting to talk about $100 million, $200 million, I mean, is it kind of blowing your mind? No, I mean, I knew it was worth that. I thought it was worth more, but that's all good. I think

it was a good deal for both sides. But when it, you know, we went through a long process and it was, these sales are not easy because once the deal is made, the work really starts. Now you have this due diligence where both sides have to dig deeply into hundreds of thousands of emails and documents to prove things and to audit things. So we got through that process. We had a couple of frivolous lawsuits that came to us after the deal had been signed but before it closed. And I don't know if you've been in that space where lawyers are looking for settlements like ridiculous stuff that you would win if it went to court, but it would cost a million bucks or two million bucks to fight and win. So you settle. We had a couple of those.

So the day that we finally closed, I hung up the phone and I cried. I bet. years of grinding it out and all of the – $10 million of personal guarantees against my property to make sure that we had enough credit to buy avocado oil, for instance. All the stuff that you don't really hear about behind the scenes that goes on and – I know you know a lot of this stuff. It's – business is not easy and it's really rewarding when it is. When did the idea or like how did the idea hit you in the first place? I mean it seems like you've been on the – that's why I'm so excited about your shoes because you have consistently – we were saying you were talking about Primal long ago.

You seem like you have always been ahead. You've always been staying ahead. So with Primal Kitchen, like what was kind of the first thoughts of like I need to make – you did mention the mayonnaise but probably – No, I mean – no, for sure. I had this idea – well, I started Mark's Daily Apple because I had a supplement company and I wanted to have a platform to – much like we have platforms today to promote our products. And over the years, I got well-known for talking about ancestral health, about sleep, sun exposure, play, all of the primal blueprint laws, but mostly about diet. I became the guy – the go-to guy for how to eat right, how to do all that. the guy, the go-to guy for how to eat right, how to, you know, do all that. And as we started to hone in on what that way of eating looked like, and you get rid of pies, cakes, candies, cookies, sweetened beverages, you get rid of the glutens, you get rid of the pasta, the breads, the cereals,

and the industrial seed oils, you come down a pretty short list of food that you can eat, right? Meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, vegetables, a little bit of fruit, maybe some starchy tubers. And that's pretty boring for most people unless you really fix it up with sauces and dressings and toppings and herbs and spices and different methods of preparation. And then it becomes infinite in a good way, which is why there's 8,000 books on paleo recipe books. But at some point, we were writing – we did a recipe every week and it was usually a sauce, like how do you make this sauce to make this protein taste better or how do you make the sauce to make this fake pasta, the spaghetti squash, you know, feel more like pasta.

And I realized people didn't want to make that stuff. They wanted to buy that stuff. And it didn't exist. So really, in those days, you had Annie's, which was a kind of a, you know, a better for you choice for moms who were hip to what they were feeding their kids and their families. You had a couple of – you had like Newman's Own in the dressing space. But even Paul Newman, my childhood hero, he'd pick up a bottle of his extra virgin olive oil dressing and it was like the third oil in there after canola and soybean oil. So I'm like, dude, somebody has got to come in here and make the kind of sauce that I would put on anything and feel good about eating and it would taste great.

And so we started a year of R&D coming. I wanted to initially introduce like five products. I had a mayonnaise, a ketchup, a mustard, two salad dressings. Your buffalo wing sauce I'm using every day. So after a year, we had only commercialized the mayonnaise. And the question was do we launch now or do we wait until we have a suite of products to introduce? And we chose to launch with the mayonnaise and then just add the products as time went by. and then just add the products as time went by.

We wanted, first of all, the proof of concept that people were willing to pay more for what was a demonstrably better product. Like you would go into the aisle of any Whole Foods and you'd look at all the mayonnaise choices, and even some of the ones that were historically accepted as a better for you mayonnaise, you'd go down and check the boxes. We win in every category, right? So we're demonstrably the best. And most people would say we taste the best. Some people have different taste opinions about that.

So it needed to be demonstrably better, not have any negative ingredients, offensive ingredients, as we'd say, and taste great. And then – so now here we are. I'm still involved with the company even though Kraft Heinz owns it. We have 85 SKUs, 85 products, and it's still basically sauces, dressings, and toppings, things you put on healthy, good food to make it taste even better. And one of my early criteria was, in the early days of mayonnaise, people would say, well, mayonnaise, you know, it's not that good for you.

In fact, it's not good for you at all. So just use it sparingly, just use a little bit. And my idea was, okay, I want something that the more I put on my food, the better it became for me. So I wanted a salad dressing that I could use half a bottle on a big salad, you know, and not have to like use it sparingly and speak it. Speaking our language right now. Spritz on some stuff. But the problem is if you go to – I mean I have some favorite restaurants in Miami, some of the best restaurants in the world, and you get a big Caesar salad and you get a bucket of dressing, Caesar dressing, go with it.

It's all made with seed oils. And so it takes this otherwise wonderful collection of of vegetables and and not only negates it it just takes it and makes it something unhealthy entirely what you got going on i was just curious like so when you um well so now that you said craft is the owner is there any like um anything in the contracts or whatever it may be where they kind of have to keep the recipe the same? Because it would be a shame if one day Primal Kitchen would then have these. This is a great question. No, it's a great question, and I get it a lot.

And it's like, Mark, you sold out to Big Food, you know, whatever. You know, whatever. And I'm like, well, first of all, there was a point at which most founders can't continue to grow their company because it takes too much money to get to the next level. And so you have to find a partner. When we went to market, we had several different suitors. I looked at Kraft Heinz and I looked at – it's owned by Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway primarily and then a group out of Brazil called 3G, private equity group. The rest is publicly traded on the stock exchanges. And Kraft is a company that really doesn't have a brand.

It has 50 different companies, 50 different brands that it manages. They just sold Ori to Potatoes, Oscar Mayer Wiener, Planners's Peanuts, Folger's Coffee, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light. We go down the list of all of these brands that you – Velveeta. You know them all. But each company has no relationship to the other. So when they purchased us, they're like, dude, you are doing exactly what we would love to be doing with all of our brands. We want to buy you. We want to buy you, we want to grow you, and then we want to learn what you're doing so that we can incorporate that across the

platforms. So imagine in any context, you buy a company for what they're doing and you love it, and then you say, no, we're going to change it. It doesn't make any sense. So with Kraft behind us, we've become accessible to more families. We're in, I don't know, 60,000 stores now. Wow. You know, the company's grown fourfold since I sold it. Everybody's happy. We never had to fire one person from our company, from the team that they acquired. We didn't have to move locations.

We're still in Oxnard, California with the main headquarters. And what Kraft has done is just provided us resources, money for our marketing and distribution ideas and contacts. Do you think your company may have had some positive impact on some of the other products that they make? Because they do make like – I'm thinking like they have sugar-free ketchup and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean I think – look, it's a long process because each one of those other companies answers to ultimately to the board of directors of a large corporation whose job is to improve increased shareholder value. Stock market. Right? whose job is to improve increased shareholder value. Stock market.

Right? So you don't want to take an existing iconic brand that has a proven track record and a proven bottom line that you can guarantee to get every year and then mess with it and say we're going to change it out. I mean Coke famously did that years ago with whatever it was, the original Coke Zero or whatever, and they had to backpedal on that. So there's some nuances there. But what we have done I think – and this was my original mission. My mission was to change the way the world eats.

And I did some of it through the blog, some of it through my books, some of it through my seminars. And a lot of it – and some of it through my health coaching program. So I have a business called the Primal Health Coach Institute. We put 5,000 people through our training program, including a lot of doctors and nurses. So that's been an outreach to change the way the world eats. But then offering a product that people who otherwise might not even know was an issue that it had seed oils or not. And now they look at the label and they kind of get an idea of what's going on and now they get interested in changing some of the rest of their diet. So the ability to do that has been huge.

achieve this change the way the world eats is by the competition imitating us and other companies starting up and going, yeah, well, if Primal Kitchen can do it, we can find a niche within that and we can change our oils out from seed oil to avocado or extra virgin olive oil, or we can cut back on sugars or we can do real flavors as opposed to artificial natural flavors and things like that. You know what's kind of cool? Like you mentioned changing the way the world eats, which is like one of the biggest things people in America need to deal with. But then the aspect of not just getting people to want to walk but changing the way they walk. It's another fundamental step one thing. Because people want to run.

They have to start liking to walk. They have to start wanting to get up to walk. And that's what you're doing with these shoes. No, that's the mission with Palooza, change the way the world walks. And it was as similar as change the way the world relates, we want to change the way the world walks. And it's, to your point, it's nuanced because it's changed the biomechanics of how they walk and changing the willingness to walk. Like I want people to want to walk, not feel like I used to feel, which is I have to walk. Like there was decades when I'm like, I'm not walking. I used to run. I was a runner. Walking's

like, what is, you know, what's up with that? I'll take a, I'll take an Uber. And then, and then as I got older and I got, you know, the effects of all the years of running and the injuries accumulated, not in my feet but the rest of me. I'm like walking is the cure for my knee issues. Walking in paloovas because I would walk in regular shoes and my knees would hurt. No, this was the aha moment years ago when I first started going to the south of France and I would walk a lot when I was there. And I'd wear what you would say are the regular iconic brands. You're going to bring us next time, right?

You stayed there for three months, you said? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was – and we – I got a lot of baggage though. We – the idea that walking was supposed to be good for me but would cause my knees to hurt because my shoes were inappropriate for that activity. I was too much cushioning and so it's like you're walking on a B, you had Newtons, you had a bunch of other minimalist shoes that came around. And then there were issues when people started running in them untrained, right? People started doing lots of miles with very, very, very thin shoes.

And so the whole thing sort of shifted, and some people said, well, okay, that opens up a whole new world of maximal shoes. We're going to have thicker shoes and we're going to have more cushion. Hocus. And that came out of MBT, Maasai Basic Training Shoes, and then Hocus and Skechers and Deckers. They all went and ran with it. And their philosophy was, okay, you want to work the small muscles of your feet, but you, let's do it by putting everybody's feet on BOSU balls. So you're walking with a BOSU ball the whole time you're walking. It doesn't work that way. And that's why people have knee issues and hip issues.

Because if you don't have that sensory input from the bottom of your feet, the knee goes like, do I bend laterally? Do I bend a little bit forward? Do I, you know, how much, you know, of this do I, do I bend laterally? Do I bend a little bit forward? Do I, you know, how much, you know, of this do I, do I, the shock to absorb? Ankles still tend to roll a little bit. You know, and people would say, well, if like I'm a nurse, I'm on my feet all day. And, you know, so I need that cushioning. Well, you don't need the cushioning and it feels good at first, but I've got nurses wearing palovas now all day long in their shift and they feel like, okay, now they feel grounded.

They feel better. They feel like they're in contact with earth, not standing on some thing that's moving them around in the wrong direction. In terms of the different paloovas, like there's the strand is the one with the shoelaces, correct? Yes. And then there's the other one that's a slip-on. What's the name of that model? The Miami. So when people are looking at the Miami and the Strand

and these different options, what should they be thinking of? Because they do feel a bit different. Yeah, they're built on different platforms. So the Strand has a 9-millimeter, a 0.9-centimeter height, stack height from heel to ground. a 0.9 centimeter height, stack height from heel to ground. And that gives the shoe not just a little bit of extra cushioning, but also still is thin enough to allow for your foot to feel what's underneath.

With regard to the Miami, the Miami, and so that's a training shoe. So the Strand is a training shoe. I'll walk 15 miles in that shoe. For some reason, I like using the strands without the shoelaces. I think you saw that. You're probably bastardizing. You're like, what's this dude doing? No, no, no. Got a big old foot. I saw that, and it's cool.

So you start a trend. Yeah, that's cool if you want to do that. So people, but I get a lot, like, I go to my gym in Miami, and now all my, like, yeah, that's cool if you want to do that. So people, but I got a lot, like I go to my gym in Miami and now all my, like there'll be 10 people wearing strands in the gym now, lifting weights, doing squats, doing, you know, lunges, um, on the treadmill, walking backwards, you know, doing the toe push, you know, the knees over toes, uh, kind of workouts. Um, the Miami is, uh is more of a casual shoe. It's designed to kick around town.

What's interesting, it looks like it's really thick there. That's sort of a fake sidewall. So it's made to look like a real fashionable shoe. But it's still got a 1.2 centimeter stack height, so it's still very close to the ground. Do you know, I don't know, this is a side effect i noticed with the miami it there's a slight pitch where it pitched me forward into

my toes a little bit i don't know if you guys know that intentionally no no no there's no pitch there's no pitch it's it's a zero drop from the heel from the heel to the midfoot it's a zero drop but the thing is is like the good thing is i felt more pressure in between my toes i mean that's good if you if you feel the toes, it's working. But it has a zero drop. It's still just a little bit thicker because this is not a shoe that we would say, okay, go hiking and feel the ground underneath. This is a shoe we would say, okay, if you're going to be standing around at a cocktail party or at a beach party or you're going to be walking on concrete or whatever. This is a great shoe. Some people still – like I got people playing pickleball in that shoe.

I'm like I'm not advising that, but if it feels that good and you move and your agility is such that you're able to jump up and down and get from space to space using that. But we also have the Desert Boot, which is – well, the men's Napa. Let's go to men's Napa. That's the leather shoe. So that's the one that – That's what I was rocking last night.

You were rocking that last night. Yeah, those are great. That's a leather lace-up. It's, I think, a really great-looking, handsome shoe. Goes with jeans, with – That color right there is killer. Yeah. That's the one I got.

I love it. Yep. And again, five-toe articulation but still looks like a real shoe. So nobody is going to go, oh, like what the hell is that? They're going to like, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. First thing people ask me, are they comfortable? I'm like, well, that's the main reason you would wear them.

They're the most comfortable shoe you'll ever wear once you get used to them. And again, some people get used to them immediately and some people are like, you know, I got to try it a couple of times. But you know, that's like when you're skiing, are you a mitten person or are you a glove person? Pat Project family, we love beef on this podcast. We talk about it a lot. All right. We love our meat, but sometimes eating the same meat all the time can get a little bit boring. That's why we partner with Good Life Proteins, which also has certified Piedmontese on their website. But sometimes you might just want to eat some chicken or fish or duck. Duck. Who eats duck? But you can eat duck. That's why if you go to goodlifeproteins.com, you can select their build-a-box options and input all the proteins

you want. Then you'll select subscribe and save to save money on all of your meat. If you enter code power project at checkout, you can save up to 25% on your subscription. That means you're going to be saving 25% on all of that different meat that's going to be heading to your door. Once again, head to goodlifeproteins.com. You can enter code power project and save up to 25%. Links are in the description box below as well as the podcast show notes but you know i know you're going to talk more about this but it takes time for the feet to get strong yes like a few years into this and my feet and probably your feet too or it's like we're gaining different abilities there they're still progressing so our feet hurt in the beginning trying to get used to certain things yeah 100 100 the feet did hurt because you weren't

putting them through all this stress. Like they're sore. Well, but I mean, it's like you take somebody to the gym for the first time again and you put them on the bench and you say, okay, you know, we're going to do 10 reps of 175. You're going to be sore the next day if that's the first time you've done it. One of the things that we get from a lot of bodybuilder lifters, you know Chris Geffen? Yeah. Sounds familiar. Okay.

Anyway, he's got a big following online, and he always lifts in palovas. Sometimes he lifts in the napas. But his observation is that he engages the muscles, all the muscles of the leg further up and more inclusively when he's wearing palovas because he's grounded. He gets that toe articulation. He gets that feel for the ground. And the toes are the starting point of, like as Kelly Starrett would say, you screw the feet into the ground when you're doing this stuff, right? In order to screw the feet in the ground, you have to have feeling. You have to have sensation about that. So yeah, I think it's going to change a lot.

And then we have – that's the desert boot. That's a little bit more stylish. You're working on some new ones as well, right? Yeah. So we've got some women's shoes coming out that are – I would say – women would say they're really cute. You know, that's what the gals say. We've got a true hiking version, the ATR coming out in first quarter and that because so many people are getting the strands and doing uh long hikes in the woods and long rucks in the woods with them and saying this is this is this far superior to any of the hiking boots i've ever had you had brad kerringer our mutual buddy brad did a nine-hour cactus the clouds hike in paloovas and and was passing guys wearing stiff sold hiking

boots all the way up. My friend Tom Hodge, he just was doing out in Chamonix, doing those ultra races out there. Every time he's not actually racing in his racing shoes, he's training. He's rucking with a 40-pound backpack in paloovas. And he says that's an integral part of his training program now. And he says that's an integral part of his training program now. I've got a lot of other ultra runners now who are using Palooza as part of their training program. They're not running in them yet. They might one day.

But they're certainly training, doing sprint training, doing distance training. That's great. And if they're doing a long hike as part of their ultra running training protocol, which a lot of these guys do. Again, when I say you can't run twice as fast as you can walk, a great example of that is in ultra running. I mean a lot of people are running ultras at 12 – they're running 12-minute miles. I used to do off-road racing in the early days. And I remember races where I would literally go from a run to a walk because I was running too slow you know I could walk faster than I could run

there you go let me ask this Mark I want to kind of ask you again about the longevity stuff that we were talking about because a lot of people talk about longevity and it's like they're not it doesn't necessarily in the biohacking community for example they talk about all these it's like, I don't know, they're not, it doesn't necessarily,

in the biohacking community, for example, they talk about all these things you can do, but working out is kind of the side thing. And when you were talking about running, you were mentioning that people need to walk and strength train. You do things like ultimate Frisbee, which allows you to run. And I think one of the benefits that come from running is like the pounding on the ground with the, like you're going faster, so you have more force on the ground, which helps with your bone density, right? Not really. You don't think so? If you look at bone density of runners, it's not great.

Okay. So this is the thing. I'm not talking about the endurance distance runner. I'm talking about individuals who are like sport athletes or people who like maybe they're running, but they're running a mile, two miles or whatever, but they're getting in that pavement pound. Do you think that there is a benefit there? Because like when I use running, I'm not trying to run 10 miles. I don't need to do that shit. I'm trying to do faster runs and I'm trying to just get in a little bit, like maybe a mile or two.

That's great. That's fine. That is an appropriate amount of running. That is consistent with our ancestral movement patterns. But our ancestors didn't go, okay, I'm running 10K today, I'm running 20K tomorrow, and they didn't run every day. They ran when they had to, and they ran distance when they had to. So the book Born to Run was sort of predicated on that idea that we are born, we've evolved to be able to run, but not every day, and that's my point. So with me, I I would say if I do a lot of walking and I do a little bit of sprinting, I'll go on a 10-mile hike, and if there are flats, I'll run for 300 meters.

I'll run until I don't feel like running anymore, and it feels good, and I want to do it. good and I want to do it. There's a big difference between that sort of persistence hunting, which is what the Hadza would do, which is what ancestral, even modern tribes would do, which is sprint a little bit, walk a little bit, jog a little bit, change direction, stop and track and smell, watch the beast, and spend two hours doing that, as opposed to metronomically running 745s for two and a half hours. Yeah. And then doing it every goddamn day. To what end, I would say. One of my favorite things to do is to put myself up against other athletes who have trained specifically in a sport for a long period of time.

And I haven't done any training except life. So if I sprint and I play ultimate and I ride a mountain bike and I do – and I lift weights and I do deadlifts, could I get in a 5K and do pretty well? I could probably maybe win my age group in a 5K right now. group in a 5k right now. I don't want to because it's like, it hurts too much. And there's no, there's no end goal that I'm trying to achieve. But the fact that I've trained through the rest of my life to be able to do that gives me a sense of satisfaction. Like, okay, this is training for life. It's, it was the original idea behind CrossFit. You know, are you someone who's able to, you know, save your family from a burning building and swim across a lake and do all this stuff? Let me ask you this then. What would your

physical recipes, because we know nutrition is important. We can talk more about that, but what would your physical recipe be for physical longevity? The things that habits you think people should try to do. So this goes back to the original Primal Blueprint, which I wrote. It was online, available in 2007. The book came out in 2009. And it is three basic principles with regard to fitness. Move around a lot at a low level of aerobic activity. In other words, that's the walking.

That's the just pacing on a phone when you're going outside to take a phone call. That's walking up and down stairs instead of taking the elevator. That's moving around a lot at a low – and it does include a little bit of jogging if that's your thing or a little bit of swimming or a little bit of cycling. Lift, heavy things. That was the rule. Lift heavy things twice a week. Not more than twice a week unless you're wanting to compete. You asked about longevity. And then sprint once a while. And once in a while usually is once a week, but maybe it's once every 10 days. But once in a while, sprint. So now you've combined these low-level aerobic activity with strength and power, maximum sustained power with lifting, and then you've got the sprinting, which is all out

the application of both of those. What that does is it gives you the ability – gives me the ability to then go for an hour and 15-minute stand-up paddle and have a blast and see dolphins and look down and see manatees and be, I would say, grinding the whole way, except my heart never gets above 125 beats a minute, and come off the water and be freaking ripped, right? Like, take a picture now, you know? Yeah.

Or to get on a fat bike in the sand in Miami and take a lot of the influencers. Sounds brutal. The influencers that you and I know and take them out on the dirt in Miami, on the sand in Miami, and kick their asses for an hour and a half. Thomas DeLauer, who's in tremendous shape. And Thomas is probably, I don't know, 35, 40 years old, something like that. Yeah, he said it was really, really challenging when he went out there and did that with you. That's my wife on the board with me. She doesn't always go with me. Some motivation there, huh?

Yeah. World's most interesting man. I don't always paddle with a hot blonde. What I do. Yeah, that's the fat bike on the beach. So is that just a lot of resistance with that bike? Yes. So the great thing about the bike is, well, several great things. Number one, no cars because it's on the beach. Number two, you don't need a helmet because if you fall,

it's generally because you are going so slow in the soft sand that you can't maintain your balance, in which case you fall into soft sand. Obviously, the view is great every day. The view changes every day. And it's just an amazing way to get out in fresh air, to get a cardio workout. And I don't, I'm not a big fan of cardio anymore, as I have probably indicated. So that's a cardio day for me. That's probably my only cardio day. I don't run. And even the stand-up paddling, it's literally, stand-up paddling, if you sprinted

really hard for, you know, a minute, you'd get out of breath and that's fine. You could do that. But if you want to do it for an hour, you got to pace yourself. So it becomes literally 2,000 repetitions per side of a stroke activity, right? So anyway, so I don't really do that much in the way of aerobic cardio the way I did every day of my life for 30 years, because there is no longevity benefit to it. Everything you do is cardio. So everything you do is cardio. It's just, now we're just talking about how aggressively do you want to do it.

Back to the shoe story, one of the artifacts of the running shoe industry making these thick cushioned shoes that allowed people like me to run 50 extra miles a week, 50 miles more than I should have, than my feet would have been telling me to stop. I kept – I trained hard. I was competitive. I was elite as was everyone else in my arena. And over the years, I developed a heart problem because when you bypass that information, when the feet are saying that's enough, the feet are also saying it on behalf of the rest of the body. That's enough. That's enough running. If you bypass that information and the heart has no say in the matter, The heart goes, Jesus, we're going to do this again tomorrow?

Like seriously? But the heart does not feel pain from it. It just goes, okay, here we go. Boom, ba-da, boom, ba-da, boom, ba-da. And so the heart over years, hypertrophy, left ventricular hypertrophy is a big problem in my generation. And it manifests itself with a lot of people in AFib. big problem in my generation. And it manifests itself with a lot of people in AFib. So the millions of guys who ran way too many miles have AFib, or I have premature ventricular contractions, PVCs. I take a medication to even it out. And this is a result of, I have to say, it's a result of

thick shoes allowing everybody to put in more miles and do more work on their heart than the heart was capable of doing. It's a little bit like, and I don't want to, again, I don't want to get too much into your territory, but when you put on a weight belt to do deadlifts, you're bypassing some weak links. So I would argue only deadlift as much as you can deadlift without a belt because that's your whole body. That's your whole kinetic chain working together. And once you strap the belt on and start working against some other stuff, you're bypassing important information that should be telling you to stop. Now, in pursuit of more weights and records, that obviously makes sense. But again, if we're

talking about longevity, that's one of those areas that I would sense. But again, if we're talking about longevity, that's one of those areas that I would say, think about the complete body and whatever the weak link is, work on the weak link. Don't bypass the weak link. It's especially powerful though with young runners, I wonder. With a young runner starting off in a super shoe

and doing cross country in a super shoe when they're super young and maybe they've never really built that foot strength. It's going to be interesting to see how that happens or what turns out from that. I mean a lot of the elite coaches have those guys do sprints barefoot on the grass. OK, cool. So there's some acknowledgment that barefoot sprinting improves foot strength. It's a compressed arena in which to improve foot strength with added force and tension in a short period of time versus running two miles barefoot or something like that. Gotcha. In your primal blueprint, one of the other things was to get sunlight? Yeah. How long ago was that?

How many years ago? 8, 10, 12 years ago? No, no, no, 20. I mean, I've been talking about sunlight forever. I've been a big fan of... Look, I'm 70. When I was in my teens, I was a

contractor working outside with a shirt off all summer long and did so. I ran. Somebody sent me a clipping of a race I won in New England in 1978. And we were allowed to race without shirts on in those days, and we pinned our number to our shorts. I was skinny as shit, too. I forgot how skinny it was. I have to send you a picture of that.

But I've always been out in the sun and I've always been a fan of sun and I've always instinctively and intuitively said, there's got to be a reason that I enjoy the sun, that I soak it up. I don't go, oh my God, put it away. So then I started writing about it with Mark's Daily Apple in 2006. And then ever since, I write about it whenever I can. I'm a big fan of getting unprotected sunlight for some amount of time. Now, that doesn't mean you burn. It means you spend enough time to get some melanin response and then you either cover up or put on a sunscreen after that. Because I spend hours and

hours out in the sun sometimes and I don't, you know, and I put a zinc oxide, tinted zinc oxide on my face, trying to at least preserve some of that. I got to get lotion now, apparently. Amen. It's just, people say black don't crack and I think maybe lotion might be some of the reason why some people look that way. But on the question of the sun, Brian Johnson, the other Brian Johnson, not Liver King, but longevity Brian Johnson. There's also the ACDC Brian Johnson, too.

Oh, I'm not familiar. You know that? Yeah, the lead singer. I wanted to do a meme, and I might still. It says, Brian Johnson Liver King, Brian Johnson Live Longer King, and Brian Johnson, liver king. Brian Johnson, live longer king. And Brian Johnson, live performer king. Hey, make that meme before this episode comes out.

Because once it does, someone's doing it. But as far as the sun goes for him, he actually is somewhat of a vampire. It's not like he gets no sun, but he keeps it to minimal sun exposure. So what are your thoughts on that? Look, I know a lot of women who have avoided the sun their whole life. Me too. They look fantastic. And I can't argue with that. First of all, I don't intend to live to 160. I don't need to live to 160. I'm going to live as long as my original gene set will allow me,

given the parameters. And one of the parameters is how much do I enjoy my life. And I love being out in the sun. So I am not going to avoid the sun on the possibility that – and by the way, it's too late now. I've spent 60 years in the sun. So it's not like I'm going to reverse any of that stuff. I take vitamin D. I mean I'm not a good converter of vitamin D, so I take vitamin D supplements. It reverse any of that stuff. I take vitamin D.

I mean I'm not a good converter of vitamin D, so I take vitamin D supplements. It's one of the few supplements I take. I take that and I take collagen. And so when people willingly choose to avoid the sun, I'm like that's – if your purpose is to live longer and that's going to make you happy, go for it. My purpose is to enjoy the most out of every possible moment I can in life, which includes being out on a paddleboard in the south of France, paddling around yachts and checking out the scenery or being on the bike and checking out the scenery and – or whatever, just hanging out. Being with your grandkids? Yeah, or being with my grandkids, or being on a dusty, hot trail, you know, with a, again, with paloozas on, feeling like every footfall is a massage for my feet, with a goal in mind to beat my last time. See, I still have that. It's still

in my brain. I remember all my hike times from all my hikes, and even though I'm not running, and I do run a little bit of them. But I'm generally hiking fast and hard and uphill and I always – I'm always watch aware. I'm always conscious of the times. So you're not just walking like just on flat surfaces and just strolling, although maybe you do that occasionally just for activity. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean – For activity.

Yeah. So again, because we have this place in France that we stay every year and it's – there's a lot of flat surfaces and there's a lot of stairs and there's a lot of hikes and trails and things like that. So it varies. But I could go a couple of miles on a flat surface and be perfectly happy. I get in the zone and I'm not strolling. I'm actually walking with purpose and with an intentional gait, knowing and literally feeling every footfall, whether consciously or subconsciously, knowing my toes are splayed. It feels good. I'm compelled to want to walk, which is an important thing for me.

Now, actually, I don't know if you mentioned this, but you did mention that fall on that hike. Yeah. Did you heal pretty quickly? Because one thing is as people do get older, falls happen and they're not being active, but they also don't tend to heal well. Yeah. For you, was that pretty quick? Yeah, no, I cracked a bone.

It was the top of my tibia. It took a long time for me to hobble out of the forest to get picked up by a car. The guy who was behind me said, Jesus, Mark, that looked bad. And I didn't know. I was just sort of in shock. So for a couple of days, I couldn't walk.

I didn't get an x-ray, but I knew it was what we call a bone bruise, a bad bone bruise. And then I started walking, and so walking was my cure. I mean, the more I could – again, up to a point. Look, using walking to recover from injury is a signal that walking is good for you. And that's the circulation and that's the stuff you need. And so it's been a couple of months now. But within a month, I was sort of back to being able to do whatever I wanted to do. I was still very tender to the touch and swollen, but I could do whatever I wanted to do without thinking about it.

I couldn't – oddly enough, I couldn't ride a bike because that tibialis muscle, the front – because I bruised the tibialis, the insertion of that. So it took me two months to be able to ride a bike, oddly enough, but I could walk. I could walk and that's the – again, the indication that walking is, I think, a go-to for everyone. A hundred percent. No matter what – whether you're in the best conditions of your life or whether you're just starting to get back after being a couch potato your

own life. You were way into nutrition and then you made products to help the world eat better. Yeah. You were way into running and now you're helping people to be able to walk better and maybe run better as well. What would the message be to somebody listening to this right now that would like to maybe try to be an entrepreneur, would like to dive into something, but they're not quite sure exactly kind of where to start? Because it sounds like you just have kind of,

I mean, maybe sounds cliche, but it sounds like you just sort of have followed your passions and your heart and stuff like that. Yeah, that's, that. Yeah, that's a dangerous path to go down, follow your passion. I mean if I'd really follow my passion at 12 years old, I would have owned an ice cream shop. But over the years, I found stuff that I was good at. And I was good at developing supplements, like one of the best. I developed supplements for QVC, Home Shopping Network, Beachbody, a bunch of other companies. Started my own supplement company. That was my thing.

I was good at it. I wasn't passionate about it, but I was good at it. And then when I realized that I was writing so much about food, I wasn't even that passionate about food or dressings or toppings. I identified an area in the marketplace that was lacking and I said, I'm going to go approach that. So did I become passionate over time? Sure. But it was mostly interesting to me to find – because I'm in the health – I'm passionate about health. So if I find something in this space that's missing that people ought to be doing, I will go after that.

So was I passionate about shoes? Not really, but I was interested in fixing a problem that had existed in my life for decades. I could not find a shoe that I could wear that I liked, that felt comfortable to wear all day long. So it always starts with me. Like how would my life improve with my invention of this? I'm sure that's how Slingshot got started. So you weren't passionate about coming up with this other than you were fixing a problem that you identified for yourself that other people must – it must resonate with them.

And that's what I would say to entrepreneurs is find you know, find – first of all, let it come to you. Be open to the possibilities and start with something because – Let it come to you. Don't force it. Yeah. And then usually when you start with something, it morphs eventually. You know, there's pivots and all kinds of things that we do in life that, you know,

I didn't set out to become the Mayo King of Malibu, you know, but I was. And it was a result of pivoting away from supplements, which was my business. I thought – I kept thinking I got to fix this supplement thing. We're not selling enough supplements. We got to fix it. And it was the pivot away going, I'm writing about food. I should be doing food. And it was the pivoted way going, I'm writing about food.

I should be doing food. So that's what I would say to most people is be open to the possibilities. Read. Understand what it is that interests you, what you're good at. If you go to coding school and you want to create an app, figure out what's missing in the world of apps. But don't necessarily follow your passion because that can be a slippery slope. And I think lots of people are sort of saying that these days. Jordan Peterson for one saying, oh, yes. No, just find something you're good at that you can serve to other people that they appreciate.

And from that comes the sort of passion and psychic income. You mentioned earlier that Liver King was on the forums and stuff of Primal Blueprint. Did you know him before he turned into the Liver King? Yeah. No, I knew who he was. I knew who he was. Yeah. What do you think of some of the stuff that he's been doing? of the stuff that he's been doing. You know, I, he's, you know, it's a cartoon character that has sort of transformed, you know, any way that the message gets out there, I guess, if, like I said, I want to change the way the world eats, and if his message is, you know, eat better and eat, you know,

organ meats and lift weights. Doesn't sound so bad. It doesn't sound so bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but I mean, I mean, you know, I had the 10 primal blueprint laws. He has the nine ancestral tenets. You know, I've had 20 trademarks

for primal nutrition, primal health, primal fitness, primal coach, primal health coach institute, primal fuel, primal footprint is the name of the company that makes paloovas. So to call people primals is whatever.

I know where you're going, Dad. You know where Daddy is. I still like your Primal Fuel. That stuff's really good. Thank you. Thank you. Great product. Appreciate that.

So kind of going back to the entrepreneurial side of things, a lot of people have heard like, oh, you have to take risks. You got to take big risks. As you were coming along, did you feel like you ever faced like a really big risk where it's like if this doesn't work out, like, oh, man, I'm going to really go under? Yeah. That's part of being an entrepreneur. I was, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I've made lots of money. I've lost it, made it back of being an entrepreneur. I was – I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I've made lots of money. I've lost it, made it back, lost it again.

When I started my supplement company, it was 1996. I had a wife and two kids. I had no money in the bank. Didn't have a pot to piss in and I started a supplement company. I left a job that was paying reasonably well that fed my family but I left that job to start Primal Nutrition. And there was – I had to borrow $50,000 from my mother's boyfriend, which – so funny. Like you say, well, OK, you borrowed money from a family. No.

The guy, when I went to sign the promissory note, I signed it. He said, no, you got to sign it with a signature that I can read. So that was – it was that clear. Anyway, I borrowed 50K from him and I set about to build this company and with a wife and two kids. It was tough times. So one of the great parts about this, my kids saw what it takes to go from nothing to building a business, right? And so that's instilled in them an appreciation of what it does take. But I've had major setbacks even since then that with Primal Kitchen, there was like six months into it, we thought we were going to lose the business within a week if we didn't immediately fix some things that we thought were unfixable.

And those – but that's just – that's part – you have to be tough. You have to be resilient to be an entrepreneur and you have to be ready, willing and able to withstand those kind of things and not let it get you down. And you also have to be okay with the failure, right? Like as I tell young entrepreneurs, if you fail this time, it doesn't mean you failed. It means this didn't work. Find something that does. You only need one home run in life in terms of business, right? You only need to hit one big one out of the park or even a

triple for that matter. And you can strike out the rest of the time, but if you get that one, that one big hit, you could be set for life. And then, so for me, I stumbled upon this accidentally. I would eat one big breakfast. I'd get a lot of work done here. And then I'd go home and I'd eat a really big dinner. Somebody kept asking me what my diet was. And I'm like, I really have two meals a day. And I just kept saying that over and over. And I'm like, why does that sound so familiar? Talking to Brad Kearns, I'm like, no shit. And the book is behind you, actually, the two meals a day book. So I kind of stumbled upon it accidentally, even though I knew you wrote the book, I knew who you were, I knew everything about it, but I found it out of necessity just because, you know, again,

I could fast the whole day, but I couldn't fast every day all the way till I got home. I would be thinking about food nonstop. Um, I didn't like eating throughout the day because it's like, how are we going to stop podcasting right now? Guys, I got to go warm up my food. Like it's just not, it's not very convenient for me. That'd be funny. I should maybe one day do it. But, uh, so again, being able to eat in the morning, I didn't think about food. I was fueled throughout the whole day. I come home and I have a really good meal. That's how I found it. How did you stumble upon two meals a day? I just would wake up in the morning and, uh, not be hungry. And I started looking into, because my assumption was back from the

bodybuilding days, you got to eat five meals a day. You have to have skinless chicken breast and rice in a Tupperware container. And if you go two and a half hours without eating, you'll cannibalize your muscle tissue. And so that was always the thought process. And then when I started digging deeply into keto initially years ago, long before I wrote the book, I realized I don't need to be maintaining blood sugar throughout the day. And if I wake up and I'm not hungry and I have all this energy and I want to work out fasted, why would I not do that? And I'm still, even though I'm a skinny shit, I still, I still, I still have this body fat self-image. Like I don't want to, I don't like, I'd sit at the edge of my bed and roll and get my fat rolls. Oh shit, I'm getting too fat. That's not a fair assessment. Sitting down, that makes it hard. No, no, no. So I, so I still have that in the back of my, you know, I'm a fat kid in a skinny body.

Ring the bell. I actually remember the first time I met him or the first time I was at your house in Malibu. You were like, oh, let me see. And you wanted to see abs. And you were like, all right, cool. And then we started talking from there. Like, I need to see what this guy has going on first before we get in conversation. Otherwise, let's not waste our time. That's amazing. Right. So good.

I do have a question on the, on the note of fasting. I'm glad Andrew brought that up because like we've been using fasting for years now. I have, there's some days where I'll have one meal, some days where I'll have two, but I've found massive benefit of it over the years. I've heard some people within health start talking very negatively about the idea of fasting, that it really doesn't do much. What are your thoughts about maybe the benefits and potential drawbacks of fasting that maybe you may have found through the years? I don't fast long periods of time. I do – I might do a 36-hour fast once in a while. I might do a 36-hour fast once in a while.

I just – A, I like to maintain my muscle mass and I do feel like that costs me. Also, I don't feel like I'm getting incrementally significant benefits over a compressed eating window, which I have right now. So I do an 18-hour fast most days, right? So is an extended fast going to increase my autophagy enough that it will be noticeable? I don't know. So my wife, on the other hand, she does seven-day water only fast twice a year. Really? She likes it and she likes them and the effect and the process. She doesn't look forward to them, but she knows she wants to do them and knows it's good for her.

Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.