”You Regain 60% Foot Health By Doing THIS!” Galahad Clark (Creator of Vivobarefoot)
Galahad Clark, co-founder & CEO of Vivobarefoot joins Russell to reveal the secrets of the shoe industry. Learn why modern footwear harms our feet, the science behind iconic deals like Michael Jordan's Nike contract, discover the benefits of minimalist shoes for 6 months, and the history of the Quaker-Cobbler legacy. This is a paid partnership. Get 15% off your first Vivobarefoot order with code COMMUNITY15: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/community Join us at ‘Community 2024' https://www.russellbrand.com/community/For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/See my LIVE NEW SHOW: https://www.russellbrand.com/live-dates/ NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Joining me now is Galahad Clarke, a member of the renowned Clarke family, who founded the iconic British shoe company, Clarke's.
Of course, Vivo Barefoot, Galahad's brand, a brand that promotes minimalist footwear, emphasising the health and benefits of walking barefoot, are our partners in Community, our annual event where we bring people together to investigate political and spiritual change, as well as having a giant, glorious festival together.
All of our profits from Community go to Mental health organisation and addiction charities, which we certainly won't be able to do without our partners at Vivo Barefoot.
Galahad, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
What did you think of the community festival?
Because it was sort of deluged, it was difficult, there was ferocious weather, there were points where it seemed like a refugee camp there more than a festival.
Points where I thought, oh no, this whole thing's going to sort of collapse inward on itself like a souffle of mud.
I was stunned on it.
It was the first time I'd ever been to a sober festival.
Yeah.
And I was interested, shall we say, showing up there wondering what it's going to be like and everyone was sort of sitting around awkwardly.
But the love and the laughter, the dancing was profound and almost more fun than any other festival I'd ever been to.
And the depth of connection and interaction was super cool.
I thought it was a great success.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Vivo Barefoot and why you were willing to work with us?
In short, how our objectives as an organisation that are about community and awakening align with the agenda of your organisation and your footwear brand in particular?
I think first of all I would say we're privileged in many ways to get to the point where we're able to sponsor a festival like that and your festival.
We're ultimately a brand about liberating people's feet, about foot freedom and a connection to nature, which obviously super resonates with everything you're doing.
We're a challenger brand, we're a challenger brand to Big shoe and you know in many ways a brand that goes beyond just shoemaking and a brand that's really helping people rediscover natural health.
Starting with feet.
What do you mean by that freedom for the feet?
Because like it suggests that other footwear might be like a Japanese foot binding with our little tootsies all trussed up in a Nike or a Yeezy in ways that are sort of fundamentally bad for us.
Is that part of the proposition of Viva Befoot?
Exactly, yeah.
So we find ourselves in the Western world where we're all walking around in shoes that are literally disconnecting us both from ourselves and from the planet, strapping loads of padding under our soles.
And squishing all the toes together basically.
So the basic notion is that by allowing the foot to do its natural thing, feeling the earth, allowing the body to move naturally, it's a completely sort of radical difference to what Big Shoe is basically propagating.
I never had the idea, like the way I used to dress 10-15 years ago, was quite often in a little, what I'd call a high-heeled kicky boot.
A Cuban heeled, like I'd have about a 4-inch heel and very sort of narrow, toed shoes.
I was well into them and somehow my feet seemed to have survived that experience.
Now I recognise that there's an aesthetic consideration when like shoes taper I suppose it just makes sense that if you're bunching your foot up in some sort of way, particularly for people that are wearing stilettos and very narrow shoes, it's pretty obvious that anything that binds a part of your body is going to be negative and perhaps in particular a foot where I understand there are a lot of nerve endings just from the reflexology and stuff that I do, that there's part of the foot that's connected to many meridian systems within the body and I suppose if you're binding all that up it ain't good.
I've never really considered there to be sort of a shoe industry in a way that is sort of, I don't know, dishonest, manipulative, controlling and all that up front.
Are you saying that there is?
That there's something that's sort of not explicit or unfair or wrong about the way shoes are made?
Yeah, we were just talking about kids, so let's start with kids.
And a child's foot is not fully formed until the teenage years.
And so, you know, the bones in the foot are not fully calcified until they're really soft and malleable.
And, you know, in the Western world, we start to put kids in rigid little heeled shoes right from the age of four or five and literally start deforming feet.
In my opinion, it's like a big public health scandal that we're literally deforming and weakening kids' feet in the way they move.
It's akin to giving them cigarettes.
Why in particular would that be bad for them?
What kind of restriction or consequences are there from, I know you say like all shoes, like if I'm buying my children Skechers or if I'm giving my children Nikes or what are they into?
Like most of the things that my kids wear are sort of pretty sparkly sometimes, things that light up on the sole.
Most shoes will be either, you know, will be restricting the natural development of the foot.
And you don't want to restrict any natural development of your kids, right?
And so most kids in the Western world, they arrive in adulthood with pretty weak, deformed feet.
And you know, the studies show that just by walking around in less shoe for six months, you regain 60% of your foot function and health.
Which is not to say that barefoot makes you stronger.
It's just to say that what's happening is the shoe industry are making your feet really weak and dysfunctional.
And then you pay for it up the rest of the kinetic chain, right?
You pay for it with people going around with bad knees and bad hips and bad backs.
And you know, a lot of kids are able to, but they don't enjoy moving anymore, right?
They don't enjoy moving as much as they should.
There's a whole kids orthotic industry where they feel like they need intervention.
You see kids playing sport bandaged up in this way, that and the other.
So yeah, I would say we're quite a long way away from just our natural healthy function starting with kids.
Well, why would that be?
Because it's not obviously a deliberate attempt to maim and undermine the anatomy of children.
And there are two sort of ideas that we're simultaneously running.
One idea is that the shoes are sort of unconsciously binding up feet.
The other one is that it's sort of disconnecting you from the earth in a literal way, almost in a sort of like, I'm barefoot right now and I've got one of those grounding mats and stuff.
Are you addressing, as well as sort of biomechanical matters, are you thinking about it in a slightly more esoteric way, that it's always disconnecting you?
Yeah, absolutely.
All of the above.
We're designed over millions of years, and our feet are sensory organs for a reason.
They're designed to feel.
They're really super complex bits of kit, right?
With 28 bones, hundreds of muscles, thousands of nerve endings.
And the modern shoe industry literally undermines every one of those systems, sort of one by one almost, right?
The padding undermines the nerve connection.
The stiffness undermines the muscles being able to dynamically use.
Don't use it, you lose it.
And then the shapes squash all the bones together and literally deform the bones.
So if your feet aren't working and all three of those systems start in your feet and then go up the rest of your body, you then have to wiggle your body around to overcompensate, right?
And so I don't think, you know, the shoe industry and shoe executives of today are not necessarily like deliberately maiming children, but it's a laziness, right?
And it's a fashion thing and I think a lot of them know it and I talked to a
lot of them. I know the industry and obviously my family's been responsible for making a lot
of kids shoes but it's just a laziness of like all the consumers not ready to wear, they want
their little kids to look like adults in fashion products.
So you're saying children's shoes in particular should be as non-interventionist as possible.
And is that the idea of Vivo Barefoot?
That's the idea.
They're just, all they're doing is protecting your foot from stepping on glass or abrasive surfaces.
They're not doing anything other than that.
That's all a shoe should do.
Humans, we don't have hooves or trotters.
We, you know, we're really sensitive feeling feet.
And we invented shoes as some of the first tools probably hundreds of thousand years ago in Africa.
To protect us from heat or, you know, and then when we started wandering out of Africa and across the mountains and up into the Arctic, we needed thermal protection the other way, cold protection.
And then we also needed protection, puncture protection, as we started crossing difficult terrain to inhabit the rest of the world.
And shoes have been made by humans in this way for hundreds of thousands of years, right?
Starting with made out of antelope skin in Africa, All the way to the reindeer moccasins worn by the Sami in the Arctic, bison moccasins that the first peoples in America would have worn, or papyrus woven sandals worn in the rainforests of Asia, etc.
And they were all just very simple protective foot coverings that allowed the foot to do its natural thing.
And it's not until recently and sort of when horse riding came along and stirrups and royalty and fashion that we all started prancing around needing pointy shoes and heels to and one thing led to another and we found ourselves you know in the 20th century in this kind of weird struggle to emancipate ourselves from nature in many ways and we got sort of bamboozled by technology And so, companies like Nike and Adidas came along and started selling a lot of...
There's a few things here though, because on one hand right, the minimal intervention should be a component of clothing, like there isn't another part of your body that you'd bind up, you wouldn't put a hat on that sort of strapped your head up and made you a little cone head.
The women of the 18th century used to wear extraordinary... What about the necklaces that make your neck longer?
You could do that for a little while.
So the only thing, of those various technologies that are about sort of deliberately warping and altering shape in order, some say, to sort of enhance sexual appeal, and I suppose that's where aesthetics and pragmatism oppose one another, like that these items of clothing are going to be sexy and appealing.
That's sort of, you're not using things for function anymore.
And that probably sort of happens as societies become more hierarchical and elitist, that you're no longer wearing things simply because you don't want to tread on a twig, you're wearing things because you want to look sexy.
And probably to demonstrate that you don't have to walk, like if you're sort of travelling around in carriages, then you can wear a lovely little buckley boot, where your feet are sort of tapered off into a fine little curly toe, because you don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to climb a mountain or carry a sow across a meadow.
Which I believe is what peasant life was primarily about.
But the thing is with things like Nike and Reebok and them type of companies, those are meant to be high performance shoes.
I mean the whole, say if you take as the epitome of the sportswear shoe to be like Nike Air, the point of that is meant to be, this is the most high performing athlete perhaps of all time across all disciplines, Michael Jordan, this is the very shoes that he wears and in some way they facilitate Excellent movement beyond what is ordinarily possible.
And that's based on cushioning and arch support and all of that.
So how is that not true?
So starting off with the peacocking around and fashion and sexual sort of, you know, wanting to appeal to people.
Display.
Display.
So, you know, and adults, of course, want to do that, and they've dressed up ceremonially since the dawn of time to impress one another in one way, shape or form.
And dare I say, you in your Cuban heels and tight trousers, pretty sexy look back in the day, right?
I believe it was.
I'd like to cling to the idea that it was.
And that's fine for adults to do, right?
Adults will always do that.
But what then happened was that the normal shoes to be worn in civilized society became heeled dress shoes, right?
And hobnailed boots of the previous ages.
So when Nike came along, Nike started making really barefoot shoes.
Bill Bowman, the founder of Nike, was actually making shoes with no underfoot technology.
He was a running coach but he realized that people were getting injured a lot so he got in some doctors to say look what's going wrong here and he said well look the problem is everyone's walking around in heels every day so their Achilles heels have shortened a little bit and their feet have sort of become a bit weak so you need to make trainers that are sort of adapted to people's the ways people's feet have adapted to Smart shoes, right?
And so the technology in the shoes are sort of there to overcome the problems in people's feet rather than just getting back to helping people get strong healthy natural feet again.
And people like Jordan and Ronaldo and whoever the most amazing sportsmen of our time, I would posit that if they'd never worn shoes before they'd still be able to And they were just wearing simple barefoot shoes and all basketball boots used to be, you know, when Converse started.
So you are basically saying that those apparent advances in design are mitigating problems that were created by interventionist foot binding.
It's a matrix.
Yeah.
And once you're in it, it's tough to get out of it.
So how have you come... You look at people, I mean just sort of on the Nike example, like those athletes, they literally bind their feet, right?
They put so much tape around their feet and then people like Jordan and the elite people, they get their foots then scanned, they get sort of bespoke shoes made for them, but they sort of wrap their feet in loads and loads of tape and then scan their feet and then make a shoe to that taped foot And so, you know, it's all the more incredible that they're able to do what they do with literally barren feet.
So your premise really is that there's a requirement for a re-evaluation with footwear.
So how have you reached that point when your family background is a shoe company?
I do remember when we were kids, Clark's shoes, which was like your famous go back to school brand in this country, you'd put your foot in a little thing and they would measure the width of your, the woman would usually, would measure the width of your foot and the length of your foot and they'd go right, yes.
I don't know if they would ever cater for a disparity in foot size, if they'd ever go, oh it's eight on this one, eight and a half on the other foot.
I think you would always round down.
Clocks were relatively good, and they were particularly good a hundred years ago.
They were a Quaker business.
Quakers?
Quakers, yeah.
Do you still have a little Quake?
Is it part of your family?
I still Quake away, yeah.
Do you go to Quaker ceremonies on Sundays?
Not as much as I should, but I still go, yeah.
And in many ways like what Clark's was a hundred years ago and Clark's actually funny enough in the 19th century were in many ways positioning themselves as a sort of barefoot shoemaker allowing the foot to develop naturally.
But clerks, like a lot of other companies in the 20th century, sort of lost their way and got bamboozled by technology.
And you see that all over.
You see that in agriculture, you see that in medicine, you see that in all these big industry changes.
And, you know, I would say that Big Shoe was the same and got sort of distracted by, you know, patents and technology and And in the end, and forgot the natural way of doing things.
Yeah, I understand.
And Clark's actually was, you know, and Quakers by their very definition were sticking it to the man, right?
They were saying, hold on, all the power's stuck in the church.
They refused to swear oaths to... You had to swear an oath to be able to go to university or basically do anything in society, right?
And the Quaker was like, fuck that, we're not gonna swear anything to anyone.
So as little spiritual communities they sort of got together and set up shop which is sort of to basically look after themselves and so like the Cadbury's even some of the early British banks or Quaker businesses and they educated themselves And they were really, you know, in many ways pioneered that intersection between business and social justice, and they were at the forefront of the Corn Laws, the suffragette movement, the anti-apartheid movement, abolitionist movements, all those things.
They were really, really involved in, you know, way ahead of where the governments and society were, and they were funding it through business.
Yes, I understand.
Communities that are not formulated around the current systems of trade and economics.
Like Quakers from early times have gone, we're going to step out of this a little bit and go our own way.
So what they were interconnected communities where they've provided their own funding, their own place of worship, their own place of commerce.
How did you transition from that?
Is it still Clark's Viva Barefoot?
Is it still connected economically and financially?
I've never been economically or financially connected to Clarks.
The family stopped being involved in Clarks.
Well it's a long story but when I was a teenager I witnessed the family effectively getting moved aside and outside professional mercenary management came in to To run it.
And I witnessed this beautiful Quaker company get really diminished, I would say, by modern capitalism.
And it's a huge part of my drive in vivo to try and build a business inspired by those Quaker ethics and those Quaker philosophies.
And in the end we're sort of trying to Stick it to the man, which is why do we want to come and support free media and you doing what you're doing and putting on festivals like you're doing and helping people reconnect back to nature and themselves and get healthy.
Right?
In part there's this idea of like oppositionism but also I feel that
there's the potential to set up alternative systems of trade that are
independent communities. Seems like what Quakers did try to do is
comparable to what other religious movements threaten.
Like we could, let's say, part of the threat of Islam could be regarded as, oh this is an alternative ideology that's setting itself up entirely at odds with modern commodifying materialistic ideologies.
That you put spirituality at the heart of your systems, even at the heart of your systems of commerce.
Do you think it's possible to build a successful business that has at its core spiritual principles?
How do you manage the economic requirements, the commercial requirements, the challenges of profit
and running a team and setting up an overhead with those spiritual principles?
How do you manage that balance?
Is it even a possible thing to do, do you think?
Well, you gotta be careful, obviously.
And the interesting thing about Quakers were that they really respected all the great books
and they weren't sort of really following a particular doctrine.
Although a lot of them were Christians, a lot of them actually had very close ties to Buddhism and things.
And so you could follow any doctrine and be a Quaker, and the principle being that they respected that everybody had a direct connection to God, or as they would phrase it, the light.
And so the Quakers could sort of get away with it in a way, because they weren't sort of trying to push a doctrine onto people as it were.
It's traditional, saying you can do your book, we're just going to be doing this.
And there's no need for mediation, we all have access to the divine.
We've all got access, we recognise the light in everybody.
So there's no priests, there's no churches, you sit in meeting.
No pulpit.
Everyone's at the same level, no pulpit.
You sit in silence.
So silence is at the core of it all, right?
And being able to sit in silence together, find consensus together.
Rather than, you know, driving anything.
That's what they were fundamentally standing up against.
Yeah.
So, in the modern world, how do you do, you know, how do you, because in those days they had little villages and their physical communities where they could do all those things together.
In this kind of hybrid world we live in where everyone's scattered all over the world, how do you pull together a group of people around a sense of higher purpose beyond just making money and efficiency and driving, you know, short-term gain?
It's an interesting challenge and probably comes back to, in our case, we try to do that through just through nature basically and we talk a lot about just reconnecting to nature and using natural principles and Being inspired by living systems and ultimately natural health and, you know, humans being able to take themselves off grid, take responsibility for their own bodies and their own health and their own... And it starts, in our case, with your feet.
How does that starting with your feet connect you to nature and what do you think is, why do you think there's a significant portion of people that run that get injured?
Well, you know, we're all one people standing on one earth connected by two feet.
It's the one great leveller around the world, right?
We're all standing on this earth at two feet and through our feet we feel the earth and our feet are designed to Have an incredible connection to the earth, right?
So there's a lot of electrical grounding connection happening between your body and the earth, which is a really important part of our health.
And actually by disconnecting and putting big rubber blocks in between, you know, it creates a lot of health problems.
How?
Well, an example would be in Chernobyl.
Like, let's take an extreme example where all the animals around Chernobyl all kind of thrived and survived on many levels, right?
And they were able to... Subsequent to Chernobyl.
Yeah, there's a whole ecosystem there now with animals and the idea is that they were able to process all that extra radiation and electricity in the air because they were constantly grounded and the earth was able to Humans, walking around in big padded shoes, the radiation gets stuck in the body.
They're not able to ever discharge it in a way.
I see.
So you're saying that Vivo barefoot shoes give you literally a better connection to the ground?
Not all of them yet.
We're working on it.
How?
By literally figuring out how to do conductive soles.
It's a really important part of the whole essence of it, right?
The nature connection.
Industrialisation by its nature becomes unconscious.
Many systems become unconscious because they are based on the reiteration and repetition of a model that is designed to create things on mass. So I suppose when you combined aesthetics and
fashion with industrialization, in a sense, you lose the connection to the purpose. This probably
applies to all forms of industry.
Mass produced clothing, mass produced clothes, mass produced food. I mean, everything that
you start producing on mass starts to bypass the particular and bespoke requirements of
the individual and the environments that for a long time we evolved in harmony with. So
part of your model, your motif, and your guiding principle is to remain conscious in the way
that you run the business, in the commercial partners that you use, in the way that you
design shoes, in what movement means and what's required for movement, and to see if you can
do something like that and still run a business. So a lot of the conversations we have on here
is, like, what is the difference between enterprise and entrepreneurship, looking for things that
could succeed in the marketplace, and a kind of...
Roofless, centralised, brutal capitalism that in a sense doesn't even care about the person consuming the product.
They would call us consumers.
They just want to march the transaction through blindly, blithely and unconsciously.
So I suppose what you're positing is that based on kind of Quaker principles that provided the precedent for your family business, you can have conscious models where the product itself is functional in
a way that's not ignoring the way that the human body works and that the
business ethos behind it is also conscious and aware not creating waste not
generating problems while pretending to present a solution. We need thousands
of businesses to start acting like this as you said right
Working on decentralized principles, putting nature at the top of the hierarchy, giving a seat to nature at the boardroom, just starting to think, you know, get away from this mechanistic technological thinking to a natural living systems thinking and, you know, We need thousands and thousands of businesses like that urgently to rise up, right?
In a way, progressivism is one of the... There are some ideologies in our culture that are explicit, but there are also some that are so ubiquitous that they're difficult to address, and one of them is progressivism.
It's the idea that we are on an ongoing continual ascent, that things are improving.
That's why even sort of quite radical intellectuals will say, No, no, no.
A few years ago, people were much poorer, diets were worse, people were living on a dollar a day, the average person this.
But I think what a lot of us sense is that there is a kind of cultural and spiritual deterioration taking place, a managed decline.
So when a business model or an idea It appears to be arcane or reveres the ideas of the past.
It's somehow antithetical and regarded with suspicion.
But there are so many different pathways that we might have chosen in the trajectory of civilization and many of the neglected pathways I offer ought be reconsidered.
Like the Quakerism, a decentralized religious movement that reveres the divine but respects your individual connection to it.
acknowledges that people do require commodities, people do have businesses, people do, let's
face it, eat oatmeal. That needn't necessarily mean that we have to create a behemoth, a
gargantuan entity where you end up in situations where BlackRock, Vanguard and other sort of
conglomerated financial interests dominate markets to the point where entrepreneurship
becomes irrelevant.
I suppose what we're talking about is how monopolies prevent true ingenuity and disconnection becomes sort of baked into those systems.
I see it all around me all the time, right?
Of young, cool businesses that are purpose-led, have real vision, and philosophically really interesting for the world, and you know, along the lines of what you were just saying.
But so many get to 30, 40 million, and they get snapped up by short-term capital, by impatient capital, whether it's private equity or big global banks.
And the capital in the business suddenly puts a short-term pressure on the business, that the business can no longer act in a way that's frankly in the interest of the original purpose, because there's just this short-termism.
Yeah, that's something I'm really passionate about on a mission to sort of, you know, in many ways show that businesses can scale, can stay with patient capital, can stay long-term thinking, can stay with nature at the, you know, in the hierarchy.
Because it doesn't happen enough in society at the moment.
It happens a bit in Germany more because there's a lot of community banking still going on, local banking.
But yeah, the capital in the world is so short term that it forces businesses to act in really irresponsible ways and that's a huge problem.
Galad, thanks for joining us, mate, and thank you for all the support you've given to community and our partners like BAC O'Connor.
They help junkies and smackheads and addicts and alkies.
Friendly House, the only, or the first, all-female treatment centre in the United States of America that we support.
Trevi Women, who help women that have got kids.
It's the only one in the country that does this.
All of them are benefiting hugely, and I think Community Festival is fantastic because we are trying to stay conscious about the kind of partners that we have.
This is difficult.
It's a difficult business deal to Thank you so much.
