Episode 248: The Longevity Power of Sensory Stimulation

It's amazing we go to the gym or the doctor or the doctor or the wherever to improve our bodies and we pretty much focus on everything from the ankles up, not paying attention to what's from the ankles down, which is the stuff that supports everything from the ankles up. Well, we're going to be chatting about some latest evolutions and things you can do from the ankles down with a dear friend of ours, Dr. Emily Sligill, but first just a reminder, hey, welcome to the movement movement podcast, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting, you know, feet first, those things at the end of your legs, and we break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the flat out lies you've been told about what it takes to, you know, run or walk or play or do yoga or cross whatever you like to do and do those things enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. And did I say enjoyably trick question?

Of course I did because that's the most important one. If you're not having fun, you're not going to keep doing whatever it is anyway, so make sure you have a good time. I am Stephen Sashan from zero shoes.com. I am the co-founder and chief barefoot officer, officer over here.

You try it. And we call this the movement movement podcast because we're creating a movement about natural movement. And the way we are creating this, that includes you is really simple. Go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com.

Find the previous episodes, find a place you can find us on social media, give us a good review, thumbs up, light five stars, you know whatever it is and spread the word. Basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. It's really simple. I am doing amazing.

That was quite the intro. Yeah, I do what I can. After like 300 of these, it's kind of a, like I can barely remember my middle name, but I can do that thing, not perfectly obviously, but you know, good enough to get from the beginning of the end without having to take a break. I love it.

I love it. That's how I want to talk about the nerves and the bottom of the feet. I literally get into like a recording of a speech that I can give you many times. Yeah.

So in just a matter of 30 seconds, we just told everyone we're a bunch of geeks. And we're proud of it. You know, I just don't argue. It's just not worth the effort.

So it's not worth the effort. So where do human beings find you right now or more accurately where are you right now and human beings don't know where that is or whatever I'm trying to say? I'm currently sitting in Chandler, Arizona in the Novoso office, trying to get ready for the end of the year, wrapping up, hitting some of the key revenue goals, but also planning some big things for 2025, which is my favorite. I love designing products.

And that is, that's really where my head is at right now. And that is why we're here. So let me do my favorite back up the half a step and tell people who the hell you are, what you do and how you got to the point where we're going to be talking about these products that FYI for people who don't know, I never let anyone on this podcast to talk about a product that I don't think it's for real. And I'm going to tell the story about how we first had that fun interaction.

But tell people who the hell you are if they don't know. Yes. So Dr. Emily, functional pediatrists, so not just a pediatrist, but functional pediatrists.

Give me a movement specialist. I've been traveling the world educating about feet, barefoot science for the last 12 years. And then I'm CEO and founder of Novoso, which is a sensory based product line, zero shoes, proudly resells. And we partnered on some products with Novos, which I'm absolutely very honored by.

And then I'm an author of a book called Barefoot Strong and I'm writing my next book and I have to talk about it so that it actually happens. But I have a book that is almost done and we'll be launching that soon. Jesus, that takes a long time. But yeah, I'm everything about spreading the message.

My focus as much as it is feet is actually movement longevity. And as much as people initially think movement longevity means that you want to move well when you're 100, I actually believe that to live to be 100 or plus, you have to move. So I'm an advocate of movement, which I know you are. Well, look, you know, there's research that these are not just opinions.

One of the things that gets on my nerves is people will say things to me like, well, you believe I don't know, I don't believe any of this stuff. This is a fact. I've got research behind it and there are now hundreds of thousands of people who have well, there's actually millions of people. But I got just from zero, she's alone.

We have hundreds of thousands of people who said, here's what happened to me once I started moving better. But to your point about if you want to live to fill in the blank, you need to be able to move. There are a couple of very interesting bits of research about that. One, and feel free to jump in on this.

But yeah, here we go. One is there's a direct correlation between trip and fall accidents, which is a very high cause of death in people, including my dad nine years ago. And foot strength. If you don't have foot strength, then that impairs everything and makes you highly likely, not highly likely, more likely to have a trip and fall accident where you can break your hip and die not too long after.

That's number one. Number two, this one's even more interesting to me. I met a woman who's a nurse at Duke University who started doing this research that shows that if your natural walking gait, your walking speed is under a certain number, and sorry, I don't remember the number off the top of my head, your likelihood of dying over the next five years has increased like by 70 or 80%. Now interestingly, of course, if you're walking really slow, it's mostly because your feet aren't doing their job.

They're not strong enough to support you're not getting the feedback they need. They're not creating stimulation of your brain needs. All the things that we're going to talk about. So when you say something like longevity requires movement, you're not just pulling that out of your butt.

This is not just a belief. There's research coming out happily starting in January about this now that we've been doing this whole barefoot thing for what we've been doing 15 years, more and more people are doing more and more research to back up. We all knew anecdotally just to demonstrate that no, this is for real. So anyway, just wanted to throw in the this is not these are not things that we just think and we're trying to convince people of this is stuff that we know is real and we're trying to wake people up to.

Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. Sometimes it is looking at a research study and applying it into a real world way.

That's why I think people like you and what I do and kind of in the space of like consumers in a sense or the real world is taking what's happening in a lab and then they just like published things and like that's cool. But they don't know how to actually word it or spin it or package it to be real world so that everyone who's listening can actually understand and use the powerful data that was demonstrated through a research study. And that's why I like what you're doing here is to then help people be like, okay, I get it. Now I understand walking speed but when I read it in the research article like I don't get that.

Well, let's be clear. No one's finding these articles on their own. Not the kind of thing that all of you beings are going to stumble upon unless they haven't saw me and they just need some way of getting to sleep with that medication. They're not on Google Scholar all night reading research articles.

You may be surprised to discover that the answer to that question is no. The average person doesn't even know what you just referred to nor do they know what PubMed is. I mean, it really, I would say it's actually the other way around that because of what we all started doing 15 years ago, ish and the response that was created from that or more accurately what happened when people started using their feet in ways they hadn't for ages or ever, that just piqued a lot of curiosity in the research community. And it's not really there.

The bad news is it's not their job to market what they've done in a way that it gets to consumers. The worst news is that the big shoe companies will put out studies that are very badly designed. My favorite, there's two things lately. I have enough to see these that I keep seeing all the time in studies.

One is aligned like this one. Despite the advances in footwear running shoe technology over the last 50 years, running related injuries have not decreased in that time. Now you know to be a rocket scientist to go if injury rates have not decreased, then there haven't really been advances. That's the first one.

The second one is we took some habitually shod, a word that no one outside of the barefoot shoe world uses people to use the word shod. We've taken people who are habitually in regular shoes. Let's just call it what it is. And wanted to test that against barefoot.

So we gave the people that we were going to have the study some time to acclimate to running barefoot by having five minutes on a treadmill. It's like, yeah, that's not what it takes to acclimate. You wouldn't say that you acclimate it to a new shoe in five minutes on a treadmill. So there's these horribly designed studies that people who are on the pro giant big thick shoe padded motion or sport, whatever thing, they will try to use to combat anything that we say because people aren't going to discover that the studies were really poorly designed and really poorly constructed.

And one last one, I'll stop reading on this. There's a guy who used to work at the University of Colorado who did a study that was trying to prove that barefoot was bad for you. And he said that he took 12 accomplished barefoot runners and over the first and last beer we had together. And I think I made him pay for it.

I said, you know, I know all the barefoot runners in town. I'm one of them, neither I nor anyone that I know was in your study. I know who was in your study. They're not accomplished barefoot runners.

They're accomplished runners who do a little bit of barefoot training on the grass at the end of their workout. That's it. And so your little study is not really telling anybody anything meaningful. But here's the kick.

Nobody would know that unless they knew this guy and they were part of this community. Otherwise, when he says accomplished barefoot runners, why would you argue? He's got a PhD, blah, blah, blah, whatever else. So anyway, a little rant about problems with research.

Well, I've seen that with textured research because I'm not a shoot company. I'm a sensory based part of line using texture. And you see that same thing where then people will try to call bullshit on the power of texture, on foot awareness and reducing injuries and improving k-parameters, et cetera. But then when you actually look at the study, it's the same thing that they're like a pillow of a shoe with a textured insole and then they're saying, wow, texture does nothing and a thick sock, like a thick wool sock.

And I'm like, well, no, no, no, because people know that you can stack up a whole lot of mattresses and if you put a P under the bottom one, people can feel that. So you know, the fact that there's a whole bunch of cushioning and a whole lot of that doesn't make a difference. We all know that. That's irrelevant.

But because you said it's textured in sensory, let's just jump into that for a second. So, Naboso is a check word that means barefoot. How did you pick and we're going to get, you know, once that further down, how did you pick that word? You are not check.

They can check. Emily, that is cultural appropriation. That is ex-European appropriation. I know, I know.

So really what it was is I was designing a bus and this is interesting on how these things work in life. But so I was concepting out Naboso, working on our first product, couldn't think of a company name. I wanted a word that was like not English directly but had something right. Like, do I pick something in Swahili or something?

I don't know. So I paid this company $10,000 to try to come up with a name, I know, or my company in a way that I wouldn't put a ceiling over my head because I had no idea what this was going to become. Anyway, that's happening. I go to Prague to teach a workshop through my education company and they're all there and they're so excited because there's a Czech-American who's coming to Prague and I'm like, I'm going to check.

But there was this huge conversation around that. I'm checking. It's where I'm checking. Anyway, Dr.

Yanda, who was a Czech physiatrist, is someone who really influenced my career. So I had this, I was drawn to check. I'm there. Someone who's attending my workshop has a t-shirt on that says Naboso on it and I'm drawn to that word.

No idea why. What is that? It's a barefoot shoe store in Czech Republic. They now sell Naboso.

But anyway, I was like, oh my God, that is so perfect. So it is trademarked in the United States, even though it's a common word in the Czech Republic because it's a Czech word that means barefoot. It's a Slavic word. And we argued with the patent office, the trademark patent office that there's such few Czech speakers in the United States that I could trademark the word Naboso.

So there you go. That is how we chose it. But you still have to pay that $10,000 people who gave you nothing, right? Yeah, but I just think it's the irony of something that pushed me in the direction.

I don't even know. I was just feeling better. We spent more money with a marketing group when we started the company. When I started Zero Shoes, and actually I called it Invisible Shoes, I built a website and I needed a name that's what I came up with.

We spent way more money than that about two years in on a branding company, and I'm going to show this on the camera, and then I'll describe it for anyone who's just listening. But I'm going to show you this is the name that they came up with. There we go. Okay.

I'll spell it for people who aren't watching. X-O-I-C-S. What's wrong with that word? I don't know.

Yeah, you're doing the same thing. How do you say it? It's like, it was meaningless. They said, well, you could own this word.

No, no, no. People need to know how to say it and spell it. We have a website. But the next day I'm at track practice.

I finished track practice. I like that thing of starting with X though. What got to do with that? I came up with Zero.

So, I have no problem that I paid them a stupid amount of money because without their bad idea, I wouldn't have thought about a good idea. Yeah, it's very similar. That's why I'm very into the world. The world guys doing these ways that you're supposed to.

You know what I mean? Okay. I make stuff up to make me feel better. Yeah, that's okay.

We can rationalize our way into pretty much anything. And so that was part one and way. Part two, I'm going to do it from my perspective because why not? Is it you reach out to me, we already knew each other, but you reach out to me and said, have developed this product.

And it does this thing about stimulating your feet and has all these benefits. And I want to send it to you and see what you think. And I'm thinking, oh crap. I have tried so many of these things.

They never work. How am I going to pat you on the head and go, thanks so much. You're totally adorable. This is not going to happen.

And so you send me these insults. I put them in my shoes. I walked around the office for an hour. And then as I tend to do in the office, I kick off my shoes.

I'm doing some work at the computer. About an hour later, I stand up to go probably to the bathroom. And my feet are like grabbing the ground. And my calves are like totally active.

And I'm going, what the hell is happening? And I called you and said, we need to talk. So let's talk about that first product. And then we're going to launch into everything that's happened since then for people who already are hip to what we're going to talk about.

We'll be able to skip ahead, but why bother? Because we're entertaining. So talk about where this came from. And wait, I don't remember if it happened before or after.

I was at the International Foot and Angled by a mechanics conference. And there was a company from Australia who was presenting or a researcher in Australia presenting a paper that was about a similar product. And I can remember if that was right before or right after you. But this has kind of been brewing in some little way.

And but you discovered it and tell that story. Yeah. So I remember I mentioned there's some textured and soul research study that in reference. I was reading those research studies when I was traveling around teaching about barefoot science, like let's get people out of shoes.

Let's get into minimal shoes, but we still need to do some barefoot work too, right? Then go back into minimal shoes. So let's be calculated on both sides. Anyway, what I would start saying is, OK, once you get out of your shoes or if you're training minimal, then you need to start asking yourself, well, what surface are we going to train on?

Nobody is talking about surfaces. Still, no one is really talking about surfaces and the best surfaces for training, especially athletically and things like that. So I got into a texture and I was like, I wonder if I could create a barefoot training surface that when people took their shoes off that we could get even more activation and function out of the foot. I was barefoot.

Then we came into texture. So the first product was a barefoot training mat, which is now one of our mats, even though it's slightly different. And think of a yoga mat with tiny little pyramids across the entire surface designed to stimulate the feet when you're doing, let's say, kettlebells or squats or lunges or whatever. Then people started using that and saying, well, that's such a limited.

It's so niche out. And my exposure is only when I'm doing kettlebells or whatever. So what if I could get that into my shoe, which led into the insole design? That made me a little bit nervous because you had the research over here and then you have reality over here in the sense of they weren't using textured insole to do insole research study.

They were making random stuff and cutting materials and flipping over things, putting sandpaper in shoes. They were using random materials. But I use that to then design our insole, which is what I sent to you and you tested. But maybe it's just me being a doctor and I'm always scared of being sued that I was like, oh my gosh, what if I give it to someone they get a blister, gets infected, their leg gets amputated, like I'm just thinking like a malpractice thing, right?

So getting into it, it was actually less texture than what we have now on our products because I didn't know how the mass consumers were going to respond to this. They responded positively. And actually people who started using them happen to have MS, happen to have Parkinson's or a stroke or neuropathy. So we started getting demonstrations of this huge benefit of our products within the neurological and neuro rehab space that I would have not thought of initially, even though there is some research data around it.

So it led to that, which then led to, oh, what if I put it on a ball like this? What if I put it on? So pause there before the what if part because that's where we move into the world. I want to back up a half a step.

So if you can describe a little more, so you said, hey, is this pyramidal thing that was on this map, can describe a little more about the actual technology so that people who have never seen an experience or are watching watching. So yeah, you can show up at their people. I'm going to show it then on this private. Yeah.

I'm holding up one of this is our penny school. Wait, wait, all I'm seeing is fuzz because your camera has not figured out well. Okay. There's a little tiny pyramids on it.

Can you see the little tiny pyramids? Yeah, I can see them on the ball again better. So little tiny pyramids. How tiny are you?

You know, just listening. One and a half millimeters. Hi. Tall.

Yeah. One and a half millimeters high and then like, you know, and again, pyramids. So what's that pyramid? Yep.

So you have a pyramid that's one and a half millimeters tall peak to peak. It's two and a half millimeters. Got it. So spread out to it.

Very close. Got it. Yep. Very, very close.

So the entire insole as an example would be covered with against from a distance, but the entire insole is covered in the little pyramids. The entire stock is covered by the time they're here. I'm not in the socket. Hold back on the side.

Okay. So, so talk about a how you came to that height, that spacing, et cetera. And what is actually doing? Yep.

So that shape, there is a research study that was done. There is a research out of Australia. Her name is Hatton, H-A-T-T-O-N-Hatton did research to look at a triangle versus more of a circle, more of an oval. So different shapes of deformation.

That's essentially what you're doing is you are indenting the skin. Which stimulates the nerve. We happen to be stimulating the same nerve that you stimulate when you read braille. So think of braille.

Look, go to the ATM or the next time you're at the ATM, look at the little braille dots. They're a certain distance or a certain height when you touch them. And if you touch them and shut your eyes, your nerves are sensing the two points. And that's how you read braille.

Okay. So technically it is two point discrimination. So the pyramid will be more acute, small, finite, more acute, deformation to the skin. What we also found out then is that the point of the pyramid will actually go deeper into the dermis, which is where your circulation is.

So on the foot, when people use any of our products, they get little indents that stay there for a little bit. And we consider that the Nabosa effect, which means you essentially touch it and you're like, oh, I have all these little indents on my finger on my foot. That is showing that point went into the dermis. Got it.

And so, sorry, go ahead. Oh, guys, just going to say then when you stimulate these specific nerves, these are called the count receptors. You stimulate as part of your peripheral nervous system. Not to get you complicated, but stimulate your brain, which is called the somatosensory cortex.

Somatosensory cortex is your brain map to essentially shape your body in space. And the brain map, which creates a homunculus, you can Google the word homunculus, you will see this person with really big hands and really big feet. Anyway, it's a funny looking person. The most sensory sensitive parts of the human body take up the largest area in the brain to shape how your brain sees your body in space.

Okay. And what I tell people is that I can only control my body as accurately as I know where the hell it is. Like, how do I control my body or not fall or not trip over something? If I don't know where my foot is in relation to the curve or where my hip is in relation to the table I just bumped into or whatever, right?

So that is perception. Perception is a sensory process. Touch, which is what Navoso stimulates his touch, is one of those inputs that helps your brain see itself in space. Perfect.

Now, there's one other part to add to this. And once I'm done, there's a great book called The Brain That Changed Itself. And it features a guy named Dr. Michael Merznick who talks about how if you don't give your brain a stimulation, it's wired to get, it's meant to get.

It will literally change its shape and essentially shut down, because why waste energy if I'm not getting the information that I need. So the example I like to give is if you taped your first two fingers together and left them like that for a while, your brain would literally change its shape. And so that if you remove the tape, you would still act as if you only had one finger. They would move together, not independently.

And they would feel like you really only had one weird finger. And happily, if you then stimulate them properly, then your brain will change back. It will redifferentiate and start functioning naturally. So people have been in a, I mean, my favorite thing to say is given that you have more nerve innings in the sole of your feet than pretty much anywhere but your fingertips and lips, how much can you feel?

How much feedback are you giving your brain through the shoe that you're wearing if it has a big, big soul? And they go, huh, none or very little. And I said, you know that if you stepped on a grain of sand, you could feel that normally, like you're wired to feel that and you're not getting that information. So what's that doing your brain?

So what we're talking about is, or whether people are already hanging out barefoot and walking over all over the place, or if they're in shoes and they haven't been doing that, is getting the brain to work properly by letting the body to give it the signals that it needs properly. And this has, as we seem traumatic effects. So for the fun of it, wait, do you want to say anything about that before we jump into how things have evolved from Matt to insult all the other things that you're using? Because this is where things get interesting to me.

But is there anything else we want to do? And why about this? So yes, so what now we have, and if I go in a direction that you didn't think I was going to apologize, but now we have our neural ball, which is a release tool, we have a neurostick. So we have these recovery tools that you could put texture on to again, wake up the nerves, but also stimulation.

So it's another benefit of what we advocate. Then we have our rehab category, you could say, which has our kinesis board, which is like a single leg platform. We have our sensory sticks that are weighted. We have some Pilates equipment.

We have our mats, we essentially radiate out. And then we have our socks, which honestly is one of my, my proudest in the sense of like my legacy. I really want to be the socks and have them in hospitals where there's like a stroke rehab center or something like that where you're thinking, this person just had a brain injury. I need to access that brain through the gateway, which I can say to the bottom of the gateway into the brain is I need to be bringing neuro sensory feedback from that access point because it's so critical to movement, which we just said is critical to longevity.

So that would be something that I would envision from it. Now, what I will say real quick, and then we can divert into any direction is so we got our utility patent and our patent was granted after quite a few years of defending it and making a case that it is a unique, innovative patentable pattern that is helping people in a very specific way. So it's been a lot of money to get that we got our utility patent. So what I try to think about is what can I design to continue to demonstrate the power of texture, but the power of sensory stimulation on human movement and longevity.

So any product ideation, really, I do that and I look at it. We have the hands. We actually have some different hand tools. We're launching one in a couple of weeks, a hand kit.

But how do I continue to push that category because that category is ultimately my legacy, just like your legacy is that the minimal footwear category is beyond you. Like it is forever a category in the footwear space. It is not a trend. Texture is not a trend to be barefoot and access your feet is not a trend.

This is like talking about breathing and saying breathing is a trend. That's not a trend. Although there are all these people who teach various breathing methods and they would argue that what they're doing is real and they're creating a trend. Anyway, everyone's going to try and carve out a thing.

But yes, our goal, and I like that you said it that way because my wife asked me a while ago, what was what's different about zero shoes than the other companies that I started, the other products that I created that literally some of my previous companies slash products changed certain aspects of the world. I invented some software that changed film and television writing forever. But she's what's different here. I said, this one's way bigger than me.

That was my little community and that was a fun thing to do and it was important and it was a big deal. But this is much, much bigger because that was just like helping people do their job better, being a little more creative. This is literally improving people's lives in a way that is so profound that it has to transcend me because I'm not the important person here. What we're doing is the important thing.

So anyway, and what's interesting is the people who are in this world, you, me, and the other other friends who are also in it, we all feel the same way. And that's really interesting. That's really unusual and contrast that to the people that we're kind of fighting against, who they would claim. That's what they really want to do.

But they have no evidence they're actually doing in fact evidence to the contrary. And they're number one goals clearly. How do we make money out of this? Not how do we help people?

But anyway, that's a whole other whatever. So in your goal, which is, I like it is that it has expanded beyond, hey, let's just do foot stimulation, all these other things about stimulation and the value there. That seems like where we're making the transition to talk about these other things and how they, what they do, who they do it for and what things could expect, what things people could expect when they start exploring this whole realm of providing stimulation that they probably haven't gotten that frankly, in other parts of the world and other times, we're more natural. And now we're faking natural, which is a fine thing to do.

I'm not trying to say that directly. But if we're not going to have it naturally, sure, we go do it. If we're not going to build a house by carrying rocks from the river to where we're doing it, we go to the gym. That's cool.

So with that wacky little preface, please, back to you for the win. Yes. So my evolution through and about, so in just my career is I'm uniquely fascinated with sensory stimulation that is well-established. But as a gateway into the nervous system, that is clear being a functional pediatrist.

But really where it starts to expand in the evolution of how this could make a bigger impact is I think looking at a broader category of just what is neuro sensory stimulation. I'm uniquely intrigued by resistance, like weight, weighted vest, weighted apparel. It helps people to feel their body in space, compression. So compression sleeves, compression apparel.

What is that doing to the proprioceptors? What we have found with our sensory sticks, which are two pounds each is they have the texture, but then the weight. And if you hold them on one side, go sides, you shut your eyes and you kind of focus on how you feel, see your body. When you have a light resistance, pulling on your joint capsules and all the proprioceptors of your fascia, it wakes up the brain in a different way.

So that's very unique. I said compression, vibration is another one. So we are, I've been using whole body vibration for years. I absolutely love it.

I've worked with whole body vibration companies before, but trying to bring that in and having a different type of utility of it. And then how can we combine these sensory stimuli to achieve something greater, right? My heart will always go towards neuro rehab and helping people who have had stroke, Parkinson's, concussions, and to go back to the basics of you have to be able to perceive your body. I need you to shut your eyes and see your body as it's moving in space and have accuracy as you're doing that.

A lot of people are sincerely disconnected. I think technology is making us sincerely disconnected. People are emotionally disconnected. It's about how to try to get back in touch with your physical body.

I mean, they don't have physical education the same anymore. Like people just aren't moving the same way, right? And movement is how we reestablish or how we establish when we were born this perception of ourself, this perception of your brain. And I often say that sensory and perception feeds mood, memory and movement.

And they're very deeply incorporated is your emotional regulation, your cognitive performance. So that's the memory. And then your movement movement, accuracy, movement efficiency, those are very interwoven. One is reliant on the other.

One calibrates the other. And then I actually believe that sensory is really the roots of those three. And that's my next book. Ah, well done.

It's interesting. I think about people's in general poor proprioceptive skill. And I think back to when I was a young gymnast, when we just were starting, and the compulsory floor exercise routine had two parts where you had to put your arms parallel to the ground. And it took us weeks to learn what parallel was because when you put your arms parallel to the ground, it doesn't look parallel.

It looks like you're pointing down. And what people think is parallel is actually above horizontal. So when I had someone email me and say, there's something wrong with the rubber using on your shoes, because look how much I wore out the heel. And I said, oh, that means you're over striding and heel striking.

And the guy said, I don't do that. I said, send me a video. So he sends me a video. And I had to show him the video frame by frame, drawing lines with a protractor, showing that he was landing with his foot way out in front of his body, with his ankle way out in front of his knee.

And it took literally 20 minutes until he went, oh, yeah, okay, I see that. And his next line, I swear to God, was, yeah, but I don't do that. I said, dude, this is a video of you that uses that to me. But the point is simply that we aren't just, I think in general, the default mode is not being hyper-aware of where our body is in space.

I marvel at the fact my wife and I got a dog. It's our first dog ever. We got him two and a half years ago, a little over two and a half years ago. And when I take him for a walk, it blows my mind how he doesn't step on things that he's not looking at.

He's just like very aware of where every limb is, except when he tries to climb the stairs and start at night and then it's pretty entertaining. But by and large, it blows my mind how aware of every part of his body he is 99% of the time in ways that most of us, stowing our toe on something or dropping us something that because we grabbed it wrong or watching the soon to be president again, tried to grab the door handle of garbage truck, you know, we really aren't that good. And to get better requires to your point requires some kind of feedback. And the stimulatory stuff that you're doing is the easiest thing to do, frankly, because anything you would do in the wild is going to be pretty unusual.

And I can't even imagine what many of those things would be. P.S. your videos. Your video comes in and out of it a bit.

But happily, when your video freezes, you have not done it yet with some really insane expression on your face. So you can be happy about that. Anyway, all that said, I love the way you framed that. And mostly because we, like you said, there's no physical education is disappearing from the elementary school system.

We don't have a built in method of getting people to get that kind of stimulation, to have their brain aware of what their body is doing, to learn new movement patterns, et cetera. So what you're providing is, again, I would argue one of the simplest ways of doing that kind of faking natural in a way that's demonstrably beneficial. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's also something that most people are not thinking about.

So I'm just trying to, I mean, it's only until someone falls. So like what you had said about tripping falls being a leading cause of morbidity and mortality, my, one of my best friends from New York, her father-in-law, this is last week, 81, right? So he's a little bit older, but in his kitchen, stepped on a sponge that was on the floor, something fell, hit his head on like the kitchen table and then he must have fallen back and hit it again. He passed away.

Yeah. This is from, they were watching like a movie on a Friday night and he was just like, oh, let me go grab some more popcorn. And then like it gives me goosebumps to think about that, that now that family and his children are going through that where it's just like, that was, it was something that he and many people take for granted. Yeah.

Just the simplicity of moving around the home. We're like, no, no, we need to have spatial awareness. We have to have foot ground awareness. It's just the whole thing that should not be happening.

There are a number of things that fit into the strength is an important one as well. I mean, having some facility with movement, I mean, I spent so much time as a gymnast and doing martial arts where I don't typically worry about falling because I'm pretty good at not landing in weird ass ways. I mean, granted, I've gone down pretty bad on the ice when the dogs eat a squirrel and yanks me and whoops. But even then, you know, not so bad.

But again, the part that people are not paying attention to, I want to say aware of, which is kind of a bit of a pun in the way, is the sensory component because it's just not something that we pay attention to unless it's funny. It's not this lot. Unless you're in a situation where there's just something that's bothering you and the thought that cracking up is I'm always hypersensitive to like labels in my shirts or when I was a kid and I had to wear a suit. I would wear my pajamas under the suit, even if it was 90 degrees out because the seams were a little itchy.

And I've just been, you know, that's my thing. So this is something that's, you know, near and dear to my heart, but that's just because I got some sort of brain deformity. And I mean, bottom line. So again, bringing this to people's awareness pun intended is so important.

And so let's kind of go down the list again of the various things that you now have where people can start exploring this and finding the benefits thereof. Yeah. So we have, we still have our mats. So the Nabosomats, so picture yoga mat size that is covered in these tiny little pyramids.

Some people we use them when they do yoga or workout. We have a standing mat, which is a two foot by two foot version. A lot of people will put that in their kitchen next to their bed and their bathroom. So you could use it as really just a house mat in any sense.

That's one, we still have our insoles. We have our flat insoles, so three different versions that are totally flat. They are purely a sensory insult, very thin. They're available on the zero shoes websites.

And then we did launch one that has an arch in it. So this is a little contrary to, don't stop reading Steven. This is a little contrary with the arch. Now the reason is that certain people, there are certain people in the world who need an arch support because they have a ligament laxity.

I just want to access all people on that. So we have that one. One is doing it because they're standing on their feet all day like a nurse. And they're just like, I am defying physiology.

How I use them is I have them in my slippers. So when I wake up in the morning, literally every aspect of my foot skin is touching something because I have a higher arch. So it's actually touching the inside of the arch as well. To pause on that one, I mean, once you said you built something with an arch, that was the first thought I had is if you do have a higher arch, to give you that additional stimulation is a great thing.

The fact that it's not super rigid is what makes it cool, even if you don't have a super high arch. So yeah, my thing about arch support is simply that if it's too rigid and isn't letting the without, we're not going to get technical. The bones in that arch function properly, then anything that doesn't let joints move makes things weaker makes that tissue around it. We're trying to avoid that.

But for the, but for people who do want that extra stimulation, who do have a higher arch, perfect solution. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

So Stephen, I'll send you these two contraming your slippers. Thanks. You think I wear slippers. I know, right?

Hold on. Are they fuzzy or are they, you know, cute, heifner slippers? Oh, they, well, yeah. You want like the smoking, smogger ones that they call?

I'm just thinking, if I was going to buy a pair of slippers ever in my life, what would they be? I would go for, you know, like something with bunny ears probably. These are also available on zero shoes.com. We have a traditional sock with a toes sock shape.

We have with grip without grip. So those are an incredible way to get that texture. Those are not some form of recovery. I wear those at night.

We have our balance board, which is our kinesis board. We have the neuro ball. We have the neuro stick. We have toe spacers in several colors, sensory sticks.

So that would be really the main product line. And then we are launching a hand activation kit this November. That's to wake up the hands. So yeah, saying what about that?

That's an interesting place to go since we typically think our hands are pretty sensitive. Yeah. So we actually have 20,000 nerves, mechanoceptors in our hands. This is mechanoceptors and about a thousand or so in our feet.

Meaning there is a large difference in the sensitive of our feet versus our hands, which makes sense because of fine motor skill, et cetera. But here, same thing, hands, your texting, swiping, whatever you're doing. We need to focus on the hands. A lot of people will use our neuro ball or they'll use our sensory sticks, which are weighted.

They're for the hand, but we have our hand activation kit happening right here. And in it, this is using a different material and it is actually compressible because there's air in it. So you can squeeze them and compress them. So you're actually strengthening the hand muscles, but you have the texture, which is going to wake up the nerves.

Also what we have found, this is just from our own consumers kind of demonstrating to us, we are very big in certain sports in certain countries, such as baseball. We are very well known in the Asian countries. They are very embracing to barefoot, obviously, because it's part of their culture. So a lot of the sports in Asia, baseball, basketball, et cetera, very much love no boss over their hand.

So we want to actually push a little bit into it also because we work so much with stroke, spinal cord injury, Parkinson's. So you start to get into hand rehab, hand OT and we want to bring in that sensory stimulation. We also have a lot of people on the neurodivergent spectrum, wherever you are in that of that. And people are actually finding that our products really calm the nervous system and they're used in certain schools.

I think something different. I mean, I think the same idea is something different. We have a bunch of parents who have kids with ADHD and autism who say our kids only want to wear your shoes and they're seemingly functionally better with them. My contention is that the simulation is acting the same way Ritalin works.

It's a mild stimulant, which feels for people who are hypersensitive in that way, feels is calming. The way that I, I mean, my joke when people ask me about various things that I've done, I joke that everything I've done in life is because I hadn't invented Ritalin when I was a kid and Ritalin's a stimulant. And when I was living in New York City, I noticed I could meditate better on a subway than in my apartment because on the subway, the noise was just loud enough to be louder than my thinking or just about as loud as my thinking. So everything was feeling kind of calm with that kind of not insignificant amount of noise.

So my contention for those people is that it's not that the calming thing is the effect of, you know, wait, this is going to sound weird. So I have tinnitus or for other people tonight, it's depending on who you are. So I've ringing in my ears. And the theory from about why that occurs for many people is that for whatever reason, your ears are not transmitting high frequency sounds.

And so your brain is recreating what it doesn't get. And so my suspicion, I'm making this up on the fly, frankly, so I could be completely, you know, creating a representation center. But my suspicion is that for people who are ADD, ADHD, et cetera, that stimulation is providing something that was missing and the brain was being hyper responsive and hyperactive to fill in the blanks. And once the blanks are filled in, it can chill out.

That's my code theory. And I'm going to add on to that. Sure. A lot of time thinking about this.

All these are things about sensory stimulation is so when we picture someone, let's just kind of ADD autistic, all of that, right? So they're they are a little bit more hyperactive, right? So let's say if I'm moving in a certain way, this is even you moving, let's say I'm a kid in school, right? I'm kind of doing this.

Every time I do this, I'm actually stimulating the joint capsule, which has proprioceptors. That's essentially what fidget toys do is you are stimulating mechanoceptors and proprioceptors from doing something, which is what you were saying is that they don't know a way to get it without like I'm doing it, right? I'm trying to do it yourself rocking. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm rocking and I'm doing something. Yeah. That's why compression works really well. That's why I love compression.

Weight. So wrist weights are used for children who have this using texture, using minimal. And it's not in the sense of it's stimulating like a riddling kind of thing. The way that I want people to think of it is this goes back to your perception of self and your need to feel safe, right?

So when I feel myself in space, right? Like I got a little compression on or a little bit of weight or something, right? I feel where I am and I'm grounded or anchored in this space in the world. So I feel quote unquote safe by doing that with someone who's let's say hyper vigilant in a sense, right?

And they're kind of up here. You give them minimal shoes, feel their feet. They have compression on they have the novoso insoles, whatever it is, then they recalibrate to the perception of self. They feel safe and now they can learn now they hear what the teacher is saying.

So that's how I approach it when I work with like OTs and stuff like that within that space. And it's very calming. It's not especially when you're talking to a parent, there's a lot of sensitivity around it. But I mean, time and time again, these children when you give them minimal shoes, weighted products, texture, vibration, they will they can actually hear, listen, et cetera.

You've had an experience where someone describes some condition and you recognize yourself in that and you go, Oh my God, I didn't know I was one of those. I just had that and this is going to sound, I mean, silly. So you know, I know, well, anyway, I know myself, but I never thought about some of these things personally because they're just part of my, I mean, they just seem like, you know, something normal to me and abnormal other people. The example that I thought of that made me crack up and go, Oh my God, what a moron.

I haven't realized this is who I am. I used to get together five times a year with this group of about 14 of us and we were just trying to see what we could do to change our lives. And the first instruction was always if there's anything anyone needs to say or do to feel that they are, you know, present and grounded and whatever, just ready to, you know, do what we're going to do for the next five days, just say it, do it, ask for whatever it is. And my thing was always I'm going to lie on the ground and as many of you as possible pile on and I found that so unbelievably comforting.

And some people wouldn't do it because they were like afraid or it had some other effect for them like, maybe I'm going to hurt someone, but I am and I just put two together in a funny way. I'm super, super sensitive to how comforting it is to have pressure of various kinds and sensations of various kinds and hypersensitive to some. And I also just put two and two together perhaps. I don't know which came first, this is a chicken and egg thing, but I was a six week premium.

I was an incubator for four and a half weeks where at that time, the basic treatment protocol was don't touch them. They're fragile. Don't touch them. And I tell you this story, an ex-girlfriend of mine were watching TV with some documentary about babies.

And so I talk about previews and how the treatment protocol changed from leaving them alone to give them a lot of stimulation. Because when you give them a lot of stimulation, they grow more, they become bigger and taller and they become smarter, et cetera. And then cuts to commercial. And there's a long silence while I'm thinking about my version of that and how that's for me.

And my ex turns and says, oh, thank God they didn't touch you. And my response is, yeah, I would probably be intolerable. I mean, I'm pretty intolerable now. But that would put me over the edge.

So the reason that I want to bring up all these things that sort of the personal version of these is I'm realizing and I'm hoping that it's being transmitted in some wacky ass way. The importance of what we're talking about in a way that people don't have, there's not even a language for some of this. There's not a context for some of this. And I do hope the same as you, that this becomes normalized and just part of our, I mean, something that just seems an obvious thing to do the way that I can't think of what else I would think of would be.

You know, it's like, oh, yeah, you should eat well, lift weights, whatever it could be. Go out and get some aerobic exercise. This should be part of just a everyday health protocol that we don't even think of as a health protocol. It just makes sense as a thing that we do as human beings who are living in this world.

I mean, and that's, yeah, I am hoping like you said that the listeners will, you know, identify or possibly understand certain aspects of themselves that maybe they could never put words to it. And then they're hearing this and saying like, Oh, okay, that sounds kind of like me. I absolutely love weighted blankets. Like I eat weight on me for me to sleep well, like I just don't just in hotels, if they do not have anything heavy, I will put like my clothes on me to weigh it down.

Sounds crazy. But that's not like it. When I speak, especially in the beginning of my career, because I would be a little bit more kind of in my head when I would do public speaking is I would have to take my shoes off. And it was my anchor.

And I like if I had my shoes on, I was like, I cannot think there's no way I can give a lecture or presentation with my shoes on because it's blocking my creativity and how I need to process it. Like those are two that really jump out at me of how I respond to them. So yeah, I hope the listeners just kind of be curious about it and just realize I just, I push into things like that versus like, I'm a freak. It's just like, Hey, that's interesting.

Let if, and understanding, let's say, wait, like people laying on you, right? You just have to feel your body to get connected and angry grounded, right? It's just like, let's go time now. I'm going to embrace it and let me push into it versus analyzing.

Yeah. And I can imagine there are people who are on the other side of this who they have no frame of reference for anything that I was referring to, but arguably and ironically, the point is still the same. If you don't feel, let's just say comforted by some of these things, there's still beneficial aspects to it that you may not even know until you have the experience. So it's not that you're, you know, trying to calm down some hyperactive or whatever, but it may be even just, look, here's a simple thing.

Weightlifters, Olympic weightlifters, one of the things they do before they go out and grab a bar and try and throw a huge amount of weight over their head is things to stimulate other parts of their body. Basically anything that's waking up your brain is going to have a global effect for whatever you're doing. So if you're on the other side of whatever, you know, the things that I'm describing, there's still a value here that you might discover that was completely unexpected. We're literally just feeling that little bit of sensory information that you didn't think made a difference similar to my story of first trying on the insults, then you're going to go do whatever else you're doing in the day and go, Oh, wow, that actually did add something to it.

Maybe for the, whatever the exact opposite reason is that I'm talking about and I wish I could think of what that would be, but I'm stuck in my own private eye at the moment. And you know, I'm dying to hear those stories as well for people to go, I was never sensitive and anything. I feel totally fine, but holy crap. I mean, I know there are, I just can't bring one to mind at the moment, but I'm dying to hear what happens when someone who doesn't relate to some of the things I might have said or thinks I'm completely full of that are crazy, discovers like, Oh, no, but in my world, here's the way this works.

And that would be really fun. Yeah, I would be totally curious. I am just so in the deep end of sensory that it's very hard for people like somehow put myself in the air. I'll give you a way of doing this.

I just remember this one. So back in the days, way back when I among other things was teaching, I developed some weird meditation techniques and was teaching those. And at one point, one of the techniques involved paying attention to sensations in your body in a certain way. And this one guy said, I just can't do it.

I said, what do you mean? He said, well, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know. I can't figure that out.

I said, well, it happened to be lunchtime. And I said, are you hungry right now? And he goes, yeah, I said, how'd you know? Expecting him to say, oh, I feel like an emptiness in my stomach or I'm feeling these sensations here or whatever.

He goes, what do you mean? I'm just hungry. I said, but what tells you you're hungry? He said, tell you're talking about.

And I realized he just didn't have, there was nothing wrong with him. He just had a completely different relationship to certain aspects of his experience to his body in this situation. It's completely legit. And he says, oh, there's another way around that.

There's another way that he has to enter into the conversation that was news to me. We're all pretty narcissistic in certain ways where we think the way we do things and see things the way other people should. The toilet paper should be over the role, not under the role, which by the way is true. Well, don't tell my sister who disagrees and she's wrong.

I spend a week and a half of her house. It made me insane. In fact, when Laina showed up, she turned the toilet paper rolls over and someone in that house turned them back the wrong way. So anyway, there are people who are on whatever end of whatever spectrum.

But this is just part of being a human being is getting sensory information and how that can impact how you're functioning. If people want to explore that more, you've mentioned we have a couple of your products. We have our Naboso Trail, Sandal that we developed, Trail, Trail, Sandal with HashNabosum material already built into it. We are reselling the installs and the socks, which are awesome.

But for people who want to find other things, please tell them how they can find those things and you. Absolutely. So the website is Naboso.com, NABO.com. We are on social media, Naboso Underscore technology.

And then for those that are curious about what I do, how I treat patients, how I look at movements, everything is related to the functional foot doc. So that's my Instagram. That's my website. You're watching a lot of the other amazing patients virtually all over the world.

So if you are open to that go to thefunctionalfoot.com. My first book is called Barefoot Storong that's available on Amazon and on the Naboso website. And then my other book is called Sensory Stipians. Coming soon within a few months.

Great. To a bookstore near you. You know what a bookstore is. Well, Emily, as always, a pleasure catching up and sharing all these things that are evolving.

It's wild seeing how you've gone from a little something idea to where things in Naboso has gone. It's a pleasure to actually see that and more to see someone who's thinking about these things and developing new ideas based on them. I'm not just going to kind of stick into a thing and being content with that, just like continually to continue to explore. So I do hope people to check out where you are and what you're doing and I want to hear more of what happens for those of you who do.

And for everyone else, just a reminder, first of all, thank you for being here, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com. There's nothing you need to do to join, that's just the domain we have. But you will find previous episodes of which there are hundreds, very interesting people, and you will also find where to find us in social media and you'll find where to get the podcast, if you want to get it somewhere other than where you currently get it, getting it. And if you have any questions or requests or suggestions anyone you think should be on the show, or if you think I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome about everything I'm talking about, that's cool.

You can drop me an email. I'm at movemovat.com. And most importantly, go out, have fun, and live life-feet first.