Vivo Barefoot is a brand that promotes minimalist footwear, emphasising the health and benefits of walking barefoot. In this episode, we talk to Gala Clarke, a member of the Clarke family, who founded the iconic British shoe company, Clarke s, about the benefits of barefooting and why we should all try to get out of our comfort zone when it comes to our feet. We also hear from the founder of Community, Viva Befoot, who talks about her experience at the Viva Community festival, and why she thinks it s a great idea to have a festival in which we re all encouraged to walk barefoot in the rain, in the sun, in nature, on the ground, and in the sand, in order to get the most out of every single day of the week. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to galoracos.co/OurAdvertisers and use the promo code VivoBarefoot at checkout to get 10% off your first pack! or 10% discount code VIVOBarefoot when you buy a pair of Vivo's minimalist walking shoes! Vivo is a challenger brand to big shoe brands like Yeezy, Nikes, and Yeezys. Vivo s shoes are designed to be comfortable and comfortable, but they re not only comfortable, they re good for the feet too. And they re also good for your feet. And they ll make you feel good, too. We hope you lllllllll be inspired by Vivo. by the Vivo founder, Gala Clarke. We hope that you ll lllll. . We ll see you in the future. - we ll send you back to the future, where you can be barefoot - in the next episode of the podcast, where we ll talk about it all the things you ve been missing out on! - by GALAAD and GALAAAD. This episode is sponsored by VIVO BEEFOOT. , and we ll tell you all about it! , so you ll get a discount code: Vivo@vibeefootwear at vivobeefoot at checkout, so you re getting a discount of $10,000, and a chance to win a Vivo boot, plus a discount on our next Vivo product, too! v=3VVVUYXQVVXAQVQA?
00:00:15.000In this video, you're going to see the future.
00:00:30.000Joining me now is Galahad Clarke, a member of the renowned Clarke family, who founded the iconic British shoe company, Clarke's.
00:00:36.000Of 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.
00:00:58.000All 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.
00:01:10.000What did you think of the community festival?
00:01:12.000Because 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.
00:01:21.000Points where I thought, oh no, this whole thing's going to sort of collapse inward on itself like a souffle of mud.
00:01:32.000And 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.
00:01:40.000But the love and the laughter, the dancing was profound and almost more fun than any other festival I'd ever been to.
00:01:49.000And the depth of connection and interaction was super cool.
00:01:56.000Can you tell me a little bit more about Vivo Barefoot and why you were willing to work with us?
00:02:02.000In 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?
00:02:11.000I 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.
00:02:21.000We'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.
00:02:32.000We'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.
00:02:45.000What do you mean by that freedom for the feet?
00:02:47.000Because 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.
00:03:01.000Is that part of the proposition of Viva Befoot?
00:03:05.000So 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.
00:03:20.000And squishing all the toes together basically.
00:03:24.000So 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.
00:03:40.000I 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.
00:03:49.000A Cuban heeled, like I'd have about a 4-inch heel and very sort of narrow, toed shoes.
00:03:57.000I was well into them and somehow my feet seemed to have survived that experience.
00:04:01.000Now 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.
00:04:33.000I'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.
00:04:46.000That there's something that's sort of not explicit or unfair or wrong about the way shoes are made?
00:04:51.000Yeah, we were just talking about kids, so let's start with kids.
00:04:56.000And a child's foot is not fully formed until the teenage years.
00:04:59.000And so, you know, the bones in the foot are not fully calcified until they're really soft and malleable.
00:05:08.000And, 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.
00:05:17.000In my opinion, it's like a big public health scandal that we're literally deforming and weakening kids' feet in the way they move.
00:05:29.000Why in particular would that be bad for them?
00:05:33.000What 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?
00:05:46.000Like most of the things that my kids wear are sort of pretty sparkly sometimes, things that light up on the sole.
00:05:51.000Most shoes will be either, you know, will be restricting the natural development of the foot.
00:05:56.000And you don't want to restrict any natural development of your kids, right?
00:06:01.000And so most kids in the Western world, they arrive in adulthood with pretty weak, deformed feet.
00:06:07.000And 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.
00:06:17.000Which is not to say that barefoot makes you stronger.
00:06:19.000It's just to say that what's happening is the shoe industry are making your feet really weak and dysfunctional.
00:06:26.000And then you pay for it up the rest of the kinetic chain, right?
00:06:28.000You pay for it with people going around with bad knees and bad hips and bad backs.
00:06:33.000And you know, a lot of kids are able to, but they don't enjoy moving anymore, right?
00:06:37.000They don't enjoy moving as much as they should.
00:06:39.000There's a whole kids orthotic industry where they feel like they need intervention.
00:06:44.000You see kids playing sport bandaged up in this way, that and the other.
00:06:48.000So yeah, I would say we're quite a long way away from just our natural healthy function starting with kids.
00:06:56.000Because it's not obviously a deliberate attempt to maim and undermine the anatomy of children.
00:07:03.000And there are two sort of ideas that we're simultaneously running.
00:07:06.000One idea is that the shoes are sort of unconsciously binding up feet.
00:07:12.000The 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.
00:07:22.000Are 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?
00:08:10.000And then the shapes squash all the bones together and literally deform the bones.
00:08:15.000So 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?
00:08:27.000And 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?
00:08:36.000And it's a fashion thing and I think a lot of them know it and I talked to a
00:08:41.000lot of them. I know the industry and obviously my family's been responsible for making a lot
00:08:45.000of kids shoes but it's just a laziness of like all the consumers not ready to wear, they want
00:08:51.000their little kids to look like adults in fashion products.
00:08:56.000So you're saying children's shoes in particular should be as non-interventionist as possible.
00:09:01.000And is that the idea of Vivo Barefoot?
00:09:12.000Humans, we don't have hooves or trotters.
00:09:15.000We, you know, we're really sensitive feeling feet.
00:09:18.000And we invented shoes as some of the first tools probably hundreds of thousand years ago in Africa.
00:09:24.000To 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.
00:09:36.000And then we also needed protection, puncture protection, as we started crossing difficult terrain to inhabit the rest of the world.
00:09:46.000And shoes have been made by humans in this way for hundreds of thousands of years, right?
00:09:51.000Starting 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.
00:10:08.000And they were all just very simple protective foot coverings that allowed the foot to do its natural thing.
00:10:15.000And 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...
00:10:49.000There'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.
00:11:07.000The women of the 18th century used to wear extraordinary... What about the necklaces that make your neck longer?
00:11:18.000So 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.
00:11:40.000That's sort of, you're not using things for function anymore.
00:11:42.000And 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.
00:11:53.000And 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.
00:12:10.000Which I believe is what peasant life was primarily about.
00:12:13.000But the thing is with things like Nike and Reebok and them type of companies, those are meant to be high performance shoes.
00:12:20.000I 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.
00:12:43.000And that's based on cushioning and arch support and all of that.
00:12:59.000So, 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.
00:13:10.000And dare I say, you in your Cuban heels and tight trousers, pretty sexy look back in the day, right?
00:13:23.000But what then happened was that the normal shoes to be worn in civilized society became heeled dress shoes, right?
00:13:30.000And hobnailed boots of the previous ages.
00:13:36.000So when Nike came along, Nike started making really barefoot shoes.
00:13:40.000Bill Bowman, the founder of Nike, was actually making shoes with no underfoot technology.
00:13:45.000He 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?
00:14:11.000And 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.
00:14:24.000And 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.
00:14:45.000So you are basically saying that those apparent advances in design are mitigating problems that were created by interventionist foot binding.
00:15:02.000So 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?
00:15:11.000They 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.
00:15:36.000So your premise really is that there's a requirement for a re-evaluation with footwear.
00:15:42.000So how have you reached that point when your family background is a shoe company?
00:15:47.000I 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.
00:16:03.000I 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.
00:16:26.000Do you go to Quaker ceremonies on Sundays?
00:16:28.000Not as much as I should, but I still go, yeah.
00:16:34.000And 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.
00:16:52.000But clerks, like a lot of other companies in the 20th century, sort of lost their way and got bamboozled by technology.
00:16:59.000You see that in agriculture, you see that in medicine, you see that in all these big industry changes.
00:17:06.000And, 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.
00:17:20.000And Clark's actually was, you know, and Quakers by their very definition were sticking it to the man, right?
00:17:26.000They were saying, hold on, all the power's stuck in the church.
00:17:29.000They 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?
00:17:36.000And the Quaker was like, fuck that, we're not gonna swear anything to anyone.
00:17:40.000So 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.
00:18:12.000They were really, really involved in, you know, way ahead of where the governments and society were, and they were funding it through business.
00:18:22.000Communities that are not formulated around the current systems of trade and economics.
00:18:32.000Like Quakers from early times have gone, we're going to step out of this a little bit and go our own way.
00:18:37.000So what they were interconnected communities where they've provided their own funding, their own place of worship, their own place of commerce.
00:18:48.000Is it still connected economically and financially?
00:18:50.000I've never been economically or financially connected to Clarks.
00:18:53.000The family stopped being involved in Clarks.
00:18:57.000Well 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.
00:19:11.000And I witnessed this beautiful Quaker company get really diminished, I would say, by modern capitalism.
00:19:20.000And 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.
00:19:30.000And 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.
00:20:05.000independent communities. Seems like what Quakers did try to do is
00:20:13.000comparable to what other religious movements threaten.
00:20:16.000Like 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.
00:20:30.000That you put spirituality at the heart of your systems, even at the heart of your systems of commerce.
00:20:36.000Do you think it's possible to build a successful business that has at its core spiritual principles?
00:20:44.000How do you manage the economic requirements, the commercial requirements, the challenges of profit
00:20:52.000and running a team and setting up an overhead with those spiritual principles?
00:20:58.000Is it even a possible thing to do, do you think?
00:21:00.000Well, you gotta be careful, obviously.
00:21:01.000And the interesting thing about Quakers were that they really respected all the great books
00:21:07.000and they weren't sort of really following a particular doctrine.
00:21:10.000Although a lot of them were Christians, a lot of them actually had very close ties to Buddhism and things.
00:21:17.000And 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.
00:21:29.000And 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.
00:21:39.000It's traditional, saying you can do your book, we're just going to be doing this.
00:21:43.000And there's no need for mediation, we all have access to the divine.
00:21:45.000We've all got access, we recognise the light in everybody.
00:21:48.000So there's no priests, there's no churches, you sit in meeting.
00:22:08.000So, 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.
00:22:20.000In 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?
00:22:33.000It'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.
00:23:02.000How 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?
00:23:16.000Well, you know, we're all one people standing on one earth connected by two feet.
00:23:20.000It's the one great leveller around the world, right?
00:23:23.000We'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?
00:23:33.000So there's a lot of electrical grounding connection happening between your body and the earth, which is a really important part of our health.
00:23:42.000And actually by disconnecting and putting big rubber blocks in between, you know, it creates a lot of health problems.
00:23:53.000Well, an example would be in Chernobyl.
00:23:57.000Like, let's take an extreme example where all the animals around Chernobyl all kind of thrived and survived on many levels, right?
00:24:06.000And they were able to... Subsequent to Chernobyl.
00:24:08.000Yeah, 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.
00:24:29.000They're not able to ever discharge it in a way.
00:24:34.000So you're saying that Vivo barefoot shoes give you literally a better connection to the ground?
00:24:58.000Industrialisation by its nature becomes unconscious.
00:25:03.000Many 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
00:25:18.000fashion with industrialization, in a sense, you lose the connection to the purpose. This probably
00:26:27.000They just want to march the transaction through blindly, blithely and unconsciously.
00:26:34.000So 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
00:26:47.000a way that's not ignoring the way that the human body works and that the
00:26:52.000business ethos behind it is also conscious and aware not creating waste not
00:26:58.000generating problems while pretending to present a solution. We need thousands
00:27:06.000of businesses to start acting like this as you said right
00:27:09.000Working 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?
00:27:32.000In 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.
00:27:43.000It's the idea that we are on an ongoing continual ascent, that things are improving.
00:27:50.000That's why even sort of quite radical intellectuals will say, No, no, no.
00:27:54.000A few years ago, people were much poorer, diets were worse, people were living on a dollar a day, the average person this.
00:28:01.000But I think what a lot of us sense is that there is a kind of cultural and spiritual deterioration taking place, a managed decline.
00:28:09.000So when a business model or an idea It appears to be arcane or reveres the ideas of the past.
00:28:20.000It's somehow antithetical and regarded with suspicion.
00:28:24.000But 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.
00:28:34.000Like the Quakerism, a decentralized religious movement that reveres the divine but respects your individual connection to it.
00:28:42.000acknowledges that people do require commodities, people do have businesses, people do, let's
00:28:49.000face it, eat oatmeal. That needn't necessarily mean that we have to create a behemoth, a
00:28:58.000gargantuan entity where you end up in situations where BlackRock, Vanguard and other sort of
00:29:05.000conglomerated financial interests dominate markets to the point where entrepreneurship
00:29:13.000I suppose what we're talking about is how monopolies prevent true ingenuity and disconnection becomes sort of baked into those systems.
00:29:22.000I see it all around me all the time, right?
00:29:24.000Of 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.
00:29:36.000But 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.
00:29:49.000And 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.
00:30:05.000Yeah, 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.
00:30:21.000Because it doesn't happen enough in society at the moment.
00:30:24.000It happens a bit in Germany more because there's a lot of community banking still going on, local banking.
00:30:31.000But 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.
00:30:43.000Galad, thanks for joining us, mate, and thank you for all the support you've given to community and our partners like BAC O'Connor.
00:30:50.000They help junkies and smackheads and addicts and alkies.
00:30:53.000Friendly House, the only, or the first, all-female treatment centre in the United States of America that we support.
00:30:59.000Trevi Women, who help women that have got kids.
00:31:01.000It's the only one in the country that does this.
00:31:03.000All 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.