”I try to live in as natural a way as possible."

- Rick Rubin, Huberman Lab Podcast

Hello everyone,

I hope these words find you well, and if you reside on the northern half of our planet, enjoying spring, that section in our lap around the sun where our planet’s funky tilt increasingly graces us with the light of the sun.

Tonight, in a most random Late Night Letter effort, I aim to tell you the abbreviated story of shoes and to free you from footwear designed ages ago for social mobility at the expense of the natural function of your feet.

That’s right, like the brutal female foot binding practices in China and various traditions in Asia and Africa that “elongate” the neck with golden rings, we too unknowingly suffer deformed feet living in the cultural wake of status-seeking shoe wearers. We needlessly suffer foot problems (like bunions, plantar fasciitis, and the need for arch support) and frequent running injuries (like shin splints, runner’s knee, and IT band syndrome) from the unnatural design of our shoes.

There are two issues with 99% of our shoes: higher heels and small, pointed fronts that keep our toes from spreading as they should.

The history of high heels began with 10th-century Persian cavalry, who intelligently added heels to shoes to keep their feet from slipping from their stirrups. However, as people with horses (and thus money and status) wore heels, other people started adding heels to their shoes to look rich and cool like them. Fast forward to the 17th century, a Persian delegation was sent to Europe, and a period known as “Persia-mania” ensued. European aristocrats all suddenly wanted to rock heels. King Louis XIV got so into them that he passed “an edict that only nobility could wear heels.” Culturally, this was probably the social high-water mark for heels: the King of France synonymized heels with nobility. Three hundred years later, almost all shoes have higher heels, and nobody can really explain why.

The podcast episode in the Highly Recommended section above is an interview with Golden Harper, lifelong runner, founder of Altra Running Shoes, and the guy who invented the term “zero drop” to describe shoes that are the same height at their heels and toes. Growing up working in his parent’s running shoe store, the story of Golden’s life is discovering that the design of modern shoes is quite stupid, and striving to deliver this discovery to the world.

Now, there are a lot of running experts out there who say that no studies prove higher heels are bad, and I am not playing a doctor on the internet here, but think: our feet are the intricate, complex product of millions of years of evolution. The foot is composed of 33 joints, 26 bones, and more than a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments that all work together to bear gravity, allow us to move, and make forceful contact with the constantly varying surfaces of the Earth. And basically no one wore heels — which significantly alter our evolved mechanics of movement — until Persian horsemen showed up in heels and King Louis XIV thought he looked pretty damn good in them:

Back in 2012, I went through the same set of realizations Golden Harper did while training for a half marathon and reading a book called “Born to Run.” Riddled with knee pain and shin splits from an intense training program, I was forced to switch to running entirely in zero-drop shoes. The pain went away and never came back. Ever since, I’ve been running without heels and have only had a single running injury in twelve years. Considering that 70% of runners have “overuse” injuries every year, this is a statistically astounding feat.

Now, I’d love to explain the amazing feeling of shoes with a wider “toe-box” that allows your toes to spread out, how to transition from “normal” shoes to zero-drop shoes slowly without getting hurt, tell you about my favorite barefoot sandals, how little I wear actual shoes these days. and how great that feels… but we’re stretching the length of this letter already.

Fortunately, that Golden Harper interview has all the info you need to become a healthy-footed human.

The more laps I make around the sun, the more I appreciate “the natural way” — the way life does it through us and all around us. Life has adapted, speciated, and survived billions of laps around the sun. If we are smart, we respect those billions of years of practice, and trust, look to, and learn from nature and life’s ways.

With love and bare feet,

Ethan

Things I Created This Month:

The Best Rick Rubin Interviews on the Internet

As a creative, if you ask me, one of the best things that happened last year was a book. The book is a collection of observations on creativity from music producer Rick Rubin. Rick has made brilliant albums with the widest range of the biggest musicians for nearly half a century.

The Creative Act: A Way of Being offers Rick Rubin’s remarkable view on creativity and reads not unlike the Tao Te Ching. Open to a random page in either and you will find an idea as simple as it is profound.

Yet somehow, the podcast interviews Rick has done since releasing the book hit me even harder. There are dozens, and it is possible that I have listened to every one of them.

Read or listen >

A Recent Stressful-Fun Photoshoot

I shot this place a couple weeks ago one evening while it was more or less still under construction. A dozen cars were packed out front and probably twenty people were landscaping, doing electrical work, constructing closets, installing fire pits, cleaning the house, and who knows what else while I was photographing it.

I probably did half the shoot from twenty minutes before sunset through twilight, literally running between shots and directing people out of the way to get it all shot before we ran out of light. It was super stressful, and good fun.

Note the great horned owl atop the chimney in the front of house twilight shots. It swooped just a couple of feet over my head while framing one up before perching up there.

Dig it >