The Four Worlds Podcast
The Four Worlds Podcast explores how a simple idea can grow into something that changes the world. Each episode takes you on a journey—from the spark of inspiration, through the creation process, innovation challenges, and to the path of real-world production.
From sketch to shelf and prototype to product, join us as we uncover the stories behind breakthrough inventions and innovations with the creators, engineers, designers, and visionaries who bring them to life.
The Four Worlds Podcast
Sole Purpose: How Vivobarefoot is Regenerating the Shoe Industry
Learn more about: Vivobarefoot
What if the shoes you've been wearing your whole life are actually hurting your feet? That's the startling revelation at the heart of our conversation with Galahad Clark, seventh-generation shoemaker and co-founder of Vivobarefoot.
Coming from a family with 200 years of shoemaking history, Clark's journey took an unexpected turn when he discovered that conventional footwear actually weakens our feet and disconnects us from nature. "The big shoe industry is genuinely one of the least sustainable industries in the world," he explains. "It's devastating for both planetary and human health." This realization led him to create Vivobarefoot, a company dedicated to making shoes that allow feet to function naturally.
The concept is surprisingly simple yet revolutionary: our feet evolved over millions of years to work perfectly without shoes. When we encase them in rigid, padded footwear with heels, arch supports, and narrow toe boxes, we're actually causing long-term harm. As Clark puts it, "Most people in the West wearing those cookie-cutter shoes have deformed, weak feet because of the shoes." These weakened feet then create problems in other areas of the body, like the knees, hips, and back.
Clark points out that indigenous cultures worldwide created perfect barefoot footwear for thousands of years, crafting shoes person by person, foot by foot from local sustainable materials. Now, through their VivoBiome system, the company is using AI, mobile scanning, and local 3D printing to return to this personalized approach while minimizing environmental impact.
While the journey hasn't been without challenges, Clark's vision extends beyond just better footwear. It's about reconnecting humans with nature, starting literally from the ground up. "When you wear barefoot shoes or less shoes and you put your feet on the earth, you psychologically can't help but believe that living in local communities and local food systems is the right path for humans."
Ready to reconsider the relationship between your feet and the earth beneath them? Listen now and take the first step toward stronger, healthier feet and a more sustainable future.
Welcome to the Four Worlds podcast from Tomorrow's World. Today, we're diving into the latest in tech, science and sustainability, from nature's mysteries and the world of inspiration to the hands-on crafts of creation, the bold breakthroughs of innovation and the scaled-up wonders of production. This is your ticket to the stories shaping tomorrow. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Four Worlds podcast. Today we're talking about sustainability in the shoe industry. Joining us for that is Galahad Clark, one of the co-founders at Vivo Barefoot. Galahad, I appreciate your time, especially all the way over in the UK.
Speaker 2:How are you Wonderful to be here and connected to Pittsburgh from sunny Somerset. We're just finishing our summer holidays here. I know all you lot have been back to school already for 10 days or so, but we don't go back to school here until September. So I'm just counting down the days that my kids go back to school on Monday and the real holidays start then.
Speaker 1:Right, right, I think the biggest thing, a part of that you said the sunny Somerset. It's sunny here in Pittsburgh, so two rarities, I think, to start off the podcast. Correct, all right, galahad, let's get into it. For people who don't know who Viva Barefoot is and what they do, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that and just give the audience a little bit of insight of what you do and what exactly your product is.
Speaker 2:So Vivo Barefoot literally means live barefoot, and so the company pretty much does what it says on the tin, where we enable people to live barefoot in, no matter what they're doing, how they're doing it, where they're doing it where they're doing it. We're a footwear company, so we we make footwear, but we make footwear that is as close to barefoot as possible, and we make a whole wide range of footwear from kids, adults, from hiking to gym to everyday lifestyle shoes. So no matter kind of what you're doing, how you're doing it, you can always experience that in pure barefoot bliss with Vivo Barefoot.
Speaker 1:And we will dive deep into this. But I mentioned bringing sustainability to the footwear industry. Give a little bit of background how exactly you do that and how you're able to basically make a product that feels like you're barefoot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I come from a long line of shoemakers, seven generations of shoemakers. Funny enough, in about three weeks time we're celebrating the 200 year anniversary of our family making shoes in Somerset making shoes in Somerset. And actually the very first shoe they ever made in 1825 was a pretty good barefoot sheepskin slipper. So in many ways what we're doing now is kind of just returning back to the beginning, but from a sustainability. So I was kind of in the shoe industry, I was born into the shoe industry and for one reason or another I then ended up in the shoe industry after university. Desperately didn't want to go into the shoe industry and from one reason or another I then ended up in the shoe industry after university. Desperately didn't want to go into the shoe industry in many ways, but it was. I was actually studying in america and it was in america that I got dragged into the industry via a long story to do with the wu-tang clan, but what you know.
Speaker 2:It was a time when sustainability and sustainability and design was a much more important topic than probably, sadly, is today in many ways.
Speaker 2:And there's an American professor called John Ehrenfeld who wrote a book called Sustainability products and filling the world up with more stuff is that a product should help us connect more with nature, make us feel more human, improve the human condition, ask important environmental or ethical questions.
Speaker 2:And I was already aware of barefoot shoes at this time and we'd already sort of started playing around with making barefoot prototypes and things and the concept of barefoot, but I realized that the only shoes that actually connect humans more to nature and actually have a sort of positive impact on human health were barefoot shoes. So in many ways I came to barefoot through sustainability thinking. So you know, my starting point was the most sustainable shoes in the world are barefoot shoes by definition. And you know, in many ways the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms and everybody has slightly different definitions of what sustainability is. But I, like John Ehrenfeldt, and he said, you know, that all of life on Earth should be able to flourish, and that for me is a great flourishing, is a great word and a great definition of sustainability. And it was through his work and through his thinking that actually, you know, I came to realize that the most sustainable shoemaking in the world is barefoot shoemaking.
Speaker 1:And you say that his definition of sustainability inspired you to do what you do now. What's your definition of sustainability inspired you to do what you do now? What's your definition of sustainability after being in this industry for so long and creating this product?
Speaker 2:well, it's it's funny because the you know, the sustainability in many ways got sort of replaced by regenerative and and there's all these buzzwords in in this world that you know some people say restorative, and you know, like the, if you were to imagine like a spectrum, and the shoe industry is genuinely one of the least sustainable industries in the world.
Speaker 2:On many levels it's a devastating industry for both planetary and human health. It's fundamentally a subtractive industry where it's taking, you know, resources from the earth and then also, frankly, taking health from humans, both in the polluting activities in the making and distributing of shoes, but then also literally in the impact it has on the user of most of what I call big shoe shoes right and then you know.
Speaker 2:So if you go from subtractive and you go up the spectrum, you know, arguably sustainability is just sort of net zero, it's. It's sort of not positive, not negative, it's sustainable. And then you might get to restorative, which is maybe net positive, where you're doing more good than you are doing harm. But then I like the definition of regenerative, which is means you know we're actually aligning to living systems, you're actually aligning to nature and you're following nature's wisdoms rather than kind of imposing oneself on nature. You know a lot of sustainability thinking and rhetoric out there is about humans saving the world and you know saving nature. But obviously the world is going to be more than fine without humans. In fact it would be a lot better without humans. So the best things humans can do to save themselves is just align themselves and ultimately follow nature and natural systems, rather than the other way around.
Speaker 1:Right and to that point. You know, believing that conventional shoes, you know, harm both our bodies and the environment. When did you first realize that, and how did that steer your vision?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean you'd be shocked how few people in the shoe industry genuinely understand human biomechanics, the way the body moves and the forces on those bodies, anatomy of the foot and the way the foot is designed and supposed to function. You know you hear so many times in the shoe industry veterans of the shoe industry when you sort of say, well, why do you do it like that? Well, why, why, why and then and, and and. In the end they go well, but that's just the way we've always done it and you know it feels that way in a lot of industries. And so I was lucky enough, I think you know, by happenstance, to a childhood friend of mine who was really into postural alignment therapy. He kept on getting injured as a tennis player and his father was an Alexander Technique teacher and Alexander Technique is all about aligning your posture. It's used a lot by actors and musicians and also sports people, and he realized that trainers, anything with a heel and anything that was conscripting his foot was actually making postural alignment very difficult.
Speaker 2:He was a student at the Royal College. He was a sort of designer and innovator and, to cut a long story short, he got a pair of Nike shoes. He sliced off the sole of the shoes and stitched a tennis racket cover on the bottom. And so he made what looked like a kind of cool pair of Nike shoes, but with none of the underfoot technology, and made it a bit wider. And he brought it to me and just said, look, this is the way shoes should be made, and I instinctively loved the idea. And then so the education then started with him and started with postural alignment thinking. And then there was a guy called lee saxby who had been studying with a guy called dr romanoff, who had been studying with a guy called Dr Romanoff who's based in America, based in, I think, florida, and he was then also influencing a guy called Dan Lieberman at Harvard University in the evolutionary biology lab. So there were, and then Chris McDougall kind of pulled together a lot of these stories in the seminal book born to run, which came out in about 2009 10 I think and so there's a confluence of educators and and science and practitioners that suddenly, all you know, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by and, frankly, to be able to study with them and learn from them, and so that that is what you know many ways kind of started that what I call first barefoot revolution.
Speaker 2:You know, v-brand five fingers were kind of at the heart of all of that, and that all happened around that time 2010, 2011 and and as I started to learn more and more, more about it and as I started to wear barefoot shoes more and more, the circles of theory and practice got bigger and bigger and one thing led to another and in 2012 we dropped everything else we were doing. We were involved in some other shoe businesses that's my cousin and I, asher and just kind of went all in on barefoot shoes because we sort of realized that this is really the only way to make not only sustainable shoes, but the only way to make shoes that actually have any chance of being regenerative or be positive for people and planet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a big part of that is the process of 3D printing this footwear. At what point did you see that potential, just reimagining footwear design in production through 3D printing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So 3D printing was being used in the shoe industry quite a lot for prototyping and just quickly imagining new shoes, and so you know, and then off the back of that, you know, obviously people were kind of well, wouldn't it be amazing if we could 3D print shoes? So that was a sort of idea that was bubbling around in the shoe industry anyway to some degree. But through Barefoot, and one of the other avenues that the barefoot adventures opened up was, you know, we realized not only is sustainable shoemaking barefoot shoemaking, but actually all indigenous shoemaking is barefoot shoemaking. And when I say indigenous shoemaking I just mean people, you know, who effectively live free, living free, people who effectively live free let's say, agricultural revolutionary times, no matter where they are in the world. So humans made footwear because our feet are very sensitive and have lots of nerve endings, and so when we started to do the running hunting in Africa, we made sandals as one of the first tools that Homo sapiens, the tool maker, ever made. And of course they were perfect barefoot sandals and they enabled the early humans to be able to run down an antelope for eight hours across the hot baked plains of the African savannah with lots of camel thorns, and we needed those sandals or protect us from the heat and from the puncture, protection from the sharp thorns in africa. And then, as that small group of humans, left africa and started to cross the mountains and cross the deserts and we made shoes wherever we went.
Speaker 2:But we made shoes person by person, foot by, from the local animal skins. So you know, the first peoples in Europe and America would have made bison skin moccasins and deer skin moccasins. The first peoples up in the Arctic made reindeer skin moccasins and the subcontinent it was buffalo sandals. The people that lived in the jungles and the forests made woven shoes out of different plants. They used lactahevia rubber and made the early molded shoes.
Speaker 2:And all those shoes were perfect barefoot shoes and they were all made person by person, foot by foot, from the local relevant, sustainable materials, if you use that slightly awful word again. And what we realized with 3D printing was you know you could go back to a shoe industry where you know you only made shoes person by person, foot by foot again, rather than in these big Asian subtractive supply chains where big factories are doing cookie cutter shoes in you know not that many different sizes. You know maybe 10, 12 adult sizes across men's and women's, only five or six sizes in each gender. And you know, by definition, those cookie cutter shoes will not fit most people because the foot shape is such that you know when you cookie cut a size and you force all of the size 10s into a size 10, by definition, only about 30% of people that are size 10 actually fit a size 10.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, that's when you see all these different brands. Oh I'm, I'm nine and a half in so-and-so brand, but I'm a 10 in this brand.
Speaker 2:It's all over the place and I couldn't agree more and the reason is because feet are all over the place, the width of the width of people's feet, the arch height, bridge height, all the volumes, all the, all the shapes very, very different, and and so what we quickly realized was that 3d printing gives us the opportunity to get away from mass manufactured shoes that don't fit people and are fundamentally unsustainable on many levels and they literally deform people's feet. Most people in the West wearing those cookie cutter shoes have deformed weak feet because of the shoes.
Speaker 2:And 3D printing gives the opportunity to go back to actually making shoes for people that really fit and allow the foot to be strong, natural and healthy and if you've got a strong, natural, healthy foot, the rest of your body works tremendously better.
Speaker 2:If you've got a weak, deformed foot, you pay for that up the kinetic thing, you pay for it in your knees and your hips and your back, you know. And so 3d printing became. So we we obviously do make shoes as beaver barefoot in those long supply chains and we do make size shoes. So ours are relatively better because they're relatively wider and they're relatively more flexible. But we realized that the ultimate expression of our mission, which is to reconnect people with nature, starting with their feet, and reconnect with their natural potential, would be to actually be able to make shoes person by person, foot by foot, again, the same way all humans had footwear made for the first 90,000 years of existence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just make people running around the world. Yeah, absolutely Completely understand what you mean and, taking all of that into consideration, wanting to get back to making shoes person by person. You have that inspiration, you have that idea and then, when you start that creation process for these shoes and for the footwear, what were some of those challenges and some of those setbacks as you got into that creation process?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because, like we said in the beginning, when you start asking people in the footwear industry, why are you doing like this, why are you doing like that, why, why, why, why, why, and you start saying, well, you know, you don't. You know, any kind of heel is throwing off natural postural alignment. Any kind of height restrictive shape is not allowing the foot to splay and contract as as it might do. Any arch support is ultimately weakening the arch because it's acting like a splint. Any kind of toe spring is rendering the big toe, the great toe, ineffective. Why, why, why, you know, why do toddler's shoes look like feet and why do six-year-old shoes look like bananas? And the answer was always well, I've always done it, and and and. So when we started saying, well, actually, there's a different way, and and, all this padding and all this support and structures and the footwear industry is full of all this kind of underfoot technology you must have a, you know, a shank which is a stiff supportive structure between the forefoot and the rear foot. You must have arch support, you must have toe spring, etc. Etc. And you know the. The shapes are all kind of ingrained in fashion culture. So it was read huge challenges, just, and we were young, obviously, and and naive, and so the experienced owners and experts in the footwear industry kept on telling us we were wrong, wrong, wrong. So, aside from just all those obvious challenges of saying, well, you know, we don't believe in any of these bogus rules that the footwear industry has set up.
Speaker 2:You know, actually, when it came to making shoes that are fundamentally a lot thinner, softer, more flexible than normal shoes, it's relatively easy to make a thick, stiff thing compared to a soft, floppy thing. Sure, especially when you're, you know, and the problem with footwear is you're sticking a sole which needs to be abrasion resistant and durable and long lasting to an upper which needs to be soft and flexible and comfortable. So you've sort of got two competing forces of materials fundamentally. And then if you increase the flexibility and you increase the wear and you reduce all the thicknesses and increase the softness, you get a big shoe-making challenge basically. So they look like simple shoes to make but in reality they're much harder to make. So the softer a shoe is, the harder it is to make.
Speaker 1:And when you're doing all of that again, keeping all of that in mind, you're finally making and producing this shoe. You're using some materials that fit that sustainable definition. What are those materials that you're using to 3D print these shoes? How does that work? Some that's biodegradable. How do you manage to pull that off?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean pulling it off would be an incorrect thing to say. We're still on the journey of trying to figure it out Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, more in that prototype.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the starting point is that the world makes 24 billion pairs of shoes every year and nearly every single one of those shoes is made with polluting materials. So nearly all the foams and plastics come from the petrochemical industry. Nearly all the leather is panned with heavy metals, which is terribly carcinogenic, panned with heavy metals, which is terribly carcinogenic. All the glues and the threads and you know various bits of hardware that you find in footwear also, you know, terribly polluting. All the waterproof microplastic type treatments are. All are all problematic and nearly all shoes, like we said, don't really fit humans and and then they nearly all end up in landfill, which is kind of the elephant in the room that there's no real end-of-life solution in the footwear industry. Some companies have started to offer solutions and becoming more of a thing. So the starting point is is horrific. So you kind of, and we make a wide variety of shoes. So when you start, let's say, with leather, so rather than you know the worst case scenario, and actually you know a lot of the big shoe industry got into trouble for with where where the leather come is a is a byproduct of the agricultural industry and so let's say, a lot of the cattle industry now has been found guilty of chopping down amazon rainforest to build big cattle farms, you know, and then using loads of bloody hormones and drugs to rear the cattle, and then the shoe industry uses the leather from those cattle farms. And you know the big agriculture. So that's the problem. So what's the solution? So can we find leather from small, sustainable farmers who are not using lots of terrible drugs and cutting down virgin rainforests to raise their animals, and so what we call wild hide? And so we source the leather very specifically from small-holding farmers that the animals live a decent life and that the skins are a bit more irregular and they've got a bit more markings on them because the animals are allowed to roam around in nature, etc.
Speaker 2:So that's like one example of maybe 50 examples taking an existing material in the shoe industry and finding an alternative, exactly, and that's with the cottons and the hemp, and then the foams and the, you know, and then the all of the chemical rubbers to the actual natural rubbers, to the, and. And look there's, there's lots of wonderful innovation happening all across the peaks and going from petrochemical plastics to plant-based plastics and and so on and so forth. And the average shoe company, let's say, of any kind of size. We make nearly 2 million pairs of shoes a year and we use literally nearly 1,000 components across all the shoes we make, and we're a relatively small shoe company in the grand scheme of things. So when you get up to the likes of Nike, it will be probably 10, different components and supply, you know. So there is a lot of sustainable innovation happening in the material supply chain.
Speaker 2:But you know, you've got to. You know, you almost just got to pick them off one by one, bit by bit. And the trade-off between something that's proven long-lasting, durable, fantastic abrasion resistance to something that is natural and biodegradable by definition, that's a tough trade-off.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of elements that go into finding a circular life cycle for shoots. It's something that maybe people don't think about. And tell me about your approach and speak a little bit about the BioSurf Flex material, how all of that is just kind of helping you work towards, maybe that circular lifestyle for footwear.
Speaker 2:So two approaches natural and what we call polycircular. And there's the biodegradable, so from nature, back to nature, using natural materials. And there's a biodegradable, so from nature, back to nature, using natural materials that can genuinely be biodegraded one approach. And then the other approach is polycircular shoes that are ultimately made from synthetic materials, ideally coming from plant sources rather than petrochemical sources, that can then be genuinely recycled. So we work on those two strategies effectively and both ultimately trying to be circular. The obvious challenge with natural, like we just said, is durability, especially in performance shoes and weight and water ricking and things, although obviously as we go, you know materials like wool, that there is no synthetic material in the world that comes close to the amazing qualities of wool, for example, and frankly the same for leather. And then on the polycircular side, and the material you mentioned is a plastic that can ultimately be truly recycled in a chemical recycling way, and actually there's a number of the big shoe companies are trying to figure this out Right. It's proving to be tremendously more difficult than anybody kind of imagined five years ago, because the problem is in the wear, in heat, the, the plastics keep slightly altering and so when you come to take back the shoes. What maybe started off as a pure set of polymers that in theory could then be recycled back into that pure set of polymers, they've slightly altered in in the making, in the treatment, the wearing. When the glue then meets the two different polymers, that then sets off another little chemical reaction. And so the challenge of being able to genuinely recycle what becomes impure polymers, to get it back to the same grade as plastic, is really difficult.
Speaker 2:At the moment, all recycling is basically downcycling. So you're taking a fleece and it turns into, you know, a rubbish bin and then turns into a playground. But to get a plastic bottle that truly can go back to being a plastic bottle is is something that's, you know where literally billions of dollars are being spent on trying to figure that out. And it's not just the actual chemistry of being able to get it back to food grade plastic, it's also just it's chemistry of being able to get it back to food-grade plastic. It's also the cultural systems and the societal systems to get people to actually engage in the recycling schemes. And you know, I think glass bottles, for example, which you'd think is the simplest thing to recycle in the world, and it's something like only 25 or 30 percent of glass bottles actually get recycled, wow, whereas glass is, you know, in theory a perfectly circular material. But you know, the big problem the glass industry has is just getting people to, bloody well, send the glass back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head right there. Just, I mean, how many communities just don't even offer recycling or make recycling extremely difficult? I've lived in places where, instead of putting out a recycling bin, you have to take it to a site. And, let's be honest, what percentage of people are taking their time out of their day? It's true, it really is you know, a minority yeah right, exactly it's.
Speaker 1:It's a very small amount. So getting there and just talking about making an unpure polymer back into pure plastic is from my writing and from some of those stories that I have done has been one of the biggest challenge of trying to find a circular plastic or a plastic that is truly recyclable.
Speaker 2:As you know, there's a huge amount of investment. There's wonderful companies really trying really hard, multiple big companies all over the world investing a lot of time, money and effort into trying to figure this out. If you'd have asked me 10 years ago, I'd have said yeah, we're five years away from this thing being nailed, but 10 years later it kind of feels like we're still at stage one.
Speaker 1:Right, it's one of those things that just always feels like it's five years away. That's a great point, like right now, 10 years ago you thought it. Right now you think like, okay, we're five years away, we'll figure it out at some point. It's all really good points and one of the kind of switching it up a little bit here. One of the things that we were interested in is your Vivo Biome system. Just tell the audience a little bit about that how you meld AI, mobile scanning and local 3D printing into building a custom circular product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Vivo Viome is the epitome of the Vivo mission. It's sort of the ultimate future of the way we love to see the shoe industry go. We mentioned it earlier. It was ultimately going back to humans being able to make personalized shoes for themselves, person by person, foot by foot again, so using modern technology.
Speaker 2:And in reality, obviously we're not going to go back to a world where we all go to the local cobbler and stand on a bison skin and they carefully measure around the skin and make a beautiful pair of moccasins to our preferences, with our tribal colors kind of stitched into the uppers and some nice beading around them. But you know, I guess that might happen more and more. But in lieu of that, like what everybody does now is they walk around effectively with a scanning technology in their pocket, and so it's not perfect yet and and and not all new phones have it, but, but basically, before long, mobile phones will be able to pretty accurately scan your feet. So with a scan, we can take that scan and then we can create, you know, and with you know, various algorithms and AI learning.
Speaker 2:We can take that scan and then create a framework for you to then be able to interact with a digital program to choose the type of footwear you'd like you can personalize it to. Do you want more grip, less grip? Do you want you know your girlfriend's name printed on the bottom? Do you want a picture of your favorite comic book hero? Put it down the side?
Speaker 2:You can kind of do anything right and and then so you know, as I said earlier, there's one thing being able to print one layer in one material, but obviously a lot of footwear needs two different densities, one for the sole and one for the upper, and, as you can imagine, there's lots of exciting 3d printing technologies that are figuring out both options.
Speaker 2:So at the moment, we can do really good sandals, we can do really good water shoes and we can do soles that we then can stick onto a sock that we call what we call hybrid, but still ultimately sort of personalized and bespoke to the user. So you know, our vision is that before long, the days of just going and buying cookie cutter shoes that don't fit you will be over and when people start experiencing shoes that truly fit them, truly allow their feet to be strong, natural and healthy and connected to the earth, and they can pretty much choose, you know, whatever style they want and it be quite unique to them. Yeah Is where we think it will go. And you know, again, with 3D printing, you know, I think 10 years ago people were kind of going in five years' time, everything's going to be 3D printed. You know, 10 years later it's going to be rather slower than people thought, right, and now we're saying five years' time everything's going to be 3D printed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's kind of the same argument. It's always that, five years down the road. And to that point, how do you foresee, let's say, ai and mobile scanning, transforming both, like you mentioned, the personalization and sustainability when you touched on it a little bit? But I'd like to hear your personal. You're doing it every day, so where do you see that kind of happening down the line?
Speaker 2:More and more companies are joining the market. More and more human ingenuity is going into figuring out the 3D scanners. More and more human figuring out the polymers, especially the sustainable biodegradable polymers. Amazing companies really figuring out plant-based biodegradable polymers. That you know kind of, because obviously you know we don't want to just fill the world up with more microplastics and what is an exciting technology that will improve health and function but in you know, there's kind of no point if it's totally toxic. So you know we and we see that happening all over the world and and you know we're not quite at more's law in terms of 3d printing and and scanning yet. But you know, like I said, the phones, that the technology is in some phones now. It will soon be in all phones. Right, it will be. It's slightly imprecise now. It will get more precise and that is pretty essential to the whole thing really working for everybody. So right now that we need physical offline scanners to be able to get it precise enough to really make a perfect pair of bespoke shoes for you, the phone can can get us pretty close, but that will improve.
Speaker 2:We see, in the polymers we just saw a new innovation literally in the last month, of a very lightweight, foamed 3D printed material that also has biodegradable qualities, that just provides a kind of softness and a flexibility and comfort that has never been seen before in 3D printing and so on and so forth. Right, and then you know, being able to 3D print the upper materials and make them soft and breathable and flexible enough but also weather resistant. All the pieces are starting to come together. You know the lovely thing about at least from our point of view. You know, this whole thing about underfoot technology and funny shapes in the footwear industry is a kind of modern phenomenon, and what 3D printing will allow us to do is go back to making shoes that are genuinely for your feet, that feel absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know there's nothing better than walking barefoot. You know, I think there's a very there are a few people that say they prefer shoes, but I think there's not many kids that start off and those are mainly adults that are just used to wearing shoes and their feet have gotten weak and they can't be bothered to do the transition back to strong, healthy feet. But there's not many kids in the world that don't prefer to run around barefoot. You're right, bad thing, and as long as you never deform and weaken a kid's foot. That sort of starting point will always be there. So humans are walking around in pointy-heeled shoes because of horse riding. We made pointy-heeled shoes to go into stirrups for horse riding and being able to fight each other on horses. To have a horse was a high status, aristocratic thing. So to have horse riding shoes was a high status thing to have. So everybody wanted to have high status heel pointy shoes.
Speaker 2:But we're kind of over fighting each other on horses now and you know, just you know, and and and actually what happened with Nike was they started off making really good barefoot shoes, but they got in a bunch of but when they everyone started running in their black barefoot shoes, people were getting injured and the doctors came in and said well, if you want to make shoes that people can immediately kind of go running in, you need to make them like their work shoes, so you need to make them pointy and heel. Running in, you need to make them like their work shoes, so you need to make them pointy and heel. So nike put in the heel stack, yeah, with all the bloody air bubbles, and started to make the shoot the toes more pointy and raised. And so you know, they made their shoes like people's feet were because of the shoes.
Speaker 2:So all the new technology in the shoe industry is there to solve the problems caused by shoes itself. It's a terrible shoe matrix and you know our job and, like in so many other industries and it's the same for the food industry, I think, same in some ways for the medical industry, same, for we're just sort of unraveling and just getting back to basic natural principles in the 21st century. We're using some modern technologies to enable that journey back in different environments, et cetera. But what we're just enabling is just getting back to that natural state of natural health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's clear there's a lot of technological advances in your work and in your industry, but there's also some setbacks in that innovation process. Let's kind of gear towards the production process, because it's kind of the same thing being able to produce locally and on demand via your micro factories. It challenges some traditional supply chains, your micro factories, it challenges some traditional supply chains. What successes and what setbacks have you experienced so far with how your production process looks?
Speaker 2:well, I mean, the success is we have successfully made 3d printed shoes that people love to wear, and and and. In very simple terms, the failure is we. We have not managed to scale that yet, and so we we're doing it in the hundreds of pairs at the moment. We think in the next year it's going to go into the thousands, you know, and then, but you know, like we said, the world makes 24 billion pairs of shoes every year.
Speaker 2:Vivo makes close to two million pairs a year, nike makes, you know, hundreds of millions of pairs a year, and so you know, the challenge is scalability. Right, the cost is still quite high, like I said, but the accuracy with the mobile scanning is is still too low. Some of the polymers and materials up until now have been too stiff and too brittle and and probably do have a little bit of a microplastic problem. So, you know, we do now think we have a system where we can scan your foot and we can make a bespoke pair of shoes for you, and at the moment it's mainly sandals and water shoes or a sole that's stuck onto an upper. It's relatively slow and relatively expensive still, but we can do it and the next phase is to figure out how to genuinely scale that Right, and are there any?
Speaker 1:what sort of like infrastructure or partnerships? I mean you said you go from hundreds to next year it's looking like thousands. What kind of infrastructure or partnerships have been most essential to delivering these custom footwear, trying to get that to scale? Is there anything that comes to mind?
Speaker 2:Scanning technology, of course Printing technology, of course Columnar science To some degree. Where you do want to stick a sole onto an upper, then it the the technology to be able to do that without a big, long asian supply chain. So so we're investing quite a lot in robo cell technology to be able to automate that process of sticking a sole onto an upper, especially where it's very variable. We're working with some exciting companies that figuring out how to do that with natural materials. We're working with some exciting companies that are figuring out how to do that with natural materials. And 3D printing can also be used to make molds. So, rather than using big heavy industrial metal molds, you can 3D print bespoke shapes and then put sort of vacuum plastic on it and then make the shoe sole out of natural material poured into the plastic mold.
Speaker 2:So there's lots of kind of exciting spin-offs, as it were, should we say, of the new ways of making shoes in more efficient ways. But being able to make shoes person by person, foot by foot, in a larger scale is the challenge. But it ultimately will be local. We're not trying to make a big global solution here, we're trying to make a local solution, but even on a local level. I live in a relatively unpopulated part of the UK, but there's still 20 million people that live in the Southwest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, exactly, I mean, and you have to think about it like this it all has to start somewhere and you know if it's small. Now you got to look to the future. And looking to the future, you know what are you most excited about? Where do you see the future of vivo barefoot foot going in? All that stuff?
Speaker 2:we live in a doomsday world right, where people are predicting that, you know, the robots are going to take over any day now and humans are basically not going to have anything to do. And, you know, at best we're we're going to have 10 years of, you know, hyper challenge, meta crises all over the world and we might come out the other side sort of with universal basic income and everybody living, you know, wonderful lives of pleasure and joy. Now I do believe that there's a chance that this new superintelligence that is being created will also, you know, perhaps re-educate humans on. The nature is infinitely more intelligent than anything that artificial intelligence will ever be, and if artificial intelligence is genuinely intelligent, it will respect that and understand that and it will teach humans that, and and and it will teach humans that, in order for humans to be happy, actually rebalancing and aligning ourselves to nature will ultimately make us happier.
Speaker 2:And living in small communities, eating natural food and I believe that when you wear barefoot shoes or less shoes and you put your feet on the earth, you psychologically can't help but believe that is the right path for humans to take to then go back to living in local communities and living in local food systems and rejecting sort of you know, being just part of a giant global corporatism that is making so many people unhappy and disenfranchised and where the robots will take over and humans will just serve the robots will take over and humans will just serve the robots.
Speaker 2:But actually regaining our sovereignty is about regaining our responsibility for our own health, and, you know, in our case, that starts with putting your feet on the ground, feeling the earth's energies, feeling your own health and your own natural potential. And you can't do that in big padded, you know, uncomfortable shoes that literally disconnect you from nature, like big shoe literally disconnects us. And so when you, when you've disconnected from something, you can treat it badly and and and you don't care about it. But when you feel something and you, you're grounded to something and you, you know you, you just you treat it with more respect and you enjoy it more yeah, and so you know contribution to what I think not many people disagree with.
Speaker 2:Now to this. You know, realigning to the, to the natural world, you know we'll be surrounded by god-like technology, no doubt about it. But in the end, you know, more and more people are obviously understanding that the real happiness comes from being in communities close to nature, eating healthy food. And you know our contribution to that transition is getting people out of big padded, deforming shoes. That is, ruining their health and disconnecting themselves from the very thing that's going to save us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Get your feet back on the ground, folks. We'll kind of wrap it there on on a pretty positive note. One last thing how can people follow this journey and follow Viva Barefoot and stay connected?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, if we're anything, we're total hypocrites, and the definition of the hypocrite is the shoemaker that goes around barefoot. And you know we live in a world of oxymorons barefoot shoes, you know, ethical business, eco-fashion all great oxymorons of our time and obviously one of the other great oxymorons is healthy digital. So, of course, we're basically you know, we're more than anything a digital business and we communicate, connecting with nature, through using digital tools, you know, and so hypocritically, unfortunately, the best way to connect with us is digitally and there's, you know, obviously, websites and social channels around vivo, barefoot. But you know, and actually it's one of the things we're interested in, how do we use technology in some ways to encourage people that you know you can only buy this pair of shoes if you actually walk up to the top of your local hill, and you can. You know that that will give you access to whatever. But obviously that's one of the great challenges is how to live healthy digital, and obviously we're staring at each other through screen.
Speaker 1:Through screen. Hey, there's plenty of benefits to technology as well. I mean, we wouldn't be able to talk otherwise and see each other. Yeah, so that's a really great point, galahad, I really appreciate your time. This was a lot of fun and I appreciate you telling us your story. Thanks again for hopping on with us.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure. Thanks very much for giving us the space, and I really wish you very well.
Speaker 1:All right, galad. Thank you so much and thank you everyone for listening. That's all the time we have today. See you next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Four Worlds Podcast. Until next time, you can catch up on the latest innovations shaping our world at TomorrowsWorldTodaycom. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Can catch up on the latest innovations shaping our world at tomorrowsworldtodaycom. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
