The Luck of Motion
JT, aka The Sneaker Savant, on how a handmade MJ card, a Nike Designer, and a trip to Portland reminded us why we do this
We recorded this one on February 13th, and I had just gotten off Instagram after seeing footage from what I can only describe as complete chaos at a Foot Locker release somewhere in LA for All-Star Weekend.
People fighting. People getting trampled. Over sneakers.
And I had this weird moment where I was like... I genuinely don’t know what’s coming out right now that makes people do this. Not because I’m out of touch, but because I’ve been doing this for 20+ years and I still can’t figure out what the shoe is that makes you willing to fight a stranger for it in 2026.
I shared that thought with JT, AKA The Sneaker Savant, right before we hit record. We’d actually been talking for about 20 minutes before we started the episode, about the economy, about the state of the sneaker world, about what we’re both trying to build right now. So by the time we were actually recording, it felt like a conversation that had already been going for a while... which I think you can hear.
JT has been around the Sneaker History community for a few years now. He’s thoughtful, he’s funny, he doesn’t show his face much online, and he’s been writing over at The Sneaker Savant on Substack in a way that I genuinely respect because it’s his. He’s not writing for the algorithm. He’s writing because he has things to say.
This episode went a lot of places. I want to highlight a few of them…
JT did a calculation a while back that basically wrecked me. If you spend 30 minutes a day on Instagram over 13 years, that’s 265 days of your life. And he knows, like we all know, that 30 minutes was the floor on plenty of those days. To me that signals something pretty important about where we are with all of this... not that Instagram is inherently bad, but that we gave it a lot, and the return is getting harder and harder to justify.
He said he’s seen his posts reach maybe 500 of his 17,000 followers on a given day. And I know that feeling. I had over 130,000 followers on the Sneaker History account at one point. Now it’s under 90,000 and still falling. That’s not a complaint, it’s just the reality of how these platforms work now. They’ll take your content, show it to a fraction of your audience, and fill the rest of the feed with ads.
The Substack thing came up pretty naturally, because we’re both at a similar place with it. I’m four months into being serious about this newsletter and the conversations I’ve had here... the genuine curiosity, the real feedback, the people who reach out because something I wrote connected with them... it’s been more meaningful than almost anything I experienced in 20 years of having my name attached to major brands and platforms.
That’s not nothing.
The Portland story JT told is one of my favorite things that’s come up on the podcast in a while.
Quick context for people who don’t know: there’s a gathering that happens in Portland, put together by Andrew from Sneaker Preservation Society and a few other guys, where a group of collectors, writers, and people who just genuinely care about this stuff get to spend a few days together surrounded by rare shoes, samples, and unlimited stories. I got to go in 2024 and it’s one of the top five experiences of my life in sneakers, no exaggeration.
JT went this past year, and the way he described it was exactly how I felt coming out of it. There’s this implicit understanding in that room that you don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to justify why you care. You’re just... around people who get it.
But the part that really got me was the card.
Before the trip, JT made 60 handmade cards featuring Michael Jordan in a Portland Trail Blazers jersey, because the Blazers famously passed on Jordan in the 1984 draft in favor of Sam Bowie. He brought them to Portland, and on the second night, started handing them out as a way to introduce himself and start conversations.
One of those cards ended up in the hands of Ken Black, a Nike designer who worked on team sports. Ken looked at the card and said it broke his heart, because he’d always regretted that the Blazers passed on Jordan. They ended up talking for a while, not about sneakers at first, just about being dads. And then Ken sent JT home with a package and introduced him to another designer named Drake Ramberg, who designed the Nike football jerseys from 1994 and 1995.
And JT, who had been living in Great Britain in the mid-90s and looking for any piece of home, had seen an Arsenal jersey with his name on the back of it. He’d wanted it his whole life. He only just learned, a few months ago, that Drake was the person who designed it.
I’ve been in this industry a long time. I’ve had moments where I had to pinch myself. And I still think that story is one of the best examples I’ve heard of what happens when you just put yourself out there and keep going. Trevor Noah calls it the luck of motion... you can’t find yourself in these situations if you’re standing still.
The Dada’s conversation is one I think people are going to have opinions about.
Steph Curry showed up recently wearing Chris Webber’s Dada’s, and a pretty popular sneaker account posted that the Dada’s were “never it.” JT, who grew up in Northern California, took issue with that. And he’s right to.
The Dada’s were absolutely a thing in certain parts of the country. They sold out. People who didn’t care about sneakers were talking about them. JT’s point was that Instagram is really good at two things: fast, and flat. It amplifies the general arc of sneaker culture and flattens out everything regional, everything specific, everything that didn’t happen in New York or LA or on the internet.
To me that’s the exact reason this newsletter exists. And it’s the exact reason The Sneaker Savant’s substack exists. The stuff that mattered to people in Sacramento or Northern California or Detroit or wherever you grew up... it deserves to be documented. It deserves to exist somewhere that isn’t subject to whatever the algorithm decided was culturally significant that week.
We can’t let that stuff get lost.
This episode is on all the usual platforms… Apple, YouTube, Spotify, etc.
If you know someone who spent their formative years arguing about sneakers with people who didn’t always agree with the mainstream take... this one’s for them.
As always, thanks for being here.
Keep building.
-Nick
I’m Nick Engvall, and I’ve been writing about sneakers and culture for two decades, from building Eastbay’s first blog to being employee #9 at StockX. I run Sneaker History (website and podcast) and write The Sneaker Newsletter... sneaker lore, business breakdowns, and the stories that connect what we wear to who we are. If you want the deeper stuff - the industry analysis, the “From the Vault” stories from my 20+ years in this business - become a paid subscriber.
CWebb is my favorite basketball player ever and I wanted Dadas so much.