  Early dark energy has emerged as one of the more promising approaches to
address the Hubble tension - the statistically significant disparity between
measurements of the Hubble constant made using data from different epochs in
cosmic history. However, the idea is not without its own set of challenges,
both from the data, in the effects it has on other measurements, such as the
large-scale structure tension, and from theoretical concerns such as technical
naturalness and the introduction of a new coincidence problem in cosmology. In
this brief note, delivered as an invited plenary lecture at the {\it 15th
Frontiers of Fundamental Physics conference}, I discuss how some of the
fine-tuning problems of early dark energy can be ameliorated by using couplings
to other fields already present in cosmology, and for which the epoch of
matter-radiation equality is already a special one. The resulting models -
neutrino assisted early dark energy, and chameleon early dark energy - provide
testable, theoretically robust implementations of this general idea. I will
discuss the formulation and the cosmology of such approaches, including some
constraints arising from both observational and theoretical considerations.
