Dr. Zach Bush ON: Science Based Approach to Healing Your Gut Health & How to Prevent Disease with Nutrition

26:17And when you find that original vibration of this is me, you become very potent. You start to tune to something bigger than the biology would have you believe in. And in that, you start to do something different with your relationship to everything. And that's the eight-point journey that we've put together for the Journey of Intrinsic Health, which is our program that we've been helping answer that question of how do you get to health. These eight steps are laid out in this eight-week journey, and it's about that change of relationship to your food, to actually water. Water is really kind of backwards as to our understanding of how we hydrate and what water is.

26:51And then we also get confused about breath and our relationship to each little respiration we take. We're confused about what happens when we fast and what does that paucity of stress on the neurologic system look like. We're confused about exercise. We do exercise kind of backwards as well. So it's reforming the relationship to all of these lifestyle things that you've been told are important, but when you go and do the thing that's important, you don't get healthier. And that was a big question mark for all of us in the medical field. of like we know people should exercise. And yet when we tell people who are overweight and diabetic to go exercise, they don't actually consistently lose weight and they very rarely improve their diabetes.

27:32Why is that? We know movement is important and yet it's not working. And I think it's because of this externalization of everything. And so since you're not you and you're this external representation of yourself, your relationship to all these things, food, movement, breath, fasting, the rest, are all backwards as well. And so this is the eight-week journey into the obvious, but in a completely new lens of everything's going to go internal instead of externally sought after. And that's changed a lot of everything. And it's allowed me to close my physical clinic where I was seeing one patient at a time and go to a coaching model where we are witness to the healing process rather than mandating the healing process.

28:12rather than the prescriptive process of an MD writing down eight prescriptions and saying, this will make you better. Realizing that can never make anybody better because those prescriptions are eight external stimuli that have absolutely nothing to do with the root cause of their disease. And so this has been an exciting journey of reversing out of my education and into the realization that there's nothing more beautiful and potent than a human being in their own field, in their own self, in their own original math. One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time.

28:49Whether it's choosing to spend a quiet night in to recharge or making a decision that brings you closer to a long-term goal, those moments of intention really matter. And when it comes to the choices we make with our money, that same mindset applies. I've learned that saving for the things that truly matter, like your first home or a reliable car starts with small, thoughtful decisions. That's why I appreciate what State Farm is doing with their personal price plan. It gives you the power to personalize your plan and create an affordable price that works for your life. You can bundle your home and auto insurance in a way that supports your journey and your goals.

29:29Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state, coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. I've talked a lot about how our phones pull us into habits that don't always serve us. The reflex to check, scroll, and react without thinking. That pull takes us away from ourselves, our relationships, and the world right in front of us. We want to be more intentional.

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30:48We all want to live with more purpose, more connection and more joy. Sometimes that starts with a small piece of wisdom, a perspective shift, a grounding practice or a story that makes you feel less alone. On TikTok, those moments are being shared every single day. Millions are finding people who show meditation techniques, discuss the science of the mind, or share daily habits that many find helpful. Others are opening up about their own journeys, talking about well-being, resilience, and healing in ways that can make you feel seen. And what stands out is the way it's shared. Ideas spread quickly and support can grow from a single post.

31:31and it all happens in a welcoming and supportive space. TikTok stimulates your mind in more ways than one. It's a place for learning, for mindfulness, for tools that support healthier habits and reflections. If you're searching for growth and connection that resonates with your own unique journey, you'll find it on TikTok. I'd love to dive into some of those eight, if it's okay, because I think identity is such a cool one, which you just touched on beautifully there. You touched on water there. I'd love to understand a bit more about that because I think that's kind of like not even talked about.

32:06I've barely heard, I know, I know my wife's, I always call my wife a water snob because she's very, very careful about the water we drink and the water we, you know, shower with and everything else. But if you could guide us to understanding what you're sharing in your eight week program around water, at least as a high level, could you guide us through that? Right now when we think about liquid water, we tend to think of this stuff in this glass here. And it tastes good to drink. It feels good to drink when it's clean. And it has this kind of refreshing quality to it for a lot of us. But my body is 70 % water and not a single ounce of that is in this form.

32:44The vast majority of the water within my body is actually in a crystalline structure. If you've ever seen Jell-O, eaten Jell-O, made Jell-O, you see liquid turn into a solid. And that gel-like structure within Jell-O is the result of complex crystal structures of the water organizing itself around proteins. And that's how I hold water. And it turns out that my biologic age and my likelihood of disease correlates perfectly with how much crystal water do I hold. That crystal water is holding something within it, and it's light. in a very amazing biologic phenomenon. This planet is able to capture solar energy in chlorophyll, which are tiny little mitochondria that live inside of plants, little bacteria.

33:32And these chlorophyll have been able to take CO2 and turn it into batteries. And the battery is a long chain of carbon. Double carbon bond is the most efficient battery ever invented by nature. It takes no energy to maintain the light within that. So sunlight is captured between two CO2 molecules and then eight and then 12 in these long carbon chains. And then we digest those by consuming food. And we liberate glucose, sugars, carbohydrates, fatty acids in the oils in our foods. And we package that up in our liver and send it out to every cell in the body. And it turns out the human cells don't know how to use any of that glucose or fatty acids.

34:09There's no mechanism for releasing the sunlight. So it has to pass it down to the mitochondria living inside our cells. So it's basically the mitochondria in plants communicating potential energy to the mitochondria within us. Those mitochondria start breaking apart the CO2 and start releasing sunlight back into the cellular matrix. And that's what's being held within the crystal structure of water. And it turns out that when I drink water like this, I'm doing very little to support the crystalline structure within my cells. For this to turn into a crystal, it takes a complex relationship to a vast array of salts, mineral amino acid complexes, and protein structures.

34:48And that's where we kind of lost the hydration story. If I drink this water, it's going to feel good. It's going to feel like I'm hydrating myself for a few minutes, but I'm going to pee this out in the next 45 minutes. If I haven't emptied my bladder, it will be sitting in my bladder. It's no longer in my body. It's outside of my body again, because this pure water has no reservoir in my body. It has to pass quickly through my bloodstream back to the kidneys and get out to my urine. And so the journey into health is really a rediscovery of how do you get water into the crystal stage. And it's a complex journey in some ways, but it is an exciting premise to begin with is I need to be more full of light.

35:28How do I become more full of light so that I'm more vital, so I can repair at a faster rate than ever before because there's more poisons in my environment than any other time in human history? I need more crystalline structure. And so we reevaluate water at that, that journey from your gut into the crystal form inside your cells, where it turns into that gel battery storage place for that light liberation from the sunlight for the animation of life to happen. And so that's a little bit of a nutshell of a lot more content that can be drilled into, but that's a little bit of that flip on the head of water.

36:02Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and you said you can actually test, you can actually see your age through the quality of that crystalline structure. You can test for that? How do you test for that? The easiest way to test for it is a relatively old technology. It's called a phase angle calculation, but you use an impedance monitor, which is a description of just measurement of resistance. And it looks like EKG leads. If you've ever seen an EKG, 12 leads around the heart and all that stuff. They're sticky little pads. You'll put one on the wrist, one on the forefinger, one on the ankle, one on the toe, and then you lay perfectly flat and you measure across that column of water that's now at an equilateral level to the earth and to gravity.

36:47You measure the amount of electrical resistance across that column. And from that, you can calculate, based on body weight and your height and all of this stuff, how much water is inside every cell. And when you calculate that, then you get a very good biologic age and biologic estimate of your vitality. An ideal phase angle is up around 10, 12. I've never seen anybody at 10 or 12. The healthiest patients walking my clinic are typically around a 7 or an 8 on their phase angle. Anybody coming in with disease, let's go with cancer for the end point there, is typically around a 4. Death happens at 3.5.

37:24And so what I just told you is ideal health is 10, death is 3.5, and cancer shows up at 4. And here we're telling everybody they're dying of cancer. As it turns out, when you look at the simple reality of water inside a cell, cancer is one of the last symptoms of a complete disconnect from the energetics of life. Cancer happens when you no longer are connected to the energy of that plant, of that chlorophyll of that sunlight that charged life in the first place. And so that's where we go with this eight-week journey is where did it break down? How did you go from 10 to 3? How'd you get from 10 to 4?

38:04Whatever it is. And then how do we start to back you up that track of crystalline water? How do we get your body to hold more light energy so that you're more vital, so that you accelerate every enzyme process, detoxification, repair, regeneration, protein structures throughout all matrices. All of that happens automatically when the light goes up. You mentioned a product earlier, the gut supplement you probably got put on by your nutritionist, but the journey into that phenomenon was our understanding of soil and food and how did it break down so quickly was the question we were trying to answer.

38:38How did we go from 1992 to 2002? That 10 years saw the complete dissolution of human health across all ages, across all organ systems in a 10-year period, across all peoples really that were touching Western civilization, Western food systems. And in that journey, we discovered glyphosate. And glyphosate is the primary herbicide or weed killer in the vast majority, 90 plus percent of the weed killers on the planet. We now spend billions of dollars a year spraying this thing into our environment. We have an estimated 4 billion pounds of glyphosate being sprayed into our soil and water systems worldwide.

39:14And it turns out, as our laboratory has been studying this compound for a decade now, every time you touch human cell systems with glyphosate, it dissolves the communication between them. It disconnects you from the boundary of being human. And it dissolves that to the point where you don't know where you begin or end of human biology and your immune system has to turn on to fight everything. So you were eating pretty healthy. You were exercising. You were living a pretty affluent lifestyle compared to the rest of the world perhaps, and yet you weren't thriving because there was a chemical now in your food that was dissolving the boundary event and your energy was now leaking out of your body quite literally.

39:51We've popularized the term leaky gut, but it's much deeper than that. That's happening at the individual cell level that's leaking light, leaking water outside of itself. And if you can't hold that crystalline water, you can't hold the vitality, the energetics of the plants you're eating, of the nutrition you're eating. And so you start to fade with your energy levels. And with less energy, you repair less well, and you start into this chronic disease that happened between 1992 and 2002, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, everything mentioned. And so that was your personal journey. And then you got put on a supplement.

40:23What is that supplement? It's not actually a traditional supplement. Most supplements are like pieces of the nutrition cascade of a vitamin or a mineral or protein or whatever it is. This is way, way upstream of that. This is not a nutrient. This is in fact the small carbon molecules that form a redox signaling system, which is a fancy word for a wireless communication network between your cells. There's two ways cells communicate. One is through hard fiber optic cables. They can pass light energy back and forth for communication. And the other one is through this more ethereal wireless communication, similar to your cell phone.

41:00Your cell phone sits there all the time with a complex transmitter in there, a transceiver where it can receive and transmit tiny little signals, but it has to be picked up by a cell phone tower that will propagate that information at distance so I can talk to my grandmother. For me to talk 3 ,000 miles away, I need lots and lots of connections between all those cell towers to cascade through to carry that message. If you lose one cell tower nearby, your cell phone's something doesn't work. Nothing broke in the cell phone is an important reality. It just can't reach the bigger system. And so the disease of today is not actually a disease of a single cell.

41:37It's a failure of that wireless communication network. And so when a single cell gets injured now, it can't send out the signal of, hey, I'm injured, I need repair. And it sits there and accumulates injury. And with that accumulation of injury, we reach cancer. Cancer is a single human cell that has 20 ,000 unrepaired genetic injuries in it. And so this journey towards cancer is not only a loss of electric light and light potential, it's a loss of communication and the loss of that regenerative potential. And so we now have a whole society of humans, 8 billion of us that are losing our light. We are dimming and we are losing our cell-cell communication.

42:14Those cell phone towers are going down and we cannot repair. But nature always prepares for the worst. And the antidote, it turns out, to the death of communication, which is happening at the human level, is actually the microbiome, which is a term that's now thrown around a lot. And I think we all have a vague understanding. I think that's like bacteria or something. But really what it's describing is complex ecosystem. It's thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of different species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and human cells alike, all getting into this coherent communication network.

42:47And so the microbiome is a description of a complex landscape of biodiversity. And each of those microbes, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and the like, are making another variant of these small carbon snowflakes. And when those carbon snowflakes go into a liquid state, into the aqueous state of your bloodstream or into that semi-aqueous state of the gel within your cells, they're able to transmit information long distances. And so we started extracting these from fossil soils before the last extinction. 60 million years ago, again, 30-foot topsoil levels, the healthiest microbiome the planet has ever seen.

43:21And so we tap back into the fossil layer of soil and start extracting that communication network. And the first time we put this on human cells was 2012. And I got to see in my lab, which was rudimentary at the time, some of the most ridiculous things happened in a Petri dish that I just didn't even believe possible. And it was a journey from stopping asking questions about the cancer cells we were talking, asking questions and studying to healthy biology. Are we witnessing health in a Petri dish? is that's what's really happening because so many things we're fixing and repairing at such a rate I never imagined before.

43:56And so it's been a very exciting journey to realize that the earth has coded into her deep fossil soils a communication network that can help us out of our crisis, that can help us beyond this isolation of the single human cell and ultimately the isolation of a single human species back into an interpretive dance with life itself. This vast biology within us and around us is ready to re-engage. We just need those cell phone towers up and running in our bodies. And that's what happened to you when you started ION. Yeah, no, thank you for explaining that. It's incredible how little we know. I mean, when I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, we just don't know enough.

44:40And individually and collectively as well. But one of the things you talked about, Walter, we talked a bit about microbiome, which I want to get back into. but a big area that you're focusing on is soil regeneration. I think that's been something that's been more recently talked about as opposed to something that we've thrown around, as you were saying about the microbiome, but talk us through that very key element of the environment. And again, if you can give us that sort of synopsis version as you did with water for us to just understand the value of that, because I want people to go and follow you and figure out through your work the depths of everything we're discussing today.

45:21But I think at least for the benefit of this conversation, if people can get a sense of just the breadth of areas that we may know me considering are negatively impacting our health, just as you said, I had no idea when I was taking eye on, you know, what was really going on behind the scenes. I want to step in that first point for you too. You made the statement that we don't know enough And that's how I felt most of my life as a doctor. That's what led to 17 years of higher education and chasing that proverbial knowledge so that I'd feel less afraid. I feel like my whole world has just flipped on its head in the last 15 years to the point where I now realize I know everything.

46:00But I don't know it up in my head. I have access to information throughout the cosmos through something deeper than my mind. And that's, again, where you are acting from in your career. and not just in your career, with your interaction with humans in general, your recent book on human relationships, not just the relationship to human cells, to human beings, how do we start to relate differently than we have in the past? And that journey, I think, is really exciting to realize we actually know everything if we listen inside. And this is the experience I'm sure you had in those few years living as a monk and everything else.

46:38When you spend more time in silence than you do talking, you find you know so much and it's not something up in your head it's not an intelligence it's a connection the real truth within you will be remembered rather than discovered and so that is an exciting journey into let's take a deep breath and realize nobody knows about crystal water nobody knows about all this stuff and it doesn't matter because ultimately it shows the layers that I can show you in our laboratory will give you a glimpse of beauty that you may not have been realizing it. But how you get to that beauty is something you all innately know.

47:16Your relationship to your water, to your food, and ultimately to your soil, and ultimately to your planet is something that precedes human intellect, human consciousness. And so we are now in a state of being where we can actually realize, okay, if everything existed, our capacity to become human existed before the moment we were human, what does that mean for our connection to the future? It's already here. It's already connected. It's already manifesting through the genome of the viruses, through the genetic potential of the planet itself. It's already here. So not only do I know myself right now, I have access to information of the future because it's already coded for in biology.

47:55That hasn't quite yet appeared, but the information is already there. The same way I can remember the past because it's coded for in my genes, then all the trauma, all the remembrances, all the experience of my ancestors, it's coded for in my genetic code. It's not in my head. It's within every single cell of my body, resonating in a crystalline structure that we would call the fourth phase of water. And we resonate in that liquid crystal state to know self and then to express self within that matrix. So deep breath for all of us right now at this part of the podcast. You know what? We're connected to all of it.

48:27We don't need to know it in our heads because we already have access to it. Beautiful, yeah. Then the soil. So how does the soil come into importance? A soil is a living life form, the most complex living life form on the planet and in life itself as we understand it. We've never measured a more beautiful system than the soil. A teaspoon of soil has more organisms than are humans on the entire planet. A teaspoon. And so there's a complexity and a brilliance and a beauty of that living ecosystem of soil that dwarfs our current understanding of cell biology. We can't actually measure in a petri dish the behavior of 8 billion different species in a teaspoon of soil because we haven't developed good enough scientific measures and fast enough computers to compute that much information so fast.

49:15So we tend to study one species of bacteria and make a whole bunch of conclusions that maybe it's bad for us. Well, this whole concept of bad bacteria and good bacteria of the probiotics has really dissolved now. We realize there is no such thing as a good bacteria or a bad bacteria. there's only a healthy ecosystem or a monoculture. Monoculture or the death of biodiversity is the demise of life. A push towards biodiversity is the matrix of health. And it is unfortunate that over the last hundred years, we've developed a deep economic and physical labor dependence on chemicals for our farming and agriculture.

49:54These chemicals destroy the biodiversity of every ounce of soil we put these chemicals on. They function as antibiotics. Glyphosate, that most common of herbicides, has been patented as an antibiotic, antifungal, antiparasite. It literally demolishes life within the soil that it touches. And yet this is what farmers are trained to use. We genetically modified all of our seeds so that the food would be sprayed repeatedly through its lifespan with that chemical. And so Roundup Ready seeds means poison tolerant food system. But when as a microbiome, you're not prepared for that poison, or as a consumer, as an animal upstream, you're not prepared for that injury, you become poisoned in a way in which you are not Roundup ready.

50:36Neither was your microbiome in your gut, which is your soil system. And so all this focus on gut health of the last 10 years is simply a description of soil is important. It's where life comes from. Life comes out of biodiversity and relationship, cooperation of biodiverse inputs. Regenerative agriculture is a description of this revolution that is afoot that we are participating in. Our nonprofit Farmers Footprint has been part of this effort to increase awareness and learning impact and innovation around the opportunity for farmers to shift away from the belief that they're there to grow bushels of corn and instead they're there to grow life within their soil systems.

51:14And when every day they wake up asking, how can I create more life and diversity within my soils instead of what can I kill today, which is what chemical farming is, which invasive weeds are now attacking. What ICU life support do I need to put my farm on? Oh gosh, I'm out of all these nutrients, so I need to intravenously inject all these nutrients with all these chemical inputs. It's an ICU condition in the farm just as it's an ICU condition in my hospital. And so this is a journey really into realizing that we are doing ICU care because we lost the matrix of life which is biodiversity, which is the soil within your gut, soil beneath your feet.

51:50And it's exciting to realize that we can participate this at every level. If we walk out in your yard right now, you have an American lawn. And an American lawn is the third largest crop grown in the United States. There are 40 million acres of lawn, Kentucky bluegrass grown in this country. There's only 120 million acres of farmland, 40 million acres of grass, so that it looks nice or whatever it is. We have lots of reasons. Convenient, you can just mow it, whatever. If we were to take that 40 million acres of lawn and convert that to food forests in our backyards, front yards, and the rest, we would never go hungry.

52:27In the next 70 generations, there could not be hunger because we would have so much food bursting from every yard. In World War II, we came close. We had lost the food system. We had lost supply chains. We had lost economics. And so we were growing our food in our backyards again. And by 1945, Americans and the British and London and the rest were growing 45 % of their food system in their backyard, victory gardens. We called them victory gardens because the campaign was, if you don't grow your own food, we're all going to lose the war. If you grow your own food, we will be victorious. Russians long knew this.

52:59Russians had really built really complex systems of what we call today peasant farming systems, where there was a lot of redundancy and a lot of hyper-local marketplaces for food systems. Russians survived some of the worst fast starvation events in history during World War II, and they won the war against the Third Reich for their resilience. And a lot of that resilience was their connection to nature, their proximity to their food system. The Germans ultimately failed because they had 3 ,000-mile supply chains and the food couldn't get to them. Today, the United States of America is failing because we have 3 ,000-mile supply chains to the food that's not grown here in this country anymore because all of our soil is dead.

53:39The cost of putting seed in the ground now exceeds the cost that it can be sold for. And so we have all these government subsidies to keep telling farmers to plant genetically modified crops and put them under dollar expensive, high intensity inputs, which is bankrupting basically every farm and they're all on life support economically, getting these subsidies that we call USDA crop insurance and all these fake things, boosting up dead soil, dead dirt. and so if there's a belief of homeland security if there's really a belief of nations are capable of safety you have to begin at the soil and presidents long back have recognized this Franklin Delamore Roosevelt said the future of every country is in their soil and he said that because we were in the dust bowl which was a devastation of our topsoils due to poor farming practices and we were starving as a nation my grandfather worked in the White House with the Roosevelt's and he was the head of philanthropy and the New Deal in getting these soup kitchens rebuilt.

54:38And so traveling around with Eleanor Roosevelt, serving soup lines that were miles long of people starving in this country because their topsoil had died. So twice in a single century, we've destroyed our topsoils through poor understanding of biology originally and now a codependence on chemical farming and antibiotics as a mechanism for growing food. And so for that, we have 3 ,000 miles supply chains. And every city has now become a really vulnerable island. And we saw that in the pandemic. Suddenly grocery store shelves were empty because the ships couldn't get into the ports, the trucks had stopped driving, and there was no food on shelves.

55:13It's a very desperate situation we're in in the United States, but unfortunately we have exported that behavior of food systems to the entire developed world. London is now as vulnerable as the United States and the rest. Paris is vulnerable. Los Angeles, where we sit today, has a three-day food supply to millions and millions of people. And so if an earthquake happens and disrupts the one highway system that comes into Los Angeles, we will lose our food supply in three days and we will have a massive riot and humanitarian crisis on our hands. We are an island unto ourselves and our food is 3 ,000 miles away and we're not realizing it.

55:50instead we have 40 million acres of grass that we can't eat and we're spraying that with roundup in our backyards to kill the few dandelions which are the only edible and anti-cancer compound that's in your backyard right now and so we need to start realizing we need to eat that dandelion green not the dandelion flower even before it flowers you're eating that green and you're getting the nutrients and you're getting life back in and and you go beyond that you say let's get some beets and turnips and all the rest let's get some other root vegetables in there and suddenly your your backyard could turn into a bounty of safety for your family, for your community and the rest.

56:23And so this is the paradigm shift that Farmer's Footprint is really working on is, can we realize how vulnerable we've made ourselves as individuals, not just at the biologic level of our chronic disease, but also the societal level as we have divorced ourselves from soil. Having the right people in your corner to support you is a great form of self-care. Just like the friend who shows up to a housewarming party when you get that dream home, celebrates your big promotion, or goes with you on a walk to clear your mind, State Farm is there to help you feel supported. They have different coverage options, whether it be for your home, car, motorcycle, boat, or even RV.

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57:31I've talked a lot about how our phones pull us into habits that don't always serve us. The reflex to check, scroll and react without thinking. That pull takes us away from ourselves, our relationships, and the world right in front of us. We want to be more intentional, more present, more connected. That's when Noble Mobile stands out. They're a carrier built to support healthier tech habits. You can keep your phone, keep your number, and still get unlimited data on the T-Mobile 5G network whenever you need it. Here's the difference. Use under 20 gigabytes in a month, and Noble gives you cash back.

58:03Take it as cash, put it toward your bill Or let them invest it at 5.5 % annually It's not just about savings It's about creating a real incentive To step out of doom scrolling and back into life Switch now to get my$100 bonus at noblemobile.com forward slash J Stop doom scrolling and start getting rewarded For presence with Noble Mobile Is there any way, I mean hearing that Is there any way to have an optimal life still eating from a supermarket like the idea that you know i'm assuming that the majority of people listening are not going to rush to start growing something in their backyard not that they should not and not that we're not encouraging it i think it's incredible when people can but again going back to that conditioning habit formation all the challenges that come with that, what can we eat or how do we eat in order to protect ourselves?

59:03Well, we learned it in spades during the pandemic. You might remember there was a moment where every place in the country sold out of seeds. And so we started growing again. And we're seeing a very exciting movement in young people right now. A lot of people are leaving the cities to go start farming. They've never farmed before. They have absolutely no idea. But they have this deep knowingness inside of them that I'm supposed to get not just to a farm, but I'm supposed to build community around that farm. So I'm going to take me and my best 10 friends and we're going to move out into the country and we're going to start farming.

59:34And the regenerative agricultural movement has been led mostly by women and mostly by youth in this country. And so there's a real movement, not just here, but now as we've spawned Farmer's Footprint UK, Farmer's Footprint Australia, the Western world is starting to reimagine its relationship to food and soil. And it's really the women and the youth that are finding this path forward for us. And it's because I think deep inside of that feminine archetype that we all have access to, male, female, the rest, that feminine archetype is about nurture and it is about connection. And that's ultimately what I believe the regenerative agriculture movement is in one word.

1:00:09It is a reconnect. It is a reconnect to nature. And there's many ways to do it. There's not a prescription for here's a regenerative farm. It's about listening into your nature, listening into the reality that's trying to express itself on that piece of land and then being in support of that rather than trying to micromanage that thing. And so that's very much a feminine archetype we can all connect to, is how do we let life start coming into our lives in a biodiverse fashion? It doesn't necessarily have to happen just that the food and the soil can happen with your community and the inputs you're taking on.

1:00:42If your input every day is CNN or Fox News, you're going to become a monocrop almost immediately. You're going to lose all biodiversity of information. you're going to become very monotonous in your belief systems. You're going to be very easy to push into a small box of fear, guilt, and shame. If you go out in nature and spend hours a day hiking and walking through nature and smelling real soil and touching ferns and being in awe of the wildflower and bathing in a waterfall, you can't be put in the same box because you are seeing the complexity and beauty of nature that predated our existence, let alone the existence of a television or a news channel or whatever it is.

1:01:22And so the excitement is for me, as far as a way as this might sound to you right now, to be growing your own food, all this stuff, you're just a few seconds away from your introduction to that universe. Get out to a park. Forget a park even. Lay down in somebody's yard that has a tree. If you lay down on your back and look up through the branches of a tree at a blue sky that has clouds passing over, your brain will start to rewire just with that light pattern. that's coming through that tree. Because in that, it's like looking into a fire. If you can't do the tree, stare into a fire at night.

1:01:55If you can't do a fire, stare into a candle. Because in the frequencies of those inputs into our neurology, we put in information in the form of storytelling. A recent study demonstrated that if we look down at a fire, picture a fireplace between us here, if we look down at a fire, around a campfire or the like, all the stem cells in our bodies turn on. They tried to figure out how are stem cells being activated by the fire. And it turned out that it had to do with not just the fire and its presence, but our eye trajectory too. If I looked past the fire and didn't look into the fire, my stem cells didn't turn on.

1:02:33But if I dropped my gaze away from the horizon and looked down at the fire, my stem cells turned on. And I believe it's a story of instead of chasing the future on the horizon, we need to look down into the energy that is between us. This fire that sits between us, we look down for a moment, become present instead of future looking to that horizon. We become present enough to sit in stillness and watch that vibrational experience of a red coal glowing and pulsing in the night. There's something in that that remembers ourselves. And it was around those fires that we sang our first songs, danced our first dances and told our first stories as humanity.

1:03:14And that runs all the way to today. The place I have felt as an earthling for the first time in my half a century, it's in the African bush, around fire, listening to African drums, hearing the vibration of voices and tongues that I have forgotten existed. And in remembering that, I find my humanity again. I realize I am from here. I do belong here. And I am of this place that is remembered around a fire looking down. And so gather around a candle or a fire, whatever it is, and start to tell stories again of things remembered or of yesterday if you need to. But start telling a story around flame.

1:03:58And that is maybe your journey back into growing a piece of food yourself in your backyard. There's going to be a deep remembrance of you of this is what peace feels like. This is what that pause does, staring into the flame, you can find the silence necessary to find that guiding sense within you that we call intuition, that guiding sense that you have followed in your career to bring you to the success you've had. And so we all have that immediately available. Before we've even grown our own food, before we've grown anything, all of that is intact. And I have again and again seen people on the deathbed.

1:04:33As a hospice doctor, I was admitting 80 patients a week to die. So I've seen a lot of things that we call death. And even when biology is completely failing and they have a few heartbeats left, a few breaths yet to take, they can get into that fire moment. And they are crossing the veil and they're back again, they're crossing the veil and they're coming back and then they open their eyes and it happens so, so often. Somebody who's been kind of in this comatose milieu of barely here suddenly comes crystal clear, looks you in the face and says a deep truth that may or may not make sense as you the receiver, but in saying it, you can see them reconnect to their original self.

1:05:12And they are more true to themselves in that moment of death than they ever were in their state of living in a state of disconnect. And so it doesn't matter how close you are to death, that firelight is burning inside of you, if not in front of you. And in the silence in front of that fire, you can remember why you came here and why you did what you did on purpose is your show and it turns out purpose is not outside of you it's not something to go find it's not something to go discover that purpose is you being you that original math that vibrates to animate your biology into a living life form for a moment that we would call a human lifespan you're vibrating there and the purpose is to be you in this form, to take in the light energy of the cosmos, of the food you eat, and express it in vitality within that liquid crystal of your body to vibrate.

1:06:06It's the vibration that makes you alive. And that vibration can be shaped by your thoughts, your beliefs, the words you carry, and the feelings that you have towards one another. And so this is our moment right now, as we can burn bright at our death moment, on our deathbed, 60 years, 80 years left, however long is there on our march into that, we can rebirth now to come off of hospice and become a new species, become a new humanity, become a new expression as we lose fear, guilt, and shame because we look past the death that we all fear and realize that life is abundant and it's infinite and it's always in its next transformation, next expression, which is always chasing more beauty and more intelligence than the rest.

1:06:47And so we sit here around a fire now talking about the demise of all things to realize the birth of everything. I find your responses so refreshing. There is such a rejuvenation and rebirth hearing the ideas that you're sharing with the world, because I can definitely personally attest to so many of the things that you're mentioning, whether it's lying down under the tree, looking through the branches, whether it's deeply excavating and looking at the roots of a plant, whether it's looking out into the sky or cloud gazing, which is probably one of my favorite things to do, which is why I live where I live, or whether it may be just feeling reconnected.

1:07:31One of my favorite things was when my wife and I went to Hawaii a few years ago and we fell in love with it because we felt the people there had their own language for a culture that we've learned differently. So having studied the Vedas, the worship of the sun and the moon are such big parts of the vedas and when we were in hawaii we would go out on a kayak every morning and pay our respects to the sun and it always felt beautiful to do it in the hawaiian culture and through their traditions and i remembered we walked around where they were showing us the paraglifts and the writings and the stories on the rock and there was this one particular one which repeated itself which was a expanding circle and it was said that whenever a child is born in Hawaii its umbilical cord is placed on the earth and a circle is drawn around it in that very spot so they can always come back to that and remember that they're always connected to the earth and that's where they belong it's incredible how these very simple ideas can be so sacred and so powerful, as you said, internally.

1:08:43You feel these things don't necessarily make sense in your head or you can't compute them in a logical reasoning point of view, but you can feel them. Even when we were there, you could see it and you could feel it. You mentioned twice there, you mentioned at the beginning breath as one of the elements. You then mentioned it again when people are in their last breath. Could you walk us through the same kind of refreshing insight on breath? The mechanism of breathing is the allowance to create new life. And we exhale so that we can breathe back in. And if you've ever been told suddenly in an audience, like, okay, everybody inhale.

1:09:22It's very hard to inhale because they didn't tell you to exhale. And so to really take a good inhalation, you got to tell the whole audience, all right, everybody exhale, blow it all out, blow it all out, blow it out. Now you can inhale. And in that exhalation, you're basically exchanging the life force with the environment around you. When I exhale, I push out millions of different little tiny variants of my genetics through something called microRNA. It's basically my version of expressing a viral message to the world of here's who I am right now. Here's what I'm expressing genetically. Here's what's happening.

1:09:57So I have a genetic signal that I breathe out. and I have a new potential for life that I breathe out in the form of carbon dioxide that I just derived from all the glucose and fatty acids that I'm deriving all of that sunlight from. So I'm releasing sunlight and then I give back the CO2 to the atmosphere so I can breathe it back in. And it turns out I need CO2 exchange. I need to breathe it as much as I need to exhale in because it's really the pulse of life and it's the way in which I use oxygen at the cellular level. So I can't use oxygen unless I've got CO2. So I breathe out a big gift of CO2, and the atmosphere gives me back CO2 in a ratio that allows me to use oxygen more effectively.

1:10:37And so CO2 is really the coursing bloodstream of life itself. It's the currency of life. And so that currency of energy is pulsing with every breath. And when I start to develop an addiction to breathing, I don't take that deep breath. And instead, I have all these short little breaths that I take all the time because I'm in a fight-or-flight state. And I don't slow that respiration down. My neurology is reading all the time panic. And so in the same way that we're addicted to water that can never turn into a liquid crystal and therefore we're always thirsty, in the same way I'm always taking all 16 to 20 breaths a minute because I'm afraid I'm going to run out of air because I haven't been taught to actually breathe.

1:11:16And so the planet is now doing this as well as humans. The planet can't take a deep breath right now because its lungs are the soil system. We've now killed 97 % of the soil systems of the planet. 97 % of arable soils on the planet are now depleted or severely depleted of their metabolism, their ability to breathe. In an ideal state, this planet breathes in a deep breath at night and then exhales in the morning. And you can watch this happen, especially in humid areas. I live in Virginia and along the Blue Ridge Mountains at night, if you stand up high on the mountains, you get to see that the forests of Virginia breathe in and these, it looks like banks of clouds suddenly get sucked down onto the surface of the trees and then down into the canopy and down into the earth.

1:12:02And so the trees are returning the breath to the soil and with it, all the water. In the morning, it exhales and all that water appears on the surface as dew on the grass and in the canopy and everywhere. Well, that dew is now very cold because it was breathed out by a deep geothermal cooling thing that we call the planet. The warming of the planet is not being caused by CO2 or greenhouse gases. We've been given a very half-truth by our political systems that with Al Gore and the rest have said CO2 is our crisis. We've now pledged$40 trillion by 2050 to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and all that because we've been told it's the problem.

1:12:43But in fact, whether it's a dying patient at the bedside who can no longer breathe, or me addicted to my short breathing, or the planet that's lost its lungs and now has emphysema, CO2 starts rising in the atmosphere and the heat goes up because we're not bringing that into the earth and out of the earth, into the earth, out of the earth on a daily basis to cool the planet. We lost the lungs, therefore we lost the exchange of life through CO2 and we lost the geothermal cooling that comes with breath. And so the planet has a fever, not for CO2, but for a lack of breath. And so this is the transit that we need to do as a planetary participant, is we need to be part of the solution.

1:13:23We need to allow the Earth to breathe again. I find it interesting that you always find the micro story in the macrocosm, and you find it fractally, which means at every single level of expression of nature, you'll find the same truth. And here we were in the middle of the pandemic where people were going blue because the oxygen could not exchange from their blood cells into their cells, perhaps in part due to a virus. But deeper than that, we had covered our planet in the highest levels of carbon contamination in history because of the largest fires that had raged for the year and a half before the pandemic and then all the way through the pandemic.

1:13:57We had the largest fires all over the world that had ever happened. So for all the poisoning in the atmosphere, we had cyanide in the air at levels unprecedented. We were breathing in cyanide, which causes this respiratory failure. we were ascribing it again just to the virus, but I think it was a lot of different factors happening at that time. We were losing our ability to breathe. Meanwhile, the planet's warming up, warming up, warming up, and CO2's going up in the atmosphere. We can't breathe. The planet can't breathe. We couldn't breathe as a species. And then we get this extraordinarily tragic moment where we watch a police officer with his knee on the neck of an African-American man, and he dies in the streets screaming, I cannot breathe.

1:14:33At every one of those fractal levels, we got to witness the suffocation of life. And it was suffocating in that moment with the police officers too afraid to move. And maybe angry, maybe lots of other negative emotions in there, but ultimately it's fear, fear of death, fear of being different, fear of everything other than self. So that knee stays on. And right now we have our proverbial knee on the neck of this planet. We are not letting this planet breathe because we're afraid we might go hungry, so we're waiting for technology to save us. We have more and more genetic technologies. We now have robots trying to mine food out of the earth.

1:15:08We're waiting for more and more technology, and we just will not let the knee off the neck of the planet because we're afraid she won't provide for us. We need to let the knee up. We need to be confident that we are one species that is the compilation of hundreds of thousands of species that has made life possible. We need to start to breathe together. We need to move to a point where there is grace rather than fear, where there is joy rather than guilt. There is love rather than shame. and to get there we're going to have to trust that we are supposed to be here we are not the cancer of the planet we are the potential energy of the planet we are the highest expression that the planet has made so far and we can stay to play if we choose and so we need to take the neck off the planet we need to take the take the knee off the neck of the planet take the knee off the neck of one another and start to move in a state of abundance and we will do this as we find those quiet spikes around the flame breathe slower breathe deeper as individuals as a planet and in so doing start to feel the future and this is the mystery that we see baking all over the world i'm very gifted in my career right now that i get to travel all over the place all the time and so in the more than one and a half million miles i've flown over the last 10 years i've gotten to meet nearly every people group on the planet.

1:16:31And I've spent time in so many continents over the last couple of years. And for all of the fear and guilt and shame that we just exercise as a planet, I have never seen more optimism, more excitement, more of that bubbling energy of, oh my gosh, it's about to arrive. We are about to arrive. Something is about to happen. This is so exciting to be alive right now. I hear that all the time. It's so exciting to be alive right now. So what is the light that's shining so bright in humanity as our biologic light dims? I think it's the original math. I think it's the soul. The energy that animates life is burning bright right now because it is not diminished by the energies that it was putting into the biologic expression of humanity.

1:17:14It is burning brighter because it says, look beyond the flesh to find the truth. And in that energy field, you will find the new life that will code for your new future. And so we have to get to that hospice moment. We have to let the lights almost die out so we can cross the veil and see the truth and then come back and change everything. Incredible. Dr. Zach Bush, if anyone's listening right now and they want to find that optimism, maybe join your eight-day program, to learn more about the solution aspect of everything you've been sharing today, where should they go? How can they connect with you and connect with your work?

1:17:47The easiest place for all the work is ZachBushMD.com. The JourneyOfIntrinsicHealth.com is the eight-week program. TheIntelligenceOfNature.com is all of the deep soil science and the supplements and everything else that have come out of that soil science and the study of glyphosate and the solutions to it. There's an opportunity for you guys to engage also just in community with us because it's one thing to take a supplement or take a class, but ultimately if we don't come into a connected community, we're not going to create that future that we have. There's an opportunity for you to engage in the community platforms that we've been creating across many of these products, going deeper than the product, to really start to create the solutions for the future that we can all feel is already here.

1:18:31That's my greatest excitement, is watching people come together. There's something called quorum sensing that I find really beautiful. When you get enough biodiversity into a living environment, suddenly the whole thing does something more intelligent than any constituent can do. And so we need to do a quorum sensing moment as not just humanity, but as a planet. And so we need to connect to our ecosystems and diversity and cultures, and for their diversity, the arts, and their diversity, the dance, and the storytelling, and the flames, in a million different iterations. And we need to bring that in together for our very bright flame to burn, and for us to connect to that quorum sensing moment where we do quantum intelligence, not from the mind, but from that knowingness within you.

1:19:10And it's in that community connect that we hope to meet you. it's beautiful thank you so much i hope that everyone has been listening and watching i hope you go and check it out and zach we end every episode of on purpose with a final five or a fast five and these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum and zach bush these are your final five so the first is what is the best advice you've ever heard given or received Slow down. What is the worst advice you've ever heard or received? Stop moving. Stop moving. Question number three, what's something that you used to value that you no longer value anymore?

1:19:51Marriage. Interesting. In what sense? You said one word. Yeah. Now I'm digressing. It was my most important value system through most of my life. And it's not to say that marriage is not important on our human journey, but it was the Course of Miracles that really unveiled what was happening in my effort towards marriage. And I enjoyed my marriage, a 20-year marriage with my wife and two amazing kids. And then she found a new path. And there was a decision whether to see that as failure or to actually, for the first time in our 20 years together, practice the un-part of unconditional. love. And I realized during our journey towards divorce, when I realized that she was definitely going to take this other path, it was a realization of, I really do love this person.

1:20:46And I'm sitting here telling her how much I love her and therefore she shouldn't leave me. Oh my gosh, what is that? That is the deepest condition I could possibly, I love you, but only if you stay right next to me and I own this thing. And so that was my journey personally into deep heartbreak that led to the deepest joy that a person can have is the exercise of unconditional love. And I certainly didn't do it perfectly. I didn't do it well, but my gosh, did I live differently after that moment where I realized I can love her on this path that she knows she's chosen. And we've gotten to watch both of us bloom into people we could have never become in that marriage because it was a box that was an agreement of no change.

1:21:29And as we back up, I think we're going to realize that we put love and relationship into a box of ownership just in the last couple hundred years. It never existed before. We developed this ownership model so we could pass wealth from generation to generation, not realizing when we built the box, we would crush love, which is ultimately the capacity to see beauty in another. And if for a moment you think you can own another's beauty, you have stolen it from them ultimately and they will become miserable and you will forget why you fell in love with them because you can't see their beauty anymore and so in a radical way we're going to have to release each other from the boxes we put each other in it doesn't mean the end of relationship is probably the birth of human relationship maybe for the first time but certainly in recent modern times we're going to have to release ourselves from the box and we're going to have to do partnership relationships in much much radically different ways and they're going to have to come out of the fear of not having enough love and start to come from an abundance model where everything is love.

1:22:27Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for opening up. And that's really, really beautiful to hear. I'm glad I asked us to go off piste. All right, question number four. What's something you're trying to learn right now or a skill you're trying to learn? Beauty, the witness of beauty. And the fifth and final question is, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be? Biodiversity. Could you expand? so that we can contextualize it. There's a known phenomenon of blue zones around the planet where people tend to live the past 100 years. And so here we are on the number one health podcast in the world.

1:23:05What makes people live longer than 100 years? And we've tried to boil it down to nutrition, and we found that almost every one of them ate completely differently. And some of them ate only cooked food, only meat, only veggies, the whole thing, only raw. We saw it all. In the end, what we have found is that those that will live under 100 years live in a culture and communities that hold at their highest value the opportunity for new connection to biodiverse ideas and peoples. And this was taught to me by a couple out of Ikaria, Greece, a Grecian island that is an incredible blue zone there. And they came and prepared a traditional five-course Greek meal for a group of us.

1:23:39And I gave this toast at the end that said, you know, this is the microbiome being nourished and we'll live forever. It will be like a blue zone because the nourishment is so deep. The nutrients are so rich. It was all from, so this beautiful thing. I was crying, everybody was crying because it was a beautiful toast. And then a guy from Icaria stands up and says, Doctor, that was very interesting, but you're completely wrong. And he said that the only reason we live past 100 years is not for what we eat, but it's because every night there's a chair set at our table hoping that somebody we don't know shows up and shares that meal with us.

1:24:08In Icaria, we never ask each other, what did you eat last night? But we always ask, who did you eat with last night? And that's what we're missing from society today. And so when we talk about biodiversity, it's certainly true at the soil level. If we don't start living for the soil beneath our feet and enriching that with every action we take, whether it be a political move, a social move, an industrial move, an economic move, if it's not supporting the soil, we would destroy ourselves. In the same way, if we continue to listen in the echo chamber of our minds and those people we are married to, and we create these nuclear families and we listen to the same box every day, whether it be a TV or our own brain, we will diminish our biodiverse ideas and our biodiverse capacity for creativity.

1:24:52And therefore, we will lose the opportunity to stay in play. Dr. Zach Bush, thank you for such a fascinating and unique conversation, one that was full of refreshing insights and ideas. and I'm hoping that everyone who's listening and watching wherever you are in the world, I hope that you'll go and follow Dr. Zach Bush, learn more about his incredible work. And I want you to tag us both and share your insights, your takeaways, the nuggets that stood out to you. Maybe there were messages or words that are ones that you're gonna hold onto and it's gonna shift the way that you practice your health and wellness routines and regimes.

1:25:26And so if you've been listening or watching, make sure you tag us and share what you learned and what you gained from this episode. And Dr. Zach Bush, thank you so much for your time, your energy, your presence, and everything that you've shared with us today. Thank you so much. I'll be heard and seen by you. Very grateful. Thank you. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain. If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged.

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