THE FUTURE OF HUMAN & PLANETARY HEALTH | Zach Bush, MD x Rich Roll Podcast

I believe that Humanity's original wound if we have one is that we saw ourselves separate from nature truth to the idea that we are quickly approaching a significant Tipping Point for both human and planetary Health despite the Breakneck pace of innovation and Technology striving to solve these problems some of which are truly existential I can't help but feel the solutions we need continue to elude us this is a sensibility I share with my friend today's guest Zach Bush who is one of the more fascinating medical Minds currently working to improve our understanding of whole body and whole planet Health today Mark Zach's fifth appearance on the show but for those who have yet to be acquainted with this unique and gentle soul Zach is a triple board certified physician he's an internationally recognized thought leader and educator on the microbiome the focus of his advocacy centers on soil and Food Systems as well as the need for a radical departure from factory farming and the many deleterious impacts of chemical intensive farming practices and he couples all of this with Solutions not just for farmers and consumers but also for Mega Industries so that we can all work together for a healthy future for not just ourselves but also for the animals and the planet at large today's exchange traverses many important topics including in a broad sense the link between human biology and planetary biology we discussed the microbiome we talk about how the quality of our soil affects our health actionable ways to regenerate the planet and many other fascinating topics super grateful to Zach for his wisdom and for sharing today and I'm proud to offer up this conversation with him so without further Ado please hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and enjoy before we dive in this episode is brought to you by Roca now I get asked fairly consistently about the glasses that you see me wearing on the show well the answer is Roca these are specifically the Hamilton frames I love them all the frames that Roca makes are high performance super light amazing Optics they've got tons of great Styles they never ever slip off my face and I'll be sharing a bit more about Roka later but for now enough let's uh let's do the thing [Music] so nice to share space with you once again my friend it's been a minute since we last did this a lot has happened you know since then um even more of course since our our first podcast I think this is your fifth appearance on the show not not including what we did at the Nantucket project maybe third I'm not sure but it was definitely about five years ago or six years ago that we must have first talked so certainly a lot since we first met at the conscious capitalism conference many years ago that's right it's an uncomfortable situation evolving where the audience gets to watch us age yes and have lots of opinions about that right but in kind of thinking about what has transpired since we last sat down you know of course uh we've all you know weathered the pandemic we're experiencing what's going on in the war with war in Ukraine yes Global soil degradation continues we're in the midst of this Mass species Extinction what is it the seventh Extinction yes um you know what else there we have Refugee crises uh seismic climate events with increasing regularity this loss of trust in institutions a growing Rift in our ability to conduct civil discourse that I think is when did to the social media algorithms that are driving separation through the siloization of increasingly bespoke informational feeds we've got exacerbation of racial strife and class economics deepening the rift between the Haves and the half-nots which of course is fueling both dissent and anger and conflict and culminating and violence which is separating us from others from ourselves from the planet uh you know that that we all share and and finally um although of course the list is much longer we're experiencing the uh in real time the maturation of artificial intelligence which is currently proliferating with blinding Speed most recently by Dent of these new generative tools like Chachi BT which if Innovation continues as it most surely will will in time although the timeline is much debated inevitably give birth to AGI artificial general intelligence which is essentially a new life form so I guess what I'm getting at to kind of kick things off is that this moment does feel historic in the sense that you know we're emerging from this pandemic to kind of now immediately grapple with this emergent form of of rapidly evolving technology which you know look does have amazing use cases you know don't get me wrong but it does feel like it's placing Humanity Upon A precipice and you know I don't in any way want to be hyperbolic but there is this almost inescapable sense that that we are approaching a significant Tipping Point for human and planetary health and I know these are things that you've spent a lot of time pondering so perhaps we can open uh with uh grappling with what is going on and and how you're attempting to make sense of it yeah as a dismal list to take through right it's yeah I mean I kind of highlighted the negative things uh at the cost of all the positive things that are going on and I'm I recognize that but well I think it's relevant and it's actually an echo of our very first combination conversation six years ago when we were taking a look at that list of catastrophic chronic disease epidemics that we were facing from autoimmune disease to cancer to autism to Alzheimer's so we made that catastrophic list there kind of at the human level and now you've laid out the kind of macro version of that same discussion of you there's only so far you can push by by all logic systems in the end and biologic systems play out in a lot of different you know micro to macro versions and so I've had a very blessed life but a lot less blessed you know 12 15 years being steeped in the laboratory looking at a single cell under the influence of these you know toxic environments that you've laid out and then participating in very broad spectrum visioning of where's Humanity as a whole and where we're going and the fun thing that we find is there's true fractals in that in that if you find something true at the Single Cell level it's going to be true at the macro level if I was going to just pick one really concrete example of that I would say it's the phenomenon of an isolated cell and so when you expose a cell that is part of a large system so you could pick an intestinal cell or something like that and you isolate it from its billions of neighbors that are all intestinal epithelial lining cells use the barrier between you and the outside world in regard to the god if you isolate that cell through toxin exposure it immediately begins to journey into cancer and so in the end a cancer cell is an isolated cell that's remained that way long enough to start to accumulate injuries because a single cell can't actually be fully responsible for its own energy source and all that it has to be connected to the greater organism for that energetics of repair and regeneration to happen at the macro level you find a child who starts to get isolated socially emotionally from their classroom and kindergarten second grade and then they're easy to radicalize by the time they're 12 years old and they become a malignant social agent and they step into a classroom with school shootings and the rest and so we become malignant I.E damaging to our environment through isolation and if we go from that single cell to that individual human now to the societal level or we could say the species level we see the same phenomenon I believe that Humanity's original wound if we have one is that we saw ourselves separate from nature and it's in that isolated Behavior isolated belief system of we are separate we somehow got rejected from nature we have age-old religious myths about kicked out of the garden and all these things this this deep belief that somehow we were rejected by Nature has led to this exploitive extractive destructive Behavior simply because we're isolated in the same form that a cancer cell becomes cancerous and malignant to its organism we have become cancerous to our organism which is a single living system called planet Earth that's a that's a you know fascinating kind of dissection of how the you know our focus on the micro impairs our ability to perceive the implications on the macro right and when we think about uh Western progress and the scientific method certainly we've been able to uh you know develop therapies and glean a greater understanding of our world through a method that is focused on uh extracting variables and and looking at things in isolation like that's the way you kind of better understand things and I know you as a doctor were on a track of literally just studying one protein you know and its impact on on on cancer and that's certainly a lens through which we can kind of better understand systems on the micro level the problem enters when we lose sight of of how that interacts with the macro right and um and and and that I think requires a certain humility about the um the reach of the scientific method to objectively understand everything and uh deprecates an appreciation for understanding the holistic nature the incredibly infinitely complex way in which you know our DNA our cells are you know particle matter is always in interplay with everything that surrounds us and it's almost like you have to uh you know look at it through almost a psychedelic perspective to understand that understand like the non-duality Oneness of our existence in context with the environment that supports us and and so perhaps talk a little bit about like you've sort of you know you were well Along on this journey when we first talked and that's seemed to mature over the years but I feel like you have entered a new phase in in your perspective and you're thinking about this interplay in particular yeah I think the human mind is limited in its capacity to Grapple with quantum physics or any infinite system because we have such a finite perspective on the universe it seems like you're quite far away from me you know six feet away there and it's impossible for my mind to wrap my head around just how close we are compared to the distance to the moon or something simple like that you know it's just like with the the misperception of Being Human in that we have these five senses that make it appear give us the impression that we're separate from the things around us has both been our greatest gift I think and maybe we come back to that in some ways or and maybe is indicative of our purpose really is why are we here like why why have monkeys that can control fire and then create technology and do all that thing it I think it and maybe it does have to do with the ability that we achieve through this separation that the five senses offer but the unfortunate side effects that stepped in perhaps before we could even find our identity and purpose was this belief of separateness and the belief that the finite this has been something that we have been witnessing in my laboratory in deeper and deeper ways over the last 12 years and I think that one way that we could back into this is first acknowledging that uh the way in which we study any cell is in isolation and so I told you that a cell isolate becomes cancer but we we understand small intestine cells only in the context of neighbors of small intestine cells we don't understand what they do when there's an immune system that lies you know a micron behind that you know tiniest fraction of a millimeter behind that eighty percent of your immune system exists with quadrillions of cells interacting we've never been able to study that because in a Petri dish you need that isolated single cell type to to do that and so we have come to understand cardiovascular disease cancer any form of you know chronic dysfunction or disorder in the body only in the context of isolation and this seemed like a really relevant way to study it because in that reductionist approach we could give it one stimulus and then understand what the reactions to that one stimulus are where we really were short-sighted or perhaps just unable to achieve in this current version of science that we work within is that what happens if there's 10 million inputs at once you know there was no system smart enough or question you know vague enough to answer that and the only way to do that is really in a clinical setting and in the same way that we do reductionists basic science laboratory in a Petri dish we do reductionist science in our clinical trials where we try to find the most monotonous group of people possible so that we can have the same predicted outcome and so 45 to 65 year old white males was the typical you know science experiment in clinical research and then you give them one drug and you control for their diet control for everything else make sure nothing else changes the challenge that we quickly realized over you know the Decades of this approach to clinical research is that it's very hard then to apply that data set from that 55 to 65 year old white man to a population of you know very genetics and backgrounds ages males females was a big piece of this problem we now know that female biology does not respond to pharmaceutical intervention ever in the same way that a male physiology really does so it doesn't matter if it's a blood pressure medicine or cholesterol medicine the female the female is going to respond differently just by that simple difference of a few stimulus of estrogen and testosterone is enough to screw up your whole expectations of a drug so then you add on to that age-related changes and you know the deeper questions of ethnic changes and all of that we realize we don't really know anything in the end after 100 Years of peer-reviewed Science and Western medicine at its best it's pretty clear that we don't have any real strong handle on what would be good for a human entering a chemical environment the answer is we don't know although we know is it hasn't gone well so far our life expectancy is going down over the last few decades not up despite stem cell Innovations and everything you've ever heard of that sounds super exciting and positive genetics you know we didn't didn't have the human genome decoded when I started medical school we were we we thought that we had 280 000 genes at the time to find out that we only have 20 000 genes was part way through my career you know we're we're way simpler than we thought on on the nature level and we're way more complex in our reaction to our environment and so this is birthed Industries like epigenetics and things like that to understand the influence of our environment on something that we thought was as stable as our genes now we find out a single Gene can have 200 400 different endpoints can produce 200 or 400 different proteins depending on its environment you extrapolate that out towards 20 000 genes you find out wow Rich you could make four million different bodies from the genes your mother and father gave you and the body you have today is not the result of mom and dad but the the effects of the environment within the womb and and more mysterious than that then the effects of the environment on your parents at the time that you were conceived and so their emotional status their physical and chemical environments all of these things were playing in to that moment of conception and determining how those 20 000 genes would behave and what body they would create in the womb and then the moment you took your first breath you began your journey into self self-realization at the genetic level and that changes minute by minute every day and so it's on one hand a grim reality wow we really miss the boat on our reductionist definition of what human life is and how it occurs and its full potential when we were reductionist in approach for the excitement that I have now that we're kind of steeping our patients into the opposite direction which is Let's Go full on holistic let's get you so connected to Nature let's see if we can get a billion inputs into you in a day instead of you know five different meals that you cycle in and out and just the monotony of the typical diet or the typical daily activities what if we give you billions of different inputs at the biologic level how resilient how regenerative do you become and I think that's our next journey is out of the reductionist world and into this holistic interconnected universe that we call Earth but to break from that reductionist history and lends into science as a means of gleaning truth to then say we're going to expand the aperture and just you know expose an individual under under evaluation to a billion inputs or whatever it is how do you then extract any kind of meaningful truth out of that that is instructional in terms of how you you know guide people towards Better Health it's a really important question and it's one in which we realize not only do we have to to surrender the old Paradigm of reduction of science we also have to surrender the old belief system about a patriarchal you know disbursement of prescriptive medicine and we have to let it be the opposite in which the the concept of health is going to have to rebirth from inside every single person the only laboratory that is relevant to you is your body and there's you know somewhere around 50 or 70 trillion human cells in there that are working with 1.4 quadrillion bacteria an unknown number of fungi and then you've got 14 quadrillion mitochondria which are tiny little bacteria living inside your 70 trillion cells and all of those cells are swapping genetics in real time all the time every millionth of a second new genetic potential and so that complex system actually gets to be interpreted every day by your senses do you have pain in your hip in your knee in your ankle today if we change your environment is that change tomorrow that's the only relevant scientific experiment for every human on the planet going forward and it should have been previously as well because we have been really flawed in our approach to applying population statistics to individuals historically and to this very day there's you know a million doctors offices today that are telling somebody this clinical trial with 100 000 people in it showed this result of a four percent reduction in your cholesterol if we put you on this medication so if I put you on this medication we expect a four percent reduction in your cholesterol if anybody's taking a statistics 101 class the first full day is that you can never take a population statistic and apply it to an individual if you tell somebody look we we reduce death in this clinical trial therefore by 20 therefore we're going to reduce your likelihood of death if we put you on this drug it is that is the fallacy number one of statistics and we're taught that and then we immediately forget that because we don't know what to tell people then well if we can't tell them that then why did we do this study the only way in which population statistics is even helpful is at like the decision-making tree of you know triaging or coming up with some sort of tactical or strategic decision at the public health level if I was you know dictating Medicare or something like that then public health statistics would be interesting okay if we make this intervention to two million people we would expect this population effect and so you can't say there's been a 20 reduction in individual cells so population studies that we call clinical trials are not applicable to the individual it's a weird phenomenon and so instead we're going to have to come up with a new set of metrics where clinical research begins to be done at the individual level which might be impossible to imagine 20 years ago but we've had this explosion of what we call biohacking and so we have all these new devices that people can wear on their own bodies and get their own data you know day in and day out of how much REM sleep did they get how much you know inflammatory markers they have in their urine how much you know blood sugars in their in their bloodstream when they first wake up in the morning like this data is now interestingly readily available to an individual consumer with absolutely no medical training I think that similar to the probiotics which were kind of our first foyer into saying hey some bacteria might be good because up until the 1970s we just thought all bacteria were our enemy there was a crack in that we fast forward 40 50 years we find out oh you know what probiotics was actually not an answer to gut health you can't actually create a diverse ecosystem by taking billions of copies of three species of bacteria as you do in a probiotic but at least it got us down that road and I feel the same way for biohacking is that we've been super reductionist again and people are running around spending hours a day keeping track of their blood sugar and their hours of sleep and all of this and for that I see a lot of them really missing out on life relationships aren't alive their their Connection in nature is not alive their connections are just feeling freaking glad to be alive has been a forgotten goal and instead it's my successes my blood sugar and my resting heart rate and my heart rate variability and my might worry ring data and that's an unfortunate result of what seemed to be a good idea of like let's strive for for Health and Longevity when perhaps we hadn't yet answered the question of what does it feel like to be alive maybe that's the goal brought to you today by Roca classes are not something you normally think about as a piece of performance gear which when you think about it is kind of insane because you can't perform at your best if you can't see well the Geniuses at Roka basically rebuild eyewear from the ground up no matter how active you are or how much you sweat these things never slip or fall off your face they're super durable they look awesome and they've got tons of super classy modern styles to choose from I've been rocking rokas for about four years at this point I love them I'm a big fan of the Hamilton style and gloss black that's this Frame right here as well as clear or I guess they call them vintage on the website and if you want to try them out for yourself you can do that right now and unlock 20 off your order with the code richroll roca.com or you can click the link in the description below okay back to the show yeah I heard you once say every biohacking event I've ever been to is accelerating the death of everybody there which is a hyperbolic statement uh but yeah uh an interesting one you know nonetheless in that uh you know I gather from what you just shared that this idea that again it's reductionist like look at these markers and make decisions accordingly um but the average consumer is doing that with a limited amount of Education to properly interpret not just the meaning of those data points but the context in which they live right so I don't neces I mean listen I'm wearing these things you know I I look at the data I hold it Loosely I find it interesting but I try not to let it dictate like my decisions um so I don't know that it's a black or white thing I think uh greater information in the hands of consumers is probably a good thing overall but I think it needs to be paired with adequate information and education so that they can understand the importance or lack of importance of of what all of this means I suppose and just kind of pulling another thread and what you shared um not to play Devil's Advocate but to you know imagine the perspective of the general practitioner or the cardiologist who is listening to this or or watching it watching watching this right now and and bristling at what you just shared and thinking I know that if I subscribe a Statin to this patient who has high cholesterol I'm lowering the risk of having a significant or potentially fatal uh heart incident as a result and so you can't tell me that what I'm doing is not having some kind of benefit so how do you you know kind of communicate with the practitioner who is rooted in our traditional system right now in terms of uh you know how we're talking about you know some of the low-hanging fruit of chronic diseases that that are unnecessarily killing or debilitating millions of people every year but are also somewhat uh ameliorated through simple interventions yeah so I I feel for any practitioner or scientist listening to this because we feel trapped right and so it's like deep down we're pretty sure that nature wasn't waiting to to perfect human longevity for us to discover statin drugs that's kind it would be a pretty narcissistic belief that we were going to somehow do cholesterol better than the complex endocrine system with the liver of a human being and so really the learning of a physician is around losing belief and trust that humans can change and so we know fundamentally that cholesterol is a direct relationship to the environment food being an obvious one but many anything that causes vascular inflammation is going to call for more LDL production from your liver to reduce that inflammation and so really fundamental to a pharmaceutical model of Education you have to lose hope that humans will fundamentally change their behavior and we do that pretty quickly we we're trained to lose hope or perhaps humans show us good reason to lose hope in them quickly because as doctors were said yeah you should tell them to change their diet too and so which is well you should eat less fatty foods or we make up these things or don't eat as much Coca-Cola and you know all these things that we say and the results don't change in their cholesterol after a few months and we're like see I I told you to change your diet but that didn't work so I'm going to give you a drug that I know isn't like Nature's answer to this but it's my best effort it's the thing I've been given in my toolbox to to lower your cholesterol so that's a bit of the rationale that has to happen inside any physician being given a toolbox of chemicals that certainly aren't from nature and another way of looking at is there any cancer in history that was ever caused by a lack of chemotherapy as you really wrap your head around that and you start to realize like no like that's not the cause of a disease is a lack of a poison on the end of the disease right and so same way as is blood pressure occurring in the individual due to a lack of blood pressure medications and so in this simple way we can start to realize like okay no we've actually just been trained in a modality of allopathic Western medicine that simply doesn't offer us the opportunity to ask root cause problems and questions or come up with root Solutions so that's been my journey as you know developing chemotherapy 2006 2007 to now even having closed my clinic to to get my patients out of that mentality of their coming to me for health and instead go to this model that we have called journey of intrinsic Health where my interaction with every single client now is that you are the Healer and I and we're going to surround You by resources and an environment of thought really it's a philosophy School of eight weeks that's going to reintroduce you to your sense of self-identity to begin with if you don't start at that sense of self-identity then I'm going to risk giving you a bunch of data or a bunch of exercises that you're going to think are the purpose of your life to beat the cancer or to reduce your blood pressure or to have less depression in your life you didn't come into a body as complex as a human to overcome the diseases of being disconnected from nature I I fundamentally believe we are more fun more unique to the to the interplay between Cosmic dust and this thing that we call a life we have so much connectedness in our capacity to have conscious thought abstract systems of belief abstract systems of visioning and and you know the possibilities of the future if we forget that and we start to again be reductionist in our definition of of success of the cancer shrunk two centimeters the last six months that's good right I don't know is it good are you enjoying your life are you do you know why you're here are you so interconnected with your family that you just can't wait to come off the pillow in the morning or are you isolated and depressed and don't know why you're here and your tumor is shrinking or growing maybe that's not the point so that's kind of where we got in our Clinic is like wow we got to get people way backed up before we even address any of the dis-ease or disorder going on in that body we got to reconnect to The Originals question of who are you what gives you Joy what lights you up what makes you want to stay because to make you stay in an unhappy place where you feel disconnected and you are part of the cancer of Humanity on the planet we're not helping the system in the end sure and you're not you're not exactly Paving a you know a solid path towards healing without exactly having that conversation and and deconstructing that and finding a a path forward of meaning and purpose and fulfillment and ikigai and all the rest right like that is the difference between the you know the very reductionist like let's look at these cells and what's going on and how do we treat them versus the organism and the super organism that that you know is is really a play right here right and and that's a you know it's a it's contrarian to our allopathic system and I think is a pill for a lot of people that that's difficult for a lot of people to swallow and absorb and and kind of um contemplate uh so where do you think we are right now in terms of progress towards a more expanded uh macro perspective on healing healing and health I mean particularly since we last spoke yeah it's I think we're speeding towards it as a society because the reductionist approach is failing so quickly now you know and so what seemed ridiculous you know to my colleagues and to me 12 years ago around the philosophy that cancer can actually be predicted by its the relationship of to the gut microbiome that was heresy when in 2008 2009 when those studies started to come out like it didn't play into our model of how cancer occurs at all didn't make any sense fast forward now we've now found every disease Maps right back to a shift or a loss of diversity at the microbiome level I.E a disconnect from the diversity of nature itself so fortunately science itself has quickly catching up here to say oh my gosh not only is it not reductionists it's not even about human cells talking the human cells have to be talking to the ecosystem at large every single bacterium fungi in the environment has the opportunity to give stimulus towards Health to the individual human that's holding that ecosystem within itself and in our lab we get to see this quite literally and quickly and this is where my biotech company got its foothold is understanding how do cells communicate in relationship to the microbiome human cell systems I was an endocrinologist which is kind of the system of hormones that help various organ systems communicate and stay in Cooperative effort towards a single healthy human body but the hormones were understood to be very specific to human cells by and large and we knew that the human hormones thyroid Etc weren't speaking directly to the to the gut microbiome for example and so there was a lack of understanding of what would be the system that would be trans species and we stumbled into this by accident as a lab group in 2012 when we were studying soil and so soil it turns out has an enormous amount of the metabolites or breakdown products from bacteria and fungi that are the result of them digesting macronutrients so you can imagine like you know a tree falls in the forest and all the microbiome fungi everything move in and to digest that down into soil while it goes from Oak tree down to digested composted soil there's a lot of eating going on and in all of that eating the bacteria are making these side products that we call metabolites that turn out to be the communication network of the ecosystem and that was our Discovery in 2012 was seeing these molecules I saw a three-dimensional model of this thing and it turned out it looked like a lot like the chemotherapy I used to make out of vitamin A compounds which was a nutrient from plants and so it was that moment where I got to ask that exciting question of like wow we have been for you know maybe 40 000 years of indigenous you know plant medicine going after plants for the medicinal quality turmeric curcumin these things go back thousands and thousands a year Chinese medicine and Chinese herbal medicine seven thousand years back at least and so we we've long recognized that the plants had it to my knowledge you know at least at this time I I don't know that we ever went after the soil for medicine I.E the bacteria and the fungi for medicine and that was the shift that we made in 2012 was wondering could that be medicine to humans and we found out that was much more important than medicine it was actually the communication Network between the human cells and this family of molecules broadly speaking is called redox molecules and that's reduction in oxidation which is a description of the movement of electrons and so what's happening in soil systems which is what your gut ultimately is this is a complex soil system that you carry around inside of you it creates a liquid circuit board for the transit of information and these tiny little carbon molecules all line up in this colloidal structure within a water state to move information just like the the chip in your cell phone or your computer does your central processing unit is moving information so that liquid circuit board is allows cells to talk over great distances very rapidly and so that was our breakthrough and so this was the first time maybe ever that humans got to start to observe human cells in Petri dishes in the context of Nature's communication flow and what we saw immediately happen was resilience and regeneration and so if you put intestinal cells in a Petri dish and you expose them to the most common toxin that soil carries which is glyphosate which is the main molecule in Roundup which is the most common herbicide on the planet currently we use about 300 million pounds a year in the United States globally four billion pounds of this stuff goes into our Soil and Water Systems and is exposed to our gut lining all over the place through the food we eat through this water we drink actually through the rainfall now 85 percent of the rain in the United States 85 percent of the air we breathe so this chemical breaks the tight junctions and GAP Junctions creating isolation between the the intestinal lining creating a leak and this has now been popularized with the term leaky gut and the medical literature it's referred to as gut permeability but that leaky gut phenomenon is the result of that injury of isolation happening to billions of cells at once due to exposure and so this was you know something that obviously pharmaceutical companies were fascinated with finding a target for because if somebody could crack that code my God what a blockbuster drug to find out that nature had cracked the code long long before probably should have amazed us too much but it it Still Remains amazing as we see this happen in Petri dishes every day in our lab is that as soon as that communication Network goes up all of those cells damaged or otherwise start making more and more tight junctions to the point where they're 30 or 40 percent more in integrally Connected than before the injury and so this has been a really fascinating look at the grace of the nature that we are from that we come out of which is it repairs faster and more vigorously than it injures as long as it has unfettered access to information nature finds a way right and and and then what you just shared I can't help but think of the example um that is commonly kind of discussed which is the ways in which uh you know the the Trees of a forest communicate with each other through their root networks and through the fungal networks that connect them through you know the soil uh to you know create this communication Network that um is always operating to protect the hole over the individual right like it's kind of mind-blowing how that all works and we're only beginning to kind of really understand that and to see that pattern show up in other aspects of biology and human biology so it's that my micro macro thing like we see it within ourselves we see it play out in nature and then in even thinking a little bit more broadly about that I went to uh a screening of of this movie pie the other day have you ever seen this movie oh it's okay so it's Darren aronofsky's first film and it's the story of a young brilliant mathematician math theorist who who becomes obsessed with trying to understand uh the laws of the universe through mathematics and he's seeing patterns everywhere and of course you know the Fibonacci sequence which recurs throughout nature and all these different ways all the way from you know the shells that you find on the beach to you know the spiral pattern of of the Universe and everything in between right and he's determined or convinced that all of this can be reduced to a mathematical number that will explain everything to the point uh of Madness because it's driving him crazy but the point being that there are patterns that recur through nature on the micro all the way up to the macro and to your point like this is is you know kind of your area of focus like how do these things that we kind of understand in the micro play out in the macro and how can we better understand ourselves and our place uh within this ecosystem uh in terms of how that interplay works so that we can live simpatico with it like in in unity with it like in Integrity with it as opposed to in opposition to it or in a way in which we're we're you know an antagonist to the environment that supports us and that antagonistic relationship is really the Catalyst or the driver of all of these maladaptions that that we see in terms of um you know whether it's disease or or our inability to live synchronously with the planet with our you know kind of fellow biological creatures is driving all of these um negative outcomes through disease through conflict through um uh the degradation of the environment and you know on and on and on yeah yeah it's super accurate and that that fractal or Fibonacci kind of phenomenon where you see it at all levels of nature it gets pretty exciting because you mentioned the mycelial network connecting all the trees and mentioned that you know all those trees are trying to protect the hole all the time and that's gotten really trippy for me to consider in recent years because that was our initial thought process too when we saw human cells repairing faster and reconnecting at rates we didn't know possible because we'd never seen healing happen in a Petri dish it's actually not possible because it's an isolated system the second law of Thermodynamics says any system left in isolation will increase its chaos so why do the why do the cardiologists or the doctors listening to this including myself back in the day believe that the drug was necessary because we had never believed healing to be possible in a damaged cardiovascular cell or whatnot we had never seen it really truly go back to some previous state of being uh it's damage control at Best in a Petri dish and so we didn't believe in healing I didn't believe in healing until I saw cells reconnected through this communication network of the microbiome to do things that we didn't think possible sorry to interrupt but like was there a certain inflection point in that where you cut you had sort of a Dawning Epiphany about about this that that transitioned you out of that traditional method you know or approach into kind of your current thinking it was slow you know because uh you know first of all my thinking it started changing even when I was in Academia so I was starting to watch vitamin A compounds kill cancer really effectively got a clinical trial started off in my basic science around that and so I was already starting to realize wait maybe we shouldn't be poisoning bodies maybe we should be feeding bodies maybe nutrition is going to be more effective ultimately than than trying to poison people with with cancer so I was already starting to kind of go through that you know very uncomfortable realization I've been going the wrong direction for 17 years in Academia yeah and so that had begun and then exiting to start a nutrition center in rural Virginia in one of the most impoverished you know parts of the country with the goal of if we can figure out how to get the low socioeconomic you know sectors of our communities to figure out how to be self-empowered in their eating to to get out of the chronic disease happening then it would work everywhere in the world going to Santa Monica or something to teach wealthy people how to eat vegan seemed like a bit of a chasing after the wind as far as like our true Public Health crisis as foot so laughs not to diminish the importance of Santa Monica health I guess but but we go out into that space and quickly in that space started to you know make some of these breakthrough discoveries that nutrition was really fast acting compared to drugs like to you start a a diabetes drug you don't expect them to you know go through any dramatic healing events you expect their blood sugar to slowly go down all this we were putting people on these plant-based meta you know diets and everything else and finding that they were would reverse type 2 diabetes in four weeks like numbers that I just couldn't believe obesity resolving itself very quickly as we reconnected people to their Gardens and start growing their own food and seeing the impact not just of the nutrition but being in the sunshine breathing real air so they were having a holistic reconnect to Nature through food and so that radical experience was happening but even when I you know first discover those molecules as a potential Source in soil as in future medicine I was still stuck in my Western medicine Paradigm so the first cells I studied that on were mcf7 breast cancer cells and did all my old chemotherapy stuff you know kind of mentality to them and when it saw it doing crazy unexpected things I was like well I'm gonna just start doing that intravenously so I was making my own stuff and intravenously injecting into myself at liters a day thinking the more the better like I got a overwhelmed my system with healing you know all this stuff you fast forward a few years it didn't really start to work until we started using much much lower almost homeopathic usage of this stuff in the gut rather than in the vein you can't bypass biology and expect biologic result and and so it was this very slow Evolution out of out of the reductionist and kind of paternalistic I gotta do something to the cells to to realize we are a living system that is self-correcting self-repairing and that's what you described in the forest those those trees are nurse mating the whole Forest into a higher state of being which doesn't necessarily mean no death it doesn't mean don't don't let anything change and that's been kind of my slow maturation I think in the last few years is realizing that to preserve you know some previous version of human health isn't Nature's goal nature is constantly moving forward on this planet for four billion years to the next better iteration of life and it seems if we just look at the genomics of the planet the definition of Nature's version of what is better it is more diversity at every single moment this nature is pressing discovering Reinventing creating new life on this planet we've gone from a few species of slime molds to thousands of species of butterflies over the last four billion years you know it's just like there's such a pressure in nature to create the next thing more Beauty more diversity more intelligence and it's been climbing that way for the four billion years and so we start to say well what really is the goal of humanity at this crisis point that you so well began us at why are we here right now depending on why are we the driving force of this sixth Extinction how did we become the existential crisis is one question but to what end is maybe a more important question what is the end of this extinction look like it's interesting because I I have considered you an optimist to the point of Pollyanna at times but that's a pretty gloomy pessimistic perspective well it's it's already happening you know you described it really well at the beginning you know the the amount of just ecosystem refugees climate refugees we have in Africa right now Mali the country of Mali is just being desertified at such an alarming rate over the last three years uh and you know the global governments decide they were going to build a green wall to keep the desert from coming any further so they they try to raise 60 billion dollars and plant 8 000 kilometers of trees along the southern and and of the desert there just to stop the encroachment because people were starving to death the the speed at which the collapse of Food Systems is happening there is just just never been seen before uh just in the Horn of Africa that little tiny corner of the of the continent right now we have an estimated 20 million people starving just in that little corner when Lynn twist who's one of my great friends and most revered you know Public Health people out there she started Pacha mom Alliance and before that with Warner Earhart and the rest was running the hunger project globally and then towards the you know late 20th century and when they were doing their work they were trying to get the global hunger numbers down from 14 million down to 4 million was their goal they wanted to hit 4 million you know decrease by 10 million those starving over the course of the 1990s here we are in 2023 just one generation later and we have 20 million people starving in just one little corner of Africa let alone the rest of the globe and so we are we are seeing the collapse of human biology on that grand scale of starvation but we can also see it just in sperm counts we've seen a 57 percent decrease in sperm counts in the United States over my lifetime that's resulted in one in three males now infertile by sperm counts not just in the U.S but in Western countries altogether we are now heading for you know the end of fertility and the end of food systems and and and and as you've laid it out there so we are losing relationship with our environment in real time and so the concept of we need to go buy or hack ourselves back to 33 years old so that we're healthy is missing the point that the biology is eroding right beneath our feet now I am a Pollyanna and I am damn optimistic and I don't think that is our future but to make that something other than our future we're going to have to do something radical which is what I would argue the force does every day is Imagine something bigger and better than it is today and so we don't need to go back to 1940s Food Systems to get healthy we need to imagine the humanity that comes after this version of humanity and we need to start growing that for us and so we need to make this Paradigm leap over our current crisis and demise so that that does not become our future and so this is the trick of many systems thinkers around the planet and we're working on this in our non-profit Farmer's footprint uh the brilliant Lauren Tucker has has tackled the project to renour Studios and has brought this to to bear with uh Regenesis and and groups of systems thinkers that for 30 years have been realizing that the only way to really create sea change in behavior is to create a new field of awareness a new Thought Field a new playground to play in from a vision standpoint so instead of trying to go and say well we got 10 million problems we got to go start fixing each one of those we don't have time for that we will go extinct trying to do the whack-a-mole here's a problem here's a problem here's a problem approach we need to do the buck Mr Fuller phenomenon which is we now need to create the reality that makes the old Humanity obsolete right and the new reality which requires a reimagination of systems top to bottom does demand an elevation of Consciousness or a shift in Awareness to uh you know sort of conceptualize paradigms that don't currently exist which is a big ask right you're optimistic about this I look around and I see you know all of the dire consequences that uh you know I shared at the outset which you just mentioned but we all just we also just experienced like I don't know a month straight of rain in Los Angeles and it's never been more green I've lived here since 1996 and now it's suddenly like some combination of Ireland and Kauai that I haven't experienced in the entire time that I've lived here the planet's ability to you know sort of Marshal its own immune response um is is nothing short of a Marvel right and in thinking about kind of like you know pull the final thread on this idea of the macro and the micro when we look at the ills of the planet from a macro perspective we see inflammation right we see inflammation in our politics and our public discourse and we see inflammation of you know in a more micro sense of of of human biology right and what happened what is inflammation it is our you know it is our it is our bodies response to disease or injury it's like an emergency response to like repair something that is wrong but inflammation we're seeing inflammation in our in our kind of you know culture right in our in in Humanities you know kind of social interaction Dynamic right and so what is the inflammatory like what is the what is the kind of um emergency response to that like is that happening in a macro sense I think we're being called upon to attend to that right like and it is much like the Fibonacci sequence right like what is happening you know when we cut our hand and and it turns red or whatever we're having an inflammatory response the inflammation in in discourse is is demanding that we kind of look at how we're interacting in a way to try to repair it so that we can get back to a healthier more productive way of communicating with each other which is part of your messaging right so all of these things back to this point of interconnectedness like there is nothing that is not interconnected everything you know every microcosm is part of the macrocosm and we can't solve those small problems um if we lose sight of you know the larger context in which they exist yeah it's really well said you know there's been huge books written on the problem of the victim perpetrator coin two sides to the same coin and it gets you stuck in a trap and so if you are the victim in a moment scenario you are likely to reverse that become the perpetrator in the next moment and that could be you know Germans getting crushed at the end of world war one and they you know are victimized two-thirds of their land is taken away from them and they react and become the perpetrators and try to take back way more than they ever had well this is the history of of conflict and geopolitics dating all the way back to the Inception of humanity the Inception and so we have been flipping this victim perpetrator coin back and forth at the macro level and I would say at the micro level down to the family level down to the individual level we flip this coin back and forth all the time uh all the way down to that individual level where I can flip the victim perpetrator on on myself in a day oh my gosh I'm beating myself up right now and oh my gosh now now I'm you know the the victim of that and now I'm the perpetrator of that you know so or the abused person becomes the abuser that's it so there is a freedom from that that is deeply understood and I would say it's a bit of a maybe it's a Trilogy I don't know but the the third option instead of flipping back and forth on that same coin is to move into creative mode creation is the alternative to perpetrator and victim you know and becoming the Creator rather than the perpetrator takes an effort to forgive the victimhood that preceded that moment and so we are going to have to come to a universal Universal moment of forgiveness in these next couple months years ahead forgive the journey that we've taken and stop with the typical activist approaches there's the bad guys cutting down the rainforest there's the bad guys pumping oil out there's the bad guys you know doing chemical farming there's the bad guys doing pharmaceutical medicine whatever it is that needs to end we can't that doesn't work we have to realize that's us being self-abusive as a species that's that's not us moving to the next thing the next expression of our possibility so we're gonna have to forgive universally and move to this creative moment as a species where we do co-ovision that radical future where we simply behave differently and we get to see it happening out of this pandemic you know you mentioned you know some evidence of ecological recoveries in places not expected with a green California I agree it's just stunning driving up to your place right here like the hills never been so verdant in the same way my gosh I never saw such extraordinary Community activation coming out of the tail end of two years of isolation and of you know intervention so for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and so we are now in our death cycle which means there's never been so much opportunity for rebirth and so this is I think where we're at right now as we've just spent the last 50 years debating science about our own endpoint the demise of our species the demise of ecology climate change global warming we've used all kinds of terms for that side infertility and we use all kinds of you know chronic diseases cancer we use all kinds of words on that side it's time for us to forgive the journey and realize we have one moment to rebirth and in that rebirth we can move into this creation mode where we're no longer stuck in that victim perpetrator mentality what is necessary in that leap I think in in and alongside that concept of forgiveness is this movement from the belief of scarcity into the state of abundance in California the last seven years huge drought the scarcity of water has been so palpable right you're out of water the things are going reservoirs are out and everybody's behaving in the scarcity model of water not recognizing that there's a a geologic system in place that if worked with if created with we could simply change the amount of water in the atmosphere rainforest moved an enormous amount of water back in the atmosphere and change water patterns globally and all this Earth is awfullying very simple it's a carbon cycle in a water cycle and if we bring all of our systems in line with healthy carbon and water cycles our forestry our agroforestry our Agronomy our health systems our you know Energy Systems they should all be based on carbon and water cycles and they should be closed loops and so if we were to do this move from scarcity to a state of realization of abundance as this Earth does more Abundant Life every iteration after every Extinction there is more life more diversity and more intelligence every time and it's stunningly beautiful in its advances right we go from palms and ferns before the last Extinction 55 million years ago to deciduous trees and wildflowers everywhere that necessitated a Extinction to get that level of new viruses into the atmosphere to code for the new life viruses are not living things viruses are the packets of genomic information that are the possibility of the future and so as we start to put many many species in this short conversation probably five or six species could go extinct those species under extinction level stress are putting out new genetic information that we call viruses or exosomes or all kinds of new words out there now and they are literally releasing the next iterations of those species that could come next as the dust settles and this death turns into a rebirth which again again happens on this planet the rebirth is going to be beautiful and we just have a few years to decide whether this new humanity is going to be part of that that new future are we going to rebirth with the planet or are we going to be that sixth Extinction event are we getting cataclysmic event that allows for all that beauty and explosion of nature to happen over the next million years and that's our gift to the planet is that we were the asteroid this time we were the thing that that destroyed the Earth so that it could be rebirthed in a higher level of intelligence everything else maybe that's not that bad of a story in the end yeah you seem neutral on whether Humanity will make it or not we are on the bubble right now and so we need to shift in this decade from arguing over abstract science of climate change and you know human health chronic diseases pandemics all that into a new paradigm where we're no longer bickering over the abstract sciences and we now only do applied science and this is what I do every day with a lot of joy is I try to imagine what is the applied science that would clean up this Earth quick enough that we could actually start to have children again we would have to get Plastics out of our water because right now I think it's a credit card every week that we consume in Plastics into our bloodstream or some ridiculous amount that's largely why we're going into this infertility crisis is too much Plastics disruption of the endocrine system through toxins and Plastics and all this and stuff so what's the what's the applied science of the the beauty we see under the microscope and the science we see on the microscope is the mitochondria dudes these little bacteria that live inside ourselves generate all of the energy for the cell to become Everlasting to really become irrepressible because if there's unfettered access to information and energy the cell will always repair faster than it can enter and so to that seven years ago we decided Well we just need to build a bunch of 40-foot mitochondrias that could chew up all the Plastics of the planet because all it's laying plastic is the same as glucose or fatty acids that your mitochondria are using it's just a long chain carbon that has stored sun energy inside it sunlight inside of it a double carbon bond is a battery for sunlight and so Plastics tires agricultural wastes currently methane off gassing destroying the planet blah blah blah that should be our energy sector we can close the carbon Loop in energy so we spent seven years engineering that we built the first full Sky scale mitochondria out in Denver last year turned it on in February and now we're going global with that technology that company is called resource dynamics that we started in it's so exciting each each mitochondrial unit digests 100 000 pounds of waste daily into biofuel and biochar or carbon black or these other critical commodities for closing these carbon loops and soil systems and others other places and so that's the result of an applied science out of a mitochondria in a Petri dish over seven years because we were just asked the question is it possible and if you put a lot of smart people around the possibility again you create that phase possibility you create that space and that's just what I do like the CEO and founder of that company but I didn't build any of that it took so many Engineers so much smarter than me to actually make that thing real [Music] so if I have a business Acumen that I'm I'm starting to really embrace it's I can hold that field of possibility for a good long time of impossibility that's interesting so I'm not sure I quite understand so so correct me if I'm wrong what you're saying is you have helped uh develop a technology wherein a mitochondria Rich environment has been cultivated to consume uh waste particularly in the form of plastic and convert that into fuel is that what you're saying yeah except we just blew up one mitochondria into a 40-foot version of it so we would try to imagine a mitochondria that was 40 foot big instead of a few microns inside your cells like that's a biological thing what do you mean 45 a 40 foot like what are you saying exactly so mitochondria used eight steps to break long carbon chains into short carbon chains to release all the energy and so we knew that eight step model would work for any long chain carbon whether it was Plastics tires Farm waste Etc so we developed an eight-step thermal process to break double carbon bonds just as the mitochondria used now they use enzymes to to break that in part and we're using thermal decoupling or temperature shift and so but in the same way that they're breaking it we just use that model of okay long chain to short chain carbons how do they do it they break the double carbon bonds eight times over and so we just use that same model so you're trying to do biomimicry ultimately in engineering in in energy sectors and people are now doing this in houses my good friend Jose Bakker in in Australia uh just finished an incredible two-year project right in the middle of fed Square in Melbourne and uh it's called the the greenhouse and uh future Food Systems it was the concept and he was a restaurateur and and she's a florist before that and everything he touched just becomes so beautiful and regenerative just because he's one of those guys that can hold the impossible for long enough that it materializes right right under his feet and so he materialized this three-story home like two-bedroom house that would grow more food produce more water and more energy than it used and he plopped his thing off grid just right down in the middle of fed square a couple years ago and got this thing growing and running and had two chefs living in the house and they had hundreds of thousands of Australians come through and students and everything else to to witness this thing it is truly spectacular yeah I've heard I've heard about that through Darren o'lane I think he visited yeah those guys so that so that is an example of biomimicry at scale because he did it over and over again so use biomimicry and waste management with stool to to gas to cook over he used it at each step of the process of the biology or metabolism of a a human system he mimicked in a house so what you're really looking at is a living organism with many different organs that are specialized to different things so this is the biomimicry we need to Design Within if it's not water and carbon cycle the at its foundation we're going to screws there's gonna be unintended consequences of that technology a good example of that is lithium we're right now we're have all these teams going into Central America jungles to try to discover the next lithium of mine that's not a solution for the planet right there actually is no lithium cycle in biology that's measured in anything but maybe tens of millions of years it's not an energy cycle for the planet and so we the further we we demonize carbon as our you know ideal energy source the further we're going to get away from the truth of where does infinite energy come from it is the relationship between Sunshine CO2 and plants when I think about all of this I think about it in the context of of an arms race with a ticking clock right like you're sharing all of these new exciting technologies that that hold you know extraordinary promise we actually know how to solve a lot of these problems but we're operating against uh you know time in the sense that you know the degradation is escalating and our you know inability to be efficacious in terms of of manifesting solutions is is inhibited by a lack of political will uh by you know you know gigantic uh conglomerate corporate interests invested in the status quo or in you know the opposite you know what is the solution to all these problems to Consumer demand for everything from you know lithium to oil and everything in between all of these you know forces that create these tectonic plates that are progressing us towards the future uh the dystopian future as opposed to you know the future that you're imagining and short of some kind of systemic Revolution or a complete revamping of systems uh in terms of how we make Global decisions and how we think about these problems and solve them from a collective perspective uh that requires you know Global coordination it seems very difficult that or or hard to imagine that we're going to get there in time before you know that that ticking clock uh you know reaches its its end point and we've passed the point of no return I have an enormous amount of confidence about something called Quorum sensing this is where if enough of a population starts to connect it starts to do this hyper intelligence thing it starts to do something that none of the constituents could have ever imagined this happens in Petri dishes you get enough bacteria interacting and especially if they got a little fungi in the mix they start to do Quorum sensing right away Force do this Quorum sensing Force start to add and do this hyper intelligence thing of resource management resource repair the wildfires that tore through your Canyons right here just you know four years five years back that inspired this massive communication Network back in the mycelium came back in because there was enough carbon substrate in that soil to to regenerate in a level that it had been failing in for many decades of drought and so the vertices that we're now seeing years after that recovery are from this Quorum sensing phenomenon where things get better than ever imagined before because of the the initial collapse and then the recovering connectivity and so project biome is trying to be the first ecological you know puzzle piece that's not out there to go and plant a bunch of trees or go fix the rivers directly instead we can be the connective tissue to get all of the people that already are fixing rivers and fixing soil systems globally to connect and if we get enough mines connected that already know the solutions are here then that new world just emerges we will do Quorum sensing as a species if we connect enough people this is why I'm back on your podcast again you connect people so effectively this is the fabric of our future this one conversation held between millions of people right now is that possibility that we connect just enough Minds to suddenly do the Quorum sensing event and we suddenly know the future that we all feel in our hearts as possible and that known future becomes the reality it's not something that we probably need to go engineer I believe all my companies are going to be gone in 30 years because we'll either be extinct or they'll all be obsolete because this new future is going to dream up things that are so in League with the infinite nature of nature that even as good as a 40-foot mitochondria sounds it's it's still a finite version of an infinite reality of true mitochondria which are ethereal and and constantly rebirthing themselves there's something coming and I can feel it under my skin and maybe I have to go die and see it on the other side of the veil but I know it's coming is a beauty that I cannot even imagine and this is maybe where we get back to that beginning statement of the five senses that we were given creates the perception that we're separate from um I think that's actually telling of our purpose we were uniquely equipped with a neurologic system that would interpret the input from these five senses that we were separate and it gave us the perception of separateness for a lot of potential vulnerability of scarcity and everything else that's unfolded but if we look to the Redemptive quality of being having that gift of perception of separateness it may be so that we can see beauty if if you're in the water as a fish your perception of the water is not actually there it's it's it is the substrate in which you live you can't see the water per se you might see light and some other things but the water itself is that thing you are not separate from it this is why fish can be in you know billions of of fish in these massive you know uh swarms that are moving through the ocean these huge coordinated Fibonacci sequences moving as one organism is because the water is there is really they are the organism with the water they're one with the thing all of this being outside the substrate of life being perceiving that we are separate from the water the air the soil gives us the ability to uniquely see its beauty and it is teases my mind as to not is that not the gift that we bring back to this world is the capacity to see her beauty there's something amazing in quantum physics it's called the observer effect and as soon as an electron is seen it changes its direction of spin what is the next future of this world may only resolve because there's a species that came along to actually see nature in her full Beauty because the moment we see everything [Music] especially probably in a vibration of gratitude we change the nature of the whole fabric of everything that was around us it has to change its direction instantly and completely and so I am curious to see if we don't repeat another like 7 000 year desertification ingredient of South Africa but we actually make a paradigm leap because Nature has been witnessed on a level that she has never been seen before in why did we discover and develop the electron microscope why did we make the Hubble telescope in this extraordinary telescope images are now coming back with our version 2.0 of Hubble why did we do that what is our fascination with it I can spend an hour looking through Hubble Telescope images just mind blown and I just get it's a spiritual experience it's better than any Cathedral I've ever stepped into is looking at the beauty through human eyes of the cosmos and in the microscope looking at the beauty of a single cell rebirthing itself when connected back to the microbiome it's so exquisitely beautiful and being seen for the first time by human eyes and so was our technological Journey ultimately to supercharge our Five Senses Into seeing the full beauty of this planet so that everything would change the very matrix by which we live breathe think and imagine within is here to shift in this moment of Crisis that you so well outlayed at the beginning it's a beautiful sentiment and I share uh you know this idea that that we you know we have the capacity uh to Marvel on a level that no other biological creature uh you know is capable of and there's something you know extraordinary about that I think the path forward however uh requires a certain level of not only you know really indulging and recognizing our capacity to you know see the beauty from the mic from the micro to the macro but also um to develop a level of humility about the capacity of our five senses but because I think what what humans also do which is you know sort of orthogonal to what you just shared is is to believe that we are capable of understanding everything through these through the limitations of the these five senses without uh you know an appreciation for the limitations of those senses without inadequate um respect for the fact that those senses are limited and and and our brains are perhaps not as evolved as they could be to recognize what is perhaps right in front of our eyes uh and and easily understood by you know brains that might be a little bit bigger than ours right so we think that we understand everything that we can deconstruct everything that we can categorize everything and make sense of our world as as as creatures who are who who you know find comfort in in in identifying patterns right and so to step out of that and to say we have these five senses they allow us to appreciate the beauty they allow us to understand certain things about how things operate but let's also understand that maybe we're not capable of really seeing the full picture here and we should have a healthy dose of humility about that and uh and and with that level of humility um perhaps not be so Hasty in the decisions we make that have such vast ramifications on you know planetary Health and Human Health oh that was a good one I love that feeling and I feel like the humility is the flip side of the coin of gratitude right and so it's like those two things go so beautifully hand in hand uh having the humility to understand that we are going to receive this future rather than achieve this future uh that we can maybe believe is possible is an exciting one but our purpose is to be in this finite existence of a human body so that we can appreciate the smell of chocolate the touch of a baby's hand the face of an elder as they're dying it is the finite nature of human life that makes it beautiful if it was infinite it would be dismal it's for the beauty of the finite that gets me excited to wake up again tomorrow and it gets me excited about my aging process too is this isn't something to be resisted and this is one of my concerns about the biohacking world is why we put such fear of Aging into people are we afraid of wisdom all right do you look at your your grandmother that died a few years back as a horrible failure because of the way she aged now you remember the way it felt when she spoke her wisdom to you and told you something of truth that was fractal through all of Nature and it hit you in a place that was not five senses mediated we are resisting our own wisdom in this biohacking journey towards a desire for infinite youth are we ready to be finite are we ready to birth into something so much more I hope the species goes on to participate in this rebirth on this planet to realize some sort of beauty that we can't even imagine but I know for myself I'm not going to be here to see it instead I want to be the oak tree growing in the forest right now putting out the mycelial networks of the forest imagines that next reality and when my oak tree falls I want it to be just as the oak is in my Virginia landscape when an oak Falls in my land there and it starts to dissolve into the soil it is an extraordinary explosion of life if you genetically sequence that trunk at the moment that it falls it's one species very limited few genes that make it Oak came from a single Acorn if you genetically sequence that log one year after laying on the the forest floor it's a hundred thousand species hmm that's who I'm going to become yeah I'm going to become on a thousand species in that root ball that I get buried under or in that ocean that my ashes get scattered in whatever it might be who are you going to become as Beauty in and of itself with the spirit of humility as you said and a deep Spirit of gratitude and this just quivering feeling under our skin of possibility yeah that's that's really you know beautifully beautifully explained um you know just to kind of close the the book on on this idea of humility and the capacity of our senses and the role of humans to you know live integrated in the world I think that you know breath and all these other modalities have their place to grab a glimpse of something that you know lives just beyond the capacity of our senses to you know kind of calibrate in our day-to-day experience but it's not to live out there it's to then integrate it into our experience and translate that into some kind of you know positive change whether that's in your personal life or in your advocacy or kind of the Legacy that you leave behind as the oak tree that falls you know in the forest and you know on that note of Legacy like you know that's a very beautiful thought about the oak falling and and you know the species proliferating and all of that I've often thought like when I die AI would it be great if if I was just buried into a garden and all these amazing plants grew out of me and then all the people that I loved like had a had a you know a banquet and just ate all the food that that grew out of my body and you know the kind of um extrapolation of your life and how it you know and how that energy can continue through the people that you care about it's beautiful you know which is cool um but on this idea of I'm glad that you brought up longevity right like this is very much in in uh the vox populi it's a zeitgeisty kind of thing right now everybody's talking about lifespan extension Health span extension a lot of energy excitement money and science you know is going into this right now the quest to live to 200 and Beyond and ultimately reach uh longevity escape velocity where you know in other words like for each year that we're alive we're able to extend life beyond that year which to me is fascinating I've had a number of guests on this show to discuss this topic um and I'm certainly uh not against the idea of exploring the capacity of human biology to be extended but I do of course take issue with this idea of immortality which to my mind seems to be born out of a great fear or an inability to really make peace with our with our own you know kind of mortality and the limited time that we're you know here on Earth right like a lot of this is being spawned by very rich people who have everything in the world and the one thing that they can't control is time right so how do they deploy their resources to you know arrest that one thing that seems just out of grasp for them and so how are you like you've already kind of stated your thesis on this but you know this is happening and certainly you know diagnostic tools are coming out of this that are that are good and and helpful and all of that but how do we have a healthy relationship with um our own mortality and and uh uh you know at the uh of course we want to extend our to we want to be as vital as long as we can right like nobody wants to live their later decades decrepit or losing their minds or unable to be productive so of course we want to enhance or increase the robustness of that but we also need a healthy uh kind of um relationship with our own demise yeah first of all I've you know bitten blessed and we talked about it our first podcast around hospice and watching people cross that Veil The reason we are afraid of death is because we can't believe things could be better and the people that cross that Veil realized instantly that it is so much better on the other side in so many ways and that there there was no more sense of scarcity when they came back on this side and so the abundance was on the other side of the veil not on this side of the veil and so that was quite a training in my own release of fear of my own death you know during those years in hospice care but I want to maybe come back to that thought of you know some of these Technologies are good and doing things I think we can't actually make any real honest or accurate judgment on any of our Technologies being good or bad until maybe a few more Thousand Years goes by and we have different perspectives because there's so many unintended consequences of human engineering that is outside of biology and and it's it's scary for me to think that that we're making judgments and that's a good technology or bad technology is AI a bad technology I don't know we'll find out human Innovation is the story of unintended Concepts it's the story of unintensive consequences that are born out of a fundamental disconnect from nature at its beginning well and and also a a hubris no obviously the hubris is the result of the ego that steps in to protect the individual that thought a guy rejected right and so our original wound was Rejection it was we all have an abandonment disorder at our root and then we developed an egoic mind and you know social behavior to try to staunch the fear guilt and shame cycles that happen and once you're in that abandonment disorder that keeps us addicted great work on addiction that I'm fascinated by is um TJ Woodward's work around conscious recovery and he's really good at helping people get down to this route of Abandonment disorders the reason they have addiction to anything I've never heard of him that's fast oh you would love to have him on he's fun yeah he's got not only books he's got an incredible curriculum that kind of comes alongside AAA as like a much more robust look it kind of what is the root cause and then what is your relationship back towards addictive substances and he changes the Paradigm completely you know to really look at substance abuse as a genius you know tool for survival of a species that's in this you know deep abandonment disorder for an individual that's in deep abandonment disorder from their parents that rejected them the father that views them whatever it is and so it's a beautiful model of again fractals of what we've done to Nature down at the individual level but what you see when you're working through TJ Woodward's work is oh my God this is the whole Human Condition we're all addicted to something and right now a lot of us are addicted to our biohacking data and so we are so addictive because we have this fundamental abandonment disorder way Upstream what I love about this Simplicity is is then rethinking the word technology we think of Technologies as things that we can that build that are not of nature that's our current con concept of technology which discards the possibility that a human cell with trillions of atoms that have self-organized into this thing is not a technology that diminishes the possibility that my 14 quadrillion mitochondria are not Technologies living inside of myself I believe we are the greatest technology expressed by Nature so far this human body is the greatest technology that's been made by Nature this far I have a high degree of confidence of that my trust in that supersedes anything that I can make that looks outside of nature we've defined nature that way even if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary nature is defined as everything on the planet minerals plants animals everything except humans or things humans have made really not only wrote ourselves out of nature encapsulate humans as part of nature a perfect encapsulation of the problem the dualistic nature of Separation Humanity yeah like inner like contemplates our role so what if the greatest technology ever made is is this human body what is it capable of doing to CR to shift from victim perpetrator into this true creative state where it can create universes what is there an opportunity for me to tap into something so much deeper than my five senses or my two hands could ever create because I am a generative Center and if I can think it it's occurring somewhere in the Multiverse if I can imagine it it's occurring somewhere out there and there's a lot of people that believe that's true from indigenous peoples all the way through if you've dreamed it it's happening somewhere right now in the Multiverse how would I possibly get there how would I get to this place where I switched from victim perpetrator on a daily basis to true creator and of all places that you know maybe shoved a huge sign of post in my face unless it was the course of Miracles there's this extraordinary description in there of how humans have become addicted to human relationship in the effort to complete ourselves we see something different than ourselves we feel incomplete and we figure oh that's the other half if we put that together then then I'll be whole and we become codependent in those relationships so that's defined in that space as special relationship the beauty that is the opposite of that that is this promise that kind of sits there is that at some point in the near future [Music] two human beings could come together that have completed themselves no longer looking outside of themselves to realize that they are a complete technology they are a complete being they have all that was ever intended at the highest technological level of Nature's whole expression right within themselves and it says that when those two people saw each other for the first time they would truly be seen because in the split state of the egoic mind that's protecting ourselves from this addictive abandonment disorder we can only see a mirror of ourselves so as much as I love you as much as I can talk to you about all of your incredible attributes every time I look at you I'm only either seeing the best of me or the worst of me and that is the result of this Schism the split psychology of the egoic mind which is too afraid to see you ultimately for the the incredible nature that you really are and so we protect ourselves Behind these egoic shields so that we cannot be seen and we cannot see when we stop with the addiction to the outside world through our relationships through our things and we become whole for a split second if two would see each other the amount of love and awe and just magnanimous sense of just amazement and wonderment that would come out of that moment would send Ripple effects to the whole energies of the planet and through the species and we will make our Paradigm leap and so it just takes two people to finally see each other to be that next technology of humanity is what we're told in that incredible course so is that possible that we will let go down that egoic Shield long enough and heal our deep abandonment disorder to become whole enough for a moment that this observer effect that we talked about earlier that if we really see the universe for all its beauty it will switch completely every atom will change we only have to do that to one other human only see one other human completely and that observer effect will change everything I believe um yeah that's uh that's a that's a beautiful and complex set of sentiment I you know in contemplating that I think of the human condition as as one of suffering born out of our inability to you know see ourselves as we truly are and instead live in comparison to others and uh and in um and in relationship to you know a past and a future from which we construct narratives that lead to our own suffering and separation right and so basically what you're saying is the the path forward is presence and the capacity to you know let go of those narratives and to allow ourselves to step into um a greater sense of self-awareness that is much more capacious and and uh and contemplative of of how we live sort of out of time right like if we can just step out of that past narrative and our Neurosis about the future and our need to be calibrated in the context of of uh you know how we relate to externalities that we would be able to touch deeper meaning within ourselves and and connect with um that kind of you know Infinite Source of of love that that truly allows us to then in turn connect with another human being and set off that like chain reaction that you're speaking of is that a fair it's exact reflection of what you're getting at it's perfectly said in our in our eight week Journey we put everybody one-on-one with a coach historically and then the pandemic happened and we saw people just being so isolated and lonely we and being economically challenged we put people to make it cheaper and maybe give them a sense of community into groups of six or eight people with a coach still but six or eight people healing instead of one person trying to heal the results have been unbelievable the speed at which we can heal in community when we witness one another's healing Journeys when we learn and are inspired by the others healing journey is so much more logarithmically fast than I ever anticipated I resisted group coaching all the way up until the pandemic because I thought it was so important because I was in my old patriarchal thing about as the practitioner and the patient and that's that's the thing that really no it's being seen and no wonder that six people in a room are going to see that individually differently through a different lens through a different perspective see Beauty in a different way and that person relate to that beauty in a different way and so the speed is there and so I'm convinced that we heal faster in a connected Community where a safe space is created and healing doesn't happen through the breath work through the food interventions or all the other eight things that we need healing happens when you're reconnected to your original Mass relationship to yourself and others to yourself first but you can't find self until you're in relationship to others but as soon as you do find self the speed at which those cells repair it's just never been witnessed it's it's just so instantaneous we actually have a word in medicine that we had to create for this because it was super awkward to write in the in the medical chart miracle happened you know and so we had to come up with something that we could put into a CPT Medicare code that said something about the fact that disease just spontaneously disappeared and so we could call it spontaneous remission when disease that's been there for decades and is threatening life itself suddenly disappears literally in a day and it's witnessed so frequently in medicine I've seen it in the cancer realm you know so often where you have stage four cancer and tumors everywhere and Mets to the brain you got three weeks to live and then suddenly the person's condition just starts to slowly improve and you you do scans and there's nothing there meaning there's not even a scar where the tumors were it literally looks as if the tissue returned to some original design that's spontaneous remission and there's a medical term for it because it happens I believe it happens when you are witnessed by yourself ultimately if you can really see the beauty within you which is to take that humble pill maybe but also to take a huge reintroduction to your own sovereignty your own sacred nature your your mega megalithic beauty within you if you can see that for a second there the speed at which you return to your original design is staggering and we have to create something other than the world miracle for it because it's awkward but it happens and if that's possible then can't we do that for a species can't we go through a radical remission can we go through a spontaneous remission as a species and resolve that original wound of the abandonment disorder of our nature and start to live within her instead of against her you mentioned the word sovereignty and and that's really kind of a touchdown or or a theme that percolates across you know so many of the the the subjects and topics that that you talk about um this this idea that we must shoulder responsibility for our own path that we you know need to kind of you know respect our intuition cultivate that rather than you know basically um you know divest ourselves of that responsibility onto other people who tell us what to do or um or uh you know kind of uh you know shirk climbing that mountain for ourselves because it's just easier just have somebody else say you should do this or you should do that and I think that this idea of sovereignty is is something that's like rising in the Consciousness like people understanding like oh I do need to take responsibility for myself like I do you know want to step into uh self-efficacy and um a sense of of ownership of my own path and that includes of course like what are the foods that I'm eating like how am I you know cultivating sovereignty in these other areas of my life which gets into uh regeneration like we can't sit here for a couple hours and not talk about the work that you're doing in regenerative soil and and you know what's happening with with Farmer's footprint so you know give us a sense of kind of where things are at with that I think you know basically like when we first spoke this was an idea then it was sort of a Content play you were making documentaries and um you know video projects telling the stories of of these farmers and what's going on with the soil but the current state of your non-profit efforts in this in this world have really matured like you're doing a lot more than last time we spoke yeah it's been really exciting to see that kind of evolution revolution could continue to catch its own momentum and this is again where you kind of hold the field as a group of people and then see something you could have never imagined come out of that field you know and so there's so many brilliant people now working within that Farmer's footprint context which was our first project within project bio which was the one I was talking about earlier but one of our favorite quotes that's been held so so brilliantly by our executive director David Leon and the teams that he's helped to assemble over these years is that humans are not made of cells but we are made of stories and that really does play true for through everything we've been talking about today if we can Envision that next story ourselves will self-organize to achieve that future and so we've been storytelling throughout this and you and I share enormous respect for a sovereign being named Liam rasovich who's here with us who she's somewhere in the dark out in there there and the wings there but she began with you and and Julie telling stories around food and she's now telling these stories on a grand scale and this is is now I think her journey really emblematic of our entire Journey as a regenerative family which is that what it works at the small level as has to be occurring at the same time and at the big level and so starting to tell really the face of global regeneration at the nation state level or the the bioregional level is our next journey into the applied science of regeneration we've done the individual stories of farmers and we will not stop that because it I would believe each farmer that is seen increases the Quorum sensing for this future as well you see a farmer they become a new generative Center for their entire Community most farmers are being unseen and are at the highest risk of suicidality for that invisibility within the Matrix of our current socio economic systems and so reconnecting Farmers is critical to our future but lay and the rest of us are seeing that there's now this opportunity to start telling a much larger story of regeneration and its potential to heal our macro relationship to the planet not just to the carrot on the plate but to them the complete ecosystem we can have healing there and really a journey back into our nature at that grand level and one piece of the puzzle that's really just dropped for me in these recent months we've had the blessing of working with a lot of the uh the pupils out of South Africa that really built the successful anti-apartheid movement and took down that that age-old you know oppression of the British government and previous to that the Dutch government the French government Etc and they came out of that as a nation just so recently and those great leaders of the anti-apartheid movement that came out of Mandela's efforts and the like they operationalized that through Community activation and it's taught me something fundamental that I think I was lacking from my understanding of regeneration in that I if you go to the project biome website that we made five years back or something that it it says we're gonna we need solutions for soil water and air if we can get those three systems working then we're gonna have a generative plan and all this five years later I'm quite convinced that neither soil nor water nor air need to be fixed they are generative ecosystems in and of themselves and they will heal in within a matter of years of the departure of humanity they don't need saving they they that's abstract to their very existence which is permanent because there's always a soil carbon motorcycle on this Earth it's infinite so this is where I'm starting to realize that project biome and our focus on stories has to do with the fourth ecosystem if you will or the fourth element of nature which is humanity soil water and air those regenerative centers the only piece we really need to solve for is human expression of our nature and so for project biome to really step into its fullness we're going to begin not mapping ecosystems and everything else that we anticipated I believe we're going to be able to step back and learn a lesson from the anti-apartheid movement and so many other social movements that have been successful in India and other elsewhere at Gandhi and the like and and his messaging the message is that the human needs to find itself again and as soon as you do no matter how humble your life may appear you become this creative Center that can change the face of everything and so really we are going to relearn Humanity in the context of soil water and air rather than try to go fix soil water in air when we see our true identity Within These infinite Loops of energy and creativity that this planet has given us an opportunity to mix with we will much quicker realize that future that we all want and so the maturation of my journey is realizing we are here to be part of a human healing that will put ourselves back in harmony with soil water and air globally and we will see a generative Planet once again that has healed itself many times over with or without humans present and we will all heal together towards this future and to get there we'll have to take the little fundamental steps that you've laid out during this yeah and what is the what are the brass tacks of that like what is the what are the logistical steps of that human evolutionary process I think it's one it can have many Logistics within it but it's connectivity and we see this in the petri dish review connect cells they go into a generative thing that you can't imagine having happen we literally need connectivity right now and we need it around one piece of us which is the creative potential within us and so we're trying trying to start to reimagine the internet as a mycelial network and what that would look like and really what it comes down to is can we connect humans over a light curiosity and if we do that I think we see the whole thing shift so what is the mechanics of everything connectivity what is the purpose of connectivity to create more biodiversity and so you will know that you're part of the connected and beautiful future if there's more biodiversity in your life every day are there more choices on the dinner table for your children more colors on the plate more sources for those Foods is that food being sourced from the soils of your backyards that are now growing foods that replace the monoculture lawn that was there last year are you going to regrow the gardens that fed this country and most of the world today by reconnecting you will find more biodiversity and so that's your breadcrumbs on your road to being part of this Futures how many people are you connected to how many parts of nature are you connected to how many trees have you said Thank you to today how many sunrises did you wake up to see last week how connected are you there and is if the evidence is there's more biodiversity in your life then it's not an abstract observance of that Sunrise that was a sunrise that got integrated and you took it back into the five senses world and says I'm going to call that neighbor who looks so lonely I'm going to reach out to the nursing home down the roadway and see if they need a volunteer just come and sit with some Elders before they die I'm going to get connected and if if the connection results in more biodiversity of thought experience human touch hugs human breath nature then you're on on the path and we're all going to meet on the other side of that that rebirth Veil and we're going to come out of that womb in an ecstatic state of existence ecstatic state of existence spoken like a good Guru and cult leader the best of it I mean it is beautiful though you know and thinking about that it is it is basically trying to uh uh um Step Into You know the nature of our forest root systems which are you know our our are naturally driven to expand and connect or our mycelium networks that are creating these vast and intricate uh webs of communication that you know basically provide the foundation for their survival and allow them to thrive and this is you know the blueprint for Humanity as well and yet we find ourselves in an increasingly fractured and isolated state that is divorcing us from that blueprint and that Birthright and the call to action as I hear you saying is to recapture that and to understand that much like the mycelium or the root systems we must do the same right and so maybe a good way to kind of end this is with some calls to action uh you know about how to do that like how to you know how to you know cultivate that level of connectivity in our life that can lead us into you know a greater sense of self-efficacy sovereignty um ikigai purpose all of that like that raises the floor of our Collective Consciousness so that we can solve these problems uh you know but practical things right for the everyday person who you know a lot of the ideas that we've been talking about today are are pretty you know ephemeral right sort of like listen I'm working two jobs I got kids like I love Zach I love what he's saying I feel inspired by his words um but tell me what I can do right now here today to help myself help the um you know well-being of my family and and and and and hopefully you know allow me to be a more productive member of my community in service to the ideals that you know Zach is espousing I mean you start by categories of experience in your week we could start with a big one of food it's something we do multiple times every day all of us and so starting at your food and looking at where where monoculture and monotony has snuck into your behavior it's Universal we are all eating about five different meals and we cycle them and so starting there and starting to ask yourself how you can diversify that I'm a strong believer in the power of getting your hands in the dirt and that can start very simply if you are doing the two jobs and everything is done working get the kids involved too and just plant a mint plant in a couple pots on the front stoop or on the patio or in the apartment Window and having the kids involved in that process will change their philosophy and their psychology very quickly as well so grow something in a pot if that's all the more you can handle but we've just launched the Garden Club so you can go to Farmers footprint.us and enjoy that you know experience of the 101 on gardening really because we've forgotten it we're two generations out in the US from knowing how to grow 40 of our food in our backyard garden so the Garden Club really takes you back into that simple step-by-step process that can take you from no idea how to even open up a seed packet or maybe not even know where to buy a seed packet to having a really burden and and diverse uh food system in your own backyard that replaces you know the Kentucky Bluegrass or whatever is there that's the biggest you know third largest monoculture in the United States is backyard Lawns 40 million Acres of lawn that's 40 million Acres waiting to be turned into a food system that would be so resilient that there would be no hunger left within this country let alone the others that would follow suit so the food is ready to be grown the land is there to be grown and cultivated and the soils will improve as soon as we return biodiversity to them so learn how to garden Garden Club Farmers for print.us get engaged with Farmers around the the area so the simplest going to a farmer's market simple as checking out and see if there's any csas that are delivering food boxes to your neighborhood these are ways to start to understand the food system at the larger level getting out of the box of food the the packaged food that's coming in the box if you have to open two or three levels of packaging before you got your food you're really not helping the future at this moment we got to get you back touching real food again sauteing carrots and onions is an insanely fragrant and just gustatory experience like it doesn't get much better than carrots celery and onions gustatory it's the sense of taste okay that's good I always use like learn like three or four from you every podcast so um so there's this this opportunity to engage the senses again in our food as we start to heal the land with our re-engagement of that so get engaged there and then the excitement of bringing in your government to help out with us at the macro scale is really happening you just had Cory Booker on he and I have done a lot of work around the glyphosate message we have a glyphosate campaign running on right with Farmer's footprint right now and the glyphosate campaign is bringing a an understanding that we're not just using this the weed killer we're using it as a crop treatment on the food right before we harvested and so we're using it as a desiccant drying agent across many different crops wheat was the first one in the 1990s and then the debut of gluten sensitivity out of that and then we did soybeans and now we some of my colleagues running around saying that we're we're allergic to the compounds the lectins that are in legumes you know yeah maybe so now that we're in glyphosate heaven but before glyphosate we were eating these things at any rate so the the answer is really activism at that level is starting to be heard and so Cory Booker and many of the other sitting on the AG committee I've had the opportunity to sit with and and there really is an appetite for change at the farm bill and other places to start to clean up our food system in a way that it really wasn't there wasn't a lack of awareness Science Education all that historically and I I've been you know testifying with groups of people to the EPA for years as to the dangers of glyphosate in our food it's pro-cancer stuff all this stuff with no no effect and it's been really wonderful to realize it's because I was going through a regulatory process that it wasn't working as soon as you go through a relationship process everything starts to move and so this is a good lesson to us as Citizens the Civic process is not one of of railing against your your politicians or appealing to your regulatory committees it's about building relationship non-judgmental relationship has to be ahead and so go and meet your legislators and start a relationship there and the regulatory Community will be able to change the regulatory can't be the Agent of Change to Washington DC it just doesn't work that way you're pushing on the Rock at the end of the the Avalanche at that point you got to go uphill and figure out why the Avalanche happened and I'm so delighted in talking to all these lawmakers on Capitol Hill that they just didn't know that information that we were presenting to the EPA it wasn't trickling there and so they're like that's as easy we control the farm bill we're the ones that actually allocate all the funds from the farm bill and we've spent you know a trillion dollars on the farm bill in the last 10 here so there's a lot of capital ready to Pivot here at the governmental levels just as there is at the industry level and just as there is in healthcare and Beyond so instead of regulatory Solutions we need relationship Solutions and we need to rebirth our Civics again and so to this end a group of us have created The Institute of natural law so get engaged that way uh we'll have our public facing uh non-profit up and going with the websites and engagement platforms all that in the coming months but the Institute of natural law is re-understanding civics in the context of these laws of nature we've covered today because there is to imagine that politics is a result of of of polarized opinions that just fight until one wins or the other that's not nature the nation never done anything that way and so our very socio-political methods are at a wonderful Tipping Point where we can rebirth the Republic that was really seen in this country a couple hundred years ago as a possibility and of course that was built on the the understanding Confucius brought to China and the understanding the Iroquois brought to 600 nations in in North America before colonialism natural law has been running long and hard and creating Beauty and Harmony and long-standing you know creative governments and creative Nations next to one another for the really since the beginning of civilization as we understand and we can return to that quite simply by applying natural law back into the system and so returning to our original documents and finding that so uh Farmers footprint.us Institute of natural law adoption journey of intrinsic health.com if you feel like you need a team of people around you if you want to committee around you to heal within you can go to that website and engage you can certainly take the eight week course but we also have a membership program that's very cheap per month to just engage with that Global community and so even if you're not going to take the coursework you can be part of the think tanks and everything else that are coming out of it because as soon as somebody shifts out of that victim perpetrator mentality becomes the Creator they are a creative epigenetic genetic change agent within the community and this is what's happening now so journey of intrinsic health is now an app it's a community app it's keeping people connected after the course and as a self-generating space for people to create their own Avenues of change and transformation and so get engaged journeymantrinsichealth.com Farmers footprint.us for Education just zackbushmd.com all my stuff is there for free and just dig deep there if you want the soil science around everything we're talking about in the Petri dishes and all that that's intelligenceofnature.com and an opportunity to really dig in there so lots lots to go to yeah that's a lot I mean beautifully put I love this idea of you know back to this idea of sovereignty and the notion of you know cultivating your inner Creator and and really you know shouldering the the the realization and the responsibility that you can make a change in in my conversation with with Senator Booker it was all about that it's like everybody has a platform everybody has relationships how are you using your voice holding on to you know hope even in the face of you know extensive you know perhaps you know impossible obstacles but understanding that this is what we're here to do right and and you know the fact that you have developed a relationship with him I think is beautiful because it is about it is about you know relationships that's how we move forward that's how progress is made and um and we all have a voice you know and I think it is incumbent upon us to to you know kind of use that voice and to you know develop uh you know on your on your idea of diversity to develop more diversity in our lives on our plate but also in our communities like diversity like your point that you know nature is nature is always moving towards greater and greater diversity right that's someone that's a law that's a lot so it's like how can we do that in our own lives how can we cult cultivate more diversity in our relationships in our experiences how can we step outside of our comfort zone to you know experience greater diversity in our life on our plate in our in our relationships Etc like that seems to be a path towards greater greater Health as a kind of Golden Rule right um along those lines actually I think you just brought it into my brain with a final little story that encapsulates this whole thing including the longevity piece we've been talking about which is uh I was speaking at this event Northern Virginia probably six or seven years back and um they flew over this couple from icaria Greece in their 60s that live on a 500 year uh Family Farm Family Vineyard they grow grapes and olives they flew them over to prepare a five-course Greek meal for the speakers of this little event it was pretty epic experience this five course meal they had forged in backyard gardens around Northern Virginia for for three or four days to get the ingredients for this meal for 17 people and every course they served was such a ritual of the description of of the food itself where the ingredients related to its ecosystem and the love that they put into each thing and stories of family with each ingredient and their memories of the onions their grandmothers and so such a journey into this meal and at the end of it I stood up and and like did this epic Zach Bush toast that I thought was just so brilliant you know it probably went on for 10 minutes long in the microbiome and it was like in the beauty of the cosmos and I guess so so pleased with this thing and uh and everybody's crying and like I was just like home run you were like yeah in your flow and this guy from a career gets up thick Greek accent doctor that was all very very interesting but you're completely wrong it was one of these magical moments where you go from Flow State to like hit the brick wall because this guy just spoke his truth and said you are completely wrong and I had just espoused everything I'd learned through 45 years of my life at that point and he just said I was completely wrong not slightly wrong completely wrong and he said the reason that we live long in icaria Greece is because not the food or the soil we grow it in as you think or I don't know what the microbiome really refers to but it's none of that it's because every table in icaria there's an empty chair sat in hopes that somebody knew that we don't know will come sit and eat with us that's why we live long and Hickory agrees and so that's the biodiversity that we could learn in a in a country where we now eat 32 percent of our meals alone behind a steering wheel it is time to re-engage folks and food is here as a focus of Fellowship not isn't just nutrients and so if you're going to lay a plate of food on your table set an extra chair and create a social environment where it's likely somebody will show up and and fill that chair and so we have the opportunity to do it at this Grass Roots level as simple as the meal and the person showing up and without the aura ring without the data we will live longer for the wisdom and beauty that we will gain from that meal seeing that new person and being seen by that new person such that we would change every atom in our bodies to become something different to that tomorrow I think you uh planted the flag for today with that thought um thank you it's uh really beautiful it's always a gift to share space with you and spend time with you and uh and uh and uh you know really just you know absorb your energy and and and share your wisdom and experience and you know I love you I'm your biggest fan I'm here to support you so there's always a chair open for you my friend to be continued because I I got an outline here full of all kinds of stuff we didn't even get to today but I think we'll be good enough for today um as I mentioned at the outset I believe this is your fifth appearance on the podcast we have hours and hours of of discourse between us so if you're interested in anything from you know glyphosate to many of the other subjects that uh that we discussed today there's plenty to mine so we'll link up in the show notes uh URLs to all of those past episodes with episode numbers and you know again so if this is your first exposure to Zach on this show you're new to the show uh Lots there for for for you to kind of dig into and explore and educate yourself thank you we'll be back in the ring again cheers thank you very much peace plants

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 81,522

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition

Id: PTHUFDH6Trk

Length: 122min 29sec (7349 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2023