Revealing the Root Causes of Modern Illness | Dr. Zach Bush

And, and this is taking us into an extinction event where we can no longer procreate. We talked about the fertility issues. Uh, 1 in 3 males in the United States and other Western countries is now infertile by sperm count. By 2040, we expect that to be 50%. By 2050, we could be tipping well past that. And so right now we have maybe 60 to 80 years left of human fertility and therefore the survival of our species in the same way we have 60 to 80 harvests left on the planet with our current structures of that. And the other option, other than extinction of the planet and humanity, is to get back into the garden as spoken to in Revelations there. And so, that understanding that this is the conclusion of the first chapter of humanity and it's either the last chapter or it's the beginning of the next chapter as we welcome ourselves back into that garden.

Hey, everybody. I'm Dr. Josh Axe and welcome to the show. Each and every week, we cover the science behind how to grow. And, This week we have Dr. Zach Bush with us here today. He is a physician that specializes in internal medicine, endocrinology, and even hospice care. And he's somebody that I followed for years and I've been so impressed with his, uh, expertise and his research on the gut microbiome along with the soil biome and the importance of sort of the human connection between us and the soil and the food we eat. I know he's seen some incredible results with people helping boost immunity, Build Gut and Brain Health, and so much more. And he's one of the people along with, I know, my business partner Jordan Rubin, who I've really followed a lot of their advice on when it comes to how to build the healthiest soil possible. And it's important for us to remember our soil greatly impacts the quality of our food today as well. And we're gonna talk about a lot of fun stuff today, everything from testosterone levels dropping in men,. We'll talk a little bit about climate health. We'll talk about gut health, brain health, and a whole lot more. Zach, welcome to the show.

Thrilled to be back with you, Josh, and the whole audience. Good to be with you.

Well, you know, I, you know, last time we talked, which was several years now, but you know, I was following a lot of your work when it comes to, when it comes to, you know, to the climate and, and also when it comes to hormones. You know, one of the things I want to dive right into this that I've seen recently is, uh, I did an episode recently on testosterone levels dropping in men, uh, consistently over time. And I know that I saw a post you did recently where you talked about the sort of connection between what's happening in our environment and these testosterone levels continuing to drop in men and the infertility rates we're seeing in both men and women. Uh, would, would you share your thoughts on what you believe kind of part of what the root cause of those issues are.

Yeah, thank you. The background here that we've got is about a 40, 50-year, you know, demonstration of the phenomenon of life within soil systems or biodiversity and its relationship to human biology. And so we began an all-out kind of genocide on the planet in the 1970s when chemical agriculture really came of age around the advent of glyphosate, which is an organophosphate that is a sister molecule to Agent Orange, which was used obviously to kill the jungles of Vietnam and North Korea— uh, Northern, uh, North Vietnam, Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict, 25 years long. And so we kind of repurposed chemical warfare to be a weed killer, you know, for our food industry in the 1970s. And with that, we inadvertently began to poison our water systems and the air we breathe, the rain that falls, et cetera, with the farm runoff of these organophosphates. And by the 1980s, the chemicals were approved for consumer use. And so every backyard garden and every driveway was starting to be sprayed down with Roundup, which is the most common delivery system for this glyphosate molecule. And that molecule functions as an antibiotic in the environment. It kills bacteria, fungi, protozoa, parasites, the whole thing. So it's been patented many times as an antimicrobial, but it was also, you know, understood to lock up key nutrients and block the pathways of protein synthesis at the cellular level. And so in the original patents from Monsanto, you can read, you know, the specific enzyme pathway, the shikimate pathway, that's blocked by this chemical, and therefore the bacteria within our soil systems and the plants that grow in them can no longer make the essential amino acids. And so we have the, you know, simultaneous advent of an antibiotic and a protein synthesis defect within nature starting in the 1970s. '76 was kind of the beginning of the large-scale use of it. By 1980s, you'll recall Nancy Reagan, you know, announcing that we needed a war on obesity. And so we saw this obesity epidemic really get a hold in the mid-1980s, and that was the first sign that we had done something catastrophic to human biology. And if you drill down on metabolism or the cause of obesity within a diverse population like the United States, you quickly get to the mitochondria. And the mitochondria are these tiny little guys that live inside human cells that are specialized bacteria. And so when we put an antibiotic into the water system and it's consolidated human body, the most sensitive kind of bellwether of change is those mitochondria starting to fail in their metabolism. And so, my laboratory over the last 10 years has been really specifically working on the effects of glyphosate on mitochondrial metabolism and the cellular polarization or the ability of nutrients and water to move across systems. And so, that or across organ systems. So, absorbing nutrients from gut to vascular system, from your vasocell— system to the cells themselves. Those things are all broken by glyphosate as well. And so you've got multiple levels of, of defects that were set up. As you look at that phenomenon of a dropping energy level within a population, obesity is only the first symptom. And then a few years after that, as you accumulate fat within the liver, condition called fatty liver, you start to get that prediabetes and diabetes phenomenon that by the 1990s was, you know, really raging through the environment of the United States and other Western cultures. That had adopted our agricultural system. Tail end of, of that, with that chronic inflammation, the gut lining and the like, you end up with autoimmune disease. And so by the mid-1990s into the mid-2000s, that decade was really the harbinger of a really big new crisis, which was gluten sensitivity, gluten allergies, full-on autoimmune disease due to gluten, which would be called celiac disease., and then of course the thyroid conditions coming after that. And by the time 2006 rolls around, we've got 1 in 4 girls by the age of 12 with antibodies to her thyroid gland in the United States. And so this advent of autoimmunity, you fast forward another 10 years and you un— uncover the neurologic conditions, autism, Al— Alzheimer's, Parkinson's really accelerating from 2006 to 2016 in a dramatic way. And then of course the cancer epidemic behind the neurologic system, uh, leukemias, lymphomas, bladder cancer, liver cancer, thyroid cancer, all of them going, you know, hockey sticking throughout the, the 2010, 2020 range. And then on the tail end of, of that decade, you see the collapse of fertility and gender identity. And the, the failure of both fertility and gender have to do with the way in which the body regulates hormonal expression, testosterone in males, estrogen in women. Based on the stress level or metabolism, metabolic capacity of that organism. As metabolism falls to a certain, you know, threshold, the body switches off fertility, which is an important protective mechanism. If you don't have enough energy to heal yourself, you certainly don't want to put the energy into offspring. You don't want to have a bunch of babies in, in a famine, for example. So when there's prolonged energetic stress on any organism, it's going to decrease its fertility naturally. On top of that is then the poisoning of sperm, ovum, and the rest by the chemical agricultural system. And so it's this bilayer of chemical disruption of protein synthesis that allows sperm to be motile, all the way down to, you know, other deeper issues that you would find in the environment with, you know, the microplastics and the like disrupting the endocrine system further. So metabolic stress, environmental stress, psychosocial stressors layered on top, and you end up with this collapse of vitality within the gendered system of the male axis of testosterone, the female axis of estrogen. And that is a crossing. So, when you put those two genders under the same stress, estrogen goes down in women, they start overproducing testosterone, which causes polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the most common endocrine reason for infertility in a woman. And it counterpart, the male drops testosterone and starts converting it to estrogen, and that leads to that decreased, you know, gonadotrophic, you know, formation of, of motile sperm, and you get decreased muscle mass, decreased expression of the whole male phenotype and all that. So that's kind of our last 40 or 50 years, which is all related to this drop of metabolism due to the widespread use of antibiotics in our food and water systems.

It's an incredible summary, Zach. You know, I think that, uh, one of the things that really hit me as you were going through this whole— that this last 50, 60 years is just— it's a— there's a domino effect, right? It's one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. And you named off so many chronic health issues, the things that people are suffering from today, everything from autoimmune disease to cancer to gut issues to infertility and so much more. And so again, and there are reasons for it, right? You talked about some of the different stressors, and obviously there is a lot of these environmental stressors that, you know, we're all exposed to today. And I actually want to, I want to jump into some solutions, then jump back to a little bit more of the history here, some things we can do environmentally. But when you have somebody, let's say somebody is watching this and they're one of those, it's, let's say it's a woman and she's got PCOS and we have a, you know, a man sitting beside her and, and he has low testosterone. What are some of the things that they can start doing? What are some of the biggest needle movers of things that they can eat, lifestyle, remove, some of those things that they can do that would start making a difference for them?

Yeah, it's an interesting world in which my science has been unfolding in the last 10 years because of what we're finding is the same thing that's going to be good for re-kickstarting your endocrine system is the same thing that's good for getting a farm field back into order. In both cases, biodiversity is the secret code to life. And this is something that was maybe a concept that I would have had 25 years ago, but it's become really gospel to me. Like, now I know that life on Earth does not occur without this code of biodiversity built into it. And this dates back 4 billion years of energetic history on the planet here as life has emerged. Biodiversity is a description of the amount of energy production you have in the body ultimately, and the body cannot produce in a monoculture environment. And this is the same phenomenon, a cornfield that fails, you know, in its fertility as a cornfield when you plant one crop year on year with, with, you know, this monotonous behavior. 10,000 acres of corn planted over and over again, the soil dies, you know, within months really, but every year requires more and more ICU-level care, injecting more and more, you know, artificial nutrients into that environment to keep the corn growing. That's kind of where you're at as a human being on the planet right now, is we have all gotten to this point where we're requiring, you know, intravenous levels of nutrients because the food has so fundamentally failed. And for the failure of that food and the nutrients in the soil, therefore the food, therefore the animal, the human, We are reaching this level of nutrient deficiency that's driving all of this, you know, pattern forward. So to get nutrients back into your body, you've got to get biodiversity back into your soil system, which would be your gut. And to do that, you're going to have to get way past the probiotic idea of like, well, here's 3 species that will make my gut better, here's 7 species. We've got to get past that and back to this 40,000 species of bacteria reality that we would actually be in a thrive state. 40,000 species of bacteria is about what you'd find in the American Gut Project studying guts all over the world. We've been able to demonstrate that the pre-colonial gut that we can still find in, in West Africa and things like that has 40,000 species. In a post-colonial, you know, food system, you've got, you know, 8,000 to 10,000 species. So we've lost, you know, a good 70% of the workforce, if not 80% of the workforce, by the time we're becoming adults compared to where we were generations back before the advent of commercial chemical agriculture. So, this is an effort of getting back into nature ultimately. And so, to get your garden back building, you need to literally touch the soil again. And so, this is hiking on the weekends into deep forests, touching waterfalls, getting into nature to touch the ferns and the plants, getting out into your backyard and tearing up the monoculture grass that you might have growing all over your yard and replanting that into a biodiverse food garden, a food forest that has perennial bushes, trees, vines that are producing food, uh, without almost any effort once it's in the ground. And then an annual garden system maybe to supplement that, but literally getting back into that soil system, and you will see your testosterone improving, you'll see your estrogen improving, you'll see you know, fertility improving with the reconnection of soil systems within your body. Your soil systems within your gut are your detox front end. It's your nutrient delivery system. It's your stimulus for your endocrine system. All these things are now recognized to be coded by the bacteria and fungi, protozoa that live within your gut, uh, and includes the, the huge interface with the enteric endocrine system. About 1 in 10 of the gut cells that line your intestines is an enteric endocrine cell rather than an epithelial gut a border cell that's there for nutrient absorption. 1 out of 10 is actually an endocrine cell. And so that means there's billions of these endocrine cells that line your entire gut. And this is where you make serotonin, dopamine for your neuro— neurogenic, you know, kind of pathways. As serotonin, dopamine get into their stress patterns, you start to put downstream effects on endocrine formation of hormones and things like that. So chronic stress due to a loss of biodiversity of the gut lack of input at the enteric endocrine cells, lack of production of your critical hormones and neurotransmitters, and then you get this cascade of the loss of gender ultimately. And so when we see this phenomenon around us of, you know, children— right now my grandson, his generation, it's absolutely stunning how many of his classmates are not identifying with a gender by the time they're, you know, 12, 14 years old. And so that phenomenon is not just social programming or something like that. That's a lot of people's concerns. I think it's— we need to come to terms with the fact that this is a biologic phenomenon of a loss of gender, because in utero, those, those hormones are not present in the ratios to commit the brain to one pathway or the other. With an XY chromosome for a male, there should be a hormonal expression that leads to a differentiation of the neurons deep in the brain that then give us gender identity. With a lack of, of testosterone, um, access during that, you know, fetal life, we, we don't produce that strong phenotype or identity as male. Same thing with the estrogen cycle for a woman. So we're, we're seeing the downstream consequences of us, not just a social system but actual biologic system of humanity, failing under this chronic pressure of endocrine disruption.

Yeah, as you're saying, you know, Zach, I, and I've looked at several studies on this, as I know obviously you're quoting here and sharing, but it's, it's definitely a, it's a combined effect, right? There are some social things, but there are definitely some biological things at play here. As you're talking about a lot of the feminizing, whether it be plastics or some of the other things that are out there, obviously you're contributing. Also not being in touch with nature, as you're sharing. I mean, this is a huge part of of development and, uh, of, of a lot of areas including, uh, testosterone and estrogen. And, you know, think about all the kids today that are spending time in inside all day. You know, my parents were like, I got home, it's like, okay, you know, stay outside and come back when it's dark out, you know. And today it's like, hey, we're going to be on playing video games the rest of the evening, and what that's doing. So obviously, I think as you're sharing, there are there are a couple things or several things at play here. And I want you to talk about this because this, I think, is not something I think a lot of people fully realize. So you quoted saying 40,000 is sort of the ideal biodiversity. You're talking about is our own internal microbiome. And a lot of people are closer to 8,000 to 10,000 today. Talk to me about— you mentioned it's not just bacteria. You mentioned protozoa, you mentioned fungi. I'm sure maybe, you know, bacteriophages. There's a lot of different things that could be part of that. Talk, talk to me a little bit about, so, and again, these are not things that you're gonna find in a probiotic supplement. I mean, maybe you're gonna find up to 40 of 'em, but not 40,000. And so share a little bit about sort of how this works in terms of you're in the environment, how that starts to build back that diversity. And then I also would love to hear your thoughts if on FMT, fecal matter transplant, if that's something you're a fan of or something you've ever recommended.

Yeah, so, um, so I think the question is kind of, you know, focusing in on— well, first statement, I guess, around that multifocal, you know, phenomenon around social program. Definitely there's lots of factors there, and I like that you keep pointing to the separation from nature. So is a video game problem for a child? Yes, only in that it's separated from nature in a sense, you know. So anything that you're doing to isolate your, your child from nature, whether that be in the womb or after birth is diminishing their vitality, is diminishing their inputs into what creates ultimately intelligence at the hormonal level or at the neurologic level or the intellectual level, etc. So, uh, the more isolated your child becomes from nature, the more undermined their immune system is, neurologic system, on down. And so I think that's a good way of, you know, looking at all things because there's, you know, it can be almost overwhelming when you start to look at the challenges of getting a kid off of video games or off of their processed food or whatever it is can start to feel like, "Oh my gosh, how can I make a difference?" And if you walk away from this conversation realizing, "Actually, it's super simple. I just need to create an experience in which nature is kind of naturally imbued into every part of the day." And so, if you transitioned the morning routine from arguing over what the kid is going to wear to an experience of first thing in the morning, everybody's got their cup of tea or their juice or whatever they're doing, and then they're out in the garden for 15 minutes to do a quick harvest. And those nutrients then end up in the school box or something like that. Those are something that would immediately change the vitality and longevity of the children that you're raising. And so those simple tools— and it's not simple, I guess on one level it's like, okay, that's a decision of the family to start a garden, do all these things. Our nonprofit teaches, you know, a garden club that's like kind of gardening 101 if you've never had a garden. Super simple course, takes you a few weeks to go through it with your kids, or you just do it on your own if you want. But, you know, getting the whole household back into the idea of how simple it is to have something growing that then is an interaction point for nature. And then just getting the family back out into environments, whether it be hiking on the weekends or outdoor projects, building things, whatever it is. So, it's this change in mentality of like it's what we can add into our kids' lives rather than what we have to take away. If we go into life saying, "Well, I can't take away all these things from my kids because they are addicted to these things," it is a zero-sum game. You can't win that one. But, if you're thinking, "What can I add into my child's life rather than take away from them?" I think quickly the kid starts to diversify their experience and their preferences simply change over time. And, time is okay. It's alright takes time to move through it. You mentioned the protozoa and other organisms. It is kind of incredible, the scale of the microbiome. And so we, you know, if an ideal 40,000 species is your bacteria, when you then look at the protozoa, you're up around 400,000 species kind of thing. And then if you look into the fungi, you're now probably at a couple million species of fungi out there. And so it is a startling amount of ecosystem that actually makes the Earth work. And it really is that it took that level of diversity to get multicellular organisms to happen. So for an earthworm to occur, you have to have that level of ecosystem diversity to create enough nutrient availability, detox pathways, metabolic pathways, protein synthesis pathways, genetic intelligence. The genome is so huge. It may be as many as a trillion, you know, genes coming out of the fungal kingdom and versus humans, we only have 20,000 genes. And so when we start to realize we, we can't live as human, we have to live as ecosystem, and quickly you realize, you know, most of the work being done in your body, 10 to 1, is a bacteria. That's probably 1,000 to 1, you know, fungi versus human cells. So you're, you're, you know, mightily outnumbered in the workforce within your healthy body when it comes to the microbiome and the ecosystems they're in. When you get to the genetic intelligence of the ecosystem, meaning like how many new possibilities of protein synthesis do I have, now you're talking about viruses, exosomes, bacteriophage, all that. You're way, way up in the hundreds of billions of, you know, copies per second. In my bloodstream right now, I have an estimated, um, 10 to the— let's see, it'd be 10 to the 15 which is around 100 billion viruses, different viruses in my bloodstream right now. And so my 70 trillion human cells are surveilling hundreds of billions of new protein opportunities, new genetic sequences that I would then create proteins from. So I am the original gain-of-function laboratory in the sense that my body is constantly looking for that gain-of-function opportunity to say, ah, there's, there's something I can use. And this model that you and I, Josh, were taught in medical school of viruses come attack us and they take over a human cell, replicate themselves until the human cell explodes— like, it was such a nasty war-type, you know, invasion mentality that we were taught about viruses. We now have to completely revise that model, and it hasn't been revised. Unfortunately, that's still taught in every school and med school in the world. But the reality is that what's been untangled over the last 20 years is that the decision to take a new peptide, a new neural peptide, or a new nucleotide sequence like RNA or DNA into a protein, i.e., taking a new virus or exosome, and then decide you're going to go ahead and replicate that is the most regularly regulated step in biology, period. It's over 250 different checks and balances and decisions that will go into that process of deciding, yes, I'm going to make this virus right now in this cell.

And then each cell will decide that.

So, you have 70 trillion cells individually deciding, am I going to take up this protein? And so when you see, you know, a virus widely taken up by the body, that means the body has done something to recognize a new opportunity there, a new protein that's going to, to take it into some different resilience, different pattern of vitality in the future. And so a viral infection, as we've named them, is actually a genetic upgrade. It's a, it's a decision by every cell to upgrade its genome. And when we look at the human genome deeply, we find out that we have integrated deep viral genes into our, our genetics over time. The human genome recognized to be just shy of 20,000 genes now. Those 20,000 genes, over 55% of them were directly inserted by an RNA or DNA virus. 8% of those genes were inserted by a retrovirus like HIV. And when you look across the lowest areas of occurrence of AIDS, which would be Asia, Western Europe, Russia, Western Europe, US— those are the lowest percentages of AIDS in the world, basically— 6% of that entire population has HIV gene inserted into our genome. And so we have taken up that HIV virus as a genetic upgrade, and it's doing something we haven't recognized yet because it's a protective effect, you know, for the huge percent of that population. They're not sick from it. They have no AIDS, they have no immune deficiency whatsoever. These are healthy people who have adopted that new gene. They have taken on the HIV, quote unquote, virus. But what they are really getting out of that is a new protein synthesis. And so they're making some new protein that they're now passing on to their children and grandchildren and the rest. 'cause in the fourth generation of having that gene within our system, we pass it through our ovaries and, and, uh, sperm. That's called a germline mutation or germline update. And so in this extraordinary way, we're starting to realize the, the, the human being as a, a pool of genetics is very plastic. We're changing all of the time. We're updating, updating, updating, and we're in this constant motion towards a different resilience, a different vitality, a different level of biologic wellness.

That's amazing. You know, one of the, one of the, well, I'm switching gears and I'm gonna jump back here cuz there's something I didn't wanna forget to sort of mention to you cuz I thought that this is something you, I'd really love to hear your thoughts on. So when I was writing, one of the first books I wrote was called Eat Dirt. And so this book was a lot about, I mean, you can imagine, right? It was very much about sort of what you're talking about, being very connected to the earth, that criticalness. It's like, you know, even And even every, you know, the major world religion is we came from the dust of the earth, from clay. Like we, we are, I mean, we are made of the substance of the earth. Like we're there, there's a deep spiritual and biological connection there. And with that, you know, one of the things I started coming across was like there's a study outta Japan and they found that, you know, people who, who eat seaweed, the Japanese, they digest seaweed better than a lot of Westerners because they eat it all the time. And they started going through, and some of these studies they came across as this sort of natural immunization. And today, I think when people hear the word immunization, they, their, their mind just immediately jumps to vaccines. But the reality is when you're connected to nature, as you're talking about, there's a level of natural immunization that occurs, right? Even think about like some people, you know, we've heard, heard sort of the old ancient remedy for allergies is raw local honey or bee pollen. Well, why is that, right? So I would love to hear your thoughts on this process of— I don't think people think about that often, is I should be naturally immunizing myself on a regular basis. But what are your thoughts on that, and then how would that, that work for people?

Yeah, this is, you know, similar pattern that you'll see throughout our current medical science and current kind of worldview of, you know, nature against mankind is our, our belief. And I think it does have spiritual underpinnings, uh, you know, just as, as scriptures almost from every religion on the planet say that we come from the Earth, i.e., the soil itself. It also says that we've got this incredible story of rejection from the garden. So, we got some point in our spiritual identity, we got rejected from the garden. And I think that is the root cause of human behavior as a whole is this wound within us that think we were rejected from nature and therefore, we are against nature and it's against us. And if you look at colonialism and all of its patterns of empire building, empire collapse, extractive economies, extractive technologies, all of these I think root back to the belief that we are rejected by nature. And this is so deeply held that if you look up the word nature in the Oxford English Dictionary, it says that it is everything in the earth, minerals, flowers, plants, animals, everything except humans or anything humans have created. So all the way down to the definition within nature, within the English language, we have excluded humans in everything that we do. And so that is a deep, deep subconscious wound within us. And it's not until we come back to the possibility that we were actually made of nature and nature is speaking through it.

Can I say something, Zach, too? I think it's so profound. Like if you, if you read the, the Christian Bible, it starts in a garden in the first chapter and the last chapter, second last chapter, it's, we end in a garden city. I mean, it's the, you know, it's bringing us back to this garden. Urban.

So, and that's, that's our decision now, is either we go ahead and walk into our own extinction where we are the existential threat to nature because of our divisive warlike behavior towards that nature, where we demonize viruses, we demonize, um, the very, you know, structures within us that, that build life. You know, for a long time we demonized bacteria and, you know, everything was about antibiotics and antibiotics was the new wave of the future. And then we find out we're killing nature through that and antivirals. And so the whole HIV/AIDS, you know, story got cooked up. And so now all viruses are bad and are attacking us and all this. And so we continue to, to make nature against us at nearly every level. And, and this is taking us into an extinction event where we can no longer procreate. We talked about the fertility issues. Uh, 1 in 3 males in the United States and other Western countries is now infertile by sperm count. By 2040, we expect that to be 50%. By 2050, we could be tipping well past that. And so Right now we have maybe 60 to 80 years left of human fertility and therefore the survival of our species. In the same way, we have 60 to 80 harvests left on the planet with our current structures of that. The other option, other than extinction of the planet and humanity, is to get back into the garden, as spoken to in Revelations there. And so that, that understanding that this is the conclusion of the first chapter of humanity And it's either the last chapter or it's the beginning of the next chapter as we welcome ourselves back into that garden. And so it really is a deep belief within ourselves that we aren't loved, that we aren't enough, that we are, you know, sinners or whatever it is that, that continues to plague us in our storytelling. And I think in our current behavior where we think we are against everything, we, we do live into that, that, you know, kind of extinction level hell that, that we're creating for ourselves on this planet.

It's a really important mentality that either we're against everything or we're to live in harmony with these things, right? I mean, it's an incredible perspective.

That scripture right there for you in every indigenous culture that I've spent time with over the last 10 years has stories that in this exact two decades we're in, somewhere between 2012 and 2030, in that time period will be the end of humanity as we know it and there will be a rebirth of a new humanity. And so, whether you can go to the Achuar tribe, which is the very last indigenous people to make contact with industrial world, 1996 was first contact. They live in the sacred headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru, all the way down to Africa and your deep Khoisan people there that have 100,000-year history or over to the Aboriginal people in Australia, all of these nations, the First Nations within North America, same stories. And so we are coming to the end of this epoch, which might be measured by a 70,000-year period. And in this, in this ending of the epoch, we have brought ourselves to our, you know, primordial, you know, knees as far as our capacity to be here biologically. And I think spiritually is in parallel with that. We've lost all underpinnings of our spiritual, spiritual identity, I think, as a, as a peoples. And for that, we see this beautiful opposite and equal reaction to all of that darkness, which is humans all over the planet are feeling this new vigor, this new sense of self, this new sense of self-identity emerging, a new spiritual sense of connectedness, a new reality that we are not only not separate from nature or the garden, we're not separate from one another. We are one species expressing itself biologically on a planet that is either going to go back into a regenerative rebirth or finish out an extinction cycle before that rebirth. I personally would love to stay and play. I'm very curious about what we become if we're willing to play in harmony with the adaptation that we are capable of, of embracing within ourselves. But to do that, we're going to have to, to heal this deep wound of fear, guilt, and shame that has been disrupting our genetics. And there's literal prophecies that in this decade we will lose the genes of fear, guilt, and shame. Which is really intriguing to me. Uh, what a blessed time to be living. If you have the opportunity to see the dissolution of fear, guilt, and shame in your life, what is that life going to look like next year? What are you going to express as a creative human being? What kind of creativity are you going to discover as a co-creator, as a divine expression of the universe? How are you going to start to step into that divinity in a new way? What are you going to create in your backyard? Is it going to be more monoculture Kentucky bluegrass, or is it going to be that verdant food forest that is the original promise, the garden where nature will provide far more abundance than you could ever use in your household, which is exactly what you'll find in a simple 10-tree program, which is what we've launched in Africa now. 10 perennial food-producing trees, vines, or bushes in, in your yard can put you and the 7 generations after you in a food sovereignty state where there is no such thing as starvation. And if there's no possibility of starvation, then you haven't new economic, you know, landscape in which there is resilience and regenerative capacity, creative capacity within every single household in the world. So there's huge, deep, deep opportunities here for us to rethink not only our relationship but also our creative expression. Are we going to build cities the same way we have built them in the last 70 years? Our cities are designed with the belief that we are against nature, and so we build, you know, these isolation chambers with air conditioning, heating,, you know, artificial water systems, and we isolate ourselves from nature in these buildings. Are we going to design that same way, or are we going to bring the garden back into our lives in all kinds of fundamental ways?

I love it, Zach. Yeah, a few things are hitting me now. One is a lot of this has to do with our identity, right? If we know we have an identity that's connected to the Creator and connected to what we're called to do here on Earth, which is make it a heavenly place, turn this entire planet into a paradise, a food forest in a way. I mean, at least a big part of it. I mean, it's pretty You know, I, I did an episode recently on, on architecture and how oppressive it is today. A lot of the sort of modern buildings, they almost feel like you're in a prison. They feel unnatural versus if you would go back and look at the workings of Michelangelo or some of the sort of artwork there, it has this sort of deep divine meaning to it where today you'd say, what does that mean? It means nothing, even the artwork today. And so You know, I love— I'm a big, uh, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien fan. So, you know, when you read the Lord of the Rings and you're reading about Rivendell or Lothlórien or these places, basically these are garden cities. Even the pictures of them, it's like everything is— it's made of stone and wood and things that are natural, built into the side of a mountain with waterfalls, and like the entire thing is a garden. You know, I think about Solomon, who is known as— for— by some that are sort of, you have a biblical worldview, the smartest, uh, wisest person that's ever lived. And he created one of the seven Wonders of the World, which was a— they called it Solomon's, the, his garden city, right? And so anyways, I love this idea of us living very connected to nature. And I, you know, I was thinking about this, Chelsea and I, when we did our honeymoon, we went on a honeymoon to St. Lucia. And, uh, we were, you know, we, we were like in the side of this mountain, uh, in St. Lucia, which is just everything was natural. There was no air conditioning. Everything was just open because the climate allowed for it, right? That tropical climate, like, and a breeze was coming in. We were never too hot. We were never too cold. There was no air conditioning in the Caribbean. So anyways, I think that, so like, because somebody could hear, okay, now Zach's crazy. He's talking about no air conditioning and no heat and how we're going to do this. But if you turn deserts into rainforests and up north, like you can actually change the climate. So I know this is something I've heard you talk about in the past. I think sometimes when we talk about climate, I think that there is a little bit of confusion. And listen, this is my perspective and my research is that some people are calling it global warming when I think really it's not just about warming. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the result of when you create a barren land, there's more heat, there might be more cold, there's more wind, there's more harshness to that environment. Can you talk to me a little bit about sort of your perspective on what happens when we, and you, by the way, I just, I'm trying to clarify for some people, you talked about monocrops versus perennials.— well, for everyone listening, monocrops means those are things that you plant once, you have to pull them out, and then you have to replant again. It could be soybeans, could be corn, something like that. But every time that happens, you're pulling nutrients from the soil, you're releasing carbon versus perennials are you're planting a walnut or an apple tree or berry bush and they just grow naturally every year. You could have— so not to answer the question for you, but I'd love for you to share just a little bit about your thoughts on sort of climate health?

Yeah, this is one of my biggest passions and interests scientifically. So, um, I started a nonprofit called Project Biome that's working on understanding the, the entire planet as a biologic entity. And so how does— how do we start to understand the organism of Earth? And to do that, you have to, to look— take a pretty high-level look at this, you know, outside of human behavior to understand where we're at. Um, it turns out that the Earth has had so many warming and cold cycles that that it's really innumerable. And so the Earth naturally does climate shift. And the thing that's driving a change now compared to the last major shift that happened about 7,000 years ago, previous biggest one 14,000 years back, and these were huge changes. 14,000 to 12,000 years back was the end of the Ice Age. I mean, this was most of the planet covered in ice. And so it's unbelievable. The ocean rises may have been 40 meters, 80 meters. And so, you know, we don't have an Earth that's recognizable from 12,000 years ago because of the amount of that. And I guarantee you that was not due to humans burning too much fossil fuels or all the other arguments that are made for global warming right now. And so we, we have to come to terms with the fact that the planet naturally is always changing, just like the human genome is always changing. Biology is always iterative, never frozen in time, never reaches pinnacle of health and then declines from there. It's always upregulating, and extinction has always been one of the hallmarks of the most explosive creative events on Earth. The last big extinction, 55 million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Ferns and palms were the only plants on the Earth. Suddenly extinction happens, dinosaurs are gone, but behind is left a viral record. We start to secrete— every organism on Earth, whether you're a dinosaur or a palm tree, microbiome in the soil system that got killed during that. It was the root of that extinction. That extinction happened due to the death of topsoil, just as almost every extinction will. And so the death of topsoil that time was an asteroid that hit, buried the topsoil in a deep layer of dust, choked out the respiratory function of the soils of the Earth, and we get widespread extinction. This time we're killing out the soil systems through chemical or agricultural rather than an asteroid, but we're repeating history 55 million years back. Back by our current behaviors. And that's not due to creating too much carbon and warming. It's due to a loss of biodiversity with respiratory function or metabolic function of soil systems. So what's driving current extinction? Same thing that last drove the last extinction. Between those two extinctions, our current sixth and the last fifth extinction of the planet, were many, many warming and cold cycles. CO2 levels, you know, way over 1,000 when the dinosaurs were thriving before the last extinction. So CO2 in the atmosphere has not mapped with extinction events. In fact, they seem to map really well with some of the most verdant green cycles of the Earth. And I believe that's what the Earth is preparing for with all the CO2 in the atmosphere. When you kill topsoil, it cannot breathe. So the CO2 ends up outside of the planet. As soon as the soil recovers, as soon as we stop chemical agriculture, the soil will take a deep breath in and we will have the greenest planet that we've perhaps ever had in 4 billion years because so much of the carbon has been brought to the surface of the planet through ExxonMobil, BP, all the oil companies pumping all those deep carbon sources back to the surface of the planet. Whether you can come to terms with it or not, our biggest mistakes, the things that have most poisoned the planet are the things that are preparing this planet to go into its most generative cycle. That, I believe, is the code of God. There is grace built into every single element within the universe. And so, what is God? I think it is an intention for an iterative expression of beauty. And so, that intention that is set for more beauty no matter what had to build a physical realm to create a space in which any insult, any sin if you want to think of it that way, any attack is always flipped over and turned into the best thing. It is turned into the generative force for the green future. So this green planet that's about to, to burst is already taking advantage of the mistakes we've made as humans, as we've undermined biology at a deep, deep extinction level. So I think we just need to come to terms with that, because that's part of losing the fear, guilt, shame paradigm of being human. Because if you look out at what we've done to the Earth, it's very fearful that our kids are not going to be able to have kids, or we will see extinction within our kids' generation, all the way to the guilt and shame that we would feel for leaving this world in such a horrific shape and passing that to our children. Water systems poisoned with antibiotics and microplastics, air systems poisoned with large carbon particulate from the burning of trash and agricultural waste, everything else that we're burning in the atmosphere. We can be guilty and shameful of that, or we can realize, wow, you know what, we did that, but we're not outside of nature. So, nature is actually doing that through us through this experiment of what happens when a species becomes disconnected, sees itself as rejected. How is it going to behave? Well, it behaves in an extractive force. Well, how can we use that extraction for something beautiful? And the answer is this transformative thing with for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Physics at its foundation, there is going to be this reaction to human extinction that will be an explosion of life afterwards. Dinosaurs became birds, mammals, and the like. Palms and ferns became wildflowers, deciduous trees, and the like. And so beauty overcame, or actually came out of, extinction. The next iteration of life on Earth is going to be more beautiful, more biodiverse, and more adaptive than even today. So I'm very curious to see what is the jump from dinosaurs to humans and from humans to what? What is this paradise about to be? And I do believe you're right. I think that all scriptures from all walks of life and all indigenous people keep speaking to the fact that there is something coming that is more beautiful, more spectacular. The New Jerusalem is described in, in Revelations there. And I think the point that's interesting to take there is New Jerusalem actually arrives here. It's not like we have to leave the planet to go find heaven. It's here. And so I think there's been this deep lesion within the Judeo-Christian mind and the Judeo-Christian storytelling that we can live however we want, we can trash the planet, we can do whatever because we're waiting to get taken off to heaven. I think we really need to deeply correct that behavior and start to realize that it's actually here. This is the, this is the place in which our spiritual identity, it has merged with our biologic identity. And we need to realize that there's something more beautiful trying to emerge at both of those levels.

Yeah. You know, there's a couple of things that stick out to what you shared with me, Zach. And I want to say too, I, you know, I probably have a little bit of a different philosophy in terms of whether, whether the world is, you know, hundreds of billions of years old or it's 6,000 years old. I do think that there are Um, you know, I, I do think a few things that you're sharing with me— one thing that stuck out to me was, uh, that, that I was really thinking about is it's— we're not living by design. I mean, that's, that's, that's a part of the core of the issue, is if we're designed to live a very specific way, and that is being perfect in character and virtue, and if somebody is perfect in character and virtue and love and compassion and generosity and all of those things, then, uh, our actions are very different than they've been. You know, the other And that'll lead to this garden city. This will lead to a lot of the things we're talking about. And the other thing is that even the word sin means missing the mark. It's missing the design, not living in alignment there. And I think that that's an important thing that I think that we're really— again, there are things that we are missing the mark on. And I think that part of it has to do with— by the way, part I hadn't heard anybody bring up some of the stuff you, in the way you brought it up before. And I think it's just so good of that, you know, like it's an identity issue. Like if we're living, if we feel like we are the outcast, like if, if we align with the thing of, hey, we're the outcasts, we have guilt, we have shame, we decide to live in that, in that identity of, hey, we're, we're the outcasts, we're, you know, we just need to live with the shame and guilt and fear versus No, hey, you know what? Like, there's grace. Like, we've been, you know, like, like there's this sort of renewal and we're children of God. It's a very, very— you act differently when you have a different identity, right? Your identity and what you believe about God, what you believe about the earth, what you believe about yourself, what you believe about others. I mean, there are people who think that you and I, that humans are a virus to the planet. And the reality is, is that with our help, God says subdue the earth and multiply. Like God told Adam and Eve like, "Hey, take this garden and make the entire earth a garden." So, we're not the virus, we're called to be the people that turn this whole place into a paradise. And I think our idea around our role of, "Well, no, people are a virus." No, people can be the— we're the gardeners. We're the people here called to be the gardeners. And when we're the gardeners, we can create a garden city. We can redeem this entire planet. We can indeed redeem people. It's really an amazing— raising mindset around that. I want to shift gears a little bit to some really practical things I know that I've heard you share before about even things. So, one, I love your advice on we need to be connected to nature, right? So, getting your kids out gardening, going on hikes as a family in nature, getting exposed to those things, just getting exposed to the earth on a regular basis. I think it's a wonderful— I think it's You know, I, I remember anytime if I'm outdoors all day, I will sleep that night like a, just a champion. You know, I think that's something people don't understand is I just wanna say, I think it's the most underappreciated area of health that you've called out here. And this is why I love your messages. Be outside with nature, connecting with nature. That's it. If you can do that, it's way more transformational to your hormones and to your, your body than probably any, almost anything else you can do. So I'd love I love that advice there. What are some things people can do practically as well food-wise? Like, I'm curious about your thoughts on, I, I've, I've seen you have it in products and talk about it before, things like shilajit or, you know, things high in humic or fulvic acid. You know, obviously there are probiotic supplements, like, like what are some things people could take or, or do in addition to some things you shared that are, are maybe,— just easy lifestyle habit-based things people could do.

Yeah, yeah. I think that one thing I'd forgotten to circle back to was your statement on the immune system and immunization as a concept there. And that brings us back in here to what your current question is around, you know, that opportunity to be outside is where you get that vitality from. You and I were taught in medical school that the the immune system is a battleground where human biology is fighting back all of nature to be sterile. And so we had this belief that the human body only could be healthy if it was sterile of bacteria, fungi, viruses. And if there was any, you know, penetration of those organisms into the human body, then we had an infection. And so then you fast forward, you know, the 30 years into— from my medical education that taught me that to today, and we realized, oh my gosh, we were completely wrong. If I have, you know, 100 billion viruses that are through my bloodstream right now so that I can be healthy, well, we must have the wrong model of the immune system. And now we find out that if you genetically sequence the human prostate or the breast or even the brain, you find out that there's bacteria in every single one of those ecosystems, and there's, you know, microbes that are naturally in each of those compartments. And so, and once again, we're just absolutely wrong about this sterilization belief. The sterile body is a healthy sterile body. We now recognize that a sterile body is immediately creating cancer. And so the phenomenon of breast cancer has now been mapped through a collapse of that soil system within the breast. And it's interesting that it follows a very similar pattern to what you see in farm fields or your backyard garden. When you start to kill biodiversity in the soil system, weeds start to crop up, and the weeds are a demonstration of this breakdown of biodiversity. Breakdown of balance between the many, many species. And so, an invasive weed actually is an expression of nature trying to rebuild biodiversity. There's only a few weeds that might survive your backyard environment of monoculture bluegrass with Roundup sprayed and all your other herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers you're throwing on there. And so, in a farm field today or your backyard, there's only a few species that can start that process of rediversification. So, weeds crop up. And so then we say, well, the weed is the problem. So we go and kill the weed or we pull the weed and we say this, and we've then taken away nature's, you know, recovery system. And so in the same way, the breast starts to express, uh, Methylobacterium radiotolerans, which is a single organism that once the microbiology of the breast is damaged, that single bacteria starts to proliferate to try to rebuild the soil system. And so we were recognizing by the— these studies were 2012, '14 kind of timeframe— started to recognize that breast cancer, the breast that harbored the cancer, had a lot of this Methylobacterium radiotolerans. So there was a new theory at the time that, oh, well, maybe this bacteria is causing cancer, um, because the other breast, when we looked at that one, had very little, if any, uh, Mycobacterium radiotolerans detectable. So it was pretty clear that it was related to the breast cancer. So, okay, that must be causing it. Positive. Then they did the study to correlate the amount of bacteria versus the aggressiveness of the cancer. And what they startlingly found was absolutely the opposite of the premise, which was the more of this, this Methobacterium radiotolerans presence, the less dangerous that cancer was. But if we went in and started treating this woman with chemo and antibiotics and everything else, and that bacteria also was killed, then this became a metastatic stage 4 cancer and killed the woman very quickly. And so it was this demonstration of of, oh my gosh, nature's always trying to do the right thing. And when we see nature appear as the weeds in the field or Mycobacterium in the breast, that's nature showing us a pathway back to health, showing us that diversity needs to get reintroduced and we need to support that rather than try to kill everything. We need to start to foster life rather than kill everything. And so in the end, as, as you know, too long of a description as usual, But in the end, what we are finding is that the immune system is not a battlefield, but actually a relationship. It is your foundational relationship to health, to vitality, to nature itself. And so your immune system is there to build a healthy relationship. It's the handshake with every other species in the ecosystem saying, hey, I recognize you, you're Pseudomonas, come on in. This is me, I'm human. What I think you're gonna be really helpful over here in my kidney meridian here. So you come over and you help there. There. Oh, hey, Mycobacterium, we need you over here. I'm human, therefore you're gonna show up in this ecosystem. So it's this incredible ambassador to the world. Wow. Is your immune system that's making these new relationships all over the place to say, hey, I need— oh, you're that one that does that detox pathway. I'm covered in poisons right now from a bunch of herbicides and pesticides that I've ingested over the last 30 years. So I need you. Actually, the bacteria that you need at that point, ironically, or perhaps yet another telltale sign of our mistake thinking nature is against us, is the Lyme spirochete. So Lyme disease is not actually the attack of a spirochete on the body. Borrelia burgdorferi actually is one of the bacteria that cleans sulfur compounds out of the body, which the human biology can't do. We only can clear carbon structures from the body., right? And so to have this other species come in that can detox the body over a period of time is actually the path. And so Lyme disease is not an attack of Borrelia, it's Borrelia coming to detox a body that's been poisoned by its environment. And so we're gonna find this again and again, that all disease that's been attributed to a bacteria, fungi, yeast, or Candida, you know, is a big one that's always mentioned out there. These are not pathologies. These are nature trying to rebuild its relationship to the human within. And if we start to realize, ah, the Candida is there because there's a lack of microbiome, then we can start moving towards these fundamental changes. You mentioned fecal transplant as a therapy that kind of came online in the last 10 years. It's pretty amazing that here we can take complex ecosystems from one human being and put it into a human being that's been largely sterilized from too much antibiotics, too much chemicals in the food, chemotherapy, whatever's decimated their ecosystem we can rebuild that. A fecal transplant only lasts for about 3 weeks, and so it diminishes very quickly if you're not reinforcing that, that treatment. So what I've moved away from in my clinic is trying to do the short-term fix and really starting to build lifestyles that, that build a resilient and regenerative, you know, soil system within your body for good rather than just for 3 weeks. And so sometimes the fecal transplant may be necessary, But in stunning studies, and there was 3 studies that were published back to back in Cell, which is one of our most rigorous peer-reviewed science journals, in September of 2018, and it showed the impact of fecal transplant versus placebo versus probiotics on the human microbiome following, you know, damage from an antibiotic. So the humans and the mice also in another study, but regardless of the animal, once given 2 weeks of antibiotics, they lose about 80% of their biodiversity. Functioning. And so you can imagine, we start with just 8,000 species. After 2 weeks of antibiotics, you're now down to maybe 1,000 or 2,000 species. You're now just crawling along with very damaged soil. The fecal transplant, uh, arm of those studies was collected before the antibiotic exposure. So you're basically giving back the individual their own microbiome before antibiotic damage. They recovered very quickly. Within 3 weeks, they were back to normal. Interestingly, the placebo recovered within 4 weeks. Just putting the, the individual or the animal back in the environment in which they lived before the antibiotic, they recovered within 4 weeks. So fecal transplant may be slightly faster, but ultimately it showed us that the environment and our daily touch of our environment is what codes for our baseline microbiome. This is very exciting because there's going to be times when you are probably exposed to an antibiotic insult could be something like an antibiotic from your doctor, or the herbicides, pesticides in your food. It could be alcohol, it could be anything that sterilized your body. Your body put back in its environment is going to recover that ecosystem within 4 weeks. If we add a probiotic though at that time, it actually froze the recovery completely. There was a momentary appearance that it was going to kind of follow the same line as the placebo and last about 5 days and then suppress the microbiome to the same level the antibiotic had. And then after 6 months of studies, the humans still had not recovered their microbiome. So the micro— this, this monoculture effect of planting 3 species over and over again— corn, soybean, wheat— in a farm field destroys biodiversity, therefore just destroys the recovery of soil systems. In the same way, 3 species, 3 bacteria, and billions and billions of copies in your probiotic is dumbing down that ecosystem to the same level that the antibiotic had caused. And so this is a demonstration that the immune system is there to build a relationship. The ecosystem is there to, to replenish that, that vitality within you. Your lifestyle is predicting better than fecal transplant ultimately, and certainly way better than probiotics. Your environment is predicting how good of a microbiome do you recover to. So build yourself a lifestyle in which you're touching new ecosystems all the time, breathing fresh air, breathing air in different ecosystems. One weekend you're at a waterfall, next you're out in the desert environment, next you're in an ocean. The more ecosystems you can touch over the course of a year, the more intelligent your microbial diversity is going to get. And this includes animals as well. Having pets in the home has been shown to improve longevity in every study ever done. It used to be said, well, it's because of the, the decrease in stress that they cause, and there's this whole social argument for why Then we discover the microbiome, find out that the dog microbiome is damn similar to the human microbiome. The human doesn't go outside at all. That dog goes, runs around, digs holes all day, comes back in and licks your face, licks the butt of every other dog, licks your face. You are getting a fecal transplant from your dog all the time with its connection to nature. If your animal is separated from nature and never gets to go outside, it's gonna have a much less effect on your overall, you know, biologic, you know, thrive state. So connect your ecosystem. System of the family, of the home back to nature. If your kids aren't outside, make sure their dogs and cat are outside and get them integrating back into that soil system again.

Powerful. I love it. So, last couple things here, Zach, is so I am— again, I love what you're teaching because I think it's so different. I thought about the one, what we learned in school, but even also what sort of the naturopath— sometimes sometimes whether it's a nutritionist or, or, or a chiropractor or a health coach or, or whatever it is, I think that obviously there's a lot of different ways we're educated in sort of mainstream healthcare. But one of the biggest differences that you've shared that has been something I've really been, I think, more keen on the past 10 years, and it was, I, I came to this through the study of Chinese medicine. And that is we're trying to spend way too much time treating the quote unquote disease or the virus or the bacteria versus no, just get your body, make it a healthy environment and the body'll do the rest. Does, you don't have to overthink that, you know, like Lyme disease is the perfect example. I give this one all the time and, and I've told people constantly whether if, and I still today have, you know, I'll have somebody with Lyme and be giving them advice and I'll say you really need a mind shift on, you don't need to treat the Lyme. The Lyme isn't bad. You just need to strengthen and create harmony in your system. And if that happens, the body's amazing. It'll heal itself. Like, I think that's the other thing people get away from is, is that, no, I need to take this herb or this medication or take this thing to heal me versus no, you just need to, you know, help your garden flourish and the body will heal itself. So this is a message I know that you're one of the only people really that I've heard who,, who, who talks about this so eloquently and makes so many connections between the earth and our bodies. And not just, you, you know, I, I thought about this as well. It's like there is this, um, and you started off talking about this, but it's like, we, you know, if we go back to the beginning of humankind and it's like we, we're put in a garden and at the end it's a garden city, but it's about causing a garden to flourish. And this is both, you know, true for the earth, but it's also true for us. Like we, we are this sort sort of, you know, reflection or resemble the earth so much in terms of we're called to flourish. In fact, there's even a term of human flourishing, right, in terms of us growing in character and those sort of things. I think that's so important. But anyways, I love your message and what you've been teaching. And so one of the last questions here, practically speaking, give me your top 3. You're like, okay, do these 3 things, and if you do them, I think you're going to see a really, you know, some, some good fruit, uh, for your labors.

Beautiful. Yeah, so over the last 14 years, you know, starting this at the University of Virginia and then ultimately exiting the university in 2010 to start a nutrition center for reversing chronic disease, and then, you know, running that clinic for over 10 years and then finally closing that this last year, replacing it with an 8-week program with one-on-one coaching that was achieving greater ends than I ever did in clinic, has been kind of my, my last 15 years in a nutshell. And And that course is called Journey of Intrinsic Health. So to your previous point, you know, looking for a drug from the pharmaceutical industry versus looking for the new magic, you know, supplement coming out of, you know, to some herb, all of those are externalizing the phenomenon of health. And so the Journey of Intrinsic Health recognized that, my gosh, it is all from within and we need to heal from within all of the time. And we need to bring that, you know, new reality. And just like your immune system is a relationship. To the ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, and the rest. You also have an opportunity to reprogram your relationship to the other fundamental 8 pillars of human biology. And so that 8-week journey is reintroducing you to aspects of your biology that you have fundamentally developed a pathological relationship to. And these are things like breath. Every American is essentially— at least 99% of our Americans are over-breathing. And so, and, and most of us have a fair amount of mouth breathing on top of that. And so, uh, by reconnecting your biology of breath back into a physiology that supports nature, you have a fundamental change of your nervous system. You have a fundamental change in your immune system. You have a fundamental change in your endocrine system. And so when you start to look at breath, sleep, movement, our, our exercise programs that we do in this country are just ludicrous. They're just injurious rather than biologically stimulating.

Younger. Yeah.

And so we have to change our relationship to all of these fundamentals. Water— your relationship to water is really confused in, in this modern world where you're told you need to carry around your bottle and drink 8 bottles a day of water. That dehydrates the inside of the cell ultimately. You cannot be drinking fresh water or reverse osmosis especially and think that you're doing something good for your body. You're sucking nutrients out of your body when you're drinking you know, straight water. And so changing our identity of and relationship within the context of all these elements that make biology happen, we have this fundamental recognition of life within us. And my favorite thing about this whole, you know, 8-week journey is that the very first one is what is your core identity? And that is the most powerful kind of transformation of the whole 8-week journey. Begins in week 1 when you realize you haven't just externalized health, health or your health programs, you've externalized you. You don't know who this is outside of your definitions of dad, you know, uh, boss, employee, you know, community member, PTA, whatever list of identities that you've taken on to kind of assuage your sense of value to your community has externalized your actual value. You actually, as scripture tells us, are son of the divine, son of God, if you will, or a daughter of the divine. That reality is so deep and it's so critical to the ways in which we start to show up in this world for this new rebirth. If we don't start getting down to that core identity, then all the other things we do are selling us short because we're ultimately chasing the wind on who we are. So, connecting to that core identity is the toughest thing that I've ever done. It's something I continue to wake every morning with, that challenge of, can you be right here right now before you step into all your roles that you're about to do in the day? Can you be here right now, you? And can you be in that sense of peace, that sense of creativity, that sense of capacity, that sense of beauty that actually must be there if you are born of this nature, which is to say the universe, which is to perhaps say the divine or God itself? And so if you are really a living being, lion, human, whatever, if you are that being, then what are you here to express? And I think that the lion never showed up to be an oak and a member of the PTA. Nature always shows up with this super powerful clarity of its identity without any fear, guilt, and shame of its role in the ecosystem. And I think that's true for a bacterium. To the oak tree, to the lion. Nature is given this capacity for knowing itself, and for that it has an incredible capacity to give so much, and it flourishes with such power. You are an element of nature. You, like the oak, have one identity that is core to who you are, irregardless of what another tree thinks of you or, or what some other organism might see in you. You have something that is innate to you, and that That begins a healing journey that is just so profound. And I think that we now made that number 1 in the week because we realized in that 8-week journey, no matter what you do to your food, your water, your breath, or whatever, if you're still externalizing your sense of who you are, you can't heal because healing is ultimately a remembrance of the original math, a remembrance of the original design that is within you. And that's the recognition that we've been—

There's this quote from The Lion King where Simba's dad Mufasa says to him, he said, remember who you you are, you know, it's the whole key, that identity. Anyway, just remind me what you're sharing, and I think it's, it's foundational. It's so good.

That's the beginning of health ultimately. And so find yourself in there and then move through that. And so there's lots of ways to reconnect, um, you know, from a, you know, biased, you know, huge bias standpoint here. But for the last, you know, 12 years, our, our Biotech Lab has been producing these soil supplements that, um, you know, I think make obsolete the whole probiotic story of you need these bacteria, you need this. What we found found in our biology lab is there's actually only two things that predict, predict the vitality and longevity of a cell in a petri dish, let alone in the human cell. That cell has to have connection to communication, and it has to have connection to water. And so dehydration and loss of cellular communication are the hallmarks of an aging cell. And there's a lot of new science around something called senescence. And then there's, of course, the, the cancer kind of carcinogenic pathway. And those are the two pathways that cells take as they start to lose connection through communication and lose hydration. And so senescence is kind of these bogged-down stagnant cells that can no longer repair well, but they also just kind of chew up energy without doing anything for you anymore. So it's like having, you know, 17 storage lockers of all the furniture you never use anymore, and you're paying $2,000 a month for storage. That's the aging process. You're no longer repairing the cells that are active because you're spending so much money or energy in trying maintain the storage of all these senescent cells. And then on the other side, you've got cancer starting to develop in every cell due to that lack of communication and lack of, of hydration. And so those are two big, big pieces that we've been studying in the lab, and it's very cool that the microbiome delivers both. And so what we've been showing is that when we take that 55-million-year-old soil, that ancient soil from pre-human contact, we had vitality on this planet that's never been measured since. Topsoil levels were 25, 30 feet deep, compressed into these, these fossil levels of, of ore called lignite. And we were able to extract the carbon data from those, the microbial networks that once thrived on the planet. And we're able to then put that communication network— these are called redox molecules, this is basically the wireless communication between human cells— and so when you take that wireless communication network from ancient soils and put human cells in touch with them, all kinds of crazy stuff breaks forth in the petri dish or the human being consuming those. Because what you're doing is you're invigorating cell-cell information transfer. And when cells communicate, they begin to repair at a rate you've never seen before. And, you know, whether— I guess you're right, people differ on the age of the Earth here, but whether you're, you're 6,000 years or 55 million years in your understanding of the timeline of Earth, pre-human soils were deeper than they are today. No matter how good your garden is, it's not at a prehistoric level of, of topsoils yet. And so we are realizing that nature has given us this gift of the ancient soils to reinvigorate our capacity. And so these are the humic and fulvic compounds that you've talked to, but it's also that deeper redox molecule within those carbon sources that we've found to be so powerful in potentiating this possibility of connection. And when cells start to repair, it's very beautiful. The first thing that it does, it starts to build tight junctions and gap junctions. And tight junctions are the things that bind billions of gut cells together to become one coherent intelligent membrane barrier. And so your immune system relies on the gut barrier, and glyphosate blows those Velcro apart, and you start to get leaky gut. And with that leaky gut, your relationship capacity of the immune system starts to break down. Down and you go into sensory overload at the immune system level and you start to react to everything. And this gives you chronic inflammation. And so chronic inflammation and a, and a dysregulation of the relationship-building role of the immune system gives you the autoimmune disease and everything else we've talked about. And so chronic inflammation, autoimmunity, cancer, and the like are this breakdown of, of connection and communication between cells. As soon as you put back those sort of communication networks of redox molecules, Tight junctions come back together. You can now give glyphosate in high doses, and as long as there's enough of the communication, the body just makes more tight junctions. And so you are repairing at a faster rate than our environment can poison you if you have enough communication. So that communication network, all of that science is on intelligenceofnature.com, and take a deep look at that. And then journeyofintrinsichealth.com can get you connected to the 8-week program if you want to kind jump into what it looks like to be supported in the community around that. And so, that community connection is the same thing that we see at the cellular level. As soon as you start that, you know, cell-cell communication, tight junctions and gap junctions. Gap junctions are the fiber optic cables between cells that share resources. And so, that's the first thing biology does. And here we are at Journey of Intrinsic Health and we find the same thing. We have a community platform. Everybody going through the program or who's gone through the program all get to communicate across this simple app and you get to see the tight junctions forming between those people. Oh, you're passionate about that thing. I just wanted to start this company after I went through Journey. I quit my company and I'm going to go do this thing that I've always wanted to do. I'm going to go do this creative thing. So, you see the cells behaving in a community of humans very similar to what you do in a petri dish. The first instinct when there's communication and hydration to the system is to build, to create, to create something greater than yourself, to connect to others and build something more vibrant, more resilient, more beautiful. And so what I've taken deep trust in is that humans connected to their microbiome become humans connected to their society. And so this new Earth that we're talking about, you know, creating together in this next 70,000-year epoch of humanity, I think really does speak to this opportunity for reconnection, these identities larger than ourselves, only by way of knowing ourselves. And so once you know what cell you you are, you can participate in these complex cellular structures that we would call society. But when you outsource that identity, you'll never know what your role is supposed to be, and you will, will increasingly have anxiety, depression, sleep disorder, sexual dysfunction, and the like due to your lack of awareness of your purpose, your identity, your sense of self.

It's so good. You know, anytime I've, I've spent time following— one of the things I love to do is study history and see the people that had the greatest influence on humanity, identity. And whether it be a Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. or a Thomas Aquinas or a Moses or someone— we could keep going back. One thing that I really— I think all of them had a keen sense of, this is who I am. And they had a level of this awareness, social awareness, self-awareness, spiritual awareness. There's this level. And I think that's a big part of what you're talking about, is having this awareness, having a sense of identity, and then contributing to the whole in the greatest way you can. And so that's one of the things I, again, I respect so much about you, Zach, is I think you've done such an amazing job. One of the things I love too, and maybe people don't realize about you, is that you have contributed so much as an educator, you've contributed as a researcher, but also you contribute in a really practical way of helping plant trees. And you're meeting with farmers and teaching them how to build deeper topsoil and actually helping heal the planet. And so that's, you know, I know that sometimes that there are people out there, and this is good, right, that are educators but, you know, in a way, you're a farmer. Like, you're doing a lot of this stuff. Remind me again, Jordan Rubin. I know we're all mutual friends, and he's a good friend of mine too. In a similar way, it's like farming, like doing practically a lot of these things as well. And so that's one of the things I've always really admired about you is you're not only a man of really, uh, you know, of intellect and great words, but also a man of action. And so I want to say thanks so much for sharing your wisdom today. Thanks so much for all you're doing. I want to encourage everybody to check out a couple of the websites that Zack shared. He's got a program, he's got an incredible community that's focusing on rebuilding health, but also rebuilding the health of the planet. And also, I love your posts on social media. Vani Hari and I were talking about you the other day, and I know we both follow you on Instagram. And so, I also want to encourage everybody, follow Dr. Zack Bush on Instagram. Again, that's Dr. Zack Bush. You can find him on social media too, always posting a lot lot of enlightening information there. And Zach, thanks so much. Thanks for the wisdom and thanks so much for coming on today.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, if you want to tap into that future of the food forest of the world, farmersfootprint.us is our effort towards creating that resilient food system and that Garden of Eden back here in the United States. And then globally, if you're interested in that whole organism approach to how Earth goes back into its generative cycle and really back to the beginning of where did life occur. And interestingly, it's going to again scope with a lot of what you see in scripture. It all comes out of that first meridian in Africa. And so, we're working on reinvigorating that first meridian that runs from South Africa up into Scandinavia. And that seems to be the birthplace of all biodiversity on the planet. And so, while we need to certainly heal this country for our own independence to persist, which is severely challenged right now as a country, we are really on our knees in regards to food sovereignty. We have no food sovereignty in this country. We grow very little of our food. We are bringing far too much of it out from outside. So rebuilding food sovereignty in the US is, is far more of a desperate need than, than I think 95% of people realize. But jump in for farmersfootprint.us. Our goal is to create such a vibrant soil system that we can put our own supplement company out of business over the next 30 years. We really believe that the earth could be more verdant and vibrant than we can possibly imagine with with this collective effort. And so we really could use your help right now, end of this year and everything else, to, to spike a flag in the ground for your family to say that you want to be part of this movement, you want to jump in to be part of this sovereign future for Earth and for humanity to express this new beauty. So jump in with Farmersville Print, be honored to have you there.

Awesome, thanks so much, Zach. Hey, thanks everybody for watching. I just want to say so grateful for you. And also, hey, if you're watching on YouTube YouTube. Let me know, what is your biggest takeaway from the wisdom that Dr. Zach shared with us today? Uh, we want to hear from you in the comments section. And thanks so much, Dr. Zach, for, for being with us. Thanks for everybody. Have a blessed week.