Dr. Zach Bush ON: The Importance of Gut Health & Why Dehydration Is Worse Than You Think

1. 0:00 – 1:40

   Intro

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush0:00

      We know people should exercise, and yet when we tell people who are overweight and diabetic to go exercise, they don't actually lose weight, and they very rarely improve their diabetes. Why is that?

   2. SPSpeaker0:10

      The bestselling author and host-

   3. JSJay Shetty0:11

      The number one health and wellness podcast- On Purpose with Jay Shetty. You know, what was your journey from conventional medicine to internal medicine? And how did you even move in that direction? Because I think that today we're seeing a lot more of that, but you've been doing this for a long time, so I wonder what that transition was like.

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush0:34

      It was a stepwise journey into a lot of left-hand turns and pivots, I think. But the, the journey began in the Philippines. I took a hard left turn in my career. I was going into engineering, took a year off, and then had the opportunity to birth babies in the Philippines with a group of international midwives. And that experience of being around the birth of human life was so riveting and so engaging that the idea of returning to a program in robotics and machines just couldn't capture my imagination anymore. And so that was my entry point into the health career, and initially thinking maybe nursing, nurse practitioner, and then eventually slippery slope took me into the idea of just going head down that medical doctor route. And that journey came along in an interesting point in human history where I didn't realize in the 1990s, none of us knew at the time, that we were about to witness the most extraordinary explosion of chronic disease in human history. We were about to see the complete collapse of the human immune system, the human neurologic system, and the debut of things like attention deficit disorder, gluten sensitivity, Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndromes, chronic pain syndromes, things that had simply

2. 1:40 – 4:50

   Humans are part of an ecosystem

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:40

      not existed 10 years, let alone in the, in the previous thousand years. And so it was a very interesting time to enter into this world of science and medicine at the point where we would lose it all. And now we recognize, you know, 30 years later that we're now in the midst of this sixth extinction event where we're losing biology at such an extraordinary rate, and we see not only cancer epidemics and autoimmune epidemics and the rest, we're seeing, you know, pandemics and the results of this real disruption of neural anatomy and attention deficit to autism, from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's, and this breakdown in our cell-cell communication such that we would really lose our self-identity in this milieu of inflammation and destruction at the cellular level, which of course is manifesting at the macro level as well. And so we see the dissolution of sociopolitical systems and this polarization and the fear, guilt, shame paradigms amplifying as our biology collapses. So never before so interesting a moment to step into this space, and it's been a real exciting journey into realizing that the end is near of an old paradigm, and the beginning is nigh for everything that we perhaps have not even yet imagined. Because we are starting to realize that to be human, to be human health, is to really a description of an ecosystem rather than a single species trying to mete out a survival paradigm within a complex ecosystem of life.

   2. JSJay Shetty3:04

      You know, one of the reasons why I've been so interested in your work is because I found myself going from being quite a healthy individual to then randomly having inflammation and having gut issues and whatever it may have been, and none of them were things I could even explain. Like, I was liv- living a generally healthy diet, or I was pretty active, or whatever it may be. But still, I'd started to see all these things, and so what started it in the first place at such a global level? Like, what has been going on with our health, the food system, and, and everything else? What, what's been happening that has caused it today where I think the majority of us either are experiencing it or know someone who's experiencing it?

   3. ZBDr. Zach Bush3:44

      Yeah. I think I had to go into the problem before I found some of the answers to your questions there. And, uh, diving deeper and deeper into the problem, I was as trained in internal medicine, which is general hospital care, kind of your adult medicine and k- conventional pharmaceutical model, running ICUs and the like, running... I was a chief resident training residents and med students at the University of Virginia, and was finding that I wasn't finding the answers to how do I make my patients healthier. I was chasing disease, and it was getting more and more difficult, it seemed every year, to actually have a, a positive outcome with my patients. And so I felt like I needed more training, and I did endocrinology and metabolism for another three years, and that training really took me into what is the communication network of this exquisite symphony that we would call a human body. How does the liver talk to the brain? How does the brain talk back to the adrenal glands? How do the adrenal glands talk to those kidneys? And so that was the fascination of that hormonal network of communication, and that drove me down deeper into the second half of that specialty, which is called metabolism. How does energy get liberated within a human cell to manifest life? And the answer, uh, was just becoming obvious, was

3. 4:50 – 9:05

   Where did nutrition science go?

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush4:50

      that it's actually not the human cell that's creating the energy. It's these tiny little microbes, these little bacteria that live inside of our cells that was liberating energy for the human cell to, to thrive upon. And those little bacteria, often called mitochondria, are very susceptible to toxins. I was developing toxins to kill cancer cells and was watching those toxins damage this ecosystem within and then make it very difficult for a cell to recover on a cancer journey. And so it was a realization that this, this paradigm of poisoning for the effort of health was just a chasing for the wind. So I'd spent 17 years of academia becoming an expert in cellular biology, becoming expert ultimately in this little niche of chemotherapy and realizing then at the end, oh my gosh, I'm chasing the wind. No matter how good my chemotherapy gets, it's never gonna actually solve the problem that I face because actually in human history, not a single cause-- case of cancer has ever been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And so it was that kind of slippery slope of root cause, root solution, root cause, root solution to realize I'm not anywhere near the root of this thing. But my chemotherapy was in vitamin A compounds, which are nutrients, obviously, from food systems. And so that was a backdoor into the question of what happened to nutrition that we would suddenly have all this cancer. If nutrition can kill cancer, where did that nutrient base go? And that led us then to some pretty exciting answers. And I had to leave the university setting at that point 'cause the research that I next wanted to do couldn't really fit into the paradigm of here's a drug, here's the disease. And I was starting to wanna ask deeper questions about how does life happen? How does biology happen? So I left in 2010, started a clinic that was, you know, based in nutrition, an idea that nutrition could be the basis for reversing chronic disease and perhaps ultimately preventing it. And that was a daunting and scary moment for me 'cause I had been trained nothing at all in nutrition. And so I was desperately looking for everything I could put my hands on in the nutrition sciences to try to find a path forward, and I was finding that the nutrition science was really disconnected from the deeper understanding of how biology worked. We were practicing on a 50-year-old beliefs about nutrition with the food pyramid and all this, when in fact we kind of knew already at the biology level that that was amiss. But we hadn't matured that, that science. And long, winding path, it turns out that I found myself back to not recent medicine, but ancient, ancient medicine. And we find that long before Hippocrates came along to say we are what we eat kind of thing, uh, Chinese medicine had recognized that we, we must, you know, re- realize that we are a manifestation of the nutrient, nutrition, the connection to nature. And maybe deeper than Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, which was a deep, deep, uh, field that you've studied extensively with your tea company and everything else. The s- science of Ayurveda dates back 9,000 years, and comparing that to, like, 50 years of food science that we throw at the, at the wall right now, it's, it's been proven over and over and over again in vast different, you know, peoples groups and genetics and everything else. And so in the end, that long, winding path took me back into this indigenous realization of we are of nature. We are of the earth. Each one of us is of the earth, and this is why we call ourselves earthlings, I suppose. But this human condition identifies that nature intended us into our existence and into our resilience and into our full potential, and it's in this last 100 years where we've accelerated this march away from that nature and the convenience lifestyles and the technology boom and everything else. And this has been that pivot point of how did we lose health? We simply distanced ourself from nature further than we'd ever been, and we did it at these fundamentals, as you point out, of the food system. And so that was my slippery slope into what's happened to the food, which took us into what happened to the soil, which has taken us into a realization of, oh my gosh, we became chemically dependent both in our farming practices and our pharmacy of the hospital. And when we took both of those industries and said, "We will technologically create a new chemical that will allow us to grow food better and be healthier," we lost our underpinnings. We lost the foundation of nutritional health on the planet and the vitality of humanity.

4. 9:05 – 15:48

   The earth will get better

   1. JSJay Shetty9:05

      It's incredible, isn't it? That it feels like such small, simple changes, but then they achieve incredible scale, right? Like, the idea of if you could find that to be the root, but the rate at which we've all been negatively impacted by it has been colossal. I guess right now, the individuals that are listening and, and all of us, it's kind of-- we're in a challenging place because I think people want to be healthier, but they feel extremely conditioned by how they've been raised, how they grew up, the kinds of foods that they've been exposed to, the types of convenience, as you said, that they have already. And I find that that's probably one of the hardest things is habit change. Because like you said, we've marched so far away from being at one with the environment or being at one with the soil or being so close to our food, and now we're being so far away that it almost feels more abnormal to go back to nature because of the conditioning that exists. And so how difficult have you found it to help people actually reconnect with that which we've forgotten when that's actually who we were, if that makes sense?

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush10:16

      I think it's almost impossible when you sit down with somebody in the construct of, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna prove to you that you're wrong." [chuckles] But it's incredibly easy to get there when you start in a state of compassion. Compassion is a much different energy than empathy, and I think we've lost compassion for our belief in empathy. Empathy is c- that effort to bring my energy, my vibration to your vibration, let you be the tuning fork 'cause you might have been, just been diagnosed with a condition. If I sit down with a cancer patient, their vibration is in fear and, you know, maybe guilt and shame 'cause they're gonna leave their children behind at a young age or whatever it is. And so if I dive into empathy and try to match that vibration, we get stuck there. We get stuck in the fear, guilt, shame paradigm, and I'm suddenly steeped in fear of, like, I don't think I'm equipped to help you free yourself of this disease. I think you are gonna die. I think that... You know, and so I have these deep fears within me around the death of my patient, and they have that deep fear of death within themselves. And so that's typically where we go as humans right now, is we're taught that this empathic state of what is the vibration of the other person across from you? Can you match that? Therefore, you're in it together. Whereas compassion is a much different state of recognizing where they're at, listening to the song they're singing, but not becoming part of that symphony, and holding this other space, this other potential reality of, okay, yes, this has happened, but what is the alternative to it? And I think you lose that when you slip into that fear state, when you lose your creativity. As soon as that fight or flight state kicks in on your sympathetic nervous system, the creative part of your brain shuts down when we stimulate the adrenal glands, which is, of course, what we're doing to our children with Adderall and all this. We stimulate with drugs those adrenal glands, and they lose their creativity. So we have whole generations now that have been taught to answer multiple choice tests at the cost of their own creativity, and performance is linked to their adrenaline levels. That is Basically, the same thing that's happening in every doctor's office in the world is the physician is afraid that they're not gonna prevent death in this patient, and the patient is afraid that they are dying. And for all that fear of an endpoint, we can't imagine life as a continuum, as a continuing energetic event that's vital and constantly regenerating itself. And so that's kind of the, the death spiral that we were in. And finding our way out of that had to do with realizing that nature has never seen an endpoint, has never seen death of an individual or a species as endpoints, always new potential energy. And the beauty on this planet has continued to get more rich, more diverse, and ultimately more intelligent with s- every single iteration. We call it the sixth s- extinction that we're in because there's been five others, and yet life booms on this planet in ways that we couldn't have imagined before that last extinction. Sixty million years ago, the dinosaurs were walking around on topsoil levels that were 30 feet deep. We're lucky if I find three inches of good topsoil [chuckles] on the Earth right now. Thirty feet deep, topsoils, root systems of ferns and palms that allowed for those forms of vegetation to fuel those dinosaurs into, to these massive bodies because there was so much nutrition, so much energy available. And then the top- topsoil died. An asteroid hit, choked the topsoils out, and life on Earth disappeared for a moment. And then it came back, not with dinosaurs, but with birds, mammals, humans. Not with palms and ferns, but palms, ferns, and flowering trees, deciduous trees, flowering plants, wildflowers. And so this has been a journey of iteration on this planet of life more rich and more intelligent at every single turn. And this needs to be embraced as a society right now as we anticipate the death of many things. We need to get excited for what will come next. More richness, more beauty is going to happen, and that's programmed into the matrix of life. It will get better, it will get more diverse, and it will get more intelligent. And if we imagine the Earth leaping from dinosaurs to birds and mammals and humans, where do we go from birds, mammals, and humans to what? What species ha- has this Earth already imagined and already coded for in the virome? The virome is a description of a library of genetic potential. It's all of the viruses of the planet. It's a database. And those viruses are new potential genes waiting to be expressed by whatever life happens next. Right now in my body, there's 10 to the 15 viruses coursing through my bloodstream. It's 10 billion viruses in my bloodstream right now. Not the same viruses repeated. Different viruses. 10 billion new genes checking in with every cell in my body say, "Is this an opportunity? Is this an opportunity? Is this an opportunity?" So as I let go of my own biology, if I let go of fear, guilt, and shame, is there a possibility for me to leap forward with my own biology, with the genes that are within me right now coursing through my bloodstream? Because I'm a microcosm of extinction and rebirth. And this is where medicine has really failed us, is it was a belief of scarcity rather than abundance, death rather than rebirth, fear of be- that w- everything was against us rather than perhaps everything is for us. And this has been that slippery journey for me of realizing at each turn I underme- estimated our potential, and we are sitting here at the pinnacle of a great rebirth of humanity if we choose to go that direction.

5. 15:48 – 25:06

   How do you get to health & prevent disease?

   1. JSJay Shetty15:49

      I guess if f- anyone's feeling that way on a personal level where they're living in that scarcity, they're living in that fear, they're living in that insecurity of... and just challenge of, "I don't know what to do. I don't know where to start. There's so many things that I need to sort out with my health. There's, you know, I'm worried about-- I keep hearing about my nervous system and the microbiome," and l- it just feels, like, overwhelming-

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush16:15

      Mm-hmm

   3. JSJay Shetty16:15

      ... because we've been so uneducated and untrained in our bodies, right? It's almost like we've been given these bodies since we've been born, but we're so uneducated about how to use them and what they need and what's good for them and what's bad for them. And so if someone's feeling in a state of overwhelm, where do you suggest they begin?

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush16:36

      We've been working for the last 15 years in our laboratory and in our clinics to sort out what's the simplest approach to beginning again because I think we really are at the end of physiology. When we see two-year-olds with osteosarcoma, when we see 15-year-olds with, you know, s- psychotic major depression, and when we see a 20-year-old with life-threatening autoimmune disease, all of these conditions are saying that we need a, a radical revolution. And so we've been working through all of the complexity of the diseases and the root causes and everything else to find then there's really eight very basic things that start to build physiology from the ground up at the cell level and therefore at the organism level and from the organism to the species. And those eight things really revolve around some very basic lifestyle interventions. The first of which is coming out of fear. And so we spend the first segment of this, um, process of finding self within the context of all the anxiety that you have, that you might feel like you're dying, that you feel like it's hopeless, feel like all the cards are stacked against you. How do we get out of that paradigm quickly? And that's an effort of really bringing the arrow inwards 'cause right now the medicine and the world at large are trying to point outside of you to say, "There's your problem. There's your problem. There's your problem. There's your problem. There's your problem." And so turning that arrow inward to say, "Where's my solution?" And you and I talked about this briefly before the podcast started of like how did you know your journey? How did you get from North London to Los Angeles and everything in between? And you answered very beautifully. You said, "My-- I just listened to my intuition." And I never tried to judge it for did it make sense or not. And that's basically what's happened at our clinic is we had to go inward and ask, where does this health come from? Because I wasn't trained into health. I was trained into disease management. And so as myself and my colleagues started to put that arrow inward, we found, wow, this is really exciting. It's super simple in the end. It's not a thousand diseases against humans. It's one health waiting to emerge. And so as you come out of the fear paradigm and that external definition of self and you become you, then your guide is your future self, your highest self, whatever is being expressed to make you alive today with a self-identity, which is pretty bizarre. It's strange that you know you wake up every morning and you know you're Jay. It's strange that I haven't woken up and at some point thought, I'm Jay Shetty because we're really the same thing. Like we're same biology, same thing. I'm in Los Angeles. I could have bumped into the Jay way very easily and been like, I'm Jay Shetty. And yet you keep being you no matter how close in proximity others are around you, no matter how much food you share the same, beliefs you share the same, you keep being you. And the really trippy thing is I get to, in that ICU setting, see people let go of the body and die. Heart stops. Brain waves come to a standstill. They leave that body and then they suddenly reanimate. We're doing chest compressions. We're shocking them, whatever's going on. Or sometimes they just spontaneously come back into that body. And they traveled after that body stopped, after that heartbeat stopped. They traveled around sometimes in the room, sometimes great distances around the planets, visit loved ones, et cetera, sometimes off the planet into the cosmos. And at no point in that after-death journey did they lose track of their self-identity. And so that is a very strange thing about near-death experiences that I think has been under-explored. Your identity preceded your biologic expression and will follow your biologic expression as your body, but you're you. When we begin health at that point of realizing that's a permanent condition that can't be destroyed by biologic processes, that's your original math. That's the vibration you're going to follow. For me, that's the anatomy of the soul. A soul is something that has been captured by the religious world to describe the thing that will supersede your life. But on the science side, it is perhaps a great description of the energy field that allows you to organize in your mother's womb. At the beginning, you're one cell that starts to divide just like a tumor divides. And then suddenly around replication 260, you start to differentiate. And suddenly a cell becomes a kidney cell or a neurologic cell or whatever it's going to become. And not only does it become a unique cell, it knows where to migrate to in a three-dimensional map to become that organ system. And we cannot find that map inside the human cell or in biology. That map seems to be in the physics field, which is to say in the electromagnetic field, which is to say in the space between everything. Your body, as solid as it appears to me right now, is 99.999% vacuum space filled with an electromagnetic field, which is super dense, that organizes the reality of tissue around it. This solid is organized by the vacuum. And so that thing, that thing that organizes Jay Shetty every millionth of a second to reorganize itself, because you disappear and reappear constantly, approximately every millionth of a second, and you keep being you. You keep coming back every millionth of a second. So one million times a second, I'm remanifesting in front of you with a map from that electromagnetic field. So perhaps that's the anatomy of the soul. Perhaps that's the thing that holds the original you. And we have set this world up for dis-ease by convincing you you're a whole bunch of identities outside of yourself. You're a son, you're a father, you're a mother, you're an employer, you're an employee, you're a boss, you're this, you're that. Bizarrely, the more altruistic those titles get, the more likely they are to diverge you from self. For me, that was the title doctor. The whole world wanted to make me feel like that was the most important thing I had accomplished. And this is what gave me value in society. And it's been a long, bumpy 30 years since getting that MD kind of behind my name to realize it's not the thing. It's not me. I'm something bigger than that. I am something more true than a compilation of somebody else's curriculum and some doctor's title. And when you find that original vibration of this is me, you become very potent. You start to tune to something bigger than the biology would have you believe in. And in that, you start to do something different with your relationship to everything. And that's the eight-point journey that we've put together for the Journey of Intrinsic Health, which is our program that we've been helping answer that question of how do you get to health. These eight steps are laid out in this eight-week journey. And it's about that change of relationship to your food, to actually water. Water is really kind of backwards as to our understanding of how we hydrate and what water is. And then we also get confused about breath and our relationship to each little respiration we take. We're confused about what happens when we fast and what does that positive stress on the neurologic system look like. We're confused about exercise. We do exercise kind of backwards as well. And so it's reforming the relationship to all of these lifestyle things that you've been told are important. But when you go and do the thing that's important, you don't get healthier. And that was a big question mark for all of us in the medical field of like we know people should exercise. And yet when we tell people who are overweight and diabetic to go exercise, they don't actually consistently lose weight and they very rarely improve their diabetes. Why is that? We know movement is important and yet it's not working. And I think it's because of this externalization of everything. And so since you're not you and you're this external representation of yourself, your relationship to all these things, food, movement, breath, fasting, the rest are all backwards as well. And so this is the eight-week journey into the obvious. But in a completely new lens of everything's gonna go internal instead of externally sought after. And that's changed a lot of everything, and, uh, it's allowed me to close my physical clinic where I was seeing one patient at a time and go to a coaching model where we are witness to the healing process rather than mandating the healing process. Rather than the prescriptive process of an MD writing down eight prescriptions and saying, "This will make you better," realizing that can never make anybody be better 'cause those prescriptions are eight externals, you know, stimuli that have absolutely nothing to do with the root cause of their disease. And so this has been an exciting journey of reversing out of my education and into the realization that there's nothing more beautiful and potent than a human being in their own field, in their own self-

   5. JSJay Shetty25:04

      Yeah

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush25:04

      ... in their own original math.

6. 25:06 – 31:38

   Why dehydration is worse than you think

   1. JSJay Shetty25:06

      I'd love to dive into some of those eight, if it's okay, because I think identity is such a core one, which you just touched on beautifully there. You touched on water there. I'd love to understand a bit more about that because I think that's kind of like not even talked about. I've, I've barely heard... I know, I know my wife's-- I, I always call my wife a water snob because-

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush25:27

      [chuckles]

   3. JSJay Shetty25:27

      ... she's very, very careful about the water we drink and the water we, you know, shower with and, and everything else. But if you could guide us to understanding what you're sharing in your eight-week program around water, at least as a high level, could you guide us through that?

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush25:42

      Right now, when we think about liquid water, we tend to think of the stuff in this glass here, and tastes good to drink. It feels good to drink when it's clean, and it has this kind of s- refreshing quality to it for a lot of us. But my body is 70% water, and not a single ounce of that is in this form. [chuckles] The vast majority of the water within my body is actually in a crystalline structure. Uh, if you've ever seen Jell-O, eaten Jell-O, made Jell-O, you see liquid turn into a solid, and that gel-like structure within Jell-O is the result of complex s- crystal structures of the water organizing itself around proteins, and that's how I hold water. And it turns out that my biologic age and my likelihood of disease correlates perfectly with how much crystal water do I hold. That crystal water is holding something within it, and it's light. In a very amazing biologic phenomenon, this planet is able to capture solar energy in chlorophyll, which are tiny little mitochondria that live inside of plants, little bacteria. And these chlorophyll have been able to take CO2 and turn it into batteries, and the battery is a long chain of carbon. Double carbon bond is the most efficient battery ever invented by nature that takes no energy to maintain the light within that. So sunlight is captured between two CO2 molecules and then eight and then 12 in these long ch- carbon chains, and then we digest those by consuming food. And we liberate glucose, sugars, carbohydrates, fatty acids in, in the oils in our foods, and we package that up in our liver and send it out to every cell in the body. And it turns out that human cells don't know how to use any of that glucose or fatty acids. There's no mechanism for releasing the sunlight, so it has to pass it down to the mitochondria living inside our cells. So it's basically the mitochondria in plants communicating potential energy to the mitochondria within us. Those mitochondria start breaking apart the CO2 and start releasing sunlight back into the side of their matrix, and that's what's being held within the crystal structure of water. And it turns out that when I drink water like this, I'm doing very little to support the crystalline structure within my cells. For this to turn into a crystal, it takes a complex relationship to a vast array of salts, m-mineral amino acid complexes, and protein structures, and that's where we kinda lost the hydration story. If I drink this water, it's gonna feel good. It's f- gonna feel like I'm hydrating myself for a few minutes, but I'm gonna pee this out in the next 45 minutes. Uh, it'll-- If I haven't emptied my bladder, it will be sitting in my bladder. It's no longer in my body. It's outside of my body again because this pure water has no reservoir in my body. It has to pass quickly th-through my bloodstream back to the kidneys and get out to my urine. And so the journey into health is really a rediscovery of how do you get water into the crystal stage? And that-- it's a complex journey in some ways, but it is an exciting premise to begin with, is I need to be more full of light. How do I become more full of light so that I'm more vital, so I can repair at a faster rate than ever before 'cause there's more poisons in my environment than any other time in human history? I need more crystalline structure. And so we reevaluate water at that, that journey from your gut into the crystal form inside your cells, where it turns into that gel battery storage place for that light liberation from the sunlight for the animation of life to happen. And so that's a, a little bit of a nutshell of a lot more content [chuckles] that could be drilled into, but that's, uh, a little bit of that flip on the head of water.

   5. JSJay Shetty29:17

      Yeah, absolutely. I mean... And, and you said you can actually test-- you can actually see your age through the quality of that crystalline structure. You can test for that? How do you test for that?

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush29:30

      The easiest way to test for it is a relatively old technology. It's called a phase angle calculation, but you use an impedance monitor, which is a description of just measurement of resistance, and it looks like EKG leads, if you've ever seen an EKG, 12 leads around the heart and all that stuff. They're sticky little pads. You'll put one on the wrist, one on the forefinger, one on the ankle, one on the toe, and then you lay f- perfectly flat and, and you measure across that column of water that's now at a, an equilateral, uh, level to the earth and to gravity. You measure the amount of electrical resistance across that column. And from that, you can calculate based on body weight and, uh, your height and all of this stuff, how much water is inside every cell. And when you calculate that, then you get a very good biologic age and biologic estimate of your vitality. An ideal phase angle is up around 10, 12. I've never seen anybody at 10 or 12. The healthiest patients walking in my clinic are typically around a seven or an eight on their phase angle. Anybody coming in with disease, let's go with cancer for, for the endpoint there, is typically around a four. Death happens at 3.5, and so what I just told you is ideal health is 10, death is 3.5, and cancer shows up at four. And here we're telling everybody they're dying of cancer. As it turns out, when you look at the simple reality of water inside a cell, cancer is one of the last symptoms of a complete disconnect from the energetics of life. Cancer happens when you no longer are connected to the energy of that plant, of that chlorophyll, of that sunlight that charged life in the first place. And so that's where we go with this eight-week journey is where, where did it break down? How did you go from 10 to three? How'd you get from 10 to four, whatever it is, and then how do we start to back you up that track of crystalline water? How do we get your body to hold more light energy so that you're more vital, so that you accelerate every enzyme process, detoxification, repair, regeneration, protein structures throughout all matrices? All of that happens automatically when the light goes up. You mentioned

7. 31:38 – 35:32

   The dissolution of health

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush31:38

      a product earlier, the, the, the gut supplement you probably got put on by your nutritionist, but the journey into that phenomenon was our understanding of soil and food, and how did it break down so quickly was the question we were trying to answer. How did we go from 1992 to 2002? That 10 years saw the complete dissolution of human health across all ages, across all organ systems in a 10-year period, across all peoples really that were touching Western civilization, Western food systems. And in that journey, we discovered glyphosate, and glyphosate is the primary herbicide or weed killer in the vast majority, 90-plus percent of the weed killers on the planet. We now spend, you know, billions of dollars a year spraying this thing into our environment. We have an estimated 4 billion pounds of glyphosate being sprayed into our soil and water systems worldwide. And it turns out, as our laboratory has been studying this compound for a decade now, every time you touch human cell systems with glyphosate, it dissolves the communication between them. It disconnects you from the boundary of being human, and it dissolves that to the point where you don't know where your begin or end of human biology, and you be-- s- your immune system has to turn on to fight everything. So you were eating pretty healthy. You were exercising. You were living a pretty affluent lifestyle compared to the rest of the world, perhaps, and yet you weren't thriving because there was a chemical now in your food that was dissolving the boundary event, and your energy was now leaking out of your body quite literally. We've popularized the term leaky gut, but it's much deeper than that, though. It's happening at the individual cell level that's leaking light, leaking water outside of itself. And if you can't hold that crystalline water, you can't hold the vitality, the energetics of the plants you're eating, of the nutrition you're eating. And so you start to fade with your energy levels, and with less energy, you repair less well, and you start into this chronic disease that happened between 1992 and 2002, chronic fatigue syndromes, chronic pain, everything mentioned. And so that was your personal journey. And then you got put on a supplement. What, what is that supplement? It's not actually a traditional supplement. Most supplements are like pieces of the nutrition cascade of a vitamin or a mineral or protein or whatever it is. This is way, way upstream of that. This is not a nutrient. This is, in fact, the, the small carbon molecules that form a redox signaling system, which is a fancy word for a wireless communication network between your cells. There's two ways cells com- communicate. One is through hard fiber optic cables. They can pass light energy back and forth for communication. And the other one is through this more ethereal wireless communication s- similar to your cell phone. Your cell phone sits there all the time with a, a complex transmitter in there. A transceiver really can receive and transmit tiny little signals, but it has to be picked up by a cell phone tower that will propagate that information at distance so I can talk to my grandmother. For me to talk 3,000 miles away, I need lots and lots of connections between all those cell towers to, to cascade through to carry that message. If you lose one cell tower nearby, you, y- your ce- cell phone suddenly doesn't work. Nothing broke in the cell phone is an important real- reality. It just can't reach the bigger system. And so the disease of today is not actually a disease of a single cell. It's a failure of that wireless communication network. And so when a single cell gets injured now, it can't send out the signal of, "Hey, I'm, I'm injured. I need repair." And it sits there and accumulates injury. And with that accumulation of injury, we reach cancer. Cancer is a single human cell that has 20,000 unrepaired genetic injuries in it. And so this journey towards cancer is not only a loss of electric light and light potential, it's a loss of communication and a loss of that regenerative potential. And so we now have a whole society of humans, 8 billion of us, that are losing our light. We are dimming, and we are losing our, our cell-cell communication. Those cell phone towers are going down, and we cannot repair.

8. 35:32 – 37:59

   Understanding the microbiome

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush35:33

      But nature always prepares for the worst, and the antidote, it turns out, to the death of communication, which is happening at the human level, is actually the microbiome, which is a term that's now thrown around a lot, and I think we all have a vague understanding. I think that's like bacteria or something. But really what it's describing is complex ecosystem. It's, it's thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of different species of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and human cells alike all getting into this coherent communication network. And so the microbiome is a description of a complex landscape of biodiversity, and each of those microbes, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and the like, are making another variant of these small carbon snowflakes. And when those carbon snowflakes go into a liquid state, into the aqueous state of your bloodstream or into that semi-aqueous state of the gel within your cells, they're able to transmit information long distances. And so we started extracting these from fossil soils before the last extinction 60 million years ago. Again, 30-foot topsoil levels, the healthiest microbiome the planet has ever seen, and so we Tap back into the fossil layer of soil and start extracting that communication network. And the first time we put this on human cells was 2012, and I got to see in my lab, which was rudimentary at the time, some of the most ridiculous things happen on a, in a Petri dish that I just didn't even believe possible. And it was a journey from stopping asking questions about the cancer cells we were tr- talking and, or asking questions and studying to healthy bio- biology. Is the... Are we witnessing health in a Petri dish? Is that's what's really happening? 'Cause so many things we're fixing and repairing at such a rate I never imagined before. And so it's been a very exciting journey to realize that the Earth has coded into her deep fossil soils a communication network that can help us out of our crisis, that can help us beyond this isolation of the single human cell, and ultimately the isolation of a single human species back into an interpretive dance with life itself. This vast biology within us and around us is ready to reengage. We just need those cell phone, phone towers up and running be- in our bodies, and that's what happened to you when you started ION.

   2. JSJay Shetty37:42

      Yeah, no, thank you for explaining that. It's, it's incredible how little we know. I mean, when I'm listening to you, I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, "We just, we just don't know enough," and individually and collectively as well. But

9. 37:59 – 41:50

   Listen to your intuition!

   1. JSJay Shetty37:59

      one of the things you talked about water, we talked about a bit about microbiome, which I wanna get back into, but a big area that you're focusing on is soil regeneration. I think that's been something that's been more recently talked about as opposed to something that we've thrown around, as you were saying about the microbiome. But talk us through that very key element of the environment, and again, if you can give us that sort of synopsis version as you did with water for us to just understand the value of that. Because I want people to go and follow you and figure out through your work the, the depths of everything we're discussing today. But I think at least for the benefit of this conversation, if people could get a sense of just the breadth of areas that we may not be considering are negatively impacting our health. Just as you said, I had no idea when I was taking ION, you know, what was really going on behind the scenes.

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush38:54

      I wanna step in that first-

   3. JSJay Shetty38:56

      Please

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush38:56

      ... point for you, too. You made the statement that we don't know enough, and that's how I felt most of my life as a doctor, and that's what led to 17 years of higher education and chasing that proverbial knowledge so that I'd feel less afraid. [chuckles] I feel like my whole world has just flipped on its head in the last 15 years to the point where I now realize I know everything, but I don't know it up in my head. I have access to-

   5. JSJay Shetty39:20

      Mm-hmm

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush39:20

      ... information throughout the cosmos through something deeper than my mind, and that's again where you are b- acting from in your career, and not just in your career with your interaction with humans in general. Your recent book on human relationships, not just the relationship of two human cells, two human beings.

   7. JSJay Shetty39:37

      Mm.

   8. ZBDr. Zach Bush39:38

      How do we start to relate differently than we have in the past? And that journey, I think, is really exciting to realize we actually know everything if we listen inside.

   9. JSJay Shetty39:48

      Mm.

   10. ZBDr. Zach Bush39:48

       And this is the experience I'm sure you had in those few years living as a monk and everything else. When you spend more time in silence than you do talking, you find you know so much.

   11. JSJay Shetty39:58

       Mm.

   12. ZBDr. Zach Bush39:59

       And it's not something up in your head.

   13. JSJay Shetty40:01

       Mm.

   14. ZBDr. Zach Bush40:01

       It's not an intelligence. It's a connection. The real truth within you will be remembered rather than discovered. And so that is an exciting journey into let's take a deep breath and realize nobody knows about crystal water and nobody knows about all this stuff, and it doesn't matter 'cause ultimately it shows... The layers that I can show you in our laboratory will give you a, a glimpse of beauty that you may not have been realizing in, but how you get to that beauty is something you all innately know. Your relationship to your water, to your food, and ultimately to your soil, and ultimately to your planet is something that precedes human intellect, human, uh, consciousness. And so we are now in a state of being where we can actually realize, okay, if everything existed, our capacity to become human existed before the moment we were human, what does that mean for our connection to the future? It's already here. It's already connected. It's already manifesting through the genome of the viruses, through the genetic potential of the planet itself. It's already here. So not only do I know myself right now, I have access to information of the future because it's already coded for in biology that hasn't quite yet appeared, but the information is already there. In the same way I can remember the past because it's coded for in my genes then all the trauma, all the remembrances, all the experience of my ancestors, it coded for in my genetic code. It's not in my head. It's within-

   15. JSJay Shetty41:24

       Mm-hmm

   16. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:24

       ... every single cell of my body resonating in a crystalline structure that we would call the fourth phase of water, and we re-resonate in that liquid crystal state to know self-

   17. JSJay Shetty41:35

       Mm-hmm

   18. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:35

       ... and then to express self within that matrix. So deep breath for all of us right now, this part of the podcast of like, you know what? We're connected to all of it. We don't need to know it in our heads because we already have access to it.

   19. JSJay Shetty41:46

       Mm. Beautiful. Yeah.

   20. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:48

       Then the soil. So how does the soil come

10. 41:50 – 44:10

    The importance of gut health

    1. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:50

       into importance? A soil is a living life form, the most complex living life form on the planet, and in life itself as we understand it. We've never measured a more beautiful system of, uh, than the soil. A teaspoon of soil has more organisms than are humans on the entire planet. A teaspoon. And so th-there's a complexity and a brilliance and a beauty of that living ecosystem of soil that dwarfs our current understanding of cell biology. We don't-- We can't actually measure in a Petri dish the behavior of eight billion different species in a teaspoon of soil because we haven't developed good enough scientific measures and fast enough computers to compute that much information so fast. So we tend to study one species of bacteria and make a whole bunch of conclusions that maybe it's bad for us. Well, this whole concept of bad bacteria and good bacteria of the probiotics has really dissolved now. We realize there is no such thing as a good bacteria or a bad bacteria. There's only a healthy ecosystem or a monoculture. Monoculture or the death of biodiversity is, is the demise of life. A push towards biodiversity is the matrix of health, and it is unfortunate that over the last 100 years we've developed a deep economic and, you know, physical labor dependence on chemicals for our farming and agriculture. These chemicals destroy the biodiversity of every ounce of soil we put these chemicals on. They function as antibiotics. Glyphosate, that most common of, of herbicides, has been patented as an antibiotic, antifungal, anti-parasite. It literally demolishes life within the soil that it touches, and yet this is what farmers are trained to use. We genetically modified all of our seeds so that the food would be sprayed repeatedly through its lifespan with that chemical. And so Roundup ready seeds means poison tolerant food system. But when as a microbiome you are not prepared for that poison or as a consumer, as an animal upstream, you're not prepared for that injury, you become poisoned, uh, in a way in which you are r- not Roundup ready, neither was your microbiome in your gut, which is your soil system. And so all this focus on gut health of the last 10 years is simply a description of soil is important. It's where life comes from. Life comes out of biodiversity and relationship, cooperation of biodiverse inputs. Regenerative agriculture

11. 44:10 – 49:54

    What is regenerative agriculture?

    1. ZBDr. Zach Bush44:10

       is a description of this revolution that is afoot that we are participating in. Our nonprofit, Farmer's Footprint, has been part of this effort to increase awareness and learning, impact and innovation around the opportunity for farmers to shift away from the belief that they're there to grow bushels of corn, and instead they're there to grow life within their soil systems. And when every day they wake up asking, "How can I create more life and diversity within my soils?" Instead of, "What can I kill today?" Which is what chemical farming is. Which invasive weeds are now attacking? What, you know, I- ICU life support do I need to put my farm on? Oh gosh, I'm out of all these nutrients, so I need to intravenously inject all these nutrients with all these chemical inputs. It's an ICU condition in the farm, just as it's an ICU condition in my hospital. And so this is a journey really into realizing that we are doing ICU care because we lost the matrix of life, which is biodiversity, which is the soil within your gut, soil beneath your feet. And it's exciting to realize that we can participate this at every level. If we walk out in your yard right now, you have an American lawn, and an American lawn is the third largest crop grown in the United States. There are 40 million acres of lawn, Kentucky Bluegrass grown in this country. There's only 120 million acres of farmland. 40 million acres of grass so that it looks nice or whatever it is. We have lots of reasons. Convenient, you can just mow it, whatever. If we were to take that 40 million acres of lawn and convert that to food forests in our backyards, front yards, and the rest, we would never go hungry. In, in the next 70 generations, there could not be hunger because we would have so much food bursting from every yard. In World War II, we came close. We had lost the food system. We had lost supply chains. We'd lost economics, and so we were growing our food in our backyards again. By 1945, Americans and the British in London and the rest were growing 45% of their food system in their backyard victory gardens. We called them victory gardens 'cause the campaign was, "If you don't grow your own food, we're all gonna lose the war. If you grow your own food, we will be victorious." Russians long knew this. Russians had really built really complex systems of what we call today peasant farming systems, where there was a lot of redundancy and a lot of hyperlocal marketplaces for food systems. Russians survived some of the worst fast star- starvation events in, in history during World War II, and they won the war against the Third Reich for their resilience, and a lot of that resilience was their connection to nature, their proximity to their food system. The Germans ultimately failed because they had 3,000-mile supply chains and their food couldn't get to them. Today, the United States of America is failing 'cause we have 3,000-mile supply chains to the food that's not grown here in this country anymore f- 'cause all of our soil is dead. The cost of putting seed in the ground now exceeds the cost that they can be sold for. And so we have all these government subsidies to keep telling farmers to plant genetically modified crops and put them under dollar expensive, you know, high intensity inputs, which is bankrupting basically every farm, and they're all on life support economically, getting these subsidies that we call USDA crop insurance and all these fake things, boosting up dead soil, dead dirt. And so if there's a belief of homeland security, if there's really a belief of nations are, you know, capable of, of safety, you have to begin at the soil. And presidents long back have recognized this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "The future of every country is in their soil." And he said that because we were in the Dust Bowl, which was a devastation of our top soils due to poor farming practices, and we were starving as a nation. My grandfather worked in the White House with the Roosevelts and his-- he was the head of philanthropy in the New Deal in getting these soup kitchens rebuilt, and so traveling around with Eleanor Roosevelt, serving soup lines that were miles long of people starving in this country because their topsoil had died. So twice in a single century, we've destroyed our top soils through poor understanding of, of biology originally, and now a codependence on chemical farming and, and antibiotics as a mechanism for growing food. And so for that, we have 3,000-mile supply chains, and every city has now become a really vulnerable island. And we saw that in the pandemic. Suddenly grocery store shelves were empty because the ships couldn't get into the ports. The trucks had stopped driving, and there was no food on shelves. It is a very desperate situation we're in in the United States, but unfortunately, we have exported that behavior of food systems to the entire developed world. London is now as vulnerable as the United States and the rest. Paris, as vulnerable. Los Angeles, where we sit today, has a three-day food supply. to millions and millions of people. And so if an earthquake happens and disrupts the one highway system that comes into Los Angeles, we will lose our food supply in three days and we will have a massive riot and humanitarian crisis on our hands. We are an island unto ourselves and our food is 3,000 miles away and we're not realizing it. Instead, we have 40 million acres of grass that we can't eat and we're spraying that with Roundup in our backyards to kill the few dandelions, which are the only edible and anti-cancer compound that's in your backyard right now. And so we need to start realizing we need to eat that dandelion green, not the dandelion flower. Before it flowers, you're eating that green and you're getting the nutrients and you're getting life back in and, and you go beyond that and you say, "Let's get some beets and turnips and all the rest. Let's get some other root vegetables in there." And suddenly your, your backyard could turn into a bounty of safety for your family, for your community and the rest. And so this is the paradigm shift that Farmer's Footprint is really working on is can we realize how vulnerable we've made ourselves as individuals, not just to the biological level of all of our chronic disease, but also the societal level as we have divorced ourselves from soil.

    2. JSJay Shetty49:53

       Is there

12. 49:54 – 1:00:26

    How to protect ourselves from chemically modified food?

    1. JSJay Shetty49:54

       any way-- I mean, hearing that, is there any way to have an optimal life still eating from a supermarket? Like the idea that, you know, I'm, I'm assuming that the majority of people listening are not gonna rush to start growing something in their backyard, not that they should not, and not that we're not encouraging it. I think it's incredible when people can. But again, going back to that conditioning, habit formation, all the challenges that come with that, what can we eat or how do we eat in order to protect ourselves?

    2. ZBDr. Zach Bush50:30

       Well, we learned it, uh, in spades during the pandemic. Um, you might remember there was a moment where we-- every place in the, in the country sold out of seeds.

    3. JSJay Shetty50:37

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ZBDr. Zach Bush50:38

       And so we started growing again. Uh, and we're seeing a very exciting movement in young people right now. A lot of people are leaving the cities to go start farming. They've never farmed before. They have absolutely no idea, but they have this deep knowingness inside of them that I'm supposed to get not just to a farm, but I'm supposed to build community around that farm. So I'm gonna take me and my best 10 friends, and we're gonna move out into the country, and we're gonna start farming. And the regenerative agricultural movement has been led mostly by women and mostly by youth in this country. And so there's a real movement, not just here, but now as we've spawned Farmer's Footprint UK, Farmer's Footprint Australia, the Western world is starting to reimagine its relationship to food and soil, and it's really the women and the, and the youth that are finding this path forward for us. And it's because I think deep inside of that feminine archetype that we all have access to, male, female, the rest, that feminine archetype is about nurture, and it is about connection. And that's ultimately what I believe the regenerative agriculture movement is in one word. It is a reconnect. It is a reconnect to nature, and there's many ways to do it. There's not a prescription for here's a regenerative farm. It's about listening into your nature, listening into the reality that's trying to express itself on that piece of land, and then being in support of that rather than trying to micromanage that thing. And so that's very much a feminine archetype we can all connect to, is how do we let life start coming into our lives in a biodiverse fashion? It doesn't necessarily have to happen just at the food and the soil. It can happen with your community and the inputs you're taking on. If your input every day is CNN or Fox News, you're gonna become a monocrop almost immediately. You're gonna lose all biodiversity of information. You're gonna become very monotonous in your belief systems. You're gonna k- be very easy to push into a small box of fear, guilt, and shame. If you go out in nature and spend hours a day hiking and walking through nature and smelling real soil and touching ferns and being in awe of the wildflower and bathing in a, in a waterfall, you can't be put in the same box because you c- are seeing the complexity and beauty of nature that predated our existence, let alone the existence of a television or a news channel or whatever it is. And so the, the excitement is for me is as far as way as this might sound to you right now to be growing your own food, all this stuff, you're just a few seconds away from your introduction to that universe.

    5. JSJay Shetty52:59

       Mm.

    6. ZBDr. Zach Bush52:59

       Get out to a park. Forget a park even. Lay down in, in somebody's yard that has a tree. If you lay down on your back and look up through the branches of a tree at a blue sky that has clouds passing over, your brain will start to rewire just with that light pattern that's coming through that tree because in that, it's like looking into a fire. If you can't do the tree, stare into a fire at night. If you can't do a fire, stare into a candle. Because in the frequencies of those inputs into our neurology, we, we put in information in the form of storytelling. A recent study demonstrated that if we look down at a fire, picture a fireplace between us here, if we look down at a fire around a campfire or the like, all the stem cells in our bodies turn on. They try to figure out, like, how is-- how are stem cells being activated by the fire? And turned out that it ha- it had to do with not just the fire and its presence, but our, our eye trajectory too. If I looked past the fire and didn't look into the fire, my stem cells didn't turn on. But if I dropped my gaze away from the horizon and looked down at the fire, my stem cells turn on. And I believe it a story of instead of chasing the future on the horizon, we need to look down into the energy that is between us. This fire that sits between us, we look down for a moment, become present instead of future looking to that horizon. We become present enough to sit in stillness and watch that, that vibrational experience of a red coal glowing and pulsing in the night. There's something in that that remembers ourselves. And it was around those fires that we sang our first songs, danced our first dances, and told our first stories as humanity, and that runs all the way to da- today. The place I have felt as an earthling for the first time in my Half a century, it's in the African bush around fire, listening to African drums, hearing the vibration of voices and tongues that I have forgotten existed. And in remembering that, I find my humanity again. I realize I am from here. I do belong here, and I am of this place. That is remembered around a fire looking down. And so gather around a candle or a fire, whatever it is, and start to tell stories again of things remembered or of yesterday if you need to. But start telling story around flame, and that is maybe your journey back into growing a piece of food yourself in your backyard. There's gonna be a deep remembrance of you of this is what peace feels like. This is what that pause does. Staring into the flame, you can find the silence necessary to find that guiding sense within you that we call intuition, that guiding sense that you have followed in your career to bring you to the success you've had. And so we all have that immediately available. Before we've even grown our own food, before we've grown anything, all of that is intact. And I have again and again seen people on the deathbed. As a hospice doctor, I was admitting 80 patients a week to die. So I've seen a lot of things that we call death. And even when biology is completely failing and they have a few heartba- beats left, a few breaths yet to take, they can get into that fire moment and they are crossing the veil and they're back again. They're crossing the veil and they're coming back, and then they open their eyes and it happens so, so often. Somebody who's been kind of in this comatose, you know, milieu of barely here suddenly comes crystal clear, looks you in the face and says a deep truth that may or may not make sense as you're the receiver, but in saying it, you can see them reconnect to their original self and they are more true to themselves in that moment of death than they ever were in their state of living in, in a state of disconnect. And so it i- it doesn't matter how close you are to death, that fire light is burning inside of you, if not in front of you. And in the silence in front of that fire, you can remember why you came here and why you did what you did.

    7. JSJay Shetty57:00

       Mm.

    8. ZBDr. Zach Bush57:00

       On Purpose is your show. And it turns out purpose is not outside of you. It's not something to go find. It's not something to go discover. That purpose is you being you.

    9. JSJay Shetty57:10

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ZBDr. Zach Bush57:11

        That original math that vibrates to animate your biology into a living life form for a moment that we would call a human lifespan. You're vibrating there and the purpose is to be you in this form, to take in the light energy of the cosmos, of the food you eat and express it in vitality within that liquid crystal of your body to vibrate. It's the vibration that makes you alive and that vibration can be shaped by your thoughts, your beliefs, the words you carry and the feelings that you have towards one another. And so this is our moment right now, is we can burn bright at our death moment on our deathbed, 60 years, 80 years left, however long is there on our march into that. We can rebirth now to come off of hospice and become a new species, become a new humanity, become a new expression as we lose fear, guilt and shame because we look past the death that we all fear and realize that life is abundant and it's infinite and it's always in its next transformation, next expression, which is always chasing more beauty and more intelligence than the rest. And so we sit here around a fire now talking about the demise of all things to realize the birth of everything.

    11. JSJay Shetty58:20

        I find your response is so refreshing.

    12. ZBDr. Zach Bush58:23

        [chuckles]

    13. JSJay Shetty58:24

        There is such a rejuvenation and rebirth hearing the ideas that you're sharing with the world because I can definitely personally attest to so many of the things that you're mentioning, whether it's lying down under the tree looking through the branches, whether it's deeply excavating and looking at the roots of a plant, whether it's looking out into the sky or cloud gazing, which is probably one of my favorite things to do, which is why I live where I live, or whether it may be just feeling reconnected. One of my favorite things was when my wife and I went to Hawaii a few years ago and we fell in love with it because we felt the people there had their own language for a culture that we've learned differently. So having studied the Vedas, the worship of the sun and the moon are such big parts of the Vedas and when we were in Hawaii, we would go out on a kayak every morning and pay our respects to the sun and it always felt beautiful to do it in the Hawaiian culture and through their traditions. And I remembered we walked around where they were showing us the petroglyphs and the writings and the stories on the rock and there was this one particular one which repeated itself which was a, a s- expanding circle and it was said that whenever a child is born in Hawaii, its umbilical cord is placed on the earth and a circle is drawn around it in that very spot so they can always come back to that and remember that they're always connected to the earth and that's where they belong. It's incredible how these very simple ideas can be so sacred and so powerful, as you said, internally. You f- you feel these things don't necessarily make sense in your head or you can't compute them in a logical reasoning point of view but, but you can feel them even when we were there you could, you could see it and you could feel it. You mentioned twice the-- You mentioned at the beginning

13. 1:00:26 – 1:10:45

    The importance of breathing

    1. JSJay Shetty1:00:26

       breath as one of the elements. You then mentioned it again when people are in their last breath. Could you walk us through the same kind of refreshing insight on breath?

    2. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:00:36

       The mechanism of breathing is the, the allowance to create new life and we exhale so that we can breathe back in.

    3. JSJay Shetty1:00:44

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:00:45

       And if you've ever been told suddenly in an audience like, "Okay, everybody inhale," it's very hard to inhale because they didn't tell you to exhale.

    5. JSJay Shetty1:00:51

       Mm-hmm.

    6. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:00:51

       And so to really take a good inhalation, you gotta tell the whole audience, "All right, everybody exhale. Blow it all out, blow it all out, blow it out. Now you can inhale." And in that exhalation, you're basically exchanging the, the life force with the environment around you. Um, when I exhale, I, I push out millions of different little tiny variants of g- my genetics through something called microRNA. It's basically my, my version of expressing, uh, a viral message to the world of, "Here, here's who I am right now. Here's what I'm expressing genetically. Here's what's happening." So I have a genetic signal that I breathe out, and I have a new potential for life that I breathe out in the form of carbon dioxide that I just derived from all the glucose and fatty acids that I'm deriving all of that sunlight from. So I'm releasing sunlight, and then I give back the CO2 to the atmosphere so I can breathe it back in. And turns out I need CO2 exchange. I need to breathe it as much as I need to exhale it because it's really the, the pulse of life, and it's the way in which I use oxygen at the cellular level. So I can't use oxygen unless I've got CO2. So I breathe out a big gift of CO2, and the atmosphere gives me back CO2 in an, in a ratio that allows me to use oxygen more effectively. And so CO2 is really the coursing bloodstream of, of life itself. It's the, the currency of life. And so that currency of energy is pulsing with every breath, and when I start to develop a, an addiction to breathing, I don't take that deep breath, and instead I d- have all these short little breaths that I take all the time 'cause I'm in a fight or flight state and I don't slow that respiration down. My neurology is reading all the time panic. And so in the same way that we're addicted to water that can never turn into a liquid crystal, and therefore we're always thirsty, in the same way, I always taking all, you know, 16 to 20 breaths a minute because I'm afraid I'm gonna run out of air because I haven't been taught to actually breathe.

    7. SPSpeaker1:02:42

       Mm.

    8. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:02:42

       And so the planet is now doing this as well as humans. Um, the, the planet can't take a deep breath right now because its lungs are the soil system. We've now killed 97% of the soil systems of the planet. 97% of arable soils on the planet are now depleted or severely depleted of their metabolism, their ability to breathe. In an ideal state, this planet breathes in a deep breath at night and then exhales in the morning. And you can watch this happen, especially in humid areas. I live in Virginia and along the Blue Ridge Mountains. At night, if you stand up high on, on the mountains, you get to see the, the, the forests of Virginia breathe in, and these... it looks like banks of, of clouds suddenly get sucked down onto the surface of the trees and then down into the canopy and down into the earth. And so the trees are returning the breath to the soil, and with it, all the water. In the morning, it exhales, and all that water appears on the surface as dew on the grass and in the canopy and everywhere. Well, that dew is now very cold 'cause it was breathed out by a deep geothermal cooling thing that we call the planet. The warming of the planet is not being caused by CO2 or greenhouse gases. We've been given a very h-half truth by our political systems that with Al Gore and the rest have said w- CO2 is our crisis, and we've now pledged $40 trillion by 2050 to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, atmosphere and all that 'cause we've been told it's the problem. But in fact, whether it's a dying patient on the bedside who can no longer breathe or me addicted to my short breathing or the planet that's lost its lungs and now has emphysema, CO2 starts rising in the atmosphere, and the heat goes up because we're not bringing that into the earth and out of the earth, into the earth, out of the earth on a daily basis to cool the planet. We lost the lungs, therefore we b- lost the, the exchange of life through CO2, and we lost the geothermal cooling that comes with breath. And so the planet has a fever, not for CO2, but for a lack of breath.

    9. SPSpeaker1:04:41

       Mm.

    10. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:04:42

        And so this is the transit that we need to do as a planetary, you know, participant, is we need to be part of the solution. We need to allow the earth to breathe again. I find it interesting that, you know, we always find the micro story in the macrocosm, and you find it fractally, which means at every single level of expression of nature, you'll find the same truth. And here we were in the middle of the pandemic where people were going blue 'cause th- the oxygen could not exchange from their blood cells into their cells, perhaps in part due to a virus. But deeper than that, we had, uh, covered our planet in the highest levels of carbon c-contamination in history 'cause of the largest fires that had raged for, for the year and a half before the pandemic and then all the way through the pandemic. We had the, the largest fires all over the world that had ever happened. So for all the poisoning in the atmosphere, we had cyanide in the air at levels unprecedented. We were breathing in cyanide, which causes this respiratory failure. We were ascribing it again just to the virus, but I think it was a lot of different factors happening at that time. We were losing our ability to breathe. Meanwhile, the planet's warming up, warming up, warming up, and CO2's going up in the atmosphere. We can't breathe. The planet can't breathe. We couldn't breathe as a species. And then we get this extraordinarily tragic moment where we watch a police officer with his knee on the neck of an African American man, and he dies in the streets s-screaming, "I cannot breathe." At every one of those fractal levels, we got to witness the suffocation of life. And it was suffocating in that moment with the police officers too afraid to move, and maybe angry, maybe lots of other negative emotions in there, but ultimately it's fear. Fear of death, fear of different, being different, fear of everything other than self. So that knee stays on. And right now we have our proverbial knee on the neck of this planet. We are not letting this planet breathe 'cause we're afraid we might go hungry, so we're waiting for technology to save us. We have more and more genetic technologies. We now have robots trying to mine food out of the earth. We're waiting for more and more technology, and we just will not let the knee off the neck of the planet because we're afraid she won't provide for us. We need to let the knee up. We need to be confident that we are one species that is the compilation of hundreds of thousands of species that has made life possible. We need to start to breathe together. We need to move to a point where there is grace rather than fear, where there is joy rather than guilt, there is love rather than shame. And to get there, we're going to have to trust that we are supposed to be here. We are not the cancer of the planet. We are the potential energy of the planet. We are the highest expression that the planet has made so far, and we can stay to play if we choose. And so we need to take the neck off the planet. We need to take the, take the knee off the neck of the planet, take the knee off the neck of one another, and start to move in a state of abundance. And we will do this as we find those quiet spots around the flame, breathe slower, breathe deeper as individuals, as a planet, and in so doing, start to feel the future. And this is the mystery that we see baking all over the world. I'm very gifted in my career right now that I get to travel all over the place all the time. And so the-- in the more than one and a half million miles I've flown over the last ten years, I've gotten to meet nearly every people group on the planet, and I've spent time in so many continents over the last couple years. And for all of the fear and guilt and shame that we just exercise as a planet, I have s- never seen more optimism, more excitement, more of that bubbling energy of, "Oh my gosh, it's about to arrive. We are about to arrive. Something is about to happen. This is so exciting to be alive right now." I hear that all the time. "It's so exciting to be alive right now." So what is the light that's shining so bright in humanity as our biologic light dims? I think it's the original math. I think it's the soul. The energy that animates life is burning bright right now 'cause it is not diminished by the energies that it was putting into the biologic expression of humanity. It is burning brighter 'cause it says, "Look beyond the flesh to find the truth, and in that energy field, you will find the new life that will code for your new future." And so we have to get to that hospice moment. We have to let the lights almost die out, so we can cross the veil and see the truth and then come back and change everything.

    11. JSJay Shetty1:08:58

        Incredible. Dr. Zach Bush, if anyone's listening right now and they wanna find that optimism, maybe join your eight-day program, like to learn more about the solution aspect of everything you've been sharing today, where, where should they go? How can they connect with you and connect with your work?

    12. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:09:14

        The easiest place for all the work is zachbushmd.com. The journeyofintrinsichealth.com is the eight-week program. Uh, the intelligenceofnature.com is, is all of the deep soil science and the supplements and everything else that have come out of that soil science and, and the study of glyphosate and the solutions to it. Um, there's an opportunity for you guys to engage also just in, in community with us because, uh, it's one thing to take a supplement or take a class, but ultimately, if we don't come into connected community, we're not gonna create that future that we have. And so there's an opportunity for you to engage in the community platforms that we've been creating across many of these products, going deeper than the product to, to really start to create the solutions for the future that are-- that we can all feel is already here, and that's my greatest excitement, is watching people come together. There's something called quorum sensing that I find really beautiful. Uh, when you get enough biodiversity into a living environment, suddenly the whole thing does something more intelligent than any s- constituent can do. And so we need to do a quorum sensing moment as not just humanity, but as a planet. And so we need to connect to our ecosystems and diversity and cultures, and for their diversity, the arts, and their diversity, the dance and the storytelling and the flames in a million different iterations, then we need to bring that in together for a very bright flame to burn and for us to connect to that quorum sensing moment where we do quantum intelligence, not from the mind, but from that knowingness within you. And it's in that community connect that we f- we hope to meet you.

    13. JSJay Shetty1:10:39

        It's beautiful. Thank you so much. I hope that everyone who's been listening and watching, I hope you go and check it out. And Z-Zach,

14. 1:10:45 – 1:17:33

    Zach on Final Five

    1. JSJay Shetty1:10:45

       we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five or a fast five, and these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. And Zach Bush, these are your final five. So the first is: What is the best advice you've ever heard, given or received?

    2. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:02

       Slow down.

    3. JSJay Shetty1:11:03

       [chuckles] What is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

    4. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:08

       Stop moving.

    5. JSJay Shetty1:11:10

       Stop moving.

    6. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:10

       [chuckles]

    7. JSJay Shetty1:11:12

       Question number three: What's something that you used to value that you no longer value anymore?

    8. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:18

       Marriage.

    9. JSJay Shetty1:11:19

       Interesting. In what sense?

    10. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:22

        You said one word. [laughs]

    11. JSJay Shetty1:11:23

        Yeah. Uh, now I'm, I'm digressing.

    12. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:11:27

        It was my most important value system, uh, through most of my life, and, uh, it's not to say that marriage is not important on our human journey, um, but, uh, it was the course of miracles that really unveiled what was happening in my effort, uh, towards marriage, and I enjoyed my marriage. A twenty-year marriage with my wife and two amazing kids, and then she found a new path, and there was a decision whether to see that as failure or to actually, for the first time in our twenty years together, practice the un part of unconditional love.

    13. JSJay Shetty1:12:01

        Mm.

    14. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:12:02

        And I realized during our journey towards divorce, when I realized that she was definitely gonna take this other path, it was a realization of, "I really do love this person, and I'm sitting here telling her how much I love her, and therefore, she shouldn't leave me." Oh my gosh. What, what is that? That is the deepest condition I could possibly... "I love you, but only if you stay right next to me and I o- own this thing." And so that was my journey personally into-

    15. JSJay Shetty1:12:29

        Wow

    16. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:12:29

        ... deep heartbreak that led to the deepest joy that a person can have is the exercise of unconditional love. And I certainly didn't-

    17. JSJay Shetty1:12:37

        Wow

    18. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:12:37

        ... do it perfectly. I didn't do it well, but my gosh, did I live differently after that moment where I realized I can love her on this path that she knows she's chosen, and we've gotten to watch both of us bloom into people we could have never become in that marriage because it was a box-

    19. JSJay Shetty1:12:52

        Wow

    20. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:12:52

        ... that was an agreement of no change. And as we back up, I think we're gonna realize that we put love and relationship into a box of ownership just in the last couple hundred years. It never existed before.

    21. JSJay Shetty1:13:04

        Mm.

    22. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:13:05

        We developed this ownership model so we could pass wealth from generation to generation, not realizing when we built the box, we would crush love-

    23. JSJay Shetty1:13:13

        Mm

    24. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:13:14

        ... which is ultimately the capacity to see beauty in another. And if for a moment you think you can own another's beauty, you have stolen it from them ultimately-

    25. JSJay Shetty1:13:22

        Mm

    26. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:13:22

        ... and they will become miserable, and you will forget why you fell in love with them 'cause you can't see their beauty anymore. And so in a radical way, we're going to have to release each other from the boxes we put each other in. It doesn't mean the end of relationship. It's probably the birth of human relationship, maybe for the first time, but certainly in, in recent modern times, we're gonna have to release ourselves from the box and we're gonna have to do partnership relationships in much, much radically different ways, and they're gonna have to come out of the fear of not having enough love-

    27. JSJay Shetty1:13:49

        Mm.

    28. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:13:49

        -and start to come from an abundance model where everything is love.

    29. JSJay Shetty1:13:53

        Mm. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for opening up, and that's really, really beautiful to hear. I'm glad, I'm glad I asked us to go off-piste. All right, question number four: What's something you're trying to learn right now or a skill you're trying to learn?

    30. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:14:07

        Beauty. The witness of beauty.

Episode duration: 1:17:33