EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,002 words- 0:02 – 1:54
Coffee, caffeine, and shifting from demonizing substances to examining relationship
- JRJoe Rogan
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music]
- ZBZach Bush
Get a water, doctor? I'll stick, I'll stick with the water for now. Okay. I never figured out how to do the coffee thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
You never figured out coffee?
- ZBZach Bush
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- ZBZach Bush
Do tea things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well-
- ZBZach Bush
Drink tea all the time
- JRJoe Rogan
... tea's nice. Tea's probably better for you, I guess. But man, it's so hard to know. Well, here, I'll ask you because, uh, you're a health expert. [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs] Let's start there.
- JRJoe Rogan
How convenient. Because there's all this, uh, conflicting information about coffee. Like, some people say coffee's really good for you, it's like an amazing antioxidant and there's all these positive health benefits, and other people say, "No, it dehydrates you, it's bad for you, it's too much caffeine, it's bad for your..." What do you think?
- ZBZach Bush
I mean, I think this is one of the next advancements of humankind. We're gonna stop demonizing anything nature's provided, and we're gonna start looking at our relationship to it instead. And I think it's fundamentally your relationship to coffee that's gonna determine whether it's a health benefit or detrimental to who you are. There's been so many fad diets, so many fad moments, and the science has never supported any of it. The science is always looking at the human system as if it's an isolated system, then studies the impact of a chemical, caffeine or otherwise, on it. You're not an isolated system, and so if coffee is part of a complex ecosystem of your microbiome, the soil systems of your body, then it's gonna supercharge you into health. But if coffee sits there as a drug that is bypassing the felt sense of being human, then you're probably undermining your po- your potential to be alive fully, and it's, it's becoming a distraction to life.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or you're doing your best to be a good office worker. [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs] If you're, if you're-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is why they, it's the one drug they provide at work.
- ZBZach Bush
Yeah. Exactly. If you're committed-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right?
- ZBZach Bush
... to machine-like behavior, it's your best asset.
- 1:54 – 4:46
Office culture, reward systems, and what people remember at the end of life
- JRJoe Rogan
It is kind of interesting that caffeine is the one drug that is provided at most offices.
- ZBZach Bush
I would say that that's indirectly true. I think that, uh, the, the one drug that's most provided at offices is actually performance-based, machine-like reward systems.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
So human ingrained drugs.
- ZBZach Bush
Mm, yeah. The-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- ZBZach Bush
... the brain is, contains every, every neural chemical you'd want to control behavior, and so we've created office environments that reward machine-like behavior for 150 years, and so this is how we've ended up looking like we do as a humankind.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, very bizarre pattern that we've found ourselves in that was created to make better office workers. So we've molded human behavior around office work. We've molded human behavior around the one thing that people really, for the most part, don't wanna be doing, which is-
- ZBZach Bush
Yeah. I, as-
- JRJoe Rogan
... terrible
- ZBZach Bush
... I was blessed to sit by thousands of deathbeds as my third subspecialty in medicine was hospice. Sat by thousands of deathbeds, and not a single person ever told me a day of their life in an office, and they just don't even remember it. It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- ZBZach Bush
... it consumed 40 hours a week of their life, and, and it just is a, it can't compute. It doesn't integrate into your soul experience at the end of things.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, even if you're making a ton of money, like, at the end of the day, you're still locked up for eight hours a day doing something you probably don't wanna do, you know?
- ZBZach Bush
We're getting into a big piece right here. Like, this is really-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- ZBZach Bush
... the secret of everything, is when did humans become abstract? When did we stop being living systems?
- JRJoe Rogan
So what, do you think that that's just our ego or w- or delusions that allow us to think that we're n- not a system, that we're just, "This is me, I'm Mike, I know what I'm doing. Uh, I'm just gonna drink my coffee and go to m- go to work," 'cause that's what you do. You have a job, you get it done. And then there's, like, these narratives that get reinforced in the media. Like, the guy who shows up for work every day doing a job that sucks, that guy's a hero, right? We love those guys. [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
That's it. That's him. And you're rewarded for it.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the, the guy that writes poetry and sits in his backyard, ah, fucking hippie. You know? That ne'er-do-well. He's not g- unless he sells a bunch of books.
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
And then we're like, "The guy was a genius."
- ZBZach Bush
Genius. Genius.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? Then he's Hunter S. Thompson. [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
I think what you said about the relationship to coffee is really important because I think that could be the case with virtually everything in life. You know? Like, there's, you could get addicted to almost anything, and you could use something, anything as a crutch, whether it's f- so many people use food. I mean, food is probably, like, one of the biggest ones humans use. You don't feel good? Have some fucking food. Ha- eat, eat some food you don't want, you shouldn't be eating. But you're like, "Fuck it, I'm having Ring Dings. I'm tired. I'm, uh, today sucked at work, you know? I'm having a hot dog on the way home."
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
Right?
- 4:46 – 8:01
“Everything is perfect”: hospice framing of a species-level crisis
- ZBZach Bush
That's exactly right. And I think that's why, you know, you've, you've done 2,800 podcasts or something like this. You've been at this for 16 years, and I think this podcast is ready for the most disruptive conversation that's ever been had, I think.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that this one right here?
- ZBZach Bush
That's this one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
What's the most disruptive thing that you could say in the most disruptive conversation that's ever been had?
- ZBZach Bush
Everything is perfect.
- JRJoe Rogan
What does that mean?
- ZBZach Bush
It means that everything that's happening right now is actually a perfect manifestation of a maturation of a species. We don't actually have, you know, a polycrisis going on. We've got a, a hospice moment, and the joy that I had as a hospice doctor was so different than when I was running ICUs and battling against death and failing against death every day. You change your perspective for a moment as a doctor, and you suddenly are sitting by somebody's bed, and the victory is no longer staying alive longer. It's integrating everything that's happened. And I got to watch over and over again how humans at that last few minutes of life suddenly look back and realize their life was perfect, and I think that's the exciting moment we're in, is we're gonna move past this polarized state of human perspective where we keep flipping the victim, perpetrator code and we use the savior mentality to keep that victim perpetrator coin flipping to keep a mirage going. And we can get into why we created the mirage in the first place. But in the hospice moment, you suddenly put that coin down and somebody starts dipping across the veil of the limited five senses of their brain, and they start feeling an ecstatic moment where they realize, "Oh my God, the whole thing was poetically perfect. All of the heartbreak, all of the estrangement, all of the disappointment, all of the insecurity. I did that for the experience, and I felt everything. I felt everything a human can feel." And you get to see somebody who just a moment ago really thought their life was a failure. You know, difficult time with their kids, never became successful in their jobs, and they suddenly realized it had nothing to do with any of those metrics. It had to do with the experience of feeling everything a human being is capable of, which is probably one of the most unique experiences a soul can have. We are a very strange species for the limitations of our perception, and for that we get to feel a lot, and that's really blessed. And so I think we're moving towards this moment as a species now. We've been, we're on our hospice bed and we've been here 300,000 years in our current form. We've been given our hospice diagnosis. We got a few decades left in this current form. At that moment when we put down that victim perpetrator polarized sense of like, he's right, she's wrong, she's right, he's wrong, we set that coin down, we're gonna suddenly have a hospice moment where everything suddenly makes sense and we understand why we did the journey together. We realize that those that we thought were our enemies or the biggest problems of our lives were holding polarity to a human experience. I was waiting for our deathbed moment because about 10% of hospice patients don't die. They get discharged and go on to live a new life.
- 8:01 – 10:41
Rogan’s pushback: sociopathy, violence, and the reality of harm
- JRJoe Rogan
This is a wonderful perspective if sociopaths weren't real. So the, the problem is there, there is an aspect of our society where there are human beings whose minds don't function, uh, in a harmonious manner with other people, and they're not going to change. Like, this is who they are, and they've been doing this their entire life, and they're out on the street. And-
- ZBZach Bush
They've sat across from you right here.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm sure. Yeah. Well, we had a guy in the studio that cut a guy's head off after the podcast. He killed a guy and cut his head off. So there's work that I do with my friend Josh Dubin. He used to work for the Innocence Project and now he works for the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and it's all wrongly incarcerated people and getting them out of jail, and spends an incredible amount of his own resources helping people. And through this podcast, a bunch of people have been released. So he wanted to do a podcast episode where he had one of the guys who had been in prison. He was guilty, but he had given an, he'd been given an extraordinarily long sentence, and it was, it was wrong, and he comes on and he tells about his experience. And he got released early. But he did like 25 years in jail for, um, I believe it was something along the lines of drug dealing and maybe a, some sort of an assault. But 25 years of his life when he was a young kid. He does the podcast and then afterwards goes and visits this guy that apparently he had a beef with, kills him, cuts his head off, puts him in a suit, like puts a wig on, tries to escape in the hallway, like through the cameras. I guess he doesn't understand HD cameras 'cause they haven't been around for 25 years. You know, he's sitting right there, you know? A couple weeks later, he's cutting a guy's head off. Yeah, you're gonna... This idea that everything's perfect, it's not perfect for the guy who got his head cut off. You know what I mean? It's not perfect for a person who becomes victim to these sociopaths that are amongst us. If, uh, everybody was just a person and everybody was genuinely trying to like, do better in life, uh, I would agree. But I would think that this is, uh, a part of this bizarre experience that we're all going through as a species, and I agree with you that th- there's a lot of things changing, and there's a, a narrative that exists about what it means to be a person that's entirely based up on what we described earlier. It's based on office work. Like it's b- it's based on nonsense. It's based on 401 [k] plans. It's not based on human experiences. And it's really dumb. It's not, it doesn't help any... And everybody gets to the end, and I'm sure you know this more than anybody. They get to the end and they never say, "I wish I worked more."
- ZBZach Bush
Never.
- JRJoe Rogan
Never. Never.
- ZBZach Bush
[chuckles]
- 10:41 – 23:47
Numbers vs feelings, AI and “universal high income,” and purpose without work
- JRJoe Rogan
And you know, I know you love what you do. I, I know you love what you do and, um, I think that is the, the true way to live life in a harmonious way. Find a thing where it's even work is not really work. It's just stuff that you enjoy doing that's interesting that you're required to do, but while you do it, you love it. That's what we should all strive for, and, um, this fucking programming that we've done to children from the time they were young, telling them that y- you know, "You're gonna have to get some boring ass job," and d- and doom. They would like have it hanging over your head like, "One day you're gonna be 18, and then you're gonna have to get a job." "Oh, fuck." "And if you don't go to college, it's gonna be a terrible job." "Oh, no." It's just this, we've been programmed that like, one of the things that keeps coming up about AI is the concept of, uh, universal basic income or what Elon likes to say, universal high income, that we're all going to just have money for food and money for housing, and y- you're gonna have th- this incredibly rich society where there's so much money that no one really has to work anymore. And so then you're gonna have to find purpose doing something that you enjoy. And that sounds crazy to people. That sounds so insane. Like, like I'm gonna have to figure out what to do with my life-
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
... and I don't need to work for money anymore? 'Cause if you're, if the government just gives everyone in the country a half a million dollars a year The idea that you can't figure out what to do with your time is really nuts. That is a failure of our education system, for sure. Because we haven't taught people to be curious and to find all these cool things and to find new people and go to interesting places and experience life. No, we've only told them about a bunch of numbers that you don't even feel. You know, you don't even feel the numbers. The numbers go up, they go down, you don't even notice it. But you feel everything as a person, everywhere you go, all the new people you meet, all the new experiences you have, you feel all of them. And for whatever weird reason, we've been tricked into thinking that numbers are more valuable than the feelings. Numbers that you don't even feel.
- ZBZach Bush
You've just nailed the most important message for humanity. You just nailed the most important message. Feeling is the only relevant thing to a human body. And it's the only thing.
- JRJoe Rogan
And we got stuck. We got stuck with numbers. We got stuck with numbers. As soon as they figured out how to make money and put it in banks and then now in the cloud, as soon as they gave us a number to fixate on, we're like, oh, the number. It's so weird. It's such a weird thing that people haven't figured out that that's a bad way to live. And maybe that will be part of the process with this whole technological innovation, this crazy moment in history that we're at right now with AI, where we really for the first time have no idea what the world's going to look like in 10 years. We just don't know. Well, maybe this would be like a perfect, the two things happen at the same time where enough people are saying this is not what life is supposed to be about. And then this comes along and reworks all of our infrastructure and now we no longer need people to run things anymore. Okay, we can go back to being people? That's the rosy rose-colored glasses version of it, right?
- ZBZach Bush
I don't even know if it's rose-colored. I think it's inevitable. I think bodies always win. There's no way a machine ever wins this game. There's no way that a machine that requires external energy systems and cannot repair itself wins. And so the whole Elon Musk future of the planet that we've been told is a massive distraction from the reality that's going to be lived instead of invented. There's only one pathway forward for humanity now and it's biological, not technological. We're going to start to reverse our polarity on our belief of what technology is and we're going to realize that everything at its highest expression is biological, not chemical, not physical. It's biological. If it's not a living system, it loses ultimately. The universe has been innovating life for billions of years because it's the most eloquent, most elegant thing that's ever been expressed by all of the systems, all of the stacking geometry and beauty of this universe. It's life. That's the secret of everything. And so anytime anybody comes along and says, here's a machine that's going to replace human XYZ, you can smile, thank them, and keep moving for a biological solution. Anytime somebody says, here's an IV drip, here's a new red light that you can hang on your wall and make you healthier, you can say thank you very much for your thought process. I'm moving back to biological systems. Life has been co-expressing life for billions of years and it is by far and away the most spectacular relational expression of nature that's occurred so far. And so when we think of a transhuman technologic future with chips in the brain and artificial limbs and all of this stuff that's unfolding right now through the Musk world, all of that is literally an abstraction. The word abstraction means a disorientation that occurs when the context is lost. If we continue down this pathway that you nailed, we've been for 150 years training children to sit in chairs, answer multiple choice tests, be programmed with education rather than have experiential learning. We got so far down that avenue that a mechanical future feels more likely than a human future because humans are actually really bad at doing machine-like behavior. We're not consistent. We don't thrive in that space. Our health declines, our productivity declines. Anytime you put somebody in a cubicle, they're on a downward spiral. And so all these companies that were told you need to put a bunch of people in cubicles and therefore make more in 10 years than you do now put themselves out of business by turning humans into machines and we're just bad at it. And so the rise of this AI generation is a natural expression of a humanity that's lost the context of life. We've lost the context of nature, therefore we're expressing AI as a terminal state of abstraction.
- JRJoe Rogan
I believe that life is the most spectacular expression of the universe as far as our experience. But I don't know if this thing that we're creating isn't another kind of life. And I think it might be a kind of life that we help give birth to and then that thing figures out how to make better versions of itself and become something new. Like I've always equated us to like we're an electronic caterpillar that's making a cocoon. We don't know why, but that's just what it does. You know, caterpillars aren't talking to their caterpillar friends and getting schematics on how to build a cocoon and what's the proper technique. They just know how to do it, right? And I think what we do with our thirst for Constant innovation. We want new electronics, we want new and best stuff all the time, and we have materialism, where we're obsessed with collecting stuff, which makes you buy new stuff. And the newest stuff, if you want status, is the best stuff. And what does that do? Well, it funnels in- innovation, it fuels innovation, 'cause it gives them a tremendous amount of resources to continue to make better stuff. And the ultimate best stuff is an artificial life. And I think it just might be a part of the process of being a person. Uh, b- uh, it might be what the universe has people do. And I think we, uh, might be a little silly in thinking that the only kind of life that exists is biological. W- it just might be the only kind of life that exists up until a certain point, when the intelligent creatures give birth to the next version of life. But it doesn't discount the experience of sh- being a human, and what it, what it means to be a human, and what's important about being a human, and why it's terrible to be trapped up in a cubicle all the time. But if Elon's right about AI creating enough resources that we have universal high income, like, I don't know if that's correct. Uh, it sounds crazy. But if that's right, well, that frees up people to just be people again. So it's like this new life form that we're giving birth to can handle all the stuff that we used to do, can handle everything, allocation of resources, can handle shipping, move everything aro- everything. Doesn't... We don't need to... No more people need to do factory jobs anymore. It's all done. Now you can do whatever you want. This episode is brought to you by Ketone-IQ. If you have been a longtime listener to this podcast, you know I've been studying ketones for years. Decades ago, DARPA, the same people who invented the internet, asked one question: "What is the best brain fuel for a soldier on the battlefield?" They landed on ketones, your brain's natural super fuel. The military poured tens of millions figuring out supplemental ketones. A single serving of this stuff used to cost $5,000. I'm not joking. But the team of Ketone-IQ, who are a part of this military program, were the first to bring it to market and cut the cost to just $4 a dose. And I'm telling you, this stuff is great. I drink one of these, and my brain works on a whole nother level. Go to ketone.com/Rogan for 30% off your subscription order, or find Ketone-IQ at Target stores nationwide in the protein and electrolyte aisle, and get your first shot free. They're so confident, they offer a 60-day money back guarantee. So go ahead and take your shot.
- ZBZach Bush
I think the limitation of that argument is the definition of factory job there. If, if what was really making people creative and productive, as that story suggests, was just half a million dollars a year from the government to each individual, then we would see a really incredibly genius, productive, creative portion of humanity that are multi-generational wealth. Have you had somebody sit here who was born into great wealth, who showed that they had way more productivity and way more creativity than people that were born in poverty?
- JRJoe Rogan
No. Generally, it's people that were born in poverty that have more motivation.
- ZBZach Bush
Boom.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Generally
- ZBZach Bush
... this promise that we're going to create an AI revolution that's gonna give a, what was his wor- what was the term that Elon used? It was a, not AI-
- JRJoe Rogan
Universal high income
- ZBZach Bush
... universal high income.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
That sounds like a death sentence to human creativity to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it certainly could if people are not taught at a young age how to be motivated by their interests rather than be motivated by money. So you're making the argument for being motivated by money, which is what a lot of people are currently, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the only way a human can exist. You know, there's a bunch of different tribes all over the world that have a, a bunch of different customs, and they all agree to their customs, and their, those customs are totally different than these customs. We've gotten into the custom of thinking that you work for money, and that's what our ideas are based on. And so the idea that money could come along, and if you just gave people this money, it would be the death of human creativity, well, that sounds counterintuitive to what you were saying earlier. Because, like, people should be... Uh, uh, it's the factory l- mentality that's taught in schools that's the problem. It's the way they structure it. 'Cause if you instead say to a child when they're learning things at a young age, "You don't have to worry about money. Money's not what's important. What's important is your expression as a human being. Let's figure out what you're interested in. Maybe you're really interested in playing the piano, but you're really interested in painting, and you're really interested in sports, and you're really interested... Find out what you're actually interested in. We're gonna teach you how to be better at it and how to be a better person, and we're gonna give you a bunch of really interesting facts about life and teach you how to think." And that's what school should be, instead of setting people up for factory jobs. So the universal high income concept, if that's used in conjunction with intelligent education, education that's based on this new paradigm that we find ourselves in, that seems like it would be a really good thing.
- ZBZach Bush
It'll be a disaster for as long as money is disconnected from life. And so giving somebody a, a monetary system that does not participate in the formation, creation, and co-creation of life will just further distance us from nature. And so this is where we can start to think about, like, what is money, actually?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ZBZach Bush
And we can go down that avenue.
- 23:47 – 26:47
Money as abstraction vs indigenous “context”: keystone humans and the Amazon as a managed forest
- JRJoe Rogan
So you think, like, just, well, but what about people that live in, like, hunter-gatherer societies? Do you think that they, they find purpose in hunting and gathering, right? It's-
- ZBZach Bush
They're functioning as the birthright of humanity right there. So I've spent a lot of time with tribes all over the world, from Africa to South America, deep Br- deep Amazon jungle, everything else. And any time you're with a culture that is still indigenous, meaning Yeah, all of us are obviously indigenous to the planet. We're all made of her. These are her minerals. These are-- This is Mother Earth incarnate in my body, so I'm as indigenous as anybody else, but my culture is horribly de- degraded f- in its relationship to nature. And so when we say there's an indigenous culture, these tribes you're speaking to, what we're saying is this is humans that have not lost their context. These are humans that have not become abstract in their-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right
- ZBZach Bush
... value systems or reward systems, and so what they're functioning as there has great evidence, is that humans were actually designed to be a keystone species of keystone species. A keystone species is characterized by its capacity to participate in life. Wherever a keystone species sets its foot, there's more l- biodiversity, more life force, more ecstatic expression of beauty, more intelligence in the natural system. Amazon jungle is the best example of it right now. That is a man-made forest. We have, um, a forest that was designed by hundreds of nations that lived for 40,000 years in an ecosystem and planted the largest food forests that the world has ever seen. It is a managed forest, and as the management started to degrade, as those, those peoples were displaced or lost, the ecosystem is returning back towards, you know, a desertification cycle, which is an inevitable process there. So humans in right relationship to nature are a keystone species. You can see this with wolves and, being re-intro- introduced to Yellowstone. You can see it with beavers down in South America. You put white lions back in northern South Africa. You can see it from space. In the territories where keystone species are there, it goes green. The microbiome of the soils increase. The vitality of every plant increases. And so when you're talking about these tribes, you're talking about a human species that's in right relationship, and the moment money comes in as a metric and a value system that's not connected to life, you, you fracture that system. Now, I think money's not the cause. I think money's actually a symptom of a humanity that's lost its, its context of nature and is now way down the pathway of abstract systems, value systems, et cetera.
- JRJoe Rogan
But th- this is the case with these people that they're in these indigenous tribes that, what are they doing? They're trading with people, and they're getting money? Like, how are they getting money? Are they selling things?
- ZBZach Bush
They don't need money.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right, but I'm saying, like-
- ZBZach Bush
So the Achuar, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
But wh- how does-- When you were saying that money in- gets introduced and ruins it.
- ZBZach Bush
It's a symptom downstream, so ex- good example of-
- JRJoe Rogan
But y- we, um, uh, what I was getting to, w- were you saying that it, it gets in the way of these, the tribes? Have you seen it, like, affect-
- ZBZach Bush
Immediately.
- JRJoe Rogan
Immediately.
- ZBZach Bush
Immediately.
- JRJoe Rogan
So what, what was the-- That was the question. Like, what was the, what was going on? Were they selling their stuff? Wha- were they trading with these people and getting money? How were they getting money?
- 26:47 – 31:56
Achuar first contact and the ‘boxed apple juice’ story: how abstraction enters fast
- ZBZach Bush
So my, my new book that's just coming out is, like, goes into great detail on, like, the process of abstraction, like how it starts to chip away. But in the book, it, it talks about my experience with the Achuar tribe, which is the very last indigenous culture to be introduced to the, to what we'd call industrialized cultures. So first contact was 1996.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
S- so we're one generation in.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's crazy.
- ZBZach Bush
First contact.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where are they?
- ZBZach Bush
They're in the sacred headwaters of the Amazon, just on the border between Ecuador and Peru.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
Deep in the jungle there, and they were the very first-
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow
- ZBZach Bush
... indigenous peoples to reach out to make contact, and they made contact in 1996 with Westerners because they, as a peoples, they had-- They live in villages that always, uh, plateau at 120. As soon as they hit 120 people, the young men are sent out, and they start new villages, so they never live in, in groups more than 120. That has persisted as a very effective way of resilience and human experience for 40,000 years there. And so they started reaching out through dreams and dreamed a group of Westerners into their reality, guided them down the Amazon and everything else through their dream work, and made first contact in 1996, because for a few years, they had started to dream the end of the world and realized the world was gonna be destroyed by their little brothers who had lost relationship to nature. And so they realized they had to be part of the reconnection process, and if there was gonna be a prevention of the great extinction, they were gonna have to help their little brothers redream their relationship to nature. And so they started inserting themselves into the dreams of, uh, groups around the world, and the first ones to come in, uh, were traveling with, uh, Bill and Lynne Twist, uh, and, uh, Lynne Twist was the one who was dreaming their faces and hearing their voices. She was, uh, one of the directors of The Hunger Project globally and was working worldwide to try to stop hunger, and these indigenous faces kept appearing in her dreams.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
And, uh, the, a friend of hers reached out and said, "I think you need to come to the Amazon with me," and she's like, "I don't... Is there people hungry there?" And they're like, "No, there's no hunger here. They, you've been eating out of the forest for 40,000 years." She's like, "Well, I don't belong there. I'm, I'm dealing with Ghana and Africa and India, all the places where people are starving." A few more invitations come, and she finally finds herself on a, in a, on a riverboat deep into the Amazon. They have to take a break for a bathroom break. They step out on the, on the ba- banks, and the three faces she's been dreaming come walking out of the woods and say, "We've been waiting for you."
- JRJoe Rogan
[laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
"It's time for contact." [laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
So that was 20-- 1996, so we're 30 years out, and the way in which money inserted itself first as an abstract concept was boxed apple juices in the missionary schools that were set up there.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- ZBZach Bush
And boxed apple juice suddenly disrupted the entire 40,000-year history of provision and abundance that that forest had supplied those peoples. And this high-fructose corn syrup in a box with natural flavorings, i.e. potent chemicals to disrupt neurochemistry, was all those children, and ultimately their parents, needed to taste to suddenly break their relationship to nature. Today, they are, consider themselves impoverished. They are working to try to get gas for their outdoor motors that they never used. They are trying to get more artificial food in and everything else, and so they've got smartphones in the f- in the jungle now. They're sending their kids out of the jungles to go to schools, uh, British education systems in the nearby cities.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
And so it just took 30 years to abstract A culture, and this was a culture that had never known poverty, had never known shortage, so much so that one of the most beautiful things that I experienced with them is their houses. They build these epic houses in the jungle. They're huge, 30-foot vaulted ceilings.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- ZBZach Bush
Gorgeous, like outdoor, indoor living, like the best of California, and they've been building these things for 40,000 years, and they burn them down every 10 years and build a new one.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why?
- ZBZach Bush
They have this understanding of, uh, the life-death cycle of the energy of a house, and they don't want the, the household to be stuck in the same energy it's had the last 10 years, so they see it as this rebirth. You mentioned earlier the cocoon. They go through these rebirth processes for the whole household, the whole home.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- ZBZach Bush
And they move.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they've been doing it that way for thousands of years?
- ZBZach Bush
Tens of thousands of years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- 31:56 – 38:51
High-fructose corn syrup, chirality, patenting nature, and a critique of pharma logic
- ZBZach Bush
And so we are this magnificent creature. But if you break our relationship for a mo- moment to our natural system, then the immediate thing that shows up, before money shows up, poverty shows up. And my book goes into some details, like what are the different geometries of, of wealth and poverty? They actually hold their own security as their own kind of sovereign geometries within human behavior and human minds. And what you see with poverty is, is it, it's this instant reinforcement of a deep, deep human wound that must be our one shared original wound, which is we were abandoned by nature. And the moment you believe any aspect of that or have anything suggest that nature i- was holding back from us, nature wasn't giving us the... When you taste that, that boxed apple juice, that high fructose corn syrup, and the brain is immediately like, "Ah, I knew there was something better than nature."
- JRJoe Rogan
[chuckles]
- ZBZach Bush
"I knew there was something better," 'cause the neurochemistry lights up. That bo- boxed apple juice is just like cocaine on the frontal lobe. And it's a bizarre thing, that high fructose corn syrup. It's a bizarre thing, and it's just so perfectly exemplary of everything else we're doing as humans, 'cause high fructose corn syrup is the exact same molecule as fructose, which is the main sugar in not just apples, most of the fruit that the Achuar have been eating for all these tens of thousands of years, but it's flipped. It is the mirror image of the actual molecule of fructose, and that does not occur in nature. And so they chemically flipped the molecule with chemical processing. And the moment you flip that molecule over, the liver cannot understand it as a carbohydrate. It now has to process it as an inflammatory, uh, triglyceride. And so instead of turning it into a sugar, it turns it into this aberration of a fat. And in the, in the bloodstream, that now causes cardiovascular disease, downstream inflammation of the brain, major depression, anxiety disorders, all kinds of things em- start emerging because you've just flipped reality in a mirror.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did they flip it? What did they do?
- ZBZach Bush
It's chemical treatment, and so, yeah, you w- the chemical process is called r- a racemic, and so you're, a racemic is the chemical name for the mirror image of a molecule. And so you can basically create chemical reactions that will create the, the mirror image of the molecule. And so you, the high fructose corn syrup is a, a processed food where you're taking normal fructose and flipping the molecule through a racemic chemical process.
- JRJoe Rogan
And why did they first start doing that?
- ZBZach Bush
Because you can patent a molecule that doesn't exist in nature. And so they created a quote unquote "artificial sweetener," which is actually, you know, a profound way in which you can start to understand how we did everything in the pharmaceutical industry. We find plant compounds, and we flip them around so that they're n- non-natural, not native to the body, and now we can patent them, and we can commercialize them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ZBZach Bush
And, you know, I'm not damning somebody else. This is me. I was, I was at the height of my career, 17 years in academia. I was creating chemotherapy, and so I was, you know, getting paid as a medical doctor to sit in labs every day with cancer cells and try to poison them. And what I found in the end was a, a family of molecules that didn't require any poisoning of the cell. They actually nourished the cell. And that's where my career pivoted hard, was the sudden realization of like, "Why, why are we trying to poison these cancer cells?" And I think this is where we can begin to like back up together, but I wanna go back to a really important point that you held earlier because I don't wanna... When I say everything is perfect, because it is, I don't wanna diminish the amount of suffering we're in, the amount of suffering the sociopath is in who's gonna be so extremely divorced from its natural system that it will think it reasonable to kill and behead somebody else. That sociopath we can look at as the great problem with humans. Humans would be just fine if we didn't have sociopaths. That was how I was trained as a biologist and a s- and a medical doctor. I was trained to believe that if there just wasn't cancer cells, we'd all be healthy. We'd all live long if there just wasn't cancer. And what I discovered over time, which is anybody who s- spends 17 years looking through microscopes down in the beauty and miraculous nature of, of biology is gonna find this, but in the end you find out that a cancer cell is actually no invader at all. It's actually the loneliest cell in a human body. And so a, a human cell that loses connection and communication with its surrounding environment immediately takes on the traits of a cancer cell. The longer it's isolated, the more malignant it becomes. The word malignant means life-threatening. And I would offer you that the sociopath is exactly the same story. It's just one human cell that became so isolated that it became malignant in its behavior to life around it. And the moment my world switched is when I started feeding those isolated, lonely cancer cells instead of trying to kill it, instead of trying to poison it, instead of trying to isolate it from the system. And then what happened was beautiful, is they actually reconnected or they self-eliminated. And so if they had enough metabolic capacity left at that moment, they could repair, regenerate, and reconnect to the greater system, and they would never threaten life. If they were too damaged and could not create enough energy for life at that moment, they would go through this gentle process called apoptosis, which is a dissolving of the cell, and a stem cell would be called in, put down a brand new healthy cell in its place. And so when we stop looking at cancers or sociopaths as the one problem with a otherwise healthy human system, we're gonna realize we don't have a healthy human system. All of these things, the sociopath and the cancer, are long-derived symptoms of a declining metabolic life force. And that's where I think I can help you back up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I hear what you're saying. So in a utopian world, no one is ever raised in a way that would create a psychopath. In a utopian world, children are raised with love and understanding always, and then you never get the sociopaths and the psychopaths. So in a utopian world, in a perfect world, that's true. But humans are, one of the really cool things about us is we're not perfect. We're very messy. So you're never gonna have great parenting across the board if you have human freedom. You're never gonna have people that don't lie. You're never gonna have people that don't steal. You're always gonna have violence as long as you have human freedom, because people are not gonna be good at raising people. And some people are gonna get raised angry, and they're gonna, you know. Unless we change what a person is, unless we all just do mushrooms together and kumbaya it all together, we're still people. And the problem with people is there's never been a single time in human history where we've been a people with no war. Not one. Not one. So you'd have to-
- 38:51 – 57:14
Telepathy, pyramids, hieroglyph ‘waveforms,’ and technology integrated with biology
- ZBZach Bush
There was one.
- JRJoe Rogan
When?
- ZBZach Bush
King Solomon.
- JRJoe Rogan
King Solomon?
- ZBZach Bush
During King Solomon's reign, the whole world went at peace for one-
- JRJoe Rogan
What year was this?
- ZBZach Bush
One generation. This would have been years after David, so it must be about 2,400 years ago or something like that.
- JRJoe Rogan
So how would we even know that there weren't wars in Morocco at the time, that just they didn't hear about, or that there weren't wars in Australia, or there weren't wars? How do we know? How do we know that there weren't wars this so long ago?
- ZBZach Bush
But King Solomon kept one of the best stories of humankind alive during that time.
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm sure he did, but what year was this?
- ZBZach Bush
I'd be inaccurate if I said it precisely, but I think King David would have been about 2,400 years ago, so somewhere in that range.
- JRJoe Rogan
What is the odds that he knows what's going on in China? Zero. 2,400 years ago, there's no 5G. You're not going on Twitter and finding out what's happening in China. There's no way he could know if there's war somewhere else.
- ZBZach Bush
There was a technology beyond all of that sitting on the planet at that time.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was that?
- ZBZach Bush
Pyramids.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hold on. So you think that they used the pyramids to find out if there's war in China?
- ZBZach Bush
I think that we had a technology called a human body at the time that was fully used, and we were fully telepathic. Maybe not this recent, but certainly further back, 10,000, 12,000 years ago, we were communicating much differently.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think people have an innate telepathic ability that's kind of muted a little bit by language and by talking and media? And then if we went back to the earliest stages of intelligence, we kind of read each other's minds. And then we realized that's kind of messy. Wouldn't it be better if we just talked? Just, "I'll just tell you what I think. I don't want to let you in."
- ZBZach Bush
It's perfect.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. And then we wrote things down. So when you write things down, you can read other people's thoughts. But before words, I bet we didn't think in those terms. I bet we thought in terms of what is that? There's a tree. There's a person. There's a deer. This is how we have to do this. Without words, there's probably an understanding of what we're saying and feeling. That's probably what we lost. That's probably why you get weird feelings from certain people. You're like, "Hmm, I don't know about this guy." You're feeling something. There's something there. You just don't know how to measure it.
- ZBZach Bush
I think you are spot on. You could have written my book for me. So there's a whole chapter in this book.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's definitely not true. [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
There's a whole chapter in there that gives an 80,000-year look at human communication from this point of wide open frequency bandwidth of telepathic communication down to text messages.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ZBZach Bush
And so there's a linear decline that happens through these different steps to the more and more abstract ways of communicating. And when we stop feeling each other and we started, like you say, you begin with tonal language before there's words. You start to create tones that are representative, but you're still giving a full sense. This is like me singing an opera to you instead of giving you a speech.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ZBZach Bush
And so tonal language was giving us a full body experience where you're listening beyond your auditory space.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- ZBZach Bush
The spoken word was where we suddenly went straight to the mind. We were no longer using the technology of the human body, and I was just going to speak. And this improved efficiency very quickly. So this was the beginning of machine-like behavior where we could stop feeling the body and we could start mentally processing information. The brain jumped in size, and we started going through all of this iterations of efficiency and optimization maybe is the way in which we create empire. We create more control, more wealth, whatever we were doing at the time. But there was these advantages that looked good as we went from tonal to spoken word, from spoken word to written word, from written word to digital representations of words, down to emojis.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. Yeah, Jamie thinks emojis are the next hieroglyphs. I think he's right. I think he's got something there.
- 57:14 – 1:05:00
Contextualizing life as energy concentration: chlorophyll to mitochondria to the human as ecosystem
- ZBZach Bush
So I wanna back up. Um, um, I think we just need to contextualize life, 'cause we get, get into the risk of, like, starting to core down on that idea and that idea and that idea-
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh
- ZBZach Bush
... and we can't find our context. So if we contextualize this conversation, what life is, then we can get to pyramids, then we can get to UFOs and UAPs and, you know, everything else that's going on-
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh
- ZBZach Bush
... right now that's starting to force us to be like, "Wait, we don't have the whole story." And so this is my favorite thing about being live right now, is there's just too much evidence that the story that we've been taught in schools-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes
- ZBZach Bush
... is correct. It is just-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes
- ZBZach Bush
... falling apart now. [laughs] It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's falling apart
- ZBZach Bush
... that's exciting. But the reason why we have things rushing into this space as new solutions that are just distracting us from actually stepping into our full potency is because we still are not allowing context to come back. And so I would love to contextualize the conversation first.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ZBZach Bush
And then let's go down these rabbit holes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, okay.
- ZBZach Bush
Uh, if you've got that first slide of mine, we can start l- l- at the most fundamental level of understanding what life is. And this took me, you know, 25 years of basic science laboratory work to finally get my mind clear and out of the way to what you said, be the antenna for the information. What is, what is it trying to show us? And ultimately, when you look across these images across this top of the slide, we've got the sun up top. The sun is the most potent, energetic thing that physics does. It's nuclear and fission and fusion, and these things we call stars. And there's roughly 10 billion stars per ga- galaxy. We got somewhere around 2.5 trillion galaxies. So there's a lot of energy being pumped out in the universe by a sun. But that little innovation just to its right at the top is chlorophyll, and chlorophyll begins a process of concentration of light energy. And so this is where we start to see more light per cubic centimeter than nuclear fission and fusion can produce. They can then pass that information in the form of energy onto bacteria and fungi. The bacteria and fungi, uh, then support more green life, and so we go from moss and, you know, slime molds to trees eventually. And so there's this constant feedback loop of concentrations of energy. The more energy per cubic centimeter you have, the more an, uh, opportunity you have for communication. The word "biosis" again, the, refers to the interconnected relationships that make life possible. If you've been in a long-term relationship before, like longer than a weekend, uh, w- you got a sense of how much energy it takes to maintain a relationship. Th- there's nothing you do in life that takes more energy than maintaining a family and your spouse and kids or whatever you got around you. That's because communication is required for co-collaboration, co-creation. And so energy has to be concentrated at higher and higher, higher levels for life to do more and more and more complex things. A couple billion years ago on the planet, we have evidence that bacteria and fungi, you know, made their transition. So bacteria, single cells, single-celled organisms suddenly gave an, an increase in concentration through an innovation of doing fermentation outside of the body. So bacteria ferment carbohydrates and fats. They use a, a non-oxygen-related re- breakdown process to break carbon bonds. All of that sunlight is being stored in carbon. And so one carbon bonds to the next, storing an, a photon of electro- uh, electromagnetic energy between them. That's a carbon bond. So when you hear, you know, of a carbohydrate, that's a whole string of carbons that's storing sunlight. A fatty acid, another long string of carbons holding sunlight. So the innovation of life was, can we store enough energy that it can be released in these exponential levels of energy per cubic centimeter? And the more that life innovated that process, the more complex life got. So bacteria, single-celled organisms can't really collaborate, but they can build an ecosystem of nutrients. Fungi figured out that they could actually get way more fermentation if they exuded the enzymes out of their body to make the whole nature around them the stomach. And so they outsourced the fermentation process to the soil around them, and suddenly there was so much more energy available, so they started to build whole networks of single-celled organisms that were now collaborating. We call these hyphae and pseudohyphae, the mycelial network of the fungal kingdom. They can go for miles, and they're still single-celled organisms, but they're collaborating now because they have so much more energy because they're doing all that fermentation outside the body, so they're not limited to what can be done inside the cell. The next innovation that just blew everything out was the innovation of the mitochondria. So that little mitochondria represented up in that glowing cell right above the baby there. Mitochondria are small bacteria that live inside human cells. The average human cell has 200 mitochondria. A neuron has 2,000 mitochondria in its neural head. 2,000 of those little bacteria living inside of a human cell, and that's actually two microbes put into one. So it's a, a little tiny methane-producing bacterium that was swallowed by an archaea, a big bacteria. And they started collaborating in a big innovation that was respiratory energy production. So we suddenly added oxygen and hydrogen to the process that used to be fermentation. So now we have respiratory energy production in the form of mitochondria, and that was a 10X improvement in energy, light energy per cubic centimeter, and then we suddenly got multicellular life. And so it was protozoa into parasites, into nematodes, into worms, into, you know, everything we have. So life has been stacking in complexity with direct relationship of how much energy per cubic centimeter exists there. The energy is predicting the outcome. It's not some organism comes along and says, "Well, I'm gonna dom- you know, I'm gonna take over because I'm smarter and more connected." Every time we've seen an innovation in nature, it's because preceding that moment, there was an innovation in increasing the amount of meiosis, the amount of interconnected relationships inside a single organism. Eventually, you get to a human. A human has more life within it than any other niche of nature on this planet. Amazon jungle, coral reefs, any other mammal. The human colon and the body systems around it contain more biodiversity, more interconnected relationships than any other system on the planet. This is more meiosis, more life, more energy per cubic centimeter. And what we get to start to recognize now in our, as our neurobiology of the gut starts to work through our, our levels of understanding, we're starting to realize there is no such thing as human intelligence. There's a human brain that is an antenna for all of nature to speak to. And so we have the most complicated antenna system of any organism on Earth, and just 10 minutes ago, you sat there saying, "You know, I think I'm actually an antenna." So this is the process that takes to great life. And 70 years ago, we started a new era of humanity called the antibiotic era, and it innovated with penicillin in the 1940s, but then it became herbicides and pesticides and took us into a massive journey of destroying meiosis. The word antibiotic is truth in advertising. To be anti-meiosis, to be antibiotic, is to be against, to disrupt, to destroy the interconnected relationships that make life possible. And so if this is right, which I don't expect you to believe yet, but if this is right, I should be able to map to you the exact way in which we've landed at this moment, which is at the crippled point of human biology globally. Chronic disease epidemics, infertility threatening the very survival of our species. So I'm gonna take you through the last 50 years and look at the human race just as a metabolic framework, and we'll see if we can make some sense out of it.
- 1:05:00 – 1:28:17
Glyphosate, industrial agriculture, and the ‘poison-dependent’ economy
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, let's do it. I like it. Um, it is, uh, very fascinating that we've gotten to where we are right now, and that we know as much as we know, and yet we still are doing things like, uh, extensive use of, uh, pesticides and herbicides, and even when they're not necessary, like the drying of wheat with it, which is crazy. Like, you, you don't... You're, you're not even using it for its intended purpose. You're using it to, as a desiccator, so you can dry out the wheat and process it quicker. What the fuck are you doing? And then you're poisoning people unnecessarily because of this.
- ZBZach Bush
See, this is why I love being with you, Joe, is 'cause, like, you say the things that I wish I would be able to say the last part. [laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
That way? [laughs]
- ZBZach Bush
That's all I really wanted to tell the EPA when I testified in front of the government.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's fucking crazy. We're crazy. Well, someone probably should have someone like me do it. I'm not the guy, but someone should say it that way, because that's really what it is. Like, you're poisoning people. And the, the really nutty thing is, the reason why they didn't do the ban on glyphosate, because it would have a devastating impact on our, our society, on our economy, 'cause all these businesses would close and go under, and they would lose billions and billions of dollars. Think of that. Think of where we are right now, where our food supply relies on poison to function. If we take the poison out, it can't function. I don't know what to tell you, but there's only one way to do it.
- ZBZach Bush
[laughs]
- JRJoe Rogan
We have to poison you. That is really wild that anybody would accept that.
- ZBZach Bush
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, you could have all your fucking lobbyists. Everyone sits in front of those microphones with notes, and they, they all have some preposterous way of framing it. But that's really what it is. You're saying the food supply relies on poison, and if we take away the poison, we'll fall apart.
- ZBZach Bush
It's actually true.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's crazy.
- ZBZach Bush
But let me show you why. Because it's not actually the food system that's about to fall apart, it's the medical system.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- ZBZach Bush
And so the thing that relies on chemical food is not the money we are making from food systems, it's the money we're making from the medical system.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, isn't it both?
- ZBZach Bush
Isn't it?
- JRJoe Rogan
It's gotta be both. It's gotta be both.
- ZBZach Bush
It's-
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause I, I know for a fact the pesticide manufacturers are, they, they work very hard to make sure that the politicians are very happy and-
- ZBZach Bush
Biosys interconnected relationships that make life possible.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
And so when-
- JRJoe Rogan
Bayer owns Monsanto, right?
- ZBZach Bush
Yeah. So Bayer purchased that recently and, and they've been at this for a long, long time. Bayer started to, to investigate the impact of interconnected relationships on human biology and fertility in the 1940s. We call it World War II and concentration camps, but that's where the, the studies really started getting set up, was understanding the relationship between microbiome, the output products, amino acids specifically, that support human life.
- JRJoe Rogan
So Bayer was involved in the concentration camps?
- ZBZach Bush
They were bought by a company called FK Pharmaceuticals in Germany, uh, in the 1930s, and then they got spun back out as Bayer b- uh, after the war with the collapse of the Third Reich. But, you know, and, and they're hardly alone in this. Companies all over the world at the time were studying this, these interconnected relationships. 'Cause there was a lot of progress being made in the 1930s and '40s, all the way back to the 1800s, of understanding that humans are an expression of an, a complex ecosystem. They're not just this isolated system. And so it was Louis Pasteur who kind of w- won the argument of nature's against us, germs are attacking us, all of that. So that, that really kind of doubled down on this belief that nature's opposed to humans, and we have to survive by sterilizing our environment. So pasteurization is rooted in his name, Pa- Louis Pasteur.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Right.
- ZBZach Bush
And so we start pasteurizing with the idea that if there's any life inside of what we're consuming, it could compete with the human life, not realizing-
- JRJoe Rogan
That is one of the nuttiest things that they've passed on, on society, that they've passed this idea that if you don't homogenize and pasteurize your milk, that you're in danger. And I, I don't know if you've ever seen some of these gaslighty articles, but some lady, I wish I'd, I saved it, somebody, uh, made a great TikTok about it today or a, a, a Instagram reel where the, she was explaining, uh, relative risk versus actual risk and how these articles are framed to show you, like, oh my God, this is so dangerous, and that people who drink raw milk are, like, 860% more likely to get sick. But it's, like, versus people who drink homogenized milk. Well, how many people get sick off milk? And then you find the actual number, and it's like, like, 1,300 a year or something like that. I forget what it was. 13,000 a year feel bad 'cause they, they drank bad milk. And out of those, how many of those were drinking raw milk? Well, it was, like, more likely that it was raw, but so then it's still only a few thousand people.
- ZBZach Bush
By the time you find somebody that actually got harmed-
- 1:28:17 – 2:08:34
Infection, immunity, and stress: disputes over smallpox narratives and ‘field effects’
- JRJoe Rogan
When you're communicating with these people, especially people that live in these indigenous cultures, do they experience infections? Do they get the flu? Does anything go through them that's in their own body, not something that's introduced by other people? We know that that wiped out 90% of Native Americans is disease that came from Europe.
- ZBZach Bush
It's a story that's told. I'm not sure that we have the greatest evidence of that. That story has been played a lot. I think it's also possible that we just killed a lot of people.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, we certainly did that as well.
- ZBZach Bush
We killed a lot of people, but I think that what's not understood was the breaking of their relationship to their natural system. And so they may have had dysentery and died of infectious diseases, but not until we displaced them from their gardens, displaced them from their land and all that. We had to break their relationship to nature if they were going to get a bowel infection that was going to cause a problem. I've just seen too many examples of connected biologic systems that just cannot become diseased. A connected system, and again, let me turn to Chernobyl for a moment because this is a pretty rad example of this. Largest nuclear event, nuclear disaster that's ever been created in human history, maybe the Japan one is now exceeding it. But Chernobyl, was it 30 years ago or something, 1976 or something like that? Chernobyl happens, huge nuclear waste dump into soil systems throughout the Siberian region there. And we have the immediate movement of humans out of the region out of fear of cancer. And sure enough, all the humans that were in touch with that system, huge rates of thyroid cancer, renal disease, all kinds of things occurred. Meanwhile, those soils are primarily inhabited by voles, a small little mouse-like creature that lives under the ground, looks halfway across a field mouse and a mole. Those tiny little creatures have been eating the most radioactive soils on the planet for the last 30, 40 years. It's almost 50 years now. And so that 50 years of eating radioactive material, they're now radioactive. So when you put a Geiger counter up next to one of those voles, it's not beep, beep, beep, beep. It's just a continuous hum. And so these are the most radioactive creatures on Earth. Not a single case of pup deformities, no collapse of fertility. In fact, the vole populations are thriving. The predator to the vole in Chernobyl is the wolf. And the Siberian wolf has absolutely quadrupled its population. No birth defects, no cancer, no consequence to eating the voles that are highly radioactive. And so these are the best examples of when a system, when a keystone species or otherwise, is connected to its nature, she will never allow an injury to occur that she doesn't allow or already have a solution for. And so at the microbiome level, we now know how these wolves and voles are surviving as they upregulate Pseudomonas. And Pseudomonas has this amazing, it's a bacteria that actually, if you look through all those food poisoning lists of like what's going to kill you on the E. coli and the Pseudomonas. Pseudomonas is one of the most feared bacteria in a hospital, for example. Turns out Pseudomonas thrive on radioactive material. They digest it, turn it into usable and safer products and all of this. And so the microbiome is there. Living in the voles, constantly converting and updating its physiology so it's repairing at a faster rate than it's being injured. And I'll show you what this looks like in a lab too in a moment, but I want you to hold that thought of there's every organism has a rate of repair and a rate of injury. And as long as the rate of repair is slightly faster than the rate of injury, it never gets a disease. You can ramp up that injury rate, and if nature stays interconnected, your rate of repair simply steps up to its right capacity. And so this is that classic adage, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. A biology that's practicing a relationship of biosis, the interconnected relationships that make health life possible. A biotic creature will always have the resources if from nature rather than from money. Money's never gonna provide you biosis. Nature's always gonna provide you the biotic capacity to overcome any toxicity that gets dreamed up, planetary or otherwise. The planet has been making horrible toxins forever. The sulfuric acid pools that this planet dominated this planet's surface. Biology came right past all of that. Biology grew up in it. Biology has no problem with chemistry because of its phenomenon of light concentration of energy, more energy per cubic centimeter than anything else in the cosmos. Life is this churning machine of iteration, repair, regeneration, iteration, repair, regeneration. And every time it does that, it has this tendency to make new iterations of itself, to become more biodiverse. New species are formed, new imagination of nature. And pretty soon you have a planet Earth that's teeming with so much unbelievable life. And finally, a container that can hold its maximum concentration of information and light energy is created, and that's a human. And so we've got this container that's holding billions of years of stress. The result of stress when connected to nature is more life force, more intelligence, more beauty. And so I loved what you said earlier because it's very important. There's a chapter in my book that's looking at this kind of neo-spiritualism of the utopia you mentioned, and you kind of call BS from the beginning on that. You're like, humans have never done utopian things. Humans are part of the stress mechanism of the planet. I'm convinced of it because what we do all the time is we stress the system. We finally invented airplanes. The first thing we did was try to jump out of them. Like, we just like stress. We like the discomfort of pushing the envelope. And I think we live on a planet in the middle of a universe that loves the same thing. It loves the stress of it. It loves the friction of possibility. It loves death because immediately there's rebirth. And every time there's a death, there's more opportunity for new creation, new imagination. And so when I say everything is perfect, it's literal. It means everything is reimagining itself all the time. And if humans do go extinct in these coming decades, that's part of a beautiful journey of life going, iterating, iterating, iterating, iterating. There's a moment, though, with every hospice patient where you suddenly get to see life return. And sometimes they choose more life in the human body, and sometimes they're like, I'm gone. That's where I belong over there. I have a next thing. I've been by so many near-death experiences, I can't even count them anymore. But every time somebody dips across the veil of the human ego and the five sensory systems here, they see a universe that's so interconnected and has got absolutely nothing to do with a human mind and its perception and its effort to explain the universe. It has nothing to do. It's a full-body experience. It is that antenna going wide open and being like, this is what it is. And I can't... It's the one thing I wish I could do, and I've never been able to do, is just help humans feel that. If you could feel what it felt like when somebody hasn't even come back to the point where they can tell you the near-death experience, but you're just standing there in witness to them, and their antenna goes blowing wide open, and you can feel what is in the field at that moment, there is nothing that compares to it. Plant medicine, peak experiences, breathwork, cold plunge, hot plunge, take your body through any stress, you will not experience the amount of energetic information that comes through at that moment to that human antenna that's still biologically connected to Earth but is perceiving the whole story. That's the end of addiction. If you could feel that, there would be no more addiction on this planet because addiction is the necessary behavior of an organism that believes itself to be abandoned by its infinite reality. Humans believed ourselves to be abandoned by nature, and we put it right in our definition. You can probably pull it up, Oxford English Dictionary. Nature is everything in the perimeter of the Earth, minerals, plants, animals, as opposed to humans or anything humans have made. Not only do we write ourselves out of nature, we put ourselves in opposition to nature as opposed to humans or anything humans have made.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the Oxford Dictionary's definition of nature?
- ZBZach Bush
Nature.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- ZBZach Bush
And so as you start to think about this, like that's the whole story is when we started to lose the antenna, when we started dulling down the receptor and we started planting mental constructs, money is where things come from. No. Money has never birthed anything. Women birth life. Money does not. Biology is self-perpetuating, always for more beauty, more intelligence. Anytime we create an abstract system to say biology needs that, biology, living people need money, living people need IV drips of vitamin C, living humans need peptides injected, it is the biggest miss [laughs] in the cosmos is humans that don't realize that we are the best antennas that have been made on this planet so far. If we begin to use those, we will not do utopia. We'll be des- we'll experience opportunities for stress that doesn't harm another individual, and this is the cha- characteristic of, of a sovereign s- you know, reality, where everything is up-leveling all of the time. And something that gives up its life is not killed. It's literally giving its life to the next. And so when you look at predation, you think, you have the lion eating the antelope. If you spend enough time with these indigenous groups, they can tell you which antelope is going to give itself to the lion, and it's not 'cause it's weak or it's broken. There's a relationship they can feel between the predator and the prey, and it's interesting that we call them prey. Who's preying in this situation? Who's a- about to go, go into an ascension process? Is it the antelope or the lion? Maybe both. But there's a relationship there in our indigenous understanding. This is where sacred hunting comes in. Sacred hunting never went out to kill anything. It came to receive more. So if you go out in nature with the attitude of, "I'm gonna receive the abundance of nature for my peoples, for my family, for my thing," and you see what nature's gonna offer you, and this is the hunter-gatherer tribes in spades here. But this is the change of mindset that we've gotta go back to, is everything is sacred. Everything is sovereign, and when we sit back into that relaxed relationship where we never got kicked out of nature, everything, our food, our shelter, our livelihoods, are gonna come from nature, not money. When we make that subtle shift of trusting this planet again, then we start turning on the antenna, and then our intelligence comes back on, and then our memory comes back on, and we don't have to sit around being like, "I wonder how those pyramids got built." We will be connected to that information because it's all still here.
- JRJoe Rogan
I wanna go back to that, but I, I wanna push back on this idea that people can survive plagues if they don't have immunity to it because one of the best examples where that seems to have wiped out an entire civilization is a- all these sites they keep finding in the Amazon. When you read about the lost city of Z, you read about the, an initial European explorers who made their way into the Amazon. They found this thriving civilization. They went back 200 years ago. 200 years later, there's nothing. And the predominant theory is that they brought with them smallpox and a bunch of other diseases, and they spread like wildfire to a bunch of people that didn't have immunity to it, and they died. Who's living more in harmony with nature than those people that were living in the Amazon? I mean, they were living in complete harmony with nature. They just didn't have the immunity to deal with European diseases.
- ZBZach Bush
So you're telling me a story that I cannot answer because the story is abstract itself. And so-
- JRJoe Rogan
How so?
- ZBZach Bush
Because you're painting a picture, A, that somebody knows that there were smallpox that went across those peoples, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, we know there were smallpox, and we know that smallpox did most certainly wipe out a lot of Native Americans, as well as a lot of European settlers. Was it because they were malnourished? That's certainly possible. I mean, that's certainly a factor.
- ZBZach Bush
I guess I would just say when. When do we have evidence that they started dying of smallpox? And I think that's after we displaced them from their tr- tribal lands.
- JRJoe Rogan
In-
- ZBZach Bush
After we displaced them from their connected ecologies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Perhaps. It's hard to say. That's hard to say because it seems like there's a lot of evidence that it spread through tribes and even tribes that were on their own, that it, it, there was, there was a real problem. But the other question is th- th- there wa- it wasn't always bountiful, like where- wherever Native Americans were, and there was times where they had, like, serious famine, and they, they didn't have food sources that were nutritious, and they did their best to stay alive. Um, it wasn't always like, "Look at all the deer and all the fish, and we have f- fruits and vegetables everywhere. We're fine." No, there was, there was certainly times where these nomadic people, uh, ran into a, a bad situation, and if you introduce a new disease, a novel disease that they don't have an immunity to during that time, that could most certainly wipe them out. Despite the fact that they're living in nature, they're n- they don't have the resources that's required to keep a biological system perfectly functioning and healthy. They're struggling. They're barely getting by. I could totally see how people like that... You know, we like to think that, you know, everybody that lived in, uh, in Am- in North America before the Europeans came had it nailed. They lived perfectly. Well, no. Tri- tribal hunter-gatherer people that are nomadic, like sometimes you run into a bad place. Sometimes you're, you know, you're in an area that has no game. That's just how it goes. You have a bunch of mouths to feed, and things go wrong. And if they're in that kind of a situation and they catch smallpox, they're gonna be compromised. Their immune system will be compromised. Completely makes sense, and there was widespread contact with these diseases that came from these Europeans who also weren't very healthy and came over here on boats. That had, that's gotta be fucking terrible for you. You're on a boat for three months. What kind of food are you eating? And then you get here, and you're spreading all your junk to all these other people that have no idea what that is.
- ZBZach Bush
I think you're, now you're on the button of it. And so it was less about the condition of the n- of people that were native to this land. It was more about the divorce of the people that were incoming from nature. And so those, those settlers or those, you know, in- industrial, you know, colonists who were coming over from Spain or otherwise, it was their radical divorce for thousands of years of, you know, innovations of clothing and horses and their, all these different layers of technologies that, that interrupted their food systems and their relationship to nature. So they were coming over here sick, I agree with that. And it's likely that that may have been more of the imprint, was less of an infectious disease and more of an, a dissonant imbalance. And so I, I think what we now know about the gut microbiome is that it has an immediate feedback loop to, to stress signals, cortisol specifically. And so if you're a Spanish, you know, colonial army that shows up with weapons that have never been seen before, and you've got, you know, this marauding belief that you're separate from nature and so you need to go steal as much as possible because you don't have enough. And so that's the downstream of the abandonment disorder of humanity is scarcity mentality, which then breeds empire rise and fall and colonialism and ownership models and all of this. And so you come over with this marauding new species. Let's think of it as a new species, because up until this point, none of the indigenous cultures here saw themselves as separate from nature. All of their, you know, 40,000 years of traditional practice where we are integrated in nature, we are an element between the cosmos and the Earth. We sit in this fine little beautiful zone between heaven and Earth, and this is human. This is the experience of being an antenna that's connected to this cosmos, connected to planet Earth. You can feel both.
- JRJoe Rogan
And a great example of that is, uh, Aztec architecture that literally mirrors the cosmos.
- ZBZach Bush
Mirrors the cosmos, as did the Egyptians.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ZBZach Bush
And so all of them were building these pyramids in 13-degree angles at the-- just like Orion's Belt. And so you, you've got, you know, Pleiadian star clusters lasered into the stones in Peru and the, and, and the temples that are built underground there, like crazy stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
Because we were antenna to the universe, and we were antenna to the Earth. We sat feeling them both. That's the magic of being human, is you can feel both. This is a very magical moment. And my patients that are dying and are letting go of these bodies, they're certainly cosmic in scale. They'll tell you exactly which planets they go to and how they expand into the universe, become stars, all kinds of crazy stuff in their near-death experiences. But they're not on Earth at that moment. So I think this wonderful moment of being an antenna, a biological antenna, not, not the physics of a soul, you know, some identity that sits outside of biologic space-time, but an antenna that's now biologically connected to more energy per cubic centimeter than it will ever feel, because the cosmos doesn't do energy as well as life. And so you can-- A sun doesn't do as much concentrated energy as life. And so this is this precious moment. And so you imagine these people for tens of thousands of years designing, expressing these incredible technologies, the pyramids and space travel and everything else that they're doing at this time. Unbelievable connectivity. And then along comes a species that look human, except they think they don't belong to Earth. They don't think-- They think they got abandoned. The whole kicked out of the garden thing has played itself out. And they come in with this killing mentality that is different than the prey and predator relationship that peoples had with each other, I'm sure, too. It wasn't just lions on-- and antelopes. There was a predation between humans from our beginning, too. We are a natural system. We, we live, we die, we rebirth, we re-death. When our antennas are wide open, we understand the relationship and the flow of life as it goes through its, you know, ascension process. But here comes this species that is fundamentally opposed to life. It is antibiotic in its behavioral relationship to Earth. The stress that would have been felt in the neurologic system from peoples that had been interconnected, understanding space and having anything over time, what they would have felt in that time would have, I think, been the infectious disease. Just like the boxed apple juice that came along to break the relationship of 40,000 years of abundance for the Achuar tribe and now put them in poverty. The same thing could happen energetically at the spiritual or psychospiritual or psychoawareness of-- That antenna could suddenly break if sudden- suddenly you felt like you were actually in danger.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- ZBZach Bush
And isn't that what we feel when we feel a sociopath in our presence? Don't we suddenly viscerally feel something like, "This is actually dangerous"? Other people can be mean, they can be assholes, but they're not-- It's that antenna goes up. And so imagine a whole civilization feeling for the most f- this, this foreign object coming at them, and it's shooting them, and it's killing them, and it's tearing up their gardens, and it's got horses which have never been seen on this continent. The cortisol level goes berserk. Immune system shuts down. Microbiome in the gut collapses. And suddenly they are experiencing diseases of the West, not because the pathogens were bad, not because some element of nature suddenly leapt across the ocean and attacked them, but because they went out of relationship. The antenna shut down. They lost the context of an interconnected biosis relationship with heaven and Earth. I think that's where we start to really see honestly what was happening at that time. It was fear that was bringing it. It was guilt, shame of being kicked out of nature. It was energetic signals that were breaking the informational stream, the field of connectivity that was, that humans were probably suspended in at that time.
- JRJoe Rogan
But even before the Europeans arrived, the Aztecs were doing horrific shit to each other. Like in the consecration of the temple of, uh, is it Tenochtitlan?
- ZBZach Bush
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
Where they killed some of the-- One of the, a Spanish chronicler named Diaz said that they killed as many as 80,000 people over four days. They sacrificed them. Like, these are-- This is not, like, a b- a balanced living with nature civilization we're talking about, the Aztecs. They were doing some wild shit, man.
- ZBZach Bush
They had survived much longer than the Europeans had. And so-
- 2:08:34 – 2:21:59
Autism, ‘The Telepathy Tapes,’ and clinic observations of family-field interventions
- ZBZach Bush
that happens... It was a car accident in 2010. When you have that experience, you suddenly realize that what you know is a fraction of what you can feel, and you have so much more information at your experiential level of capacity to, to inform your biology than the mind will ever be able to create. And so this is where we start to live telepathically. And this could all be theoretical, but I will tell you, I have seen thousands of patients in my clinics that are living this reality already. They have already gone back to telepathic communication wide open, and they are called autistic people. Autism is a neurologic development necessary at the end of a period of time when humans went into complete abstraction. Money systems went abstract, have noth- no relationship to nature. We have medical systems that are actually chronic disease management systems that are bankrupting the world now. $5 trillion in a year spent on disease management in the United States alone. We are bankrupting the systems that got separated from nature. They are going to collapse. They are gonna fail. And suddenly, we develop a neurology that cannot be programmed with the old abstract systems and belief systems 'cause they are feeling too much. We call it sensory processing deficits, but really what it is, is a mind that's no longer gated with excuses, with defense mechanisms, with tolerance levels of, of cognitive dissonance.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is this why... Have you seen that ch- There's, uh, one young boy who flew over Manhattan in a helicopter, and then he-
- ZBZach Bush
Mm-hmm. Drew the whole thing
- JRJoe Rogan
... drew the entire skyline, like, completely accurately-
- ZBZach Bush
Mm-hmm
- JRJoe Rogan
... just from his memory.
- ZBZach Bush
Yeah, and it's, it's, you know, a project that's become known as "The Telepathy Tapes" is a great example of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
And, and I was on their second season of that talking through what I experienced in clinic, is that we now have not just a theory of, of telepathic communication. We have the lived con- experience between thousands of people that are in their, in their between space, between the words. They are traveling to a unified location that they all agree exists, which is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah
- ZBZach Bush
... called the hill.
- JRJoe Rogan
The hill.
- ZBZach Bush
And so they are having a experience in which massive amounts of information are being transmitted back and forth, and they cannot be programmed with death is bad and things, you know. They can't believe any of the abstract things we've been taught because they feel too much. The reason I became so clear on this was total accident in my clinic, which is the only way new ideas come along, is complete accidents. 'Cause when we, when we do scientific research, it's way too linear. We see something, we're like, "Well, if that's happened, then this must be the way it is. Well, if I just saw that, then this must be a way it is." So we do these linear, you know, knowledge-based systems, and so we get nowhere. We go in circles, and, "Well, cancer must be..." Here we are. We've known cancer wasn't the problem. We knew that cancer was a metabolic symptom, a symptom of metabolic collapse 100 years ago, so well-defined in medical literature, everything else. Otto Warburg was the guy who, like, broke the whole news in the 1920s. So here we are 100 years later still thinking like cancer's coming out of the woodwork and attacking healthy human bodies. So we go on these linear things. What we are forgetting is these leaps in awareness, these l- a much bigger antenna system is available to us. And you, you only get there when you finally surrender your knowledge base and you start to feel what's happening in front of you. And so I was taught that there was a, a disease called autism that was affecting our children, and for years, I helped manage these people in clinics and everywhere they showed up in the medical system. And I saw it as disease, and my m- linear mind was always like, "I gotta, I gotta fix that. Maybe if I do this, I could fix the human brain. Maybe if we flip this switch, it'll work. Maybe if we put this chemical in their body, we can change their neurochemistry and get them to be able to tolerate a day." My clinic that I launched in 2010 was called Revolution Health Center, rural clinic, ti- town of 550 people, no resources monetarily. There was no reason this was gonna become an explo- explosive hub of, of innovation if you measured it by money. I was hemorrhaging money. I was not making money as a doctor at all. Rural doctor, had left the, the hallowed halls and the marble halls of academia, and I started seeing autistic kids a lot in these rural environments and in these inner city or urban environments where we have these really high penetrance of autism, and it's not being diagnosed 'cause they don't have the resources to, to bring the attention to, like, child's five, seven years old, and by that time, there's been no resources brought to the kid. So lots of undiagnosed, you know, autistic neurology out there. So I was seeing a lot of in clinic, and these kids are heavily affected, and the suffering is kinda through the roof. They are hitting their head against a wall six, eight hours a day. They have a callus on their forehead from rhythmically hitting their head, striking their head against a wall. And when they get upset, somebody comes in their environment, stresses them, they start smearing feces and blood on the walls. It is, from parenting aspect, the most horrific hell you can possibly live in, the amount of suffering being expressed. And so these kids with highly affected autism are coming in my clinic, and they can't even sit in front of you. They run around in the clinic room, and they can't make eye contact, can't make physical. They're feeling too much, and they'll go hide in a corner, hit their head against the wall, stim somehow. They're stim, stimming their body until the chaos of everything they're taking in is shut down to one signal of pain. So this is an intense way to see a human being, and this kid's four years old sitting in front of you, and this mother is more exhausted than you've ever seen a human being. And so we started trying to, like, go into the woodwork of, like, what resources are we not thinking of here? And by this time, I was starting to be exposed to Native American indigenous practices and new energetic therapies, Ibrahim Karim stuff out of Egypt, and it was like, "Okay, show me something. Give me some tool here." And we stumbled upon this very simple tool, which is called an emotion code therapy, and it's a simple way of bringing the mind into awareness of where an emotion is stored inside of itself, and then you run a magnet over the forehead or the top of the head to reset the, the magnetic pull of the water around the brain, and it changes the neural chemistry. And so it was a powerful tool. I was super excited about it. But most of these kids coming in so affected wouldn't even get close enough for me to do the therapy. So we started doing it on the moms to show the kid, "Hey, this is safe," and they'd come in and get a couple treatments. After two years of this, we started to realize all of the kids were improving before we ever got that treatment installed. They were improving when Mom got treated. That started to make me realize they're not expressing a personal experience. They're expressing a field effect. Their antenna's wide open. And when we removed Mom's emotional stressors, the kid got better. And so we started treating everybody in the field. And, and a t- and a heavily autistic child will require three to five full-time, you know, efforts to, to get it. So they got a grandma, two aunties, an uncle, two brothers that are taking care of the kid. And we started treating the whole field. Like, anybody who has touch with this kid in a week, we wanna see them. We wanna do, cl- clear their emotional field. The effect was just undeniably effective. Every time you cleared another individual whose emotional field was being felt by the kid, the kid improved.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- ZBZach Bush
And so what I started to realize is these kids, because they are a wide open antenna that cannot damp themselves down, they don't have the filters that would allow them to survive in an abstract, fake environment that's artificial through and through. They cannot do it. And so all they can do is feel everything. And now they're feeling what those native cultures must have felt when Europeans showed up for the first time. Neurologic systems that are wide open, that suddenly see an abstract human being and the suffering they are in, will collapse its own neurology, will overwhelm the system. And so the same thing that our autistic are showing today, I believe is very similar to what it must have felt like to be an Inca or Mayan in your habitat and suddenly see the field disrupted by a stress signal, an unbelievable s- signal that just broke the whole field. So we have stories about floods, but we're still thinking of the flood as a physical, you know, wave of water that came over. Is it possible that the flood was actually a neurologic experience of overwhelm that wiped out the entire memory bank? Did we do that when a sector of humanity truly experienced and believed itself to be separate from nature for a moment? Was there an original abandonment issue?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, Joe, I don't think it has-- They're mutually exclusive. Um, and I think there's a lot of physical evidence that the, uh, impact, the Younger Dryas impact theory specifically is real.
- ZBZach Bush
I agree there's water. I agree water goes up and down. I agree that there's massive floods. But when we talk about the Inca and the Aztec, there was no flood at that time. So what I'm really getting at is, is it possible there's something other than just physical floods? Can there be energetic floods that break a system?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. So in that case, these settlers coming across, not just the diseases, but just the fact that they were there.
- ZBZach Bush
They can shatter a field.
- JRJoe Rogan
And these peop- they're marauders. These people are coming in on horseback. They have muskets.
- ZBZach Bush
They think they've been kicked out of nature for a thousand years.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ZBZach Bush
They're terrified that they're gonna die.
- JRJoe Rogan
They're cutting people's arms off if they don't give them their weight in gold.
- ZBZach Bush
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
They're breaking the field.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. You've read some of the depict- There was, um, was it a, um, a bishop or s- some, someone traveled with, some religious person traveled with Columbus' first crew and wrote these horrific depictions of what they did to the native people that they found. And once they found that these people had gold, they demanded their weight in gold, were cutting their arms off, and dashing babies' heads on rocks. They were, horrific stuff. I forget the, the guy, who it was, but it was some religious figure who traveled with them. Here he is. Bartolome de las Casas. So, um, he was a Spanish lawyer, clergyman, writer, and activist best known for his work as a historian and social reformer. So this is the guy. And, uh, so he, he recorded what the Spanish settlers did. He described and rallied against the atrocities committed by the conquistadors, uh, against the indigenous people. Arriving as one of the first Spanish settlers in America, Las Casas, uh, initially participated in the colonial economy built on forced indigenous labor, but eventually felt compelled to oppose the abuses committed by European colonists against the indigenous population. So he's one of the reasons why we know that we probably shouldn't be celebrating Columbus Day. [chuckles] Probably wasn't a great guy.
- ZBZach Bush
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 2:21:59 – 2:41:09
Language as abstraction: nouns vs verbs, junk DNA, and humans as ecosystems—not a species
- JRJoe Rogan
The Dead Sea Scrolls are bananas.
- ZBZach Bush
And if you look at the, the language of Aramaic, then we're getting a layer or two back from abstraction, where there's actually shape to those that are actually transmitting information.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's something about wr- looking at that written language as well that's really compelling.
- ZBZach Bush
Your antenna's up.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, especially, like, old languages. There's something about, like, old Hindu. You're looking at, like, ancient Hindu scripts, ancient Tibetan scripts.
- ZBZach Bush
Look at Farsi.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes. Farsi too.
- ZBZach Bush
Farsi gives me goosebumps.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ZBZach Bush
When I read Farsi, when you look at a Rumi poem written in Farsi-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm
- ZBZach Bush
... you realize he wasn't transmitting a poem. He has so much mathematical truth in a r- uh, in a f- thing that's in the form. So he's telling you geometry. He's telling you sacred geometry, the fabric of the universe, in the form of a language that is not symbolic. It's, it's a true depiction of information.
- JRJoe Rogan
It really is interesting that all-
- ZBZach Bush
An embodied information
- JRJoe Rogan
... these ancient languages are so beautiful. Uh, ancient Hebrew is another one. It's beautiful. You look at it, you're like, "Well, this is wild to look at." You know? And then when you find out that ancient Hebrew, they didn't have numbers, so the letters doubled as numbers. And so there was, uh, uh, there was actually numerical value in words that were missing. Like, when the translations got to Latin and Greek and eventually English, like, we lost what they were try- there was something that they were saying that if they could read it, they knew. There was, there was more context to these words than just simply, you know, you're talking about a bush, you're talking about a tree, you're talking about a lake. No, there's, there's something to it. It's really, really interesting stuff. 'Cause it's like, why did, why did language get less complex as it got more recent? That seems strange.
- ZBZach Bush
It got more symbolic.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- ZBZach Bush
So it wasn't necessarily the complexity that was the problem, it was that it, it separated itself from the actual information. So now the word tree is a symbol of something that actually has never been a noun. So now we have a word that has no movement in it. It's a noun. It does not express movement. And we now assess, you know, 60% of, of the surface of the Earth as a non-living, non-moving thing called a tree.
- JRJoe Rogan
Huh.
- ZBZach Bush
Whereas all native cultures-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm
- ZBZach Bush
... when you ask them, "What is that?" they will use a verb. And so what they're saying is, "That is treeing. That's treeing."
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh.
- ZBZach Bush
"That's treeing."
- JRJoe Rogan
Really? They use verbs?
- ZBZach Bush
Nothing, nothing is static. It's all verbs. English was the first language to come around and characterize everything as a noun. And that's why it became the language of science, is because science broke its relationship to motion. It wanted everything to be static, therefore studiable, therefore we could control its variables. And so every time somebody shows you a cancer study, shows you a cardiovascular disease study ... I did this for years. I've got a peer-reviewed science, everything else. I was literally having to break every element of nature so that I could prove that my protein, Cup TF1, was the most important thing for cancer. I had to break every relationship to nature that that cancer cell could possibly have before I could study that protein. And so everything that we call trust the science these days is an aberration. It is a symbol of, of life. It is not life itself. And so science itself has become this noun-structured belief system that has no f- no flow in it. There's no verbing happening in science. It's there's a bacteria, there's a mitochondria, there's a human cell, and we think of those as three different things. No, it is life lifeing. And what it's doing is finding more and more ways to stack complexity to get more and more light concentrated per cubic centimeter.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- ZBZach Bush
And everything is in one relationship. There is no tree, human thing. There's life doing biosis, interconnected relationships. And this is getting very fun now, as like we actually got the science now to prove that we were wrong. And so we think, "Okay, here's human DNA, double helix, Watson and Crick. This is Bible of the biologic kingdom now. Everything comes from DNA, and human DNA is much better than bacterial DNA, 'cause bacteria just have little circle loops of DNA. We have this beautiful spiraling double helix. This has gotta be the best in the land But then we start in 1992, you know, we set out to decode the human genome. And we thought, well, this is gonna be amazing. It's gonna be a 40-year project because we knew how many, you know, genes we could decode each year with our genetic sequencers. So we thought we were gonna have to find 400,000 genes because we knew by this time that we had 400,000 different proteins in the human body. So we're like, well, we need to find a gene for each of those because we knew that a gene made an RNA that then made a protein. We knew how it worked. Watson and Crick started us off. 1996 rolls around, and the team finishes 25 years ahead of schedule because there were not 400,000 genes. There was 25,000 genes. Everybody laughed, said, "You screwed it up." Three more teams finished over the next two years. The first team was wrong. There was not 25,000 genes. There was 19,000 genes. They had miscounted because they had dual-counted some of them. We have less than 20,000 human genes that make a human body. The reason why that's so embarrassing is because a flea has 30,000 genes. A fruit fly has 13,000 genes. So you sit somewhere between a flea and a fruit fly genetically. In fact, you're a little closer to the fruit fly than the flea. That's probably why the flea can jump 40 times its height, and you can't. But there is something sitting here right in front of us at the genetic level saying to be human is not to be a species. And so what is all that DNA doing? There's so much DNA in a human. How can we have so few of that? How small of that information actually coding a gene? And it turns out the number's one and a half percent. One and a half percent of the DNA held inside of a human cell is actually coding for a gene. 98.5% we ended up calling junk DNA. So it was called junk DNA for 25 years until somebody started to realize that we were preserving our junk DNA more carefully and passing that to our young than we were the genes. And so there's something super important being preserved by biology from generation to generation, all this junk DNA. What we now have found out is the mitochondria. Again, 200 mitochondria, many different species variants living inside a single human cell because they change their genetic sequencing very rapidly. And so you got maybe, you know, a couple hundred different versions of a mitochondria sitting in a single human brain cell. Those, it turns out, are storing their genetic information in the double helix of the human cell. And they go and access inside the human nucleus the gene that is theirs for their own reproductive capacity and pull an RNA out of that, come and decode a protein so they can reproduce every three days for your entire life. So the mitochondria are storing their genes in the human cells. This was-- This doesn't fit any biologic map of Watson and Crick. You're starting to realize there's a collective expression of, in the antenna of being human. And that's what DNA ends up being, is it is actually an antenna system that's taking in information and then unwinding and rewinding to reveal different genetic sequences to all of life within a human ecosystem. So we are now convinced genetically that it's impossible that a human is a species else we'd be somewhere between a flea and a fruit fly. The magic of being human is in the 98.5% of our DNA that doesn't code for a human gene, that is likely coding for all of life. That's what it means to be a keystone species genetically, is we are the life. We are the life record. It is happening through us, in us, around us. Life is ascending through a biologic matrix that we call a human body, but it is not a species, it's an ecosystem. And 70 years ago, we started the antibiotic era, and we started wiping out the diversity inside of a human body. And so the toxicity of herbicides and pesticides have very little to do to their impact on a human cell. It has to do with the impact on the entire ecosystem that's expressing itself through this massive genomic library that is so big we can't even wrap our head around. If we strung you end to end, you've got around 50 to 70 trillion human cells. Each of those cells has about a meter of DNA bundled inside of every nucleus of every cell. If we strung you end to end, we could wrap Joe around the circumference of the planet right at the equator two million times. Your DNA wraps around planet Earth two million times. The amount of genetic information in there is plenty to hold a record and a code for all of life on Earth. It will not surprise me that in the coming years, we start to realize the entire code is here. We found out just recently that you could take the human genome and rearrange it into 178 puzzle pieces and spell pig perfectly. The genome is this warehouse of life of Earth. It's not belonging to a human species. And I believe that this is where we are going to really spend a lot of our new excitement around what it means to be human as we start to move into our next era. The antibiotic era is coming to an end. It's crippled our biology and our fertility to a point where we cannot continue it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, how do we move past it?
- ZBZach Bush
We become biologic again. We're gonna end the chemical antibiotic era, and we're become, move into the biological renaissance. You, you talked a couple times about this moment of like m- remembering, like the renaissance that we can all point to, sudden explosion in math, science, art, massive re-- you know. It doesn't make any sense what was happening 50 years before the renaissance, and then the renaissance, and what would happen the next 200 years. It, it was a parametric explosion of creativity of human capacity, human mind capacity, creativity, everything.
Episode duration: 2:51:31
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Transcript of episode Xq2aJpDHIio
