The ROOT CAUSE Of Disease Nobody Talks About! (HOW TO LIVE LONGER) | Zach Bush

1. 0:00 – 4:46

   The Genome Surprise and Humans as an Ecosystem

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush0:00

      To be human or to be alive is a story of a complex ecosystem within us made of something much greater than a single species. And so what's happened to create this chronic disease epidemic is we created a lifestyle that isolated us more and more from the greater environment around us.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:16

      [Instrumental music] Zach, you went to medical school in the '90s like I did, and back then, the rates of chronic disease were very different from the rates of chronic disease we see today, whether that be heart disease, mental health problems, cancer. You know, when I was at med school, it was one in four people were gonna get cancer in their lifetime. Now, the rate is one in two. In your view, what's going on?

   3. ZBDr. Zach Bush0:50

      I think backing up a little bit, we can look at that medical school, school era. The 1990s had this incredible new promise that w- we would be the first generation of doctors to practice something called personalized medicine.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02

      Yeah.

   5. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:02

      And we had the promise that we would swab the mouth and run genetics on the person, and we could tell them exactly what diseases they would get and what drugs they would be sensitive to or would work for them. And so we, we believed we were about to crack the code on human disease and longevity and all these big promises. 1992, ni- we started the Human Genome Project as a scientific community, and we were-- started to decode the, the DNA of humans, and it was a super exciting time. And so we really believed that we were about to understand what made a body a body. And then 1996 rolled around, just as you and I were speeding up our, our pre-medicine and getting ready for medical school and all of that. Suddenly, we found out that we were wrong about everything, and what we were wrong about was the genetic code. [laughs]

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:49

      Yeah.

   7. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:49

      We, we really thought that each gene coded for a protein, and that DNA strand of Watson and Crick from the 1950s, we thought was the, the template for life.

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:59

      Yeah.

   9. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:59

      And we really believed that when we figured out the, the 200,000-plus genes that coded for the 200,000-plus proteins in a human body, we would understand everything. And we came to 20,000 genes, and we were 10 times less complicated than we thought at the genetic level. And suddenly, we realized we were completely wrong about the-- our whole concept of what it means to become human, what it means to b- build a human body. And to b- understand that 20,000 genes, which is a tiny fr- tiny number, w- we already knew that a fruit fly had 13,000 genes-

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:34

       Yeah

   11. ZBDr. Zach Bush2:34

       ... and a flea had 30,000 genes. So to find out that we're somewhere between a flea and a fruit fly seemed like really [laughs] bad news on some level, but the really bad news was, "Oh my gosh, we've got the wrong model."

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:46

       Yeah.

   13. ZBDr. Zach Bush2:46

       We're not gonna have personalized medicine 'cause we don't know how the body decides to make, now understood, 400,000 different proteins from just 20,000 genes. And what's uncovered is that to be human or to be alive is a story of a complex ecosystem within us that is made of something much greater than a single species. And we have this vast life within us of bacteria, fungi, protozoa.

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:13

       Yeah.

   15. ZBDr. Zach Bush3:13

       This massive life that's communicating through the virome, through these genetic codes of the viruses that are carrying information to and fro. And now we know about microRNA, which is, what? 95, 97% of the entire genome codes for these little microRNA to shape the behavior of our mere 20,000 genes.

   16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:33

       Yeah.

   17. ZBDr. Zach Bush3:34

       And so we realize that we are these plastic, malleable genetic opportunities, possibilities, rather than a, a distinct identity at the genetic level. And so what's happened to create this chronic disease epidemic that you started the question with is we, for the last few hundred years of science, believed human to be an isolated event.

   18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:00

       Yeah.

   19. ZBDr. Zach Bush4:00

       We believed that we were the highest genetic code in the land-

   20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:04

       Yeah

   21. ZBDr. Zach Bush4:05

       ... and we must be the most intelligent thing on Earth. And for that, we created a lifestyle that isolated us more and more from the greater environment around us, and we took no notice of the devastation we were meting out on the microbiome of the soils, of the water systems, of the rain, the air we breathe, which was, of course, influencing our bodies, and we were losing our landscape. And so over the last 40 years, it's estimated we've lost some half of life on Earth. 50% of the complexity of life on Earth disappeared under the pressure of human behavior-

   22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:38

       Yeah

   23. ZBDr. Zach Bush4:38

       ... of isolationism. And in our isolation, we manifested chronic disease epidemics we could have never dreamed of.

   24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:44

       Yeah.

2. 4:46 – 14:18

   Reductionist Medicine, Endocrinology and Mitochondrial Energy

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee4:46

      You mention isolation, and if I think back to our medical school training, one thing it did a lot was isolate different parts of the body, different diseases. You know, this, this idea now that we've got so specialized whereby a certain problem is a lung problem, that's a heart problem, that's a neurological problem. And I would say one of the biggest problems in medical school training, especially for what we're seeing today with these chronic diseases that, in many ways, are driven by the way we're collectively living our lives. That means a lot of different things. It's not just the things that we have control of. It's nes- you know, it could be the pressure coming from our employer. It could be what's going on in the environments around us. But this reductionist isolation-type approach is incredibly problematic, isn't it?

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush5:44

      It's a crisis. It's a crisis. It's losing the forest for the trees kind of phenomenon. And when you go and study a single tree, and you get-- you- your entire professional identity becomes your knowledge of that single tree, [laughs] you know?

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:58

      Yeah.

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush5:58

      And so for me, that was a protein. Um, I, I, I went into especially-- Similar to your journey. You went and studied nephrology, I think, and were ready to go into that super subspecialized understanding of just the kidneys.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:10

      Yeah.

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush6:11

      Which is a tiny part of the human body, right? And I, I was really being drawn towards cardiology and all this 'cause it's just like, well, the heart, you know, super important level. And the more I got into that space, it was-- I realized I was missing the f- the role of the heart in something bigger than itself, [laughs] you know? And so like you, I backed out and said, "Well, what, what is it that I really am interested in?" I was r- interested in the bigger system, and so I ended up in a specialty called endocrinology, which is the study of the way in which all the organ systems communicate. And that ended up to be a slippery slope. That's actually why I ended up leaving academia, is the further I got into understanding the communication networks of the body, the more I realized I was on completely the wrong track of understanding human health and the manifestation of disease. But the interesting experience when you go into a hospital system today is, as a patient, you are radically categorized into one of these organ systems, and you're a heart or you're a kidney or you're this, and people rush in and they look at a bunch of lab numbers and they, they treat you in the same way that you would expect in some ways, which is-

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:23

      Yeah

   8. ZBDr. Zach Bush7:23

      ... you're a number. You are, you know, a, a problem to be solved rather than a human in a complex ecosystem-

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee7:32

      Yeah

   10. ZBDr. Zach Bush7:32

       ... manifesting stress. And so that study of endocrinology, I, it started in hormones, and I was studying the, the ways in which hormones communicate, uh, across body systems. And it turns out the kidneys and the bone, bone being the probably biggest endocrine organ in the body, which is still not known out there, but the bone is producing over 400 different hormones that we haven't even named yet. We don't know what they do yet. And so this huge cascade of information is flowing out of your bone when you move or exercise, out of your kidneys when you drink water or consume electrolytes, or a huge amount of information coming out of your liver, out of your gut. And there's this symphony of coordination to tune 70 trillion cells that are organizing all these different organ systems into one function, to be alive. To be alive-

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:24

       Yeah

   12. ZBDr. Zach Bush8:24

       ... in that moment. And so I thought, "Wow, this is so beautiful. This is so eloquent." And then this is, you know, 2005 to 2010, when suddenly we were starting to crack the code on mitochondria, which are these little bacteria that live inside of our cells. And this was a crisis, again, kind of similar to 1996 when we suddenly realized, oh my God, we, we have the wrong model for DNA. By 2006, we realized we probably had the wrong code for cell-cell communication. And my second half of my specialty is metabolism, so endocrinology and metabolism is the subspecialty, and metabolism is really a description of how energy is produced, and that turns out to be entirely the mitochondria's role in human physiology. And so we re- we rely on a non-human species called mitochondria, these little bacteroids that live inside of our cells, to run and produce all of the energy that will, will manifest our capacity to be alive. And so it's like the fundamental realization.

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:23

       Yeah.

   14. ZBDr. Zach Bush9:23

       And, and when I was in training in the '90s, we thought mitochondria-- We were trained to think mitochondria are part of the human cell.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:28

       Yeah.

   16. ZBDr. Zach Bush9:29

       By 19, you know, '98, 2000, by 2006, we, we realized they have their own very unique DNA that's actually much more similar to a virus or a bacterium than it is to anything else. And these little genetic codes of the mitochondria were swapping information to the genes inside our nucleus of our cells. And so we were sharing, in real time, genetic information with the bacteria inside of our cells, so much so that some of the critical genes that, that mitochondria use to reproduce themselves, just as bacteria reproduce, the, the mitochondria are always reproducing inside your cells to keep a, a population of, of bacteria inside your cells. They store those critical genes in the human nucleus.

   17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:15

       Yeah.

   18. ZBDr. Zach Bush10:15

       And then they go and retrieve that and get that back out of the human to express their own reproductive capacity. And so [chuckles] we're watching this dance between-

   19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:26

       Yeah

   20. ZBDr. Zach Bush10:26

       ... bacteria and human cells that is inextricably reliant on one another. And when you start to wonder, like, how did the first mammal form? H- because to be a multicellular organism, forget the mammals, how did the first reptile form? To be a multicellular organisms means you are 100 intrinsically-- 100% intrinsically responsible and dependent upon the vitality of mitochondria inside your cells. So how did this all occur? How did we-

   21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee10:56

       Yeah

   22. ZBDr. Zach Bush10:56

       ... produce this intelligence of life? And the answers, you know, bizarrely, are coming back to viruses. The viruses are not alive. The viruses are actually just packets of information that have a genetic library that is-- I grew up, my grandmother was the director of PR for the Library of Congress, and so I'd be-- as a kid, I would go to this massive stone building in Washington, DC and-

   23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:21

       Yeah

   24. ZBDr. Zach Bush11:21

       ... walk in, and they have an archive of everything that's ever been published, you know, in, in modern history. And, and so you go into this tome of information, and it's just mind-boggling the amount of words that humanity has printed in, like, the last few hundred years.

   25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:37

       Yeah.

   26. ZBDr. Zach Bush11:37

       It pales in comparison to how much is written into the genetic code of life in the viruses. And so the viruses are this extraordinary traffic of information between bacteria, fungi, multicellular creatures, plants, you know, the, the soil itself, and it's all communicating through the potential of life, and we're swapping information. And at one point, we suddenly got these viral updates that allowed us to cooperate with these bacteria inside of our cells. And, and so this plastic event happened, and when that happened, the s- the moment a bacteria successfully entered a eukaryotic cell, we suddenly 10xed the amount of energy that could be produced. 'Cause before this moment, it was all fermentation. We suddenly went to respiratory capacity for energy production using water and oxygen.

   27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:26

       Yeah.

   28. ZBDr. Zach Bush12:27

       And at that moment, we were 10x'd our potential of energetics in a single cell. And the endocrinology field started to falter in our belief that, oh, we, human hormones run the body, because we're starting to realize there was a deeper communication happening that was down at the genetic level and at the bioelectrical level of mitochondria.

   29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:52

       Yeah.

   30. ZBDr. Zach Bush12:52

       They were producing a liquid circuit board of energetics that allowed one cell to communicate through light energy to the next cell. And so [laughs] this is where the whole model started to fall apart-
3. 14:18 – 18:35

   Creating Health Versus Treating Symptoms

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:18

      Many people have had an inkling into this idea that it's not just about us, it's not just about humans, it's not just about the human cell. As, you know, the science of the gut microbiome has become more and more mainstream, right? And as media articles get written and more and more of the public starts to hear about these trillions of microorganisms that live inside us, we have to feed these gut bugs in order to optimize our health. People are starting, I think, to switch on to that fact. Um, but I guess 50 years ago, if someone had said that on a podcast, had podcasting existed 50 years ago, which it didn't, people would've thought, "You're crazy. What are you talking about? What, what, there, there are these trillions of bugs living inside us? [laughs] What? Are you kidding?" Right? So it's amazing how quickly we've had to have a complete paradigm shift in who we are. In, in fact, it's not just us, we're just one of [laughs] trillions of other organisms. And these organisms that, you, you know, you mentioned a couple, fungi, bacteria, viruses, these are things that we have demonized, that we have called problematic, that we have developed therapies to kill and eradicate. And if you really follow this thread to its logical conclusion, well, if who we are is a result of the cooperation between a whole collection of different bugs and species, they're starting to kill in isolation certain ones of them. It's gonna absolutely upset the balance inside us. We see that with the gut microbiome. But then it also, I think, going back to this point you mentioned before about the creation of health, and I thought that's, that's not something we learnt in medical school, you know, the creation of health. It, it's, it's such a simple concept, but a mind-blowing concept as well, because actually at no part in our medical sc- tr- school training in the '90s, not even now, is there a focus on how do you create health in a human being. Because once you start to learn how to do that, whether it's through the gut microbiome, through nutrition, through sleep, stress, you know, whatever it might be, what you often find is that whatever name your disease has, whatever symptoms you might be suffering from, they start to disappear. They start to [laughs] ... You know, my first book came out five years ago. I, and I talk about what I call these four pillars of health, food, movement, sleep, and relaxation. And I still, Zach, to, to this day, get messages from people saying, "Oh, that book helped me reverse my depression. That book helped me get rid of my fibromyalgia pains. That book helped my mom reverse her type 2 diabetes." Thing is, it's, it wasn't a pain book. It wasn't a fibromyalgia book. It wasn't a depression book. It wasn't a diabetes book. It was a book on the creation of health, and in many ways, that's at odds with the model that we got taught.

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush17:27

      It's, it's at complete odds, and that's been, you know, a slow journey for me of deconstructing the education of, you know, the medical field and its reductionist view to this expansive view of inclusion.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee17:42

      The reductionist view has value?

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush17:44

      The reductionist view does have value because I believe that the human mind has been such the domain of human awareness that it's taken a stepwise reductionist view for us to come to the possibility that we were wrong. And so I think we had to do a linear stepwise journey to realizing we were wrong, not just about human health, we were wrong about planetary health, we're wrong about human existence, [laughs] and that to believe that bacteria, fungi, viruses, these building blocks of life on Earth, are against us is an extraordinary mathematical fallacy. There's no way that this teeming life Quadrillions of organisms on the planet were against human life or we would not be here

4. 18:35 – 23:42

   Weeds, Pneumonia and Biodiversity Collapse

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:35

      There's a really important point here. A lot of people will be familiar with something like a pneumonia, right? Where they see their doctor, they've got a, a cough, lots of green, smelly, yellowy sputums coming up, and the doctor identifies, "Look, you got a problem here. Um, you have a severe chest infection. We call it a pneumonia. This is the bug that's causing it. This is the bacteria that's causing it. I'm gonna give you this antibiotic to kill that bug." And of course, when someone takes that, they often find seven to 10 days later their cough and their chest is a lot better. So how do you put those two things together? You say that these things are our friends and we've co-evolved with them. W- what, how can you... If someone's confused with that, how would you put that together for them?

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush19:24

      Yeah. I think the easiest way to picture this is maybe if you've had any experience in a garden or a farm, something like that. So, um, when you go and clear cut an area and say, "I'm gonna turn this forest into a garden," take out all the trees, you dig up all the plants. There was maybe 100,000 species of flora and millions of species of different tiny fauna and bees and everything, and you tore all that out, and you left this bare dirt. What is the first thing that happens? Weeds start popping up that weren't there just moments before. So the weeds start popping up, and our training as gardeners and farmers is, the weeds are the problem. Go kill the weeds. And so we go and spray and kill the weeds, or we pull the weeds, or we do whatever, not realizing that the reason the weed is there is because we clear cut the ecosystem. We eliminated biodiversity. The reason a bacteria becomes weed-like and starts to overgrow is because it's doing the same thing as the weed. It's trying to restart life. But it turns out that to restart life, you've so damaged the whole m- metabolic function of the soil within the body at that point, that a few species need to move back in to start to rebuild the relationship between human and bacteria. And to get there, you need this interplay. And so we actually need sickness in those times. We need fever. Fever's a critical reset for the immune system to rev up its, its response indication to bacteria and the rest. It turns out that for thousands and thousands of years, people survived pneumonia without antibiotics.

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:05

      Mm-hmm.

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush21:06

      Some people didn't, but most people did. And so when we were exposed to toxins, which could be alcohol or lead or mercury back in the day, or all the toxins that we've come to live around as industrialized civilizations for a couple thousand years, we kept clear cutting the land. We kept eliminating biodiversity, and then when the weeds cropped up, we blamed the weeds. I think in medicine, in 20 years, 50 years, when pneumonia happens, we'll be like, "Oh, we just need to backpedal a few steps, figure out what came in and plowed up all of the biodiversity." And an antibiotic might be used, but I think it's more likely to be something more like an adaptogenic effort where we say, "Okay, the bacteria needs more s- more support from biodiversity." So instead of trying to kill all the bacteria in the lung-

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:56

      Yeah

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush21:56

      ... we'll, we'll quickly have an inhalation process where we'll be inhaling biodiverse information, and the biodiversity itself is what makes the weed no longer necessary. And regenerative farming is showing this. When we work with farmers now through my nonprofit, Farmer's Footprint, when we're out there watching farmers do this work on their own, they, they move into damaged soil systems where weeds are taking over. They're Roundup-resistant weeds. They're, they're drug-resistant weeds because the genetics have all been perturbed by constant chemical exposure, just like we have drug-resistant bacteria in the ICU because of constant use of antibiotics. So we create these massive problems in the war against biodiversity or-

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:34

      Yeah

   8. ZBDr. Zach Bush22:34

      ... against bacteria, whether we're in the soil or in a human, same story. As soon as a farmer stops spraying and stops trying to kill the weeds and says, "I'm gonna actually move in with the weeds, and I'm gonna support biodiversification, so I'm gonna plant 15 to 30 species cover crops. I'm gonna stop plowing so that the soil can actually have some armor on it and start to recover its own metabolism, its own energy system," within one season, 40 years of crisis on that farm goes away because the weeds that were causing a problem are literally gone. Right across the fence line are those same weeds that are being problematic. It was biodiversity that the weed was there f- to correct. As soon as the biodiversity returns, the weed has no role in the ecosystem, and so it disappears.

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:18

      So the weeds are the symptom. They're not the problem.

   10. ZBDr. Zach Bush23:21

       The weed or the pneumonia [laughs] you know, the, the cancer, these are symptoms of a collapse of biodiverse balance.

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:28

       And our focus as medical doctors typically has been, "That's the symptom. Let me eliminate that symptom." This goes, this goes even beyond what we've been speaking about. This is even a headache, right?

   12. ZBDr. Zach Bush23:42

       Yes.

5. 23:42 – 31:25

   The Hidden Costs of Common Drugs

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee23:42

      Something as common as a headache. I remember, Zach, um, one day in general practice, after I moved from nephrology, I moved to general practice 'cause I was getting frustrated with how super specialized I thought things were becoming. I thought, "I don't want to spend my whole career just looking at kidneys. I, I want to see everything. I want to see how everything relates to one another." I remember at the end of one of my clinic days, I looked at my list of patients, and I, I, I'd probably seen about 40, 40, 45 patients that day, and I asked myself, "How many patients, Rangan, have you really helped today? Like, really helped?" And hand on heart, I can only say I'd really helped 20% of them. The other 80%, I thought, "Sure, I've done something. I was polite. [laughs] I, I listened to someone. I, I, I may have sent them for a test. I may have given them a drug That was gonna mask their symptom, but I knew they'd be back. I knew-- I thought, "I'm not really helping them understand what's going on. I don't really know what's going on. I can't practice like this for the next 40 years." And something like a headache is a prime example where we give pills to get rid of the headache, and sure, that can have use, right? But it's a two-part equation for me. It's saying when that patient comes in, it's like, "Listen, I understand that this is debilitating. I understand it's really difficult. Here are some options here. Like, you've got a severe migraine. Okay, this medication, uh, it's definitely gonna help you or I think it may help you with your migraine, but it's not gonna help us understand what caused it in the first place. Would you like me to help you understand what might be causing it?" We don't have that second part of the conversation, so a lot of people think, "Oh, I've got migraines. I ne- I therefore need migraine pills. I need to carry them in my handbag. I need them, um, you know, when I go on holiday. I need to keep them with me in case I get a migraine." And again, I, I'm not criticizing that. I understand that that may have value. But I found in a lot of cases, dare I say in the majority of cases, if you take a holistic approach, you can help a patient understand why they're having a migraine, why they're having a headache. You know, it's, it's the same problem, isn't it? We look at the symptom. We try and get rid of that symptom without understanding, well, what's causing it in the first place.

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush25:57

      [inhales] Yeah. It's-- And it's darker than that in some ways [chuckles] in that the pills that we would give for that headache, Tylenol, ibuprofen, these drugs have immediate consequences-

   3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:12

      Yeah

   4. ZBDr. Zach Bush26:12

      ... in the microbiome, in the liver, in the kidneys. We're damaging systems with the very things. And if we go back to the pneumonia one, it's very interesting 'cause it seems very simplistic. Bacteria overgrown in the, in the lung. We should give an antibiotic.

   5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee26:24

      Yeah.

   6. ZBDr. Zach Bush26:24

      That seems so obvious and so, so benign. Well, let's just give them the antibiotic. What we now know is that as soon as an antibiotic hits the system, within the next 12 months, the risk of that person developing major depression goes up by 24%. If you give them two courses of antibiotics in that year, their risk of being-- a major depression goes up 44%. And so here we are treating pneumonia or a urinary tract infection or a sinus infection, and what we're really doing is undermining the entire metabolic capacity of their gut-brain axis, and we are predisposing that person to a loss of sense of self-identity, and they develop that deep major depression, this disconnect from self, because self is not a single species. Self is the description of your relationship to nature, the nature within you. And so when we give an antibiotic or we give-- Ibuprofen is a scary one. So ibuprofen, long before it goes to damage a kidney, [swallows] one of the first things it does is damage the tight junctions in the gut lining. And the tight junctions look like Velcro. They hold billions of cells together, called epithelial cells, to create this boundary event between the bacteria and your immune system. And that boundary is literally your cellular sense of self-identity. So we give ibuprofen, and we destroy all of the Velcro in a moment. And hours after your headache goes away, your gut is leaking-

   7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee27:46

      Yeah

   8. ZBDr. Zach Bush27:46

      ... information into your immune system, and you have now lost your cellular sense of self-identity. And if you stay on that ibuprofen chronically, 'cause you get a migraine every twen- two, two times a week, and you're on these high doses of ibuprofen for two to three days at a time, suddenly your sense of self-identity is disappearing at the cellular level, and you start to get dysfunction between the immune system and the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and so you start to get infections. And so this vicious cycle between, you know, undermining the gut-brain barrier and your s- true sense of self-identity is pretty, pretty dark. And to realize that our brain is really the result of all of this communication from the bacteria and fungi rather than some human event is a startling new science. One study re-recently was looking at children that were given a couple days of diflucan, which is a, a potent, you know, a-anti-parasite kind of treatment, antifungal as well. And so you give this antifungal treatment of, of diflucan, and the brain volume of that child will shrink by 10% over the next week or two. And so to-- That didn't-- Nobody thought of that for 40 years of antifungals because we thought that fun-fungi and fungi were bad for humans.

   9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:05

      Yeah.

   10. ZBDr. Zach Bush29:05

       Because we thought that life was a competition for space. We thought, "We need to mete out this space to be human. We need to push back all the bacteria, viruses, fungi. We need to clear-cut the forest so that we can be a healthy human in the midst of this vast, you know, competition of life." To find out that the fungi are somehow dictating our brain volume is trippy. It-

   11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:29

       Yeah

   12. ZBDr. Zach Bush29:29

       ... and what we find out, of course, is that the bacteria that are living, the bacteria, fungi, and protozoa that live on the surface of your gut are actually directly communicating with your brain-

   13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee29:40

       Yeah

   14. ZBDr. Zach Bush29:40

       ... through afferent nerves. And so these afferent nerves that have been recently imaged are reaching past the boundary of your gut lining out into the milieu of bacteria, fungi, and the rest and getting direct information from specific species of bacteria and fungi. They've isolated some of these species. It's pretty fascinating. If you lose this species of bacteria, you get prone to generalized anxiety disorder.

   15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee30:03

       Yeah.

   16. ZBDr. Zach Bush30:03

       And so it's very beautiful to understand that the information that's going to make this brain really high-functioning, vibrant source of creativity, source of potential new, new experience is largely being dictated by the fingers on the keyboard. The, the computer chip in your c- your computer never wrote a term paper. Neither did the keyboard. Your finger somehow wrote that. If you look at the human body, the brain never wrote a term paper. Neither did the fingers. Something outside of us came in to create the thought, and the fingers on the keyboard of your brain look to be the bacteria, fungi, protozoa that are within you. And so in the end, we are getting to this trippy moment of science where we're realizing To have a human thought, to be a creative human being is to be an expression of nature itself. And so as we have come to believe that it's a reductionist human against all other life, we should kill everything bigger than ourselves, which we've done. We should kill everything around us. We should kill everything inside of us so that we can be more human. We lost our curiosity. We lost our creativity. And so we start to do these patterns of behavior that across 7.9 billion people start to be very repetitive.

6. 31:25 – 38:54

   Competition, Cooperation and Quorum Sensing

   1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee31:25

      Yeah. There's a couple of things that come up for me there. Um, one is this idea of competition. Something I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the past few years, primarily because I used to be someone who was incredibly competitive. When I start to unpick the stories in my mind, where did they come from? Why have I ended up the way I have ended up? I realized, oh, wow, you, you were using that competition to help fill a hole in your heart. But what I've learned is once you identify where that comes from, once you actually fill that hole in your heart with other things like love and community and family and nature, I'm no longer competitive. I have known-- I have no need for that trait anymore, and genuinely, I'm not competitive anymore. It wasn't who I was, it was who I became. And as I move through that, I think a lot about society. I think about this tension between competition versus cooperation. Competition, cooperation. I think of what you say about when we used to be single-cell organisms. Well, competition was probably very good then. You know, everyone's out for themselves trying to survive. I'm gonna compete. But as we become multicellular, as we need the other cells, the other bacteria, the viruses, the other organisms in order to thrive, well, we no longer need competition, we need cooperation. And I think that works for me on an individual level. I think it works in terms of human health, in terms of what you're talking about. But it's a wider problem in society, isn't it? This, this kind of tension between competition and cooperation.

   2. ZBDr. Zach Bush33:19

      It's a beautiful observation. The microbiome teaches us, you know, maybe another deeper lesson here, which is pretty interesting in that, uh, as we really start to understand how the microbiome functions, because it actually functions as a whole. It doesn't function as staph aureus bacteria against strep bacteria, which is what we thought again. But it's more back to that story of the weeds. If you bring in enough biodiversity, there is no competition. Instead, everybody understands their role within the greater beauty of it all, and it is purely cooperative. And so as we look at the bacteria and fungi, we can g-get to witness something called quorum sensing. Whereas when you get enough bacteria in a Petri dish growing, they suddenly do something very bizarre. They go into something called quorum sensing, where they start to behave as a collective, and they do things that no single species within the group could have done, and then they do something greater than the addition of each species' contributions. They suddenly do a synergistic event, and they can behave in extraordinarily intelligent fashions. And this happens on grand scale. On a farm that could cover thousands of hectares, you can suddenly see soil that's completely dead and depleted of ma-manganese and selenium and critical micronutrients for plant health suddenly recovering spontaneously without adding any of those nutrients to the soil. And the way in which that happens is when you stop perturbing the soil through plowing and, and chemical spraying, the fungi start to understand the greater ecosystem, and they start to carry not just the information of depletion and plenty, they start to carry the nutrients themselves across hundreds of acres of land to redistribute resources for life to occur. And so the microbiome starts to f-- uh, both at the micro level of a Petri dish and the grand scale of a thousand-acre farm, the whole system becomes intelligent, and it becomes hyper cooperative. It becomes hyper alive. This life force becomes so thriving that it, it has a creativity to it, in and of itself. And not only is it going for the diversity that is known, it's pushing for a diversity that's never been seen before. It-- and it does that through viruses, which are basically new potentials for, for biodiversification. And so the way in which, you know, the globe traveled from a few species four billion years ago to the thriving ecosystems that have gone extinct five times, and with each great extinction event on this planet, we see an explosion of biodiversity after the extinction because the stress level of extinction created a bunch of viral new information of new possibilities. When an organism is stressed, it's-- tries to find new avenues to thrive, and it puts out those potential avenues through viruses. So when we see an explosion of viruses on the planet, we know that we're putting extinction-level stress on all of the organisms of the Earth. And the result is that when the extinction pressure, in this case humans, [chuckles] but historically it was an asteroid that killed out topsoil or whatever the, the existential threat is, when that threat is gone, life comes back so fast and furious in a diversification event that had never occurred before. And so before the last extinction, sixty million years ago, we had dinosaurs and ferns as kind of the macro flora and fauna. After the extinction, we see life return with deciduous trees flowering plants, fields of wildflowers of insane diversity. We see it go from reptiles to birds to mammals. We see this intelligence emerging, not only intelligence, but biodiversity, and the intelligence probably coming from the biodiversity. Now that we understand those fingers on the keyboard, the more biodiverse the ecosystem, the more intelligent potential there is for that quorum sensing to happen across all species. And we express life as this vibrant epicenter of possibility at a more extreme level. And so I think competition did never, never existed in the bacteria and fungi, though we've been taught that as, as doctors. Competition did not occur until the human ego was created, and the human ego became necessary the moment we thought we were separate and against nature. Being separate from suddenly created an immediate scarcity event. And when things become scarce, we become defensive, and the egoic mind is our ultimate defense structure that we all have tapped into to protect our minds and our bodies and spirits against this existential fear that we are isolated alone, that we're separate from nature, and it's against us. And we're, we're boxing ourselves in more and more furiously these days in a fear of this nature. And the further we get into industrialized nation kind of behaviors, the more we forget our connections to nature, the more we've forgotten what it feels like to be a curious, creative force in nature that's there to, to be a synergistic possibility of life. And we start to back in ourselves into these little corners of defensiveness, and now it's antibiotics and antidepressants and antivirals and antifungals and anti-everything, and we become an anti-species in our fear of everything around us. And in that fear paradigm, the ego gets stronger and stronger, and the behavior of ego is competition. And so what's happening to you, and I think in my own life and career, is

7. 38:54 – 43:34

   Being Crushed: Cancer, Isolation and the Human Tumor

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush38:54

      we've been able to get to the breaking point. I don't-- I won't speak for you 'cause I don't know your history well, but I know I didn't change until I broke. I had to be freaking crushed. My ego had to be crushed, and I had to be so faced with the frailty of my own knowledge, my frailty of my own capacity as a medical doctor to change somebody's life, save a life, all these, you know, lines we're told.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee39:19

      Yeah.

   3. ZBDr. Zach Bush39:20

      I had to be crushed. I had to realize I was part of this crisis of every patient walked in. I separated them further from their intuitive capacity for health because I kept stepping in with these palliative drug measures to treat their symptoms, and I was pushing them further and further away from the possibility of healing. And so, you know, after 10 years of that, I finally left the university in a state of crisis 'cause I'd been studying cancer and chemotherapy development, uh, and I suddenly realized that no cancer on Earth had ever been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And so once that settled in, I was like, "I could study chemo-- I could be the best chemotherapy developer on the planet, and I will never undercut this scourge of cancer because the cancer isn't there due to the lack of my drug. It's there d- it's an expression of a darker stress, a deeper level of disconnect." A cancer cell is ultimately the most isolated cell in the body, and in its isolation, it loses its metabolic potential 'cause it's no longer cooperative. It's no longer quorum sensing. It becomes isolated and thinks it's the last thing living, and the only thing that it can do is reproduce because it can't repair. It doesn't have enough energy to repair, so all it can do is split, and so that becomes a tumor and then a cancer, and it starts to suck energy out of its environment because it can no longer produce its own energy. And that's what humans are on the planet right now. We can no longer repair ourselves because we don't have enough energy within us. We have been so disconnected from our own energy sources that we are sucking energy out of the planet faster and faster. We are the extractive force, and we're doing that because of our isolation.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:00

      Yeah.

   5. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:00

      And so we have, uh, become the tumor on the planet. We have 7.9 billion people that are replicates of a fear paradigm, of an egoic realm where we believed ourself to be separate. To get really at this concept of separateness and the immediate result of scarcity, we can use the example of a fence. The moment that colonialists set out in the world and go find a new world, you, you got the, your-- the English, Spanish, French moving across oceans, the Dutch, you know, these massive empires moving out with their ships around the world, and as soon as they would land, they would start to shift the mentality of the, the peoples there to the belief of ownership.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee41:50

      Yeah.

   7. ZBDr. Zach Bush41:50

      No indigenous people really believe in ownership. They believe that they are a cooperative part of, of the ecosystem around them, and they see themselves as connected to Mother Earth, nature, the divine, and they see themselves as in a flow state with life itself. And then a colonialist shows up and says, "Wow, all these new resources. I'm gonna own this little plot of land." And so we did. We, um, my family arrived 400 years ago in the United States [chuckles] from, from England and the rest. And so the Bush family arrives 1617 in little Georgetown and starts setting up their, their little sh-shop there, and the first thing they do is they build these, you know, picket forts with these big 20-foot fences around them to protect themselves. The moment you put yourself in a 20-foot fenced-in area that might cover a couple hundred meters, you've lost connection to the entire planet, and you've said, "I own this little thing." And for a moment, you think, "Well, that's super powerful." And-

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee42:52

      Yeah

   9. ZBDr. Zach Bush42:52

      ... you just became the weakest organism on the planet the moment you put up the fence because you disconnected yourself from the whole. And the indigenous people, of course, in all sectors of the world look at that and be like, where do you hunt? Where do you get your stuff? You can't support yourself.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee43:09

       And this is what we call progress.

   11. ZBDr. Zach Bush43:11

       This is because we own it. Because the egoic mind is that competition. So the moment you create separation is the moment you create scarcity is the moment you need the ego and then you need competition. And so what you're experiencing in your life and what you've done on your six-week program on television to bring people back into harmony with wellness,

8. 43:34 – 59:06

   Journey of Intrinsic Health: Identity, Resonance and Play

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush43:34

      we actually did a similar thing. I just closed my clinic a few weeks ago. And it was for the reason that over the last few years, I've built an eight-week program called Journey of Intrinsic Health that teaches the eight building blocks of biology to create a thrive state within any person in any stage of life, in any state of health or disease, because these eight pillars belong at the foundation of health. Whether you're a bacteria, a fungi, or a human, you need these eight things. And the first one, the first step of the eight, we just refer to as be. If you can't realize that you are a source of divine information and divine self-identity, if you can't hear that, you're never going to get to health. You have to be present for a moment. And to be, you have to start to listen to yourself. And you and I had a little conversation about how hard it is to listen to self today. In the eight-week program, that first section is so powerful because typically I have people rushing into the program that have been told they are diabetic. I am diabetic. What a scary sentence. That's your self-identity now is a symptom of metabolic collapse. I am diabetic. We do this in medicine all the time. We talk to each other as doctors. This is a 48-year-old breast cancer patient.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee45:06

      Yeah.

   3. ZBDr. Zach Bush45:07

      What? A 48-year-old breast cancer? No, this is a 48-year-old woman that's expressing the stress of isolation at the cellular level because of her disconnect from a greater nature and has lost the self-identity at the cellular level such that she's creating a tumor as a symptom. But we don't say that. This is a breast cancer patient. She's on this chemotherapy regimen. She's had two rounds of radiation. The receptors on the surface of the breast cancer are ER positive, PR positive, and HER2 negative. Who the hell cares? It's like it's as if somebody gets a cold and the doctor rushes in and starts measuring the amount of snot coming out of your nose. Oh my God, it's green. Oh my gosh, it's three grams of snot today. But you know it's not the snot that's causing the cold. The cold is causing the snot. And so what is the cold? The cold is you haven't slept. You haven't seen vitamin D in months. You aren't breathing real air. The cold is an expression of your disconnect from your nature and therefore you're creating snot. But in the cancer realm, we rush in and study the hell out of the snot and pretend like we've not only defined the disease, we've defined you. So in this journey of health and disease, the first step is I am. And that's very hard to accept because in the egoic world of fences and defensiveness and competition, you inherently know that you are not enough. And the ego is telling you that every day. You aren't enough. Keep pretending, keep acting, keep the facade going because you're actually not enough. You better start. You need to fill yourself up with all the stuff. Keep competing. Keep getting more stuff. Get more awards. Go get more stuff because deep inside of you, you're feeling like you're not enough because your ego is sensing that scarcity all over the place. And ultimately, your drive to be number one in the class or somebody's drive to spend hours of content absorption from Netflix or Hulu or social media, it's an effort, a competitive effort towards filling all of the perceived gaps in yourself. And so to start an eight-week journey into a thrive state, you have to listen in. And beautifully, the last step, the eighth one in the journey is play, which is I think the most evolved version of cooperation. And so when you look at the gamut of what a cell is trying to do, whether it's a bacteria or a breast cell or a prostate cell, what it's really trying to do is play in a field of biodiversity to create something greater than itself. And when we realize that's who we are as humans, as we are sovereign beings built and created in the I am state, where we can actually tap into our own hearts and minds, something deep within us and feel truth. I'm not sure if you or I will ever hear truth from another person, but we will feel truth. Feeling truth is such a beautiful experience. It's a resonance. We're taught about five senses of the human body, touch, smell, blah, blah, blah. There's a deeper sixth sense. And that sixth sense is one of an understanding of frequency resonance. It's basically your body is an antenna. You are a column of water. I'm a column of water. Water organizes around electrical potential in a very intricate antenna-like form. And when frequencies from all of the cosmos come and hit your column of water, it's going to create a fingerprint, a very unique experience of resonance. That is your reception of all of the quorum sensing information coming from not just the bacteria and the fungi in your gut or soil systems, air you're breathing, from all of the cosmos. The stars billions of light years away are bombarding your column of water with information. The electron flow of the aurora borealis, the northern lights sweeping onto this Earth day in and day out, 100,000 lightning tr- strikes a minute to bring all that electricity down onto Earth from the cosmos is vibrating on Earth. And you take your shoes off and you go walk in the garden for a moment. Whoa, so much information. And you suddenly become this column of antenna, this, this vibrant resonant structure, and your body is designed to resonate-

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee49:48

      Yeah

   5. ZBDr. Zach Bush49:48

      ... specifically to your tune. That's what truth feels like, is the sudden-- That, that moment that an A string on a violin tunes correctly to the tuning fork in the middle of the hall. Suddenly there's this, this reinforcement, and you can feel the A string on a guitar hit that, that, that A. You can feel it hit ideally 432 hertz. But we tuned everything off a couple hundred years ago. We switched from 432 to 440, which is its own funny story of disconnect from nature as we retuned human music out of tune with nature. And so we have again and again separated ourselves from nature in these little ways. But at 432 is your concert, you know, original concert A. At that hertz, you have this incredible stacking of information in the tones of the, of the audible range.

   6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee50:44

      Mm-hmm.

   7. ZBDr. Zach Bush50:44

      And they're ultimately playing a version of a C scale. And when we start to study nature, we realize this scale is being played everywhere. Bees are very cool this way. So a hive of bees will thrum its wings in the key of C. And when you put somebody with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, in the presence of a beehive, that C retunes their cognitive dissidence of post-traumatic stress, and over the course of a few months, that PTSD can go away simply by being in the resonant frequency of the key of C from bees. This is the next step of medicine, when we start to realize we're not actually just the collective conglomerate of biology. We are actually biophysics. We are physics before we are biology, which is to say we are energy before we are a cell. The energetics, the, um, electromagnetic field emanating into and out of my body is what makes me, me. And it's tuning my whole body to these resonant frequencies of energy that then inform the human cells to work in concert with the nature around them.

   8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee51:57

      Yeah.

   9. ZBDr. Zach Bush51:57

      And the symphony starts to tune. And so the eight steps of Journey of Intrinsic Health that we do online is this eight-week journey into tuning you back to the capacity to hear yourself. And the first thing that you wanna do when you really listen into yourself is you wanna play. You want to just be creative with the nature within you, with the nature without you, with the nature of the other humans that you're starting to realize are also beautiful, sovereign beings.

   10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee52:24

       Yeah.

   11. ZBDr. Zach Bush52:24

       And the exuberance that comes out of this eight-week journey, I saw it was a great success. And then I would go to clinic, and I would do the reductionist thing. Even in my broad worldview, I've got all of these integrative m- practitioners. We do emotion code therapy. We do Egoscue therapy. We do all these things that I wasn't taught in medical school.

   12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee52:43

       Yeah.

   13. ZBDr. Zach Bush52:44

       So in my head, up until a few months ago, I was like, "I'm doing a very holistic clinic. I, I'm such a good doctor." And I had this story in my head that I had become this evolved doctor. And then suddenly a few months ago, I was slam-faced with this clear message, "You have to shut the clinic." And I was like, "No, I can't be hearing that right." Listening to that resonance frequency inside of me. Why is that feeling right? Why? As I dug dr- deeper and deeper and was willing to go through my next shattering [chuckles] event that just happened a few months ago, I, I always hope that it's the last shatter when I go through these episodes, but it never is. [laughs]

   14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee53:23

       They never are. They never are.

   15. ZBDr. Zach Bush53:24

       They come faster and more furious as you become willing, right? [laughs]

   16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee53:27

       You think you're, you, you think you're at the center of the onion.

   17. ZBDr. Zach Bush53:28

       Yeah. [laughs]

   18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee53:28

       And then you're like, "Oh, there's, there's another layer."

   19. ZBDr. Zach Bush53:30

       Bummer. This was a big one for me 'cause, like you, I'd been practicing medicine, you know, actively in my own clinics for 20 years, but before that for 10 years. And so 30 years, my primary identity was I'm a medical doctor. What I learned in that journey is that I had created all kinds of codependencies to my identity as a doctor, ultimately codependencies with my patients. And I was-- I so loved the experience of people coming in being like, "Well, Western medicine is doing this to me and this to me, and I, I'm so tired of taking the drugs and this. I just wanna get to the root cause. I'm so glad you're here." And then I would bring in this amazing holistic, you know, kind of stuff, and I'd be the hero. And I had become addicted to this identity of this alternative to, you know, a, a reductionist philosophy of medicine. But the deep, you know, truth is that I had just become another version of that competitive egoic mind. And so in letting go of the clinic and starting to let go of my identity as a medical doctor is deeply troubling in my egoic mind because much of my value system of what I bring to humanity was based on the fact that I was a medical doctor, and then I was a integrated medical doctor, and I was doing all these things, and you get all the accolades from your patients rather than... You know, when I was in academia, I'd run around, literally travel the country to get awards from other doctors.

   20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee54:57

       Mm-hmm.

   21. ZBDr. Zach Bush54:59

       When I went to my next step, I started being awarded by my patients My next step is to be awarded by myself. I need to see myself value when I wake up in the morning and l- look out into the sunshine and feel my body resonating in nature. That needs to be the reward award. That needs to be the recognition of value. And if I step into life anything but for recognizing that my value is in being self, being in that I am moment, then I am in special codependent relationship with-

   22. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee55:33

       Yeah

   23. ZBDr. Zach Bush55:34

       ... everybody around me.

   24. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee55:35

       There, there's, um, there's incredible honesty in what you've just shared, a real willingness to go on frankly a difficult and challenging journey of self-discovery. A- and also if we think about health or we think about what it means to be healthy, at its very core I, I really think a big part of it, if not the whole part of it, is when you're able to validate yourself, when you don't need it from anyone else, when, when you can stand in your truth, when you can say, "I know this is who I am. This is who I am. I, I'm enough in who I am," that's when health, that's when happiness, that's when harmony and balance, everything starts to come off the back of that. Because when we don't have that, as you didn't have, as I didn't have, as frankly most people [laughs] don't have, we do rush around. We, we seek more things. We consume more. We want more. We want accolades, nicer cars, nicer phones, nicer holiday, all these things to in somehow make up for that feeling of lack inside. And your journey from conventional medicine to, you know, integrated, you know, I get it because I've made similar, um, steps in my own life, and you realize actually that... Well, certainly for me, you know, my whole mission with this show, wi- with everything I do in public, is I want every listener to be empowered so they can be the architect of their own health and happiness. I don't want a dependency on me or any other doctor. I, I see medics should be guides, helpers, partners with the patient to help guide them. But then ultimately at some point the patient, even the term patient I don't particularly like these days, th- the individual has to-- the plan has to become their own plan, not the doctor's plan. Like even I guess someone going on your eight-week course, I'm guessing the goal is, yeah, you share some education, you share some insights, but at the end of those eight weeks I'm guessing you want that individual to feel empowered to know, "Oh, man, I get it. I get it. These are the things that I need to do for myself." And I find, Zach, I don't know your take on this, a lot of what we are trying to do to improve the health of people who are coming to see us is help them make changes to their lifestyle. But what I've realized is that if your desire to make those changes comes from a place of lack, they're never gonna become permanent. They're gonna be three, four weeks, you feel great, then you, you flip back and you, you beat yourself up. Why can't I stick to this plan? Why can't I do it? Whereas when they come from a place of fullness, that, "No, I am enough in who I am," whether I can stick to this plan or not, I find the lifestyle changes actually start to become effortless. They, they start to become part of who you are. If you truly love yourself, why would you not nourish yourself with quality food? Why would you not nourish yourself with decent movement? Why would you not nourish yourself each night with quality rest and sleep? You know, I, I, what's y- what's your perspective on that?

   25. ZBDr. Zach Bush59:04

       [inhales]

9. 59:06 – 1:02:28

   Closing the Clinic, Codependency and Self-Validation

   1. ZBDr. Zach Bush59:06

      Yeah. It's, it's so interesting. So, you know, that march from, you know, symptom management medical doctor to integrative medicine, then went to educator, and so I thought of myself as I'm just gonna teach health. But the whole concept of didactic education is a fallacy. Nobody actually should be taught anything. People should learn to hear their connection-- hear through their connection to the entire knowledge field [laughs] , which happens. We, we know everything if we listen long enough and quiet enough and ask the right questions and, and come at it from this state of abundance and connectivity rather than competition and scarcity. And so I moved from educator to what I think is being achieved right now in the current version of in, in the intrinsic health journey, which the, the words are important. Intrinsic. It is built into your fabric, this thing that we call health. There's nothing I can bring to the equation to, to make this health event occur, and that was a similar journey to what you took. 'Cause I start-- I left academia in 2010, 12 years ago left and started a, a plant-based clinic to treat-- plant-based nutrition clinic to reverse chronic disease. And it was super successful in about 30% of my patients, and it was a little bit successful in 30% of my patients, and it was not at all successful in 30% of the patients. [laughs] And so I had this incredible thing where the information I was teaching so well was failing in 60-plus percent of my patients. And so how is that possible? It's because, uh, th- my information isn't that person's truth.

   2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:00:51

      Yeah.

   3. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:00:51

      It isn't reinforcing their sense of self. So what's happened now is that intrinsic health and the journey to it has become a reality where I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold space in this eight-week journey- And I'm going to help you realize you have become codependent in these eight categories. The first one of just I am. You have so outsourced your concept of who you are. And unfortunately, you've done that to your doctors. You've allowed your doctors to tell you who you are. That's a crisis. We got to fix that. But in the next steps, we tackle things like nutrition, breathing, sleeping. And it turns out in each of these areas, nutrition being such an amazing example of it. How often do you meet somebody and they say, I am vegan? Wow, you have boiled your self-identity down to a belief system about food. You automatically have a pathological relationship to the energy source of your body as soon as you take it on as your self-identity. We have to recognize that we are sovereign resonances in this symphony. And so as we start to uncover these codependencies at each level of biology, we start to set you free. And so at the end of this course, nobody's saying, Zach taught me so much. They're all saying, I am a freaking miracle.

   4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:02:16

      Yeah. Love it. I love it. That's what it's about. They've empowered themselves because it was always there. It was always there. Life just got in the way.

10. 1:02:28 – 1:14:56

    Fear of Death, the Disease Economy and Extinction

    1. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:02:28

       What triggered when you said that was it's actually death that gets in the way because it's actually our fear of death that leads to this reductionist behavior of short-term decision-making of we got to treat the cancer, we got to treat the autoimmune disease, we got to treat the wrinkles on our face. We're trying to avoid death through our current sense of disconnect from source. The deep lesion, why is medicine the largest industry on the planet, outstripping military for the first time in human history? Why is medicine the biggest industry? The biggest military in the world is the U.S. military. We spend $700 billion a year, $700 billion a year on our military, but we spend four times that much, four times on our medical system in the United States. 4X military spending is chronic disease management. How did we do that? How did we create that much energy towards the dysfunction of humanity? And now we're in a trap because the biggest economy on the world is now dependent on its biggest economic driver, which is disease. If you're an economist, you would fear your TV show, an eight-week program of intrinsic health. That's really bad news for the current metrics of economy. And so when we say that we need to recreate everything if we're going to avoid the sixth extinction that we're in the midst of, what it means is we're going to have to fundamentally change our value system, which is, again, what you were just talking about. And in the same way that taking down the fence gives you the abundance of everything, taking away the fear of death for a moment, the fear of the headache, and just becoming still is the most powerful thing we can do. And so I think we will all leave medicine soon, maybe because we go extinct. But whether we change our behavior and stay and play or go extinct, we can't have the largest economy in the world be chronic disease. It's not survivable. And as we humble ourselves to realize it's not the human mind that fixes things, it's the human presence that becomes a vibratory force. It's an expression of the bacteria, fungi, protozoa within me. So when I become still, all I can be really aware of is my human cells and what I'm feeling. But what it allows for is the symphony of life within me, the bacteria and the fungi, to do the quorum sensing and suddenly become part of me. And suddenly I'm not wielding a human brain to try to figure out how to fix something. I'm wielding nature itself. And I become a force of nature because nature created me to be that force of nature. We are the most complex central processing unit that this planet has ever manifest. The human brain is this extraordinary capacity to take in massive amounts of information, organize it quickly, and then come up with a creative expression. If your life is feeling like a massive input of external information that's confusing you and taking away from your identity, you're probably right. And if you listen deep enough, the first thing you're going to hear is a scream. There's a scream happening inside of your head that's saying, this can't be it. What the hell are we doing here? Why am I feeling like I'm going to explode when I'm just trying to lay in bed or try to drive across the town to pick up my kids from soccer practice? Why do I feel like I'm about to just freaking annihilate everything inside of me? Or why do I feel a complete void and darkness in me? Why do I feel so vacant? That scream of reality is the only authentic thing that you're probably hearing in the day. And if you go into that space and then respect the scream and just say, you are rational. The scream is rational. It's okay to feel that. In fact, it's truth. The scream is saying, I am here. Pay attention. You are some sort of extraordinary manifestation of an energy field that we might call a soul that's animating human cells to behave in a certain way, to take on a certain form that would follow a certain function of vibration, to be self and to express itself creatively as part of the divine manifestation in the universe. If we become present to one another, we will heal each other so fast. Yeah. And there's so much healing to be done. And it happens spontaneously, which is so reassuring. Because if we look at biology on Earth, we only have about 50, 60 harvests left on the planet before we lose all viability of our topsoil system. 50 or 60 seasons left. If we look at human biology, with our fertility rates, our chronic disease rates, all of this, we only have about 80 years left. And so we are marching to our own extinction behind our fences of scarcity, behind our senses of egoic fear of everything around us. And that's okay. We did that to learn the greatest truths. We did that to bring our planet, perhaps all of life on this planet, to this extraordinary transformative event where the highest intelligence in regards to information processing, which is in the human mind and in the mammals themselves, the whales being a great example of this, all the keystone species being great examples of this. These keystone species, whether they be white lions of Africa or the wolves of the Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., these keystone species are the integrators of all of the information of the system around them. And as soon as they take on a sense of identity, of humble role within that ecosystem, the whole ecosystem comes alive. And so when we reintroduce keystone species to damaged ecosystems, the whole ecosystem, flora, fauna, within two, three years has completely regenerated. By putting wolves back in, where we had hunted them into extinction, put lions back in, and the bacteria of the soil suddenly improve. And the vitality of the flora and trees and fauna and the water retention of those soils and resistance to drought all recovers. And so the beautiful thing is that if we will step into our sovereignty, if we could recognize that we are a king of the jungle, we've been asked to step into a queen-like state with our nature. We've been asked and welcomed, invited to be a keystone species that would integrate information from all walks of life, whether bacteria or wolf. We're being invited to be the ultimate transmission of complete thought, quorum sensing, hyper vibration, high, high vibrations. And physics seems to be striving for that in the universe. Higher and higher vibrations of light energy are being expressed within us. And the beautiful balance of nature is that the more extreme you build the egoic world of fear and shame, the more extreme the light will manifest. And once you listen to that first hour of our podcast and then think about the last two years, it had to happen. We had to manifest the worst disease epidemic in history because we did the opposite of nature. Instead of saying, oh, wow, a virus that's going around the world is a clear signal that A, all of the organisms on Earth are under extreme stress levels, and B, their immune systems are so disconnected from their relationship to the virome that it can't make a proper response. And so there's this discordant, chaotic response to the stimulus of a virus. And we're seeing people die not from the virus. Viruses are gone within the first two to three days of exposure. People are dying weeks and months later from complications of secondary pneumonias, blood clots, micro blood clots, strokes, heart attacks. Those are happening weeks later because the immune response to a normal virus was so discordant, so chaotic because as a species we have become so disconnected from harmony. And so we're so out of tune that our response to a normal stimulus is sending us into the death tolls of our species. And so we have an opportunity to come to terms with that or ignore that. And that will be the real test of this pandemic. Are we going to accept a narrative of fear, isolation as the solution, death, therefore run away? Or are we going to recognize we simply are denying life and therefore we're dying? We need to step into life and to step into life we need to step into harmony with a nature that allowed us to show up in the first place, called us to show up in the first place. I believe there is a call in this universe to resonate more, to show up louder to our own tune. And we will not complete the human symphony until each of you listening starts to find your own tune. Our economies are actually forces of energy. So we have aligned our energetics with false beliefs. We've based the metrics of success of monetary systems on things that are fundamentally disconnected from nature. And so now for us to survive in our current economic model, we have to extract more. We have to be more dysfunctional. We have to do more spending on medicine. It's going to go from 4x to 8x military spending over the next 10 years. Currently in the United States we're at about $4 trillion a year of spending. We're expecting that by 2030 to reach $8 trillion. At which point we're 10x military spending. And so this is the course we're on. We are all tuning to a tune of fear death when we should really be tuning to life as an opportunity. We have the opportunity for life. And we will find that when each of you go silent and train yourself to go still enough to feel that sixth sense, that deep resonant within you that says, "This is me. Holy cow, that feels so good."

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:13:35

       Yeah.

    3. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:13:35

       "That feels so good." And in that moment, you start to heal everybody around you, not 'cause you're a medical doctor, but because you're a resonant truth. You are a resonant tuning fork. And as soon as somebody strikes that tuning fork in that, in that hall of the, the orchestra, everybody knows how to cooperate with that to create a single purpose. A, a Beethoven symphony can be played when e- everybody understands its relationship to a true tone.

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:04

       Yeah.

    5. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:14:05

       And if you will be a true tone, your children will understand who they are, and they won't think of themselves as your child. They'll think of themselves as I am, and they will start to express themselves instead of th- the beliefs you think they should have. [laughs] And they will start to express their curiosity instead of your metrics of success.

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:25

       Yeah. I mean, so powerful, Zach. I mean, one of the things you're... For me speaking to that, the importance of each and every single one of us cultivating, creating time, space to be with ourselves, to hear ourselves. I, I've, I, I've said multiple times on the show that I think the most important thing I

11. 1:14:56 – 1:30:37

    Solitude and Reconnecting With Soil Within and Around Us

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:14:56

       do each day for my health, for my family's health [laughs] , for my professional work, is a daily practice of solitude, where I sit with myself. I can start to hear what's going on inside of me. I think these days we distract so much. We consume so much. Even good content, even good podcasts or good audiobooks, whatever, it doesn't matter. You can't just be consuming the whole time. You have to have time where you allow your, your innermost thoughts, emotions. Otherwise, you don't know what you're truly feeling, and you run around just compensating for, um, th- this lack of awareness, this lack of knowledge. And, you know, I used to work in intensive care. You know, I remember as a, as a junior doctor being taught about early warning systems by one of my seniors, saying that, "Listen, if we track certain metrics like pulse, oxygen saturations, heart rate, respiratory rate," whatever, you know, "we track them, we can predict who's gonna need a high dependency bed in four hours, who's gonna need an intensive care bed in a few hours." And at the time as a, you know, second year out of med school, I thought, "This is incredible. We can, we can predict who's gonna end up there. We can take a different course of action to help that patient not need that high dependency bed or that intensive care bed." And for me, a daily practice of solitude is the same thing. It allows us to take the pulse on our own life. It allows us to detect that early warning system within our own bodies. When is tension building up? When am I suppressing an emotion? I find that when I can regularly practice solitude, I'm singing to a different tune. I'm resonating at a different frequency, which impacts how I feel about myself, how I interact with my children, with my wife, with my friends, with my guests. It all comes down to solitude for me, and I think it's something that is long forgotten. People, people now will say, "I don't have time. I don't have time for solitude." That's, that's where we've got to in modern human progress, apparently, in society, where we no longer have time to just be with ourselves and be. It, it's, it's really quite incredible. Uh, Zach, one thing we've never really spoken about on my podcast before, uh, in any detail is soil health. And one of the things I love about your work is how you beautifully articulate for people how it's very hard for us as individuals to be healthy in isolation, that actually health actually is that cooperation [laughs] between human health and environmental health. Why is soil health so important? What does soil health really mean? And, and to make it really practical for people, is, is it true, for example, that if we were eating broccoli 50 years ago, that it would have more nutrition, more nutrients in it than, let's say, if we buy organic broccoli today? You know, is there a difference? Talk, talk to us a little bit about soil health and why it's something that we need to be thinking about for the planet, but also for ourselves.

    2. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:18:27

       I'm, I'm gonna dive into soil health with you, but, uh, yeah, there's some profound stuff that just came through about solitude that I think is very interesting-

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:18:36

       Sorry to interrupt. If you are enjoying this content, there's loads more just like it on my channel, so please do take a moment to press Subscribe, hit the notification bell, and now back to the conversation

    4. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:18:46

       ... I've never thought about before. But the word solitude, the, the base core of that, soul, is very interesting because if we look at the current behavior of humans, we have an attitude [laughs] that is amalgamation of our reaction to external inputs, and so our daily attitude towards self or others is reactionary. Solitude with that base of soul, listening into yourself, suddenly finding that, that peaceful core diffuses all of your attitudes so quickly. So instead of attitude, let's do solitude. And I think the American psyche especially, but perhaps the whole European psyche as well, hears the word solitude and thinks loneliness. Yeah. And loneliness is again an egoic belief system of scarcity, right? And disconnect. We believe we're not, we're separate from everything, therefore to be in solitude must be lonely. In Western civilization, we've forgotten that we are connected to everything. And physics now proves this out. Quantum physics, everything else has proven that everything is everything. We are a unified hologram of information. We are expressing energetic forms as life on planet Earth or beyond. And so solitude, which can diffuse the attitudes that you came in, is the thing that will finally nurture you at the level that you've been begging for in all of your life. You've filled your life, whether you know it or not, with a bunch of relationships to externalize the sense of completion or the sense of safety or the sense of I am enough. And so you've taken your egoic split mind and combined it with a bunch of other egoic split minds to try to create a whole mind. But in so doing, you created this deep codependence of identity, this deep codependence of connectivity. And so as we look at solitude as an avenue to be that first step in the journey to health, solitude is this reconnection event that makes you realize, oh my gosh, I am literally, it is literally impossible for me to be alone. Because lying within me is a soil system that is highly intelligent. Quadrillions of organisms, current estimates around 1.4 quadrillion just bacteria, let alone you add the protozoa and the fungi and viruses. You're in the quadrillions and quadrillions. There's literally a cosmos of life within you. It's impossible to be alone. You are connected to the soil system of Earth. Your gut, your skin, your sinuses, your lungs, they're covered in soil. They are this vibrant connection of biodiversity. And so when you ask about soil health, it's going to actually come back to this solitude where you have the peace of mind and ability to realize you are a complex network of an ecosystem. And as we start to study soil systems and the microbiome at large, we find out that you are the amalgamation of whatever you breathe, touch, and eat today. And if you keep isolating yourself further and further from nature, you become a very monotonous expression of nature. And so if you live in an air-conditioned home and you keep your windows closed, you run to the garage, you jump in a plastic off-gassing car, you drive with windows closed and air conditioning to the office, you park and you breathe gasoline fumes while you walk into the office. And then you walk into the office that's an off-gassing amalgamation of carpet and paint and drywall. And you breathe that all day long while you look at a computer screen that's feeding you a blue tone light source that has nothing to do with the solar cycles of life, the light forms that change from morning to night. And you're isolated in every form. The bacteria in your skin and in your gut become very monotonous. You lose biodiversity for this disconnect from nature. And so you become much like that chemical farm that's lost its vitality and is overrun by multi-drug resistant weeds. And you're going to have sinus problems. You're going to have sleep problems. You're going to have attention problems. You're going to have mood disorders. You're going to have all of that for this lack of biodiversity within the ecosystem of the soil within your body. What we find is very exciting is when we reconnect you to nature, when we have you go start walking in old woods and we start having you touch flora and fauna again, life starts to return to your body very quickly within minutes. And so if you will go out and breathe fresh air, take off your shoes and let your skin touch earth for more than a few minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that's enough to really start to get the bacteria of the soils back into your feet, back onto your skin. And the American Gut Project that started 15, 20 years ago is now doing deep microbiome genetic research over in Africa with some of the hunter-gatherer tribes over there. And they're showing 40, you know, 4x to 40x biodiversity within the guts of these indigenous peoples versus the typical Western gut. We've lost, you know, 4x. We've lost 80% of our biodiversity and therefore we express disease as we do. And the cool thing that they're finding in the American Gut Project over there in Africa is they're realizing that the indigenous peoples, one of the dominant species in these hunter-gatherer tribes in the gut has never been seen in a Westerner's gut. And so they set out to try to find where's this species bacteria coming from. The only place they could find it is in the hides of zebras. So these hunter-gatherers will kill a zebra, quarter it, and carry it for two days back to the tribe on their shoulders with bare skin. And in that two days, that bacteria becomes their, they become, their skin becomes the hide of a zebra. And in that, they come back and immediately you watch these tribes, all of the kids are climbing all over the people that have just returned. They're welcomed back into the family. There's hugs. There's physical contact. There's no clothes involved. So there's no barrier between the zebra skin and the tribe. And then they eat zebra meat. They don't consume that animal until they have become that animal. That's pretty extraordinary. No wonder the zebra feeds them so well. No wonder they find such vitality in their food. If you are a consumer of food instead of a participant and a, and a so- a, a sense of sovereign witness to your food, if you go to the grocery store and you pick up plastic-wrapped pieces of meat, and you've actually never seen a cow up close, you've never touched a cow, you've never touched a chicken, you've never held a chicken, and you're sitting there eating its eggs that were washed of all of its, their bacteria so they would look pretty in the carton next to you, so there'd be no fecal matter or anything else on there, you don't have the bacteria appropriate to welcome this thing into your body. And so it's a very terrifying thing that we have a food system that has so separated ourselves from the source. And in our isolation from our food, we have 5,000-mile supply chains now of food based on slave labor. The food system is the most horrific humanitarian crisis we have. The abuses of farmers globally is the living day concentration camps. We have built multi-trillion dollar food system on slave labor globally. If you're going and buying a cucumber for, you know, one and a half pounds, you're literally supporting slave labor somewhere in the world [chuckles] . And so we have to come to terms with the fact that when we disconnect ourselves from soil, when we b- lo-lost our fundamental relationship to Earth, we stopped growing our own food, we stopped carrying our own zebras, we also lost the sovereignty of the sense of the people that we would ask to go do the labor. We didn't just become disconnected from the soil, we became disconnected from our humanity. And so we, we compartmentalize our lives, and we think it's somehow-- somebody must care about... W- I, I actually don't even think people realize somebody's picking the cucumber [chuckles] .

    5. SPSpeaker1:27:33

       Yeah.

    6. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:27:33

       I, I don't think somebody realizes that somebody's growing the cucumber. I don't think people actually know what a cucumber is. They just say, "Wow, this salad is great," and they forget that the salad actually has cucumbers in it. Like, we are so, so [chuckles] isolated from reality, and in so doing, we have disrespected life on every scale. And so we have a humanitarian crisis, we have a soil crisis as we started to believe in extraction versus co-creation. And so we are the tumor on the planet. We are extracting energy from every system, human systems, planetary systems. We're extracting, extracting more and more desperately every year in our, our fear of scarcity, our fear of death. This whole anti-aging movement that we're in right now of our, our industry, integrative medicine, is everybody-- well, it's all about longevity medicine. It's all about, you know, youth forever. What happened to our respect for elders? Why are we trying to resist becoming elders? What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of gaining wisdom to find out that we had done everything wrong? I think that's why we are resisting wrinkles on our face, not because we don't wanna become old, because we don't wanna become wise. Because the moment we become wise, we find out we've been on a empty journey. We have been chasing all the wrong things. We've put 99% of our energy into other people's metrics of success. The wisdom that we're, we're resisting on the face that we see in the, in the mirror is not a fear of wrinkles. It's a fear that we may be denying our reality. We may be de- denying self. And so we wanna believe we're young. We wanna believe there's lots of years ahead to figure out life-

    7. SPSpeaker1:29:12

       Mm.

    8. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:29:12

       ... because there's a mounting scream within us saying, "You're going the freaking wrong way. Correct the course. Correct the course, humanity. You don't have much more time to become wise." And so step into solitude, and ultimately, you'll find your way back to soil. Soil-tude [chuckles] . We will find ourselves back to soil-tude when we realize we are a central processing unit for life to occur. We are not some sort of competitive, you know, species fighting for life. We were given life, and if we can't receive that gift, then we will fight for-- against death. We will receive the gift of life. We will fight against death. That's our choice. We can go one way or the other. To receive, you have to be silent. You have to be, uh, hands open. To fear death is to have a chokehold on, on, on life. And so we have to open our hands up, start to receive. We have to receive in our backyards. We need to, to plow up our, our backyards and, and plant gardens again. We need to plant the garden to remind ourselves not just of the soil, but of the humans that we've been forcing to grow our food for us at slave labor r-rates and-

    9. SPSpeaker1:30:37

       Yeah.

12. 1:30:37 – 1:38:52

    Farming Crisis and Soil as Medicine

    1. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:30:37

       Currently, we're losing 8,000 farms a year in the United States to bankruptcy for lack of s- lack of, um, you know, succession. Uh, the kids can't work on the farms anymore 'cause there's no economic benefit to it, so they all left the farm. And so these farms are going bankrupt or, or our average age of farmers in the United States is approa- approaching 70 years of age. Average age of farmer is 70 years old in the United States. There, there's no-- we take over. The farmers are dying of suicide. They're dying of their fourth cancer because they are, have been put on the front lines of chemical warfare against nature.

    2. SPSpeaker1:31:13

       Yeah.

    3. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:31:14

       And so we are only moments away from losing our food system, and the pandemic showed it Suddenly our shelves were empty. Suddenly everybody working in a meat processing plant got deathly ill because they're covered in antibiotics every day. Because to keep meat from growing invasive weed-like species of bacteria, you have to cover it in bleach and awful, you know, antibiotic sprays all day. And so any worker in the food system became the most vulnerable to a pandemic. And so we lost reams of our workers, not to death necessarily, but they got sick, and then they got paid not to work [laughs] in most Western cultures, and so suddenly we lost our workforce because they were so vulnerable. And they were plunged into deeper poverty and dependence on their governments and, you know, uh, welfare programs and everything else. We disrupted the supply line of food because it was so vulnerable to begin with, because we had so disrespected the soil and the worker and, and the, the creative farmer that would, would have the courage to go out and create. So if it's just a single pot you start with in your backyard, start there. Plant something in the soil. So that's the journey at kind of the macro level. If you'll allow me, I'll do a micro version of that real quick- Yeah ... that I think is beautiful. Let's see. But soil, it turns out, was my avenue into my current journey of intrinsic health. So we were-- We had started this nutrition center, and we were feeding everybody well scientifically proven diets that would reverse inflammation and chronic disease, plant-based diets that were rich in alkaloids and medicine within the food and anti-inflammatories and anticancer compounds, antidepressing compounds in the food. And there was 40 years of science. By the time I launched this in 2010, there was 40 years of good science coming out of Cornell and a lot of great universities showing that, my gosh, the food system has all of this intelligent medicine within it. And so I took all of that science, and I developed a, a nutrition program, plant-based nutrition program, and I went-- like I said, saw 30% of my patients, like, reversing chronic disease like butter. It was just, like, beautiful. It was just smooth transitions. Every week they felt better. Less medicines. Wean them off all their drugs. Diabetes goes away. Obesity finally reduces. Their depression goes away. Their migraines go away. Their cancers remit. All of this beautiful stuff happening in that, in that chunk. But when we're seeing 30% of our patients actually get worse, it started to lead to those questions you just had about soil. Is there something missing from the food? Are we missing the food? The f- medicine within the food? So that's-- So I set out into soil science for the first time with a couple colleagues, and we were looking at papers based on soil science as to kind of what was missing, and I, I believed it was really gonna be that. But not only did we find that we had lost 80% to 90% of many of the micronutrients in our food, and therefore our alkaloids and all the medicines within our food, which had happened. Lycopene is a good example. So lycopene in tomatoes is a really cool anticancer compound, and the tomato of today has a fraction of the lycopene that tomato had in the 1960s. Wow. And the reason we lost that was 'cause we destroyed soil systems through chemical farming. So we started spraying antibiotics into our soil systems, and as soon as we did that, we weakened the plants, and so then we had to spray more, more, uh, fertilizers and, and, you know, medicines into the food. So we, we, we direct-- developed a drug dependence in our food system, and it got more and more expensive every year. That's why so many farms are going out of business, is it costs so much money to put the, the ICU drugs into the plants to keep them alive long enough to get to harvest- Wow ... that, that we're losing the entire economic viability of, of farming. And so-- And the same thing's happening in the ICUs of America, and we're now spending 4X military spending on ICU medicine. [laughs] Yeah. And so we did the same thing in soil as we did in our hospital systems. We came to believe we were against things, and we needed to wake up every morning as a farmer or a, a physician and kill something. And so we went out to kill bacteria and the pneumonia. We went out to kill the, the invasive weeds. And so we get up every morning to go kill stuff, to only find out that we're killing ourselves [laughs] in our belief that we're, we are in competition with nature itself. And so at the micro level, as we started to study soil, we discovered something amazing, was that the, the bacteria and fungi in the soil were creating a communication network. This is called redox chemistry. It's these small carbon molecules that were carrying oxygen and hydrogen to exchange electrical information in soil systems. And I recognized that molecule to be very similar to the role of the chemotherapy I had developed, which was a vitamin A compound. And so in that moment of s- looking deep in soil science and finding a medicine within the soil, it ga-- it was that goosebump paradigm-shifting thing of like, oh, my gosh, we've been looking to plants for medicine for 5,000 years of Chinese medicine, but, uh, we hadn't looked deeper into how does soil create a plant? Mm-hmm. Of course, that would take an enormous amount of communication, enormous amount of coordination of resources, and that's what we discovered in soil. And so when you ask, "What's the importance of soil?" Over the last 10 years, our basic science laboratory that I started-- As soon as we found these molecules, we started our own lab, and we started studying these things in human systems. And we s- we found the connection that had been missing in all of this data that was starting to come out in 2006 to 2010 that was saying the gut microbiome's super important. The gut microbiome seems to be related to every disease we've ever described. Depression to cancer, acne to, to Alzheimer's seems to be mapping back to the microbiome. How is that possible? 'Cause it didn't fit any of our disease understandings of human cells. But when we found out that the soil was actually making this redox chemistry happen, was making electrical communication possible, it solved for the crisis of the microbiome in human, human chronic disease. So we started putting this stuff into Petri dishes. Keep in mind that for hundreds of years of Petri dish-like experiments- We assumed that human cells were human cells and would be in their best behavior when they were isolated from bacteria and fungi and all. So all of the studies that we've ever done in cell biology to study human science was done in isolation. We only understand human physiology when it's disconnected from its nature. This is why all of our drugs are so short-sighted, not because we're stupid, but because the exact experimental model that we were using couldn't show us the actual reality of that effect of drug on a human life form that is a complex amalgamation of millions of species.

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:38:11

       And under laboratory lighting. And we know the impact natural light has on our health and our circadian biology. Even that in labs, we're not even, we're missing that piece of the puzzle as well, aren't we?

    5. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:38:24

       There is no nature in a Petri dish. And when we base our entire understanding of cell biology on an unnatural system, the likelihood we're right about anything is zero. Zero. We don't understand a drug like ibuprofen in a human body because we've never experienced it in the landscape of a true living human body. We only understand its influence on single cells that are grown in monotony in a Petri dish, completely isolated from all of life.

13. 1:38:52 – 1:46:12

    Ancient Soil Compounds, Glyphosate and Regenerative Farming

    1. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:38:52

       So we started taking these carbon molecules out of fossil soils. As it turns out, each species of bacteria and fungi makes their own variety of these carbon molecules. So we call them carbon snowflakes because everybody kind of has a sense that a snowflake, each snowflake is different from the next in its crystalline form. In the same way, these big complex carbon structures made by bacteria and fungi as they digest food, as they digest nutrients, they make this byproduct of communication. And the byproduct of communication is coordinating all of life around it, which makes sense because a bacteria consumes a little bit of food and says, okay, I just consumed this. I need all of the life around me to know that I just had this resource and I've turned it into all these other resources. So I'm going to send out some information to reflect what just happened to me so that we can start to cooperate in our macro behavior as a colony of complex microorganisms. And so they created a communication network. And so in 2012, for the first time, we took a communication network from fossil soils, incredible biodiversity in those soils 60 million years ago, predating the last extinction, which was the death of topsoil. So this was the most complex ecosystem of soil organisms that has survived the four billions of years of the planet or would develop through those four billion years. So we take that communication network and we put that on human cells in the laboratory. And for the first time in scientific history, we got to witness human cells repairing themselves in spontaneous form. They would spontaneously make tight junctions and gap junctions. Gap junctions are literally fiber optic cables that run between cells. Cells don't make tight junctions well when they're in monotony. But suddenly we added back the information stream of bacteria and fungi and the gut cells that we were growing suddenly created these cohesive tight junction systems of self-identity. Suddenly the human gut in a Petri dish developed a capacity for self-identity when exposed to the communication network of bacteria and fungi from 60 million years ago. And the chemical that we were watching under the microscope was glyphosate, which is the primary antibiotic used globally now. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup, which is the famous weed killer. We genetically modified our crops, corn, soybean, wheat, a bunch of different things now to handle different forms of Roundup. And that Roundup glyphosate molecule destroys tight junctions at about 10 times worse than ibuprofen. It's a holocaust of damage to human self-identity. And so now our food and our water systems are impregnated with this chemical. 70% of the rain, no, 78, 80% of the rainfall in the United States is now contaminated with this compound.

    2. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:41:36

       Oh, wow.

    3. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:41:37

       And that's now true globally. Globally, we spray about 4 billion pounds of this chemical into our soil systems globally. And it's water soluble, which means it ends up running off into our river systems and ultimately evaporating into our clouds and rains back down on us. 75 to 80% of the air we breathe is contaminated with this glyphosate chemical. And so we have imbued human life with a chemical that breaks down self-identity. The beauty that we see in this communication network from intelligent soil is that it is the antidote to glyphosate. 60 million years ago, soil systems developed a reservoir of information that would be the antidote to our chemical holocaust on the microbiome. I don't think I have been witness to a bigger story of grace than that. Nature would plant within her archaic soils an antidote to our decimation of those very soils. Nature is built in a graceful checks and balances system that says if you will have reverence for life, you will have more life. If you will participate in life, there will be more life. If you decide to kill everything around you, you will die. And so this is the existential moment we've come to as a species. Will we continue to kill or will we receive life? And the microbiome of the soil system is teaching us something beautiful about this. And so now we have this whole line of dietary supplements for sinuses, gut, skin that's taking information from 60 million years ago, putting it in a bottle and sending this out all over the world. Millions of households being connected to this original information. Not because we want the product to sell, but because we want the information in that bottle to reconnect each of those individuals-

    4. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:43:36

       Yeah

    5. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:43:36

       ... to their original self-identity, because as soon as they drink that, they start making tight junctions and gap junctions across their gut lining, across their pulmonary vascular linings, their gut-brain barrier even. And so they're starting to build self-identity back in. And I believe that when we find our self-identity again, we will stop destroying soil systems, and we can put our, our supplement company out of business, 'cause there's no logic-

    6. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:43:59

       Yeah

    7. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:44:00

       ... that we need 60-million-year-old soil to fix the, the ... be the antidote to our crisis right now. Soils of today could solve that problem if we stop killing everything in the soils. And so ION supplement line is really a story of reconnection to life, and when you start, you know, diving into the possibility that you can reconnect to ancient information, you will find yourself in there.

    8. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:44:26

       Yeah.

    9. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:44:26

       And we're taking, you know, all of the energy of this thing, and we're seeding new ideas, and we're seeding new nonprofits and all of that to help us realize that we are interconnected. And so we started Farmers Footprint, a, a mission to help farmers start to reclaim their sovereignty and start to understand their role in a connected nature of food systems rather than a disconnected, you know, kill-everything me- mentality. And we're finding the vitality of farmers improving.

    10. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:44:55

        Yeah.

    11. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:44:55

        We find that their mental health improves, and suddenly generational farming comes real again, and we see younger generations returning to the farm to carry on a next generation of farming because they get excited about more life being on the farm.

    12. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:45:08

        Yeah.

    13. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:45:08

        They see their parents becoming more vital, and suddenly that 65-year-old farmer has a 40-year-old kid who's like, "You know what? I'm tired of the ri- rat race in New York. I'm fricking pulling the plug, and I'm gonna come back to the farm-

    14. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:45:20

        Yeah

    15. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:45:20

        ... 'cause I think you got something here. This regenerative thing looks pretty cool." [laughs] And so regenerative farming is regenerating our hope in our connection to soil, which will ultimately give us back our self-identity because the supplements are just showing us something of the potential of a, a life much better lived.

    16. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:45:37

        Yeah.

    17. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:45:38

        As a return to soil vitality will be a return to human vitality. A return to human vitality will be e- expression of life vitality, a sovereignty, and a respect for life itself. So that's been my journey in the soil.

    18. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:45:54

        Yeah.

    19. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:45:54

        At the macro level to the micro level. Soil will tell us the path back. It will show us who we are.

    20. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:46:01

        This is a story of hope now. From one of doom, this is a story of hope. There's things that, you know, you're involved with. There's things that are happening that hopefully can get us out of this mess.

14. 1:46:12 – 1:57:00

    Reconnecting With Nature After Antibiotics and Final Advice to Feel More

    1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:46:12

       Early on in the conversation, you mentioned, I think right at the start, we spoke about if, let's say, someone takes a broad-spectrum antibiotic to treat an infection, the consequences can be an increase in the rates of other conditions afterwards. Let's say depression, for example. You know, a lot of people will hear that statistic, get really panicked that, "Oh man, I've taken an antibiotic," or, "My child needed an antibiotic for an infection. What are the consequences of that?" Can you help us-

    2. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:46:40

       Yeah

    3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:46:40

       ... sort of make sense of that?

    4. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:46:41

       So the, the story here is reconnect as deep as you can into nature as soon as you see a problem.

    5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:46:47

       Yeah.

    6. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:46:47

       Depression, headaches, anxiety, cancer. Reconnect into nature. And so a lot of what we do is, is preach breathe your biome, 'cause it turns out that your microbiome is not just coded by your food. It's mostly coded by what are you breathing.

    7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47:01

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:47:02

       Does the air you have carry biodiversity in it? There's m- hundreds of millions of species in the air that we're breathing, and so if you go out of the house and the air-conditioned car and the office, and go spend time hiking trails as wild as you can find, and you breathe that, or you go bathe in a waterfall instead of chlorinated sterile water, you start to rebuild communication very quickly, within minutes. And so if you've been exposed to an antibiotic, realize the need for the antibiotic was a symptom of a poor ecosystem to begin with. The best option is go and redouble or quadruple-

    9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:47:39

       Yeah

    10. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:47:39

        ... the amount of bacterial species you have. It's all symptomatic of a lack of nature. So you need to rush back out into nature. And so a lot of what I do is when disease occurs, I ask people to radically change their environment, and a lot of that is, is difficult, you know, uh, in the mental range, but it turns out, turns out to be much simpler. Basically, I say, "You need a completely different environment." So if you live in, in the beaches of Southern California, I'm gonna ask you to move to the high deserts of Arizona or California or into the rainforest environment of the Great Smokies in Tennessee for a few months. Because if I do that, I'm gonna so radically change your bacterial soils. There's no way that your body can continue to express the same disease that you showed up with. A lot of people say, "Well, I don't have enough money to do that, you know?" But there's incredible, you know, s- websites now where you can do house swaps, and you've got, you know, Airbnbs. You've got all this-

    11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:48:36

        Mm-hmm

    12. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:48:36

        ... opportunity to t- radically change your environment, easier than it's ever been in human history to radically change your environment. So if you radically ch- plug back into a different nature than you've been steeping yourself in, you will have a different result. It's impossible not to have a different result. [laughs] And so it's very exciting when we start to realize-

    13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:48:57

        Yeah

    14. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:48:57

        ... that the science of ION, that liquid that you're drinking, is only showing you the potential that you have in reintroducing yourself to nature. And so get back out breathing real systems. And unfortunately, we are in a situation where 70% of the air we breathe is contaminated-

    15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:49:13

        Yeah

    16. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:49:13

        ... with glyphosate, and it's getting harder and harder to find nature, in the same way as it's harder and harder to find solitude because you're so full of attitude for your activity of everything that you're-

    17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:49:23

        Yeah

    18. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:49:23

        ... allowing to program you. And so we are reaching this crisis of access to information that is real. We're reaching a crisis of, of contact with nature. We have an opportunity to reconnect, and we're being invited. The science has proved it out. The science is there to show us that there is a path that looks much different than fear, shame, guilt, and the, and, and the avoidance of death. [laughs] There's a much cooler science saying you are a resonant being in a complex system of life expression that is different versions of the particle state of light.

    19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:50:00

        Mm-hmm.

    20. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:50:01

        The universe is an explosion of light energy that is manifesting many particle states of diversity, and in that complex tapestry of energies throughout the cosmos, there is great beauty. And I believe that if you look deep enough into yourself and you spend enough time in solitude to find that soul and to start to express soil-tude, [laughs] when you become the soil, when you become the very nature that would nurture you, you will become so beautiful you can hardly stand it. And in that moment, we will set a completely different course for humankind, and we will become kind to our nature, to each other through that journey into solitude, into the soil itself, into our reconnection.

    21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:50:51

        We've moved from, I guess, a, a tone of worry and doom and I guess hopelessness about the future in the face of powerful entities, environment, things around us that we don't feel we have any power over to one right at the end here of, of hope that there is something that we can do. Zach, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. For people listening, do you have any final words, any final thoughts for them to think about how they can take this information, how they can individually for themselves, for their family, for their work colleagues? What can people do right now to start improving their lives and improving the lives of the people around them?

    22. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:51:54

        To feel better, I think all of us are gonna have to be willing to feel more. Right now we are suppressing our intrinsic capacity to feel, and it's obvious why we're suppressing it, because most of what we're feeling is uncomfortable. We're feeling pain, we're feeling anxiety, we're feeling depression, we're feeling panic, we're feeling exhausted, and so it's obvious why we are in a drug culture of stimulants, coffee to sodas to cocaine. It doesn't matter. We're, we're after the stimulants because we're trying to mute the exhaustion within ourselves. If we're going to feel better, we're gonna allow ourselves to feel all of that and then look for the root cause and believe that there's a root solution. So feeling more is going to be that, that trust fall into yourself. Everything you are feeling right now is the only real thing happening to you. Everything else is external falsehoods. It's a, it's a game show. [laughs] The only thing that's real is what you are feeling right now. If you are feeling depressed, heartbroken, abused, isolated, abandoned, those are valid feelings of you existing as a ancient, wise soul in the body of a human that's been programmed into a belief of scarcity and therefore egoic, desperate defensiveness. Allow yourself to feel all of those things, all of those horrific things inside of you, and then know that the solution, the antidote to the feeling itself is inside that feeling. If you stop suppressing your ability to feel and allow yourself to feel, you will find the solution to your depression, to your pain, and everything else, because deep to that scream is a truth, is a voice that is you. You will find yourself in the authentic feeling of everything you're going through right now. So to practice solitude is to come into enough silence to feel and trust the feelings and respect the feelings and acknowledge that they are just feelings. They're not necessarily the reality of the universe. They are the result of being disconnected from that universe. And in l- enough time of allowing those feelings to percolate to the surface, have the very uncomfortable experience of being with them, sitting with them, they will, they will process through. The microbiome of your gut has enough neurochemistry in there to allow you to get past the stress of it. 90% of the serotonin made in your body is made by the gut s- relationship to its bacteria. 90% of the, the feel-good serotonin, 50% of the dopamine, feel-good dopamine, is coming from the gut's ability to ameliorate your pain, your suffering. And so listen into yourself. Let those experiences, those stressors, those feelings bubble up, and you will feel better-

    23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:55:14

        Yeah

    24. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:55:15

        ... for your permission to feel. And so I d- I did this yesterday intensely. I went through a massive day yesterday. I, I went to sleep with massive knots in my stomach last night, just roiling in feeling. I didn't-- I couldn't even put a name to all the feelings I was having. Whoa, the more intense life gets, and when life gets intense, you know you're living. [laughs]

    25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:55:39

        Yeah.

    26. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:55:39

        Which feels so much better than the numbed-out, depressed state that I was in in 2010 at the University of Virginia when I was a che- chemical, [laughs] you know, chemotherapy doctor, scientist, so separated from nature. And so I am willing to feel today the intensity of being alive is worth it. It's not easy. It's not comfortable, but it is comfort- comforting in the end, that I am actually alive and I can feel. And if I can feel, it means I am alive. And if I can feel, it means I can get through that feeling to a deeper truth. And if I can get to a deeper truth, it means I can build richer soil in my life and become more abundant in my relationship to a world that I am not separate from.

    27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:56:25

        Zach, challenging, thought-provoking. What a wonderful conversation. I wanna thank you, and, uh, I've loved it, man. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for coming.

    28. ZBDr. Zach Bush1:56:36

        Appreciate it.

    29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee1:56:37

        [upbeat music] If you enjoyed that conversation, I think you are really going to enjoy this one about the daily things you can do to lose weight and prevent disease.

    30. SPSpeaker1:56:45

        I used to think, you know, weight loss is just about willpower. It's about calories in, calories out. The energy balance equation is always true, but people always misinterpret it to mean that just eating fewer calories leads to body fat loss. It does not

Episode duration: 1:57:00