Zach Bush MD: Regeneration of Our Health and Our Earth Introduction

Well, today we’re going to explore regenerative practices, why they are so important, not just what goes on in the farm, but what goes into our mouth and everything that happens in between all that. My guest today is internationally renowned Zach Bush, M.D.

He’s a physician specialising in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He’s an internationally recognised educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease and the food systems. Zach’s passion is for education and reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity and gut/ brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming, and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers and mega industries to work together for a healthy future for people and the planet. Sounds very much like what this podcast is about.

Zach visited Australia in December 2022 at the end of last year. He put on several lectures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Byron Bay. I was fortunate enough with a packed house of about 300 people to attend his Sydney presentation, which was really inspiring. He’s a great educator, a great storyteller. I then had the pleasure and the opportunity to meet with him the following day and we sat face to face. I don’t do that as often as I’d like to, but I’ve sat we sat face to face and had a chat, and that is this podcast that you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Zach Bush.

Podcast Transcript

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Unstress. My name is Dr Ron Ehrlich. I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I am recording this podcast, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to their Elders – past, present and emerging. And as I have said many times, the reason I do this is not only out of respect for our First Nations people, but because we have so much to learn from them about connection and respect. And today’s podcast is very much about that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:00:35] Well, today we’re going to explore regenerative practices, why they are so important, not just what goes on in the farm, but what goes into our mouth and everything that happens in between all that. My guest today is internationally renowned Zach Bush, M.D.

He’s a physician specialising in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He’s an internationally recognised educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease and the food systems. Zach’s passion is for education and reaches across many disciplines, including topics such as the role of soil and water ecosystems in human genomics, immunity and gut/ brain health. His education has highlighted the need for a radical departure from chemical farming, and pharmacy, and his ongoing efforts are providing a path for consumers, farmers and mega industries to work together for a healthy future for people and the planet. Sounds very much like what this podcast is about.

Zach visited Australia in December 2022 at the end of last year. He put on several lectures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Byron Bay. I was fortunate enough with a packed house of about 300 people to attend his Sydney presentation, which was really inspiring. He’s a great educator, a great storyteller. I then had the pleasure and the opportunity to meet with him the following day and we sat face to face. I don’t do that as often as I’d like to, but I’ve sat we sat face to face and had a chat, and that is this podcast that you’re about to hear. I hope you enjoy this conversation I had with Zach Bush.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:02:27] Zach, welcome. Not just to the show but to Australia. And on behalf of everybody that’s heard you ever speak. I know that comes right from the heart. You should know that too.

Zach Bush MD: [00:02:37] Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:02:37] Listen, well..

Zach Bush MD: [00:02:40] It’s a pleasure to be with you, Dr Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:02:41] Thanks. Zach, Farmer’s Footprint is about stories, and I wondered if you might share with us the Zach Bush story. What brought you to this point in your life?

Zach Bush MD: [00:02:53] So similar meandering path to all of us probably than find ourselves in the decades of life, but certainly an unintentional journey which is so fortunate because I don’t think we can dream just how good life can get when we’re young and being told, well, you know, a path and so certainly told this story about where I was going when I was young and that was a story about being a mechanic and then maybe an engineer eventually and things like that. And I was good with my hands and grew up pretty blue-collar life, pretty good welder, pretty good at working on cars and kind of picture that life for myself for a lot of years, all the way through kind of high school, I started a construction company doing that kind of thing.

And so when my life took a hard left turn, I’d taken a year of college from clinical, going to engineering, and then jumped into the Philippines and was working with a group of international midwives birthing babies. And that’s really where my life pivoted hard. There’s something about watching the miracle of birth that just is so transformative that once I had experienced that, but it wasn’t just that actually there was another miracle happening that I was witnessing was these Filipino women. Here I am, a young kid, no medical training, really given some direction on how to do the 14-day wellness screenings on these little kids and these women be lined up every Thursday, you know, 60, 80, along with their newborn babies. And I’d be taking these babies and weighing them, doing all their little things, checking for hip dysplasia and listening to their hearts and. The interaction between a woman and her child. And the trust of that’s an unspoken trust that when you come to a health care provider and there’s something that happens there that was part of that magic of like, why wouldn’t I want to be part of that, that part of that really intense human experience where this is the most important thing that this woman has ever experienced and she’s going to put it in your hands and ask for an experience of collaborative care for this child, you know, And that really transformed me.

Zach Bush MD: [00:04:49] So I think at that point I was done. I couldn’t go back to I thought about robotics and engineering like I thought I wanted to do. And there was something about life that really grabbed me at that point. And so I went back and got a Spanish major and pre-med. And in that time I started laying seeds that I think I had no idea what I was learning at the time. But I dived into Spanish literature as my passion, my graduate degree there, and got into Gabriel Garcia Marquez and…

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:05:19] One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Zach Bush MD: [00:05:20] One Hundred Years of Solitude there. And that book is set a new genre in literature called Magic Realism. And fast forward almost 40 years later. I think that’s that’s my life is magic realism now. And so I had to go on a long arc from the magic of childbirth, the magic of seeing a mother of a newborn child and a trusting relationship with a provider through the arc of belief that I could command so much information in my head that I could be responsible for human life and I could be responsible for human disease and management, and that I would be empowered with a pharmaceutical, you know, a toolbox that was going to change people’s lives. I really went deep in on that. I was as serious as you can get on Western medicine. I went very deep on. I was in internal medicine, running ICUs and then endocrinology and metabolism, running a lot of outpatient clinics. And during that time got into the biochemistry of cancer and was running a lab around that the development of chemotherapy out of Vitamin A compounds. And those are deep you could get in there. And it was in my study of vitamin D that I started to get into food and nutrition and it really broke my world open again.

And I took another hard left turn at that point realising that. And it was one of my patients that really changed this disease, I had gotten chemotherapy from concept through basic science to its first clinical trial, which doesn’t usually happen in a few years. It was really kind of this high-speed experience. And so I was jacked up, I think in the head of so much excitement, I’m going to change the world with this chemotherapy thing. And then the very first patient that was in my trial, she came into the General clinical research centre. I just kind of waiting in the hospital, super quiet. They try to dress it up like a kind of hotel feel. So it’s not like in my medical wing. And she sat there that night. I was probably eight or 9:00 at night and we were chatting about she has had a unique tumour in the base of her brain that was specific to the chemotherapy I was making. So we’re talking through just the what the chemo was and what the, you know, how safe it was and all these things. And I was more shocked that her I think I was. I repeat that because I hit my mic. I was more shocked than her, which when the nurse walked in and what looked like a hazmat suit and I found out that this was like clinical protocol for delivering an investigative drug. And so she’s like has a full face mask on and gloves and this latex gown and comes in holding these six green pills and walks over to the patient who’s now like giant eyes and dumps these into her hand and the patient like your first. And you want them in her hand because it’s like this woman’s terrified to even breathe around them. And the woman says, here is a glass of water to swallow these six capsules. And the woman looks at me like, “Am I crazy? Like, why am I putting this in my body?” And so it took me 45 minutes to convince this woman to put that in her body and she swallow it. And no bad outcomes, anything like that, except that I think that night was probably the darkest night of my doctoring world, is I found out that to be a doctor, to get people to take something that their body knows they don’t need, shouldn’t take. You have to break somebody’s intuition. You know, that night I broke a woman’s intuition about her own body, and that was a really dark experience in the end. So that was the whole arc of the joy of watching a woman with a child to the darkness of watching.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:08:40] How far into your medical degree were you at that point?

Zach Bush MD: [00:08:43] I was way down the road by that time. I’d gotten my M.D. ten years before that, and I had been doing, you know, clinical research and specialities and all that medicine. So that was I was a full 20 years after the Philippines. So it was a long arc of believing that I was on a promising track towards a future that was good for my patients.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:09:02] And that’s not an uncommon feeling for the, dare I say, the vast majority of medical practitioners.

Zach Bush MD: [00:09:08] I think you’re right. I mean, we do have the highest suicide rate of any profession aside from farmers. And so farmers and physicians have the highest suicide rates in the Western world as any profession. And. Interestingly, we’re trained by the same group, which is the chemical industry.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:09:25] Yes.

Zach Bush MD: [00:09:25] And so there’s something about being trained into a world philosophy that humans are waiting for a magic chemical to come along to improve their crop or their health. And at that point, you are so… I think the journey is so divorced from nature at this point that you lose your grounding as a sense of who you are.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:09:47] At that moment from that shock of seeing the reaction of this woman to where you are now, I mean, there’s a whole integration. I mean, you could have gone off and just studied biochemistry, which I’m sure you did. But there’s a big step there too, to realise. Yeah, the big picture.

Zach Bush MD: [00:10:04] Yeah. I think that’s what has to happen from there. That was my moment of, you know, total reductionist thinking of there’s a tumour, I need to kill it with this drug to realising there was a woman with an intuition about her own health. And so that’s it. And that was 14 years ago now, so it takes me to another 14-year-old, you know, journey. And I think we kind of organise our lives in these seven-year sections similar to crops, you know, a farm field, we’ll do a seven-year cycle.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:10:30] I think Ayurveda looks at seven years cycles.

Zach Bush MD: [00:10:33] Ayurveda does, and ancient Hebrew methods for health and farming all revolve around that seven-year cycle. So in my own life, I can certainly see those seven year patterns happening. And I think I’ve been through two of those seven-year cycles, looking for the human spirit. And I think for the first seven years I was looking to understand the human spirit, my patients. And then I realised, you know, seven years back that I wasn’t going to find it unless I found my spirit.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:11:00] Interesting.

Zach Bush MD: [00:11:00] This last seven years, I think it’s been really a journey into self that’s been pretty intense. And each of those blocks, you know, to imagine, you know, Philippines, deconstruct my engineering belief and then pivot and deconstruct my chemotherapy belief and pivot and deconstruct the beliefs that somebody else’s soul that I’m looking for and realise it’s me. I get each of those big turns. You have to be willing to die for almost everything that you believed you were. And that’s a bit of the trend that I advise my patients in now. And then I actually run an eight-week course now online. It’s called Journey of Intrinsic Health, and it looks at the eight kinds of building blocks of physiology in the lifestyle that would support those eight blocks. And the very first block is to let go of everything for the first two weeks. We’re deconstructing their sense of and belief of who you are. And that’s an incredible journey and the most potent part of the whole experience, I think. And after those two weeks, we see people doing radical things in their lives, leaving the abusive marriage they’ve been in or finally leaving the job that’s making them miserable. And they start the company they always wanted to start and people start dreaming a new dream, telling themselves a new story. So I think this began with you asking where’s what’s the story of Zach. And I think my story is just a microcosm of the human journey, which is we are desperately looking for self in the end, and we are looking for the true story of who we are. And we certainly can do that at the individual level. And by so doing, we discover the story of humanity itself. And I think that’s exciting. I hope you have it as well.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:12:31] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I’m a lot further into my career than you are, and I still have a sense of wonder and in fact, ignorance. I practice ignorance all the time and I find it really exciting. But a lot of doctors practice ignorance with ego and arrogance and…

Zach Bush MD: [00:12:48] Insecurity?

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:12:49] Insecurity. And that’s it, isn’t it? I mean, people want certainty, and that’s part of the problem. I mean, to your first pillar, there is let go of everything. That’s a big step. What is, just very quickly, because that’s a bit of a diversion at this point. But what are quick, the other seven pillars?

Zach Bush MD: [00:13:07] Yeah, Yeah. So they include things like once you’ve changed relationship to self, it allows you to really start to understand your co-dependency in all types of different areas. And this co-dependency is a program deep in our physiology, often in the subconscious. One of the major ones is our subconscious relationship to food, which universally is pathologic. You know, we have addiction personalities with the food that we touch. And so changing the relationship to food is a fundamental next step, debunking the whole belief system that there’s a keto diet or a paleo diet or a vegan diet that’s going to fix you, you know. And as we continue to look outside of ourselves for labels or lifestyles that we believe are the solutions, we continue to diverge from that core self. That is actually what health is. What is healthy? To be healthy is actually a vibrational state of coherence with higher self, and so it doesn’t have to do with what you’re eating. Instead, what you’re eating codes for, you know, a pattern of co-dependence. Once you break that co-dependent relationship to self, then you can break could have been a relationship with food, and other things that were co-dependent with his breath.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:14:17] Interesting. It’s a great passion of mine.

Zach Bush MD: [00:14:21] And in dentistry it should be because that hard palate is the very first thing formed in the embryo, which is so fascinating to me before the brain, before the heart, before the vascular system, the hard palate, first the embryonic development. And that hard palate in its formation depends highly on how much vitamin K2 MK4 is sitting there in the uterus, which in that womb it’s the most abundant nutrient. And what it does is help line up the grid of information as to where the bone is supposed to form. And so, with more vitamin K2, you can move further and further from the centre line of embryonic development. And so the centre line is basically emanating the original math, or it sets up the electromagnetic field that the cells then line up within, and vitamin K2 allows for the migration of this, the osteoblasts that will build bone. So you have this migration effect, and ideally, you have that broad palate that then forms the sinuses and then your ability to nasal breathe. And, of course, you probably have done huge podcasts on this and know more about this than I do. So no need to, you know.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:15:23] No, it’s good.

Zach Bush MD: [00:15:24] It’s fascinating to me that nasal breathing versus mouth breathing determines your life expectancy more than do you smoke or not.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:15:33] What a statement.

Zach Bush MD: [00:15:34] Unbelievable.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:15:34] What a statement.

Zach Bush MD: [00:15:35] You’re more at risk of sudden cardiac death if you’re a mouth breather than if you’re a smoker. I mean, these are things that we’re just not taught in medical school. So the mouth breathing, nose breathing thing is important. And it also has to do with your neurologic state. So when you shift into a sympathetic state, you’re much more likely to be mouth breathing, downshift into that parasympathetic, much more likely to be in the state. Same thing when you get chronic congestion, sinusitis and allergies and everything else and now your mouth breathing. Now you have to shift into sympathetic. So it’s a vicious cycle there. So there’s that side of breath, but there’s also that subconscious thing, right? There’s not enough air to breathe. And so we tend to shallow breathe at a very high respiratory rate to reassure the brain in the sense of scarcity that we have, that things are okay. And so in medical school, you’re taught the resting heart respiratory rate should be around 16, 20 and every chart you’ve ever seen as 16 to 20…

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:16:37] Which is probably normal for our society, but not ideal.

Zach Bush MD: [00:16:40] So normal for our society. Nobody mentioned that you could breathe slower than that.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:16:45] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [00:16:46] I found Buteyko breathing great by… This guy named Buteyko back in 50 years ago now. But it’s an incredible technique for retraining your body to breathe that it’s appropriate range, which is 4 to 6 times a minute.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:17:00] Hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [00:17:01] And if I had a written on a medical chart for breaths per minute, somebody would have called the code bell when a single person was dying because nobody in medical schools ever heard that the normal respiratory rate is 4 to 6 times a minute. And yet when you train your body to get down there to that 4 to 6 respirations a minute, you can’t believe what happens to your sense of self, to your sense of safety, even your sense of nurture, sense of fullness and abundance. And your capacity for creativity. And so this is a really interesting practice to reset. And of course, when your heart rate or when your respiratory rate drops to six, your heart rate now drops into the fifties, which is kind of your ideal resting rate, which you never see anybody at. So you look at any medical chart, they’re breathing 16 times a minute in a hurry, 78 to 82. And so where our heartbeats are faster, our respiratory rate is faster. And so we have this abnormal relationship to these worlds.

Heart rates is interesting in that there’s been some pretty cool biologic demonstrations that you can predict life expectancy by that, the resting heart rate of the animal. And so, for example, and they all equal about the same. So a mouse has the same lifespan by heartbeats as an elephant. When a mouse lives for about two years, and I don’t think it will live to 80 years. And the difference is the resting heart rate. But it’s the same number of heartbeats for both mammals to its endpoint. And humans fit that same total heartbeat lifespan. And so having a low respiratory stay, low heart rate. Now you’ve expanded the number of years you can live by preserving that heart rate and possibility.

Zach Bush MD: [00:18:37] Exercise an interesting thing. We train people to exercise and then this sense of desperation as well, and the sense of like, I got to do more, I got to push more, I got to get more minutes in, I got to get more calories burned. So we create these weird, you know, metrics for exercise and we end up elevating heart rate for hours after exercise because we don’t exercise correctly. So after we change relationship to breath, we work on exercise and then our relationship to exercise and how that’s really programmed at the deep vascular and neurological level to work much differently than we’ve been trained to go to gyms and things like this. After you’ve broken that relationship, then you can start to really get into your relationship with rest of the gut and the like. And so we cover sleep and then we also get into fasting and the importance of how to modulate your relationship to nutrient intake, of course, but also the microbiome and how it turns over has huge nutrients or £6 of the microbiome in your gut turns over every 2 to 3 days. And so you have £6 of food. When you’ve stopped eating, you’ve got £6 of nutrients that can deliver your body. And so teaching people how to use that nutrient pool. Game changer for physiology.

And there’s, you know, now a lot of people out there that are practising Eritrean lifestyles where they just don’t eat and they can eat, not eat for 40, 50 days and they never shift into a fasting state because their body has learned to regenerate the nutrient reservoir within the microbiome system and from the air they breathe as well and from the sunshine that they look into so that qigong masters, you stare into the sun in the mornings they can go fasting for 40 days. And as long as they’re looking into that morning sun for, you know, they train themselves to reach an hour, an hour and a half of looking in the morning sun, you and I can make it maybe two or 3 minutes of looking at that sun as it comes above the horizon that is too bright. Training their body to physiologically relationship with the sun and they can absorb nutrients. The energetic state of the sun, which is, of course, what the plants are doing by proxy for us when we eat food, but they can do it direct from the sun.

So physiology is far more intelligent and its the capacity to absorb information and nutrient from the world than what’s on our plate. And that’s a big shift in mindset. And once you’ve gotten to that state of freedom of understanding that you are a continuum of an infinite amount of energy, then it changes your sense of self within the community. And so the last chunk of the course is about what does it look like when we say we when you’ve reached me? And that’s really the joy that comes out of the course is this fundamental shift of not only who you are, but why you’re here to be in the community.

Zach Bush MD: [00:21:06] And so the eight-week journey is pretty profound experience for all of us, I think. And we do it with a one-on-one coach so everybody’s got that mirror. We also do group coaching than at a cheaper price point and things like that. But group coaching in some ways, depending on your personality, can be even more potent because watching somebody else transform through this journey actually becomes your own version of a more potent mirror because you know you’re capable of that level of transformation. And there’s something about watching a woman decide to leave that marriage two weeks in, and she’s tearful but also suddenly emboldened. And the confidence level of lovely that you’ve never seen another human at. And you’re sitting there sharing she’s sharing that with six strangers and her coach at the end of the week. It gives you a sense of what are we scratching the surface of when we say that we’re in fellowship or when we’re in community.

And I think that the people in that course realise this is what I want to live my life as. And so we ended up developing an app that is a community app that people can stay in for infinitum after they’ve done the course. Staying in community with these large groups of, you know, hundreds of people, now they’re gone through the course, and they create stuff together. And so they create things not just for themselves, they create things for the larger community. And so they’ve created business accelerators and, you know, clubs and poetry groups and all kinds of stuff. And they and they keep showing up every week. Someone will show up with their same six groups, but all tend to show up or a lot of them show up on Mondays with Marlene, who’s our community manager for the journey, and they want to be around the energy of transformation once they’ve tasted it, because they don’t want to forget their full capacity for it, because the world is so eager to distract us from that capacity, even once we grasp it for a moment. And so, surrounding ourselves with the people that are willing to do the work of surrender and transformation becomes a real addiction. And I think that’s where I’m at my life. If we’re going to have to live an addicted life, let’s be addicted to that transformation.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:23:10] Look, this is all music to my ears. And actually, one of my mentors who was a doctor many years ago said to me he started his career as everything, thinking everything was physical. Then he thought everything was mental, and now he realises everything is spiritual, which is kind of tapping into what use you’re saying.

Look, you also I know you’re associated with… You have this Project Biome and I just wondered if you might share it with us. What is it? What’s the vision? What’s the mission? Tell us about Project Biome.

Zach Bush MD: [00:23:37] Yeah, so Project Biome is the 501(c)(3) non-part profit that we started in the United States and how we’re shifting to become more of a global NGO. But it’s got a vision of transforming human relationships, societal relationships to the soil, water and air. And as we looked at those three elements of the ecosystems that we live within, the soil was the most obvious one as to where we do the most damage through our food systems and through apparel and our energy sector and all that. And most of the crops grown in the world are not for food. They’re for ethanol, for gasoline or for plastics, for polyester, for our clothes or whatever it is. So our fundamental relationship with nature has to be the end of the soil.

So we started a project called Farmer’s Footprint in 2018 within Project Biome, which is really looking at accelerating the universal adoption of regenerative agriculture, which is to say reconnection agriculture, where you’re reconnecting the plant to the soil, ultimately the human or the animal consumer to that soil and directly. Reconnecting that soil to its sources of sun, water and air and ultimately into the microbiome that makes it thrive within it. And so Farmer’s Footprint has been affecting you know, global awareness of regen through awareness, education, innovation and policy, as are four avenues of impact. And it’s been a real experience beyond my imagination. We set out thinking we could kind of change the mindset of the Midwest, of the U.S., where we started the project with a documentary film looking at the Mississippi River and all this, and we had no idea it was going to, you know, vibrate out to the world so quickly. And I believe the pandemic had a lot to do with accelerating this when the world found out that its food supply was so limited and so vulnerable, people started asking questions they had never asked before, it’s not in the recent century.

Zach Bush MD: [00:25:19] And so is a big gift for us to realise just how vulnerable cities are in particular, but also rural environment. Same thing. Your typical big city now has a 2 to 3 day food supply, so if something disrupts supply chains, ships coming in, trucks getting in two or three days, that place has empty shelves. And that’s, you know, something that’s terrifying, and it’s reality and it is only abstract until it happens. So that started to happen throughout the world with those empty shelves. And it gave us all a reminder maybe a big technologic industry of food that allowed for 3000-mile supply chains wasn’t maybe the best idea for resiliency and human wellness and food security and all the things that looks like we have when we walk into a grocery store. It’s full of stuff. It’s hard to imagine what it would look like when empty. And in that moment you also have to question yourself, “What am I capable of doing?” I know how to grow food, and fortunately, the world sold out of seeds in the first few months of the pandemic because everybody suddenly realised I better grow something.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:26:20] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [00:26:21] And so it was the biggest increase in backyard gardens since the 1940s. And so that’s exciting that we went through, you know, 80-year divorce from backyard gardens and we just rediscovered them. For many households, we’re still less than 1% of households growing something, but 1% is better than nothing, which is where we were. So I’m really excited to say that I think there’s a new revolution afoot, not just in farmers now around regen, but in the household. We’ve got to get reconnected to soil. And we need it close to home. It’s not our backyard. We need to go to the farmers’ market. We need to be a part of a community-supported agriculture system. We need to be part of a food force up the street, wherever it is. So we’ve got a real opportunity now to kind of look at that.

So now Project Biome as it shifts, is shifting gears to look at how it is the global collapse actually happening and why. And that’s an older story. It’s about a 2000-year-old story as to how we deserve to fight about a third of the world through the destruction of North Africa. And we did that through Empire building initially with the recent empire of Egypt, which was 4 to 5000 years ago forward. And then, you know, about 2000 years ago, the Roman Empire moving in there. And those two empires started to change the dynamics of the two major river systems in North Africa. North Africa was an incredible jungle at the time. It was one of the largest rainforests in the world. It was said that you could walk from one side of North Africa to the other out seeing the sun because the tree canopy was so complete. Now you look up a map of North Africa, the largest desert in the world that continues to the right. And so you’ll see Saudi Arabia sitting next to a complete desert as an entire nation. To the right of that southern Russia, and then all the way up into Siberia.

One-third of the landmass of the world desert divide when we lost those two rivers in North Africa. And so we have a vision of not only recovering North Africa but starting to recover Amazon in South America, and Central Africa and its rainforests around the of Congo being the last stronghold of forest right now. It’s disappearing quickly all the way to Australia. So that we’ve got to get the southern hemisphere breathing again because, ultimately, the southern hemisphere is really the breathwork of the planet in a lot of ways. And the northern hemisphere is like kind of the last gasp of energy that we have going on right now. Fortunately, the northern hemisphere does pull in the vast majority of CO2 and methane that’s produced every year, pulling back in June, July,

Zach Bush MD: [00:28:49] And like 98% of the CO2 we produce in a year. So these big maps of all the CO2 production humans are going because of CO2. It’s not true. We suck all of that right back into the earth as soon as the Earth goes green. The reason why global climate change is happening is, yeah, we leave behind another 1% or 2% of carbon every year in the atmosphere. But the real issue is we are losing the respiratory cycle that happens daily in the soil system, in a healthy soil system. There’s a big inspiration into the soil every evening and then it expires in the morning and we call that dew. And so it’s hydrating and cooling the air by point deep in the earth. And so especially in summer months, you need this radiant reduction of heat of the planet by sucking it underground and releasing it. You kill soil, you can no longer breathe that and do the geothermal cooling of the planet. Double that in the middle of the day. If you have soil that’s now been bare by overpowering and chemical spraying and you have just row crops and 90% of that soil is now bare, middle of the day sunshine. And you know, any continent on earth, you can reach soil temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which is probably somewhere around, you know, with that equal out to in around 45 degrees Celsius, 50 degrees Celsius right there on the surface temperature of the soil. Whereas across the street where you got a regenerative farm that’s kept their soil covered with a cover crop in organic material armour and all this, you’re like more like 20 degrees Celsius. And so you can cut in half the soil temperature, which is the radiant heat to the atmosphere in the summertime by allowing soil to be covered by the cover crop. And if you have a microbiome in there, you’re doing geothermal cooling morning and evening.

And so by losing the geothermal cooling and increasing radiant heat, we’re changing the atmospheric temperature quickly. CO2 is a symptom of that, not the cause of that. And so that I think is a crisis. We have a misperception around what’s causing global warming because right now everybody’s talking about pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere underground, things like that. To fix global warming or climate change. They’re going to be dismally disappointed in 50 years when they find out, oh, crap, we just deserted by the whole world. And now the world is much hotter than it’s ever been. Not because their CO2 atmosphere, but because we’ve lost soils mechanics.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:31:09] So I think it’s interesting that Elon Musk puts out this reward for carbon sequestration. And yet, you know, photosynthesis, if I’m not mistaken, is a big part of that. That solution, taking it out of the atmosphere and putting it into the soil. And the other thing is nature takes about 500 years to grow an inch of soil, and yet regenerative agriculture can do that pretty quickly, kind of?

Zach Bush MD: [00:31:33] Stunningly fast. Yeah, Yeah. If you look in the textbooks of agriculture, it takes 100 years to make one centimetre of topsoil. And we can actually find like, you know, as Australia it’s Joel Salatin is one of the godfathers of the regenerative movement in the United States.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:31:46] And we’ve spoken to Joel.

Zach Bush MD: [00:31:47] Ahh, he’s been on this show. That’s great. Yeah. So Joel and I are actually pretty much neighbours in Virginia and you know, when you go walk Joel’s farm with him, you know, one, one generation back, his father. Middle age, middle-aged buys that farm. And at that time, it was, you know, two-thirds of the surface was in rock rocks on the surface. Half an acre in size. And now you can’t find a single rock there because there are 18 inches of topsoil on top of the rock that had been buried just one and a half generations back. 18 inches of topsoil that should have taken, you know, a couple of millennia.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:32:21] Mm hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [00:32:21] And so we definitely have a misperception in farming about Mother Nature’s capacity to heal because we’ve never let heal, you know, we always try to do something to her to get her to grow soil. You try to grow soil with chemicals, something like that. Maybe a centimetre, 100 years is accurate. But you let Mother Earth do that with intense bio diversification, as is her code of life, then suddenly life just goes abundant. And that’s exactly the same thing in medicine. In the medical world. We do not believe that humans can heal because we’ve never allowed nature to take its course in human. We’re always tinkering with it with chemicals and pharmaceuticals that are inherently not made for that body. And so when we allow a patient to heal, when we allow Earth to heal, the abundance is beyond our imagination. And she’s done it every time. Mother Nature has done this, every extinction event, it gets more abundant, more biodiverse, and more intelligent with the species she expresses every single time. And we’re now in the midst of the sixth extinction. So I’m kind of excited for Mother Earth to see what she does next. Selfishly, I kind of hope we change our behaviour and stick around to see what that looks like.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:33:28] Yeah, I hope. I hope we’re here for it, for it anyway. But Charlie Massy‘s a person I know, you know, and I know. And I mean, he’s a bit of a hero to many people and me, and I loved when he said we should focussed on dominating rather than enabling nature. And that was the other thing too, about the similarities between holistic health care and holistic land management, you know, enabling nature, enabling the natural immune system to do that.

But the microbiome. Now that’s a big one. And you last… I attended the lecture last night and it was brilliant. Thank you so much for it. You gave a wonderful overview of the planting of the garden and I wondered if you might just take our listener on a little bit of that journey.

Zach Bush MD: [00:34:14] Yeah, the planting of the organic garden of Human body is a new discovery. Really. In the last 1015 years, the story started to break in the late 2000, so 2007, 2008, when we started to decode the genetics of the microbiome we were in for a lot of surprises. Among them was just how diverse the ecosystem of the gut could get, you know, say, the American Gut Project, poorly named because it was actually studying, you know, people around the world, including these hunter-gatherers in Africa and these traditional hunters and gatherers eating their traditional diet of 40,000 years had about 40,000 species in their gut, whereas the American gut had about 10,000 species. So we lost, you know, 75%. Now, you know, three-quarters of our microbiome by just living a western civilised diet slash lifestyle. And so that was kind of the beginning of the aha moment where we should be way more diverse than we are. But the deeper aha moments started to come when we started doing genetic sequencing of human tissue and look and asking the question, is there a microbiome there? And it was stunning, you know, as this was 2012-2015, where these articles really started to burst big. Like, oh my gosh, there is a healthy microbiome in the human prostate, in the breast, in the lung, in, you know, the liver. And more recently, there’s a healthy human microbiome in the brain, which was just like we thought this was the holy of holies of any bacteria got in there. We assumed we die of meningitis or whatnot to find out that there’s bacteria, fungi, yeasts and all that. Living in the cerebral spinal fluid as it as a healthy balance is dumbfounding.

So where does that microbiome come from? Because we’re actually relatively sterile when we’re in the womb of mother? Not completely, though. We’re going to find out there are little bacteria in there and everything else, but certainly, there’s nothing that doesn’t have the biome of the gut and everything else that we would have as adults. The moment that you go into the birth canal, the first thing to begin life is to plant that organic garden into that baby. And so baby will descend into the birth canal and at that point, is exposed to vaginal flora, which looks a lot like Balfour in a lot of ways. And the vaginal flora is in the sinuses of the child, in that in the airways and everything else, because the child hasn’t taken a breath yet. So for hours, that child is bathed in bacteria – ears, knows eyes, throat, skin covered, descending down through mother’s kind of organic environment of the microbiome and getting bacteria, fungi, protozoa, even parasites, getting this healthy ecosystem planted in that child such that is born gradually. We get this incredible, robust, you know, experience.

Unfortunately, a lot of women are not being allowed to even get to the point where they are having you know, I had to censor the vaginal canal and babies are being induced and then C-sections, you know, as a planned removal of the baby. And this is not just Western world. Today, China has 52% of its birth by C-section. And most of those are planned, you know, have Thursday would be convenient Okay? So let’s cut the woman open and take the baby out. You just pull the baby out that has no organic garden. So that child is devoid of the ecosystem that would ultimately give it its immune system, which is interesting because we used to think the immune system job was to kill all those bugs. But we now understand after the last ten years of science that oh my gosh, the human immune system is shouldn’t even be called human. The concept of an immune system is the description of a balanced ecosystem of species, understanding its different relationships and different compartments of nature.

Zach Bush MD: [00:37:43] This compartment of the human body needs to have diverse ecosystems. It’s unique. The breast tissue should have a different ecosystem than the brain, and the microbiome seems to sense that know that and know its role in each of these special compartments of the human body and out there in nature. And so this is this humbling journey and to realising that at each stage of life we are planting our full potential of life by the ecosystem of diversity that we plant within us. And now if you look to the Western lifestyle where you jump out of bed in the morning and maybe you go take a hot shower, and you scrub down with a bunch of soap and remove the microbiome, and you go getting dressed in polyester clothing, and it’s off-gassing plastics in your bloodstream, and then you go and jump in your plastic off-gassing car that’s parked in a garage. And then you go drive through a bunch of traffic breathing exhaust that’s being blown through some sort of air conditioning system at you and then get to the office. You get out and go into a completely, hermetically sealed building that they call an office building, that no windows open and it forced air all day long. You know, the fluorescent artificial light. What is the organic garden you’re planting?

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:38:50] Hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [00:38:50] Do you have an organic garden at that point or do you have some sort of, you know, very reductionist belief system about how life works at the cellular level at that point. And for that we suffer. And so as you lose microbiome, you immediately lose neurochemistry. And so we now know 90% of serotonin and more than 50% of dopamine made in the body is made in your gut lining in relationship to the bacteria that sit on those endocrine cells that line your gut. And so with the loss of bacteria, you get a loss of serotonin, dopamine, which is to say you develop a loss of sensory processing a lot or a lack of mood stability, a lack of sleep, and that all snowballs into major depression journalising anxiety disorders, panic attacks, poor sleep quality, poor sex drive, chronic fatigue, chronic pain syndromes, which are all now, of course, epidemics since about 1982 when we start spraying our food directly with glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in all the weed killer in the world. But it happens to have been patented as an antibiotic, antifungal, anti protozoa, everything. So it kills the organisms within us and now we’re eating food and drinking water and standing in a rainfall that is contaminated with this water soluble toxin that is an antibiotic. And so we’re sterilising the planet, therefore sterilising our own experience, therefore slipping into this divorce from our vitality.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:40:07] Wow. I was going to ask you how we get it, how did we get it so wrong? But I don’t think I’ve ever had a more comprehensive assessment on that. So thanks for that. And one of our guests, an integrative gastroenterologist. Now, I didn’t even know such a thing existed, not a segue, not to many of those around Dr Pran Yoganathan. And I asked him, what about the gut as the second brain? And he said he disagreed. He thought it was the first brain.

Zach Bush MD: [00:40:29] I do. I do.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:40:30] Agree. I do, too. I do, too. And the other thing that I found really interesting was the similarities between and I shouldn’t be surprised, actually, of the soil microbiome, the gut microbiome, and the oral microbiome. And it’s all connected.

Zach Bush MD: [00:40:45] All connected and very plastic, which is exciting. I mean, they can change a lot over the course of a day or a year or a lifetime, which is reassuring because if we step back and realise the crisis that we’re in with microbiome and diversity or collapse thereof and start to think about the nature we live in, there’s a huge opportunity for us to get more diverse than we’ve ever been because we are more mobile than we’ve ever been as a species. And so the ability for me to jump on an aeroplane and be in a completely different ecosystem here in Australia for a few weeks, total change in my microbiomes and just swimming in the ocean here, knowing that every second I was in there I was seeing bacteria, fungi, viruses and everything else that I’ve never seen before. And that’s a wonderful experience because I know that as I sit there and just give gratitude to this life in and around me, I’m giving my body the opportunity to do this adaptation that’s been called gain of function, you know, and there’s a lot of fear around gain of function labs. And all of those viruses are there for our gain of function.

Since the very origin of a virus, which was 3 billion years ago, the whole purpose of viruses is to move genetic material around. They’re not living beings. They’re not part of the microbiome. They’re the way that microbiome talks genetically. And so every bacteria, every fungi, every multicellular organism, whether earthworm or human, we exude viruses, which is to say we exude new genetic options. And so when I go dive into the ocean, there are 10 to 30 viruses in the ocean. That’s one with 30 zeroes after. That’s more stars than our in our entire galaxy. We have 1.5 billion stars here, and you have to add another 20 zeros after that before you get to the number of viruses in the seawater. And so and then there’s even more in the air and there’s more in the soil. So you’ve got ten of the 31 viruses in the soil, 10 to 31 in the air, General, 30 in the ocean water. It’s just teeming with genetic information. And I love jumping into that ocean because I’m imagining the blue whale. And what is it telling me? That is my new opportunity to express.

Zach Bush MD: [00:42:42] More than 50% of my genome that I inherited from Mom and Dad was inserted into the genetic code directly by a virus. More than 50%. More than 8% of those genes that I inherited from Mom and Dad were inserted by a retrovirus that has been characterised as HIV as the terrifying retrovirus. But in fact, retroviruses are critical as the germline changes in the maturation of species. And so if it wasn’t for retroviruses, we would stop evolving. And in fact we’ve proven this very well with antiretroviral therapy. Antiretroviral therapy is what we treat HIV with. And when we put people on these two, three drug regimens that block any ability for us to translate viruses into our bloodstream within months, you have visceral obesity and diabetes within a year or two, and you have a collapse of immune function and neurologic function over the next few years, major depression is nearly 100%. So there’s just this cascading dysfunction of biology when we stop allowing viruses to participate in our constant, you know, genetic upgrade.

And so that’s, you know, it’s something to think about when we think about like a cell phone as, you know, Apple gets away with selling you a new cell phone every year or two because they stop taking care of the software platform that you’re running on. So it doesn’t update as well and starts to act slower and screw up and losing data or sits there and freezes up on you. What’s happening is the operating system is no longer getting its upgrades and when we put ourselves on an antiretroviral, we stop getting the viral upgrades and our software starts to decay. The reason why we swim in oceans of genetics, whether we would be breathing, digging in the soil or diving in the water, is because we need constant upgrades. We need constant communication for the next potential because we live in a pretty vicious world of change.

Nature loves to change, and if you’re not actively changing with or you’re going to be left behind, and when you stop introducing the microbiome, when you stop allowing viruses to upgrade the operating system of your genetics, you start to decay. And separate from that vitality and change transformation capacity that nature presents all the time.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:44:52] Mm hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [00:44:53] And that’s, I think, where we’re at as humanity. There’s so much friction between us and our nature now because of our stubbornness to try to resist change. And we do this in our economics. We try to resist change in economics, which is, by the way, we build houses. We try to build houses that are indestructible, which, of course, nature abhors. And so she comes and destroys our houses, wildfires, floods that you guys have been through so severely in Australia here as just through in New South Wales, and then, you know, drove for hours and hours of damaged roads, knocked out bridges. And this was a year ago that you guys really started with the deep flooding. This country may take decades to recover from nature’s effort to change.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:45:31] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [00:45:31] And it’s our resistance to that change that makes it look like a natural disaster when in fact it’s just nature doing her work to keep transforming the surface of this planet for something more beautiful and more intelligent, more vibrant than was here before. And so until we start doing city design and housing design and life design to match that transformative energy of nature, we’re going to be frustrated. We’re going to feel like she’s against us. But in reality, we are simply resisting her design, which is a constant update, constant transformation, and constant new imagining of the story of life.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:46:06] You talk about this. The importance of the virus upgrading constantly, because I think a lot of focus in medicine, in health now is on the mitochondria, which, you know, has a certain history, microbial history, too, doesn’t it?

Zach Bush MD: [00:46:20] It sure does, yeah. So mitochondria is a bacteria. The bacteria that live inside ourselves that we call mitochondria. So people don’t freak out that they’re full of bacteria. But they’re just bacteria. They’re what’s called archaea. The archaea were kind of the first bacteria to show up on the planet about 4 billion years ago where the first archaea, the archaea are still living today all over the planet are really good at really bizarre, you know, intense ecosystems, acid pools, you know, acidic oceans, you know, volcanic ash. You can find archaea in these zones of really harsh conditions. And shortly after that, well, shortly half a billion years later, half a million later, small bacteria that produce methane came into existence. And at one point about 3 billion years ago, there was an archaea that managed to absorb one of those methane-producing bacteria and create a double membrane single organism. And that double-celled single organism was a leap forward in biology because suddenly we shifted from our ability to get energy out of glucose and fats from fermentation, which is what single-celled organisms do to this respiratory release of energy, which is to say sunlight from carbon. And so that’s what the mitochondria are able to do. This double-walled bacteria can take glucose and fatty acids and put it through a respiratory cycle where oxygen and hydrogen are exchanging, and you end up breaking those carbon bonds of glucose or fatty acid zipper chain of carbon. And as you break carbon chains, you release the sunlight that was stored in those carbons by the chlorophyll that you talked about earlier that was grabbing CO2 out of the atmosphere and building glucose and fatty acids. And so the irony of this whole, you know, climate change story that you were talking about earlier, where there’s too much CO2 is ludicrous. It’s like say there’s too much life potential on planet. We need to get that out of the atmosphere.

If we suddenly change our understanding of that and say, “Oh my God, there’s never been more potential for life than there is right now; we just need to get enough carbon cycle moving.” And instead of sequestering carbon, which will kill the planet instantly, we need carbon to move. It can’t move right now because we killed the arable soils of the planet since we were stored and, you know, carbon cycle, suddenly there will be more nutrients and carbon backbone for soil systems to grow bigger, vigorous, more nutrient dense plants that will then grow more nutrient dense and vigorous. Animals and humans and the like. And so we could see the best health of this planet over the next 200 years if we start to close the carbon loop and close the water cycle within nature as well, both water and carbon, we tend to drive into these waste streams and take them out of the life cycle. And when a planet that runs on carbon and water starts to be divorced from its ability to do that cycling, we see biology fail, and we call it climate change or extinction or whatever it is, but it’s really just the loss of carbon of water cycles.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:49:10] Hmm. So how are you seeing climate change? A bit of a digression here at the moment, but it’s a big topic. And given that context, what is your view of how we’re being presented with climate?

Zach Bush MD: [00:49:24] So frustrating, right now. To boil this down, so you know what we’ve done, as you know, since The Inconvenient Truth and Al Gore and all this, you know, rolled out this story a new for the socio-political environment to start to grasp the science of the last 30 years of the last century. You know, the alarm bells were certainly going off in the 1970s, like scientists already knew, or at least the ones that were paying attention at the time knew that we were in a very catastrophic relationship with nature by the late seventies, by the late 1990s, you know, Al Gore makes famous for the sociopolitical scene that, you know, we’ve got a serious problem. And of course, unfortunately, that was a politician that immediately created polarisation around the topic. And so now pretty much red state, blue state, you know what people believe? Do they believe in climate change or not?

I think it’s interesting that we rebranded to climate change because it was global warming for decades, as you recall, and people were debating is the planet really heating up or not? And then scientists realised, well, that’s an irrelevant argument because who cares about the heat? We are losing biology. Releasing water systems, rivers are going dry; we’re desertifying everything. We’ve killed all the coral reefs like we got to just come, I think climate change is a radically stupid way to call it again because it sounds like, you know, as if that’s a bad thing. Well, the climate has been changing on the planet for billions of years, period. It’s just what it does is it’s always in change. So that’s not a bad thing. We should really call it earth destruction or something like that. We should call it human-engineered extinction. That would be coming to terms with the problem, right? You know, sterilisation of the planet. As we sterilised the planet through, you know, agricultural practices, £4 billion, £4 billion of glyphosate are poured into our soils every year now, which is sterilising the soil, the water system downstream, the air we breathe, the rain that it collects that herbicide and then rains back down on us. The whole water cycle is contaminated with an antibiotic. We’re sterilising. And in that period of time, 1976 to today, we’ve lost 60% of sperm counts in the United States.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:51:23] Incredible.

Zach Bush MD: [00:51:23] We have one in three males infertile. And now that’s affecting the entire Western world. 52% reduction in sperm counts in the whole Western world is now affecting the eastern world and the in the Near East and the Mid-East regions. I was just in India driving through Delhi in this little cab and on the back of every third or fourth rickshaw is a big advertisement for in vitro fertilisation.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:51:46] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [00:51:46] In India.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:51:49] Wow.

Zach Bush MD: [00:51:49] Which means that you know a country that still lives primarily on traditional farming, which is to say that most farmers in India still farm less than two acres. Instead of these big mega farms of the West, they’re seeing enough chemical now to cause the same sterilisation. And maybe deeper than that, the whole biology of the planet is being affected such that no matter what they’re growing and eating, they can’t thrive either. And so the sterilisation of humanity is happening as we sterilise the planet of her microbiome and the ecosystem around us. And we have to remember that the sperm right just off of bacterial energy. The mitochondria and the tail of a sperm is how it swims. It’s where it gets the energy to swim upstream and get to the egg in the first place. When you kill the mitochondria or when you damage those mitochondria with glyphosate, when every drink, every food, the likelihood of that sperm getting to its target diminishes radically. And so we are losing the vitality of, you know, the capacity for reproduction.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:52:44] And the effect on kids. I mean, you were mentioning statistics last night, pretty pretty shocking.

Zach Bush MD: [00:52:50] They’re shocking. And we’ve gone from one in 5000 children with autism to one in 30 in the United States or that same period of time. We are now on target across the United States to hit one in three children with autism by 2035. And so we have a devastating, you know, effect on neurologic capacity for sensory processing when we sterilise these children in the womb and expect them to birth normally. It’s not just autism. Unfortunately, the amount of childhood cancer in the United States is just off the rails. We’re building six storey cancer centres to house children with cancer now in Texas and other places. As we start to see this complete collapse of that organic garden within the children were birthed and whether it be by C-section or by just early antibiotic exposure to mom and child and a whole max, or just eating the food we’re eating, even breast milk is now understood to carry high amounts of glyphosate in it. And so we’re we’re in it now. We created a stew of anti-life basically by all this antibacterial antiviral anti as soon as we shift into a lifestyle and a society of anti, we will die. And so actually I really want to include activism in that as we we need activism, we need people to whistle blow. But I think that chapter’s wrapping up. We need pro activism instead of activism. We don’t need to be told what we’re doing wrong. We need to be told the other story. And so when we started Project Biome Farmer’s Footprint, we knew we were going to set out to be something different than whistleblowers. So we never ran around saying it’s Monsanto’s fault and we’re going to pick it with Monsanto and to do this and that. Instead, we said, Let’s start telling the story of a future where that whole world of chemical agriculture is simply obsolete and looks ridiculous to anybody. At the same time, I was on that journey as a medical doctor. What does it look like to create a clinic that makes obsolete a pharmaceutical model? And the most difficult decision I made my professional career was to close my clinic a few months ago.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:54:48] Right. You’re not seeing patients anymore?

Zach Bush MD: [00:54:50] Not through my clinic.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:54:51] Not through your clinic.

Zach Bush MD: [00:54:52] Because I realised the word clinic was part of the problem and I started realising people had to identify as sick or at risk for sickness before they would walk into a medical clinic, may it be a holistic or whatever we called it. They still had this I need something outside my self-model. So in the last six years we built that journey of intrinsic health and now I see people through that avenue into in-person experiences after that course that we’re designing so that we can do the high work that we designed, a 12-year journey of understanding integrative therapies that maximise life. I’m much more interested in maximising life than treating disease now. And it’s okay if somebody has a disease, you can maximise the life and therefore, the disease becomes obsolete. I used to call that cure or healing or things like that. Now it’s just obsolete like it was to cure or even get the disease power, right? It’s like as if it was a problem. It was just a symptom of the lack of vitality of the organism.

Cancer is probably the best example of it, and one of the tools we use in clinic a lot is something called a phase angle measurement, which is kind of like getting an EKG. You put electrolyte toes on the finger and on the wrist, and then on that too, and on the ankle. And then you lay the person flat and you can measure the total body impedance, which is to say resistance, which then gives you a very good calculation of the intracellular water. And intracellular water is a very close measure of your vitality. In a healthy state, you should be up around 1011. You can even see as numbers as high as 13. The highest numbers I ever saw in anybody walking in my clinic, including myself, is like 8 to 9. So none of us is at our full vitality of intracellular water. Cancer happens at about four, so you’ve lost, you know, and the huge portion of life potential and intracellular hydration by the time you exhibit cancer. Death happens at 3.5.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:56:43] Wow.

Zach Bush MD: [00:56:43] And so moving from 10 to 3.5 is vitality to death and cancer appears at four. So when our whole population starts expressing leukaemia, thyroid cancers, bladder cancers, liver cancers, breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer and all the rest that are going epidemic since the late 1990s. We can be sure that we have lost the vitality to a near-death state. And so when you start to realise cancer is just kind of the last symptom of vitality disappearing, suddenly the goal is much difference, that of trying to now kill that cancer, which if you’re successful in that, you never improve the person back to anything. You’ve actually diminished their life force even further by chemotherapy, radiation, everything else. The likelihood of them expressing cancer at some point is extremely high and the likelihood of them dying at the same point is extremely high. So much so that every clinical trial that’s ever dared to actually track five year mortality always has to report that there’s no change in all-cause mortality. No matter what we do. Chemo, radiation, surgery, cancer’s gone, not gone. They still die at the same point. No matter what we do.

Because the cancer was a symptom, not the thing that killed them, they’re going to die because they’re running out of life force. And when you’re running out of life force, you can you can express all kinds of different diseases. It starts way back to metabolism, which is to say mitochondria, which create our energy. So when you start to diminish that life force and one of the first things you start to see is, is visceral obesity, because you can’t take the calories and put them into sunshine anymore. And so you’re losing that vitality, convert carbon into sunlight. So you get visceral obesity, which then leads to chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, then into frank obesity, diabetes. And meanwhile you’re starting suppress, major depression, sleep disorder, sexual dysfunction, and you keep going now, now an autoimmune disease. And then you get into chronic fatigue syndromes, chronic pain syndromes. And then it’ll point to cancer. And so that whole journey and forget the degenerate nerd logic stuff that comes in there, dementia, 100% of Americans now screened after age 28 are showing those early signs of senile dementia.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:58:48] Wow.

Zach Bush MD: [00:58:48] Starting to lose short to long-term memory. At age 28, 100% of people in the study. So it means we’re starting to really diminish all of our capacities as not just across the immune system but across neurologic function and some of these fundamentals. So that journey of vitality or the loss of it is now exhausting for me to even think about trying to oppose it, because though you got 7.9 billion people that are putting the lights out on themselves.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [00:59:12] Hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [00:59:13] There are no medical system in the world that can mount that kind of response to save the planet or save the species at this point. And so for that reason, closing my clinic was the idea of why am I putting my energy into that side of the equation at all? Why am I asking my patients to put energy into that side of the equation? The only reason we should engage as humans at this point is because we’re ready to up-level the vitality, up-level the energetics of each organism that engages in a process. And so these new immersive retreats that we’re putting together are really focussed on how do we help create a physiologic experience where the person is suddenly emitting far more light energy than they ever have in their lives just for five days. And for that five-day period, see what happens to their creativity, their sense of self, and their spiritual sense of vertical connection source, all of these different cascading effects that happen when you get light, energetics aligned and vibrational and coherent. And in that experience I find joy. And so that’s much different than me kind of fighting it out with concern is the person can recover from cancer or not recover from cancer and use that as the metric of success. You know, is there cancer remission this month? How good it still is. Like, yeah, that’s a very lame metric of success because the person is still like on the brink of 3.5. So let’s get them up to the number of eight, if anything, and see what they do, what do they express.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:00:29] And when you talk about water, I think it’s worth reminding our listener that we’re not just talking about this kind of water that you’re about to drink or the water in ice or in steam. This is a particular type of water. Isn’t it?

Zach Bush MD: [01:00:43] Yeah, Yeah.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:00:44] The fourth phase of water.

Zach Bush MD: [01:00:45] Fourth phase, yeah. And in some ways like talking about the fifth phase of water is because I don’t know which is fourth or fifth, but there are five phases of water, and there are probably more. But the five phases that you would experience in a normal day are pretty interesting.

First phase is the obvious liquid that I just jumped in this morning or just drink now.

The second phase that’s obvious is ice. It is a weird structure, right? So most structures, when they go from liquid to solid, decrease their volume, water is the only structure that increases its volume when it freezes or when it goes solid. And so that incredible crystalline form of ice is beautiful. Does all kinds of quantum physics that are clever in there and everything else.

Zach Bush MD: [01:01:22] And then of course, there’s what I would say is the third phase, which is steam, which is still liquid, like the ice is still liquid that’s now frozen. Steam is still liquid that’s in a high vibrational state due to temperature shift. And now it’s starting to release from its tightness to large, you know, electromagnetic organisation. So in this liquid state here in this glass, if I’m to get down to the atomic level of the relationships between hydrogen and oxygen that we would call H2O, that relationship right now there’s about 70 oxygen and 140 hydrogens in mathematical or quantum physics relationship to make it liquid. As it goes, ice that turns into, you know, a slightly lower number, but it goes into a more crystalline structure that holds more space between. As you go from water to steam, you break that 70 oxygen and down to maybe 3 to 4 oxygen with six hydrogen around it. But if you put your hand over that and that boiling pot, it’s going to get wet very quick. Right. And so as soon as you drop the temperatures, it’s liquid.

The fourth phase of water I would say is then gas. And so the true gas, state of water is what you experience with your breath. And so as a river evaporates or lake or your swimming pool or whatever it is, is evaporating, it’s not going to steam. You can hold your hand over that pool all day long and there then it’s not wet, but the water is going right into the clouds.

And clouds, I think would be the fifth phase of water. And they’re just a bizarre state of pseudo-crystalline relationship of water that’s visible now in the air because of its structure and the way that it captures light. But it’s still very much its own phase of water.

Zach Bush MD: [01:03:04] The sixth phase then that we could talk about in biology is very unique. And there is a book called The Fourth Phase of Water, not to confuse the whole situation, but, you know, Pollock’s book called Fourth Phase or this, you know, call it six or fifth, whatever numbers you want to put on this phase is very interesting that when life grabs water, it does something very unique to it in which it turns into a liquid crystal. And liquid crystals are known in a lot of areas of science, specifically around radio technology. And the liquid Crystal radio was a big breakthrough. It went from two radios to the liquid crystal. So you could have a tiny little crystal that could tune into a radio station because those crystals vibrate at a certain wavelength of radio signal coming in through the air. So the relationship between waveform and reception transmission and liquid crystals have been long known in the radio world. It turns out that’s what’s happening in the water in our cells. And so when water goes from the liquid phase in the blood, which we call plasma, most, the volume of blood is obviously water as it transits into the cell, which is a very interesting passive process. There are pumps for everything to get, there are insulin pumps to get sugar into the cell. There’s sodium pumps and potassium pumps to get electrolytes exchanged across that cell surface. There is no water pump to get water inside the cell. And yet I mentioned earlier one of the best predictions of life vitality and your longevity is how much water is inside the cell. So it’s weird that we didn’t design pumps to get water in there. If we did, I think we’d live forever. I think the emergence of these aquaporins are an interesting biological expression of the finite nature of life.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:04:41] So hang on, Aquaporins?

Zach Bush MD: [01:04:42] Aquaporins. An aquaporin instead of a pump. It’s just a passive tube that runs from the outside of this cell inside, and it’s open. There’s no gate on it. What happens is that the sodium-potassium gradient across the cell basically creates a battery. So there’s a high electrical charge across the gradient of the cell membrane, and water is attracted to that internal environment with the high sodium content and or high potassium content, rather. So the high potassium content inside cells pulling water through the aquaporin channel in a liquid state. The second it crosses millisecond one-millionth of a second across that cell membrane. It shifts from that third phase or that first phase of water, which is liquid into this fourth or sixth phase of water, whatever you want to call it, and suddenly liquid crystal. So it doesn’t leak back out. Not only does it not leak back out, the aquaporin channel, you can actually cut that cell in half and it still doesn’t leak because it’s in the crystal structure. It takes it a couple of minutes or hours to dissolve back into liquid. Once you disrupt that electrical charge of potassium and you can experience this.

Actually this morning this happened, that’s why I have Band-Aid on my finger because I cut my finger in a sliding door this morning, boom, bleeding and all this. But the blood is coming out of my blood vessels in smashing my finger and disrupting millions of dermal cells underneath my skin. I should have had water running down my arm and nothing leaks out of those cells because it’s in the crystal State. And so that liquid crystalline state is very interesting is like I said in a radio, that’s for receiving information. And so I believe biology has figured out how to take water into this information trends transit mode where it’s able to receive and transmit waveform energy in the vibrational state of the liquid crystal water inside your cells. And we now know that water H2O coats the very surface of DNA to create a double helix. We used to think that that double helix from wasn’t correct, just described the nucleotide sequence of that human genome. And we thought, Oh, that’s amazing. But it’s really amazing when you find out the reason it bends like it does is because H2O coats the nucleotide sequence very specifically to create that beautiful quantum spiral of the genomic code. And so that water in its crystal liquid crystal state is vibrating on the surface of DNA to help the DNA know how to behave.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:06:56] Right.

Zach Bush MD: [01:06:56] And so as we screw up water structure inside the cell, we’re losing the vibrational connection to source to the original vibration of who I am.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:07:03] It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because the vast majority of cancer treatment focuses on the genetic component of it, the water component which protects the DNA is such an important thing. I mean, this is the whole argument between genetics and metabolic approach. I know we had Professor Thomas Seyfried…

Zach Bush MD: [01:07:23] On good.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:07:24] And he was amazing. Of course. He’s incredible. But that concept of it’s not just semantics, it’s big, that difference, isn’t it?

Zach Bush MD: [01:07:33] Well, I mean, yes.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:07:35] I mean, a whole industry, right?

Zach Bush MD: [01:07:36] A different ballpark altogether. Yeah. Our whole industry has been misunderstood itself. So my cancer research was definitely focussed on killing things. Yeah. You know, so I was trying to kill cancer cells. And so as a doctor, you know, unfortunately, after decades of practising, you find yourself waking up every morning trying to figure out how to kill things. How do I kill the bacteria or fungicides growing in my patient in the ICU? How do I figure out how to kill the cancer cells in my patients? Or, you know, how do I kill depression? Antidepressants, you know?

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:08:05] Yes.

Zach Bush MD: [01:08:06] We’re just programmed in this anti anti anti kill everything mode. And for that we lose forest for the trees, you know, and it’s been long known. 100 years ago they were realising that the mitochondria inside cancer cells are completely misformed and, therefore they can’t make energy. So we knew 100 years ago that the precursor to the genetic injuries of cancer are mitochondrial damage. So we’ve known this for a very long time.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:08:31] This is the Otto Warburg.

Zach Bush MD: [01:08:33] Otto Warburg was the first to really describe that in detail. But he was I mean, he was obviously playing off of other scientists at the time, and well, he got well known for it. But as soon as we had a light microscope and to look at cancer cells that are close enough range to look at a mitochondria, it’s pretty obvious that they get deformed and a deformed, you know, double membrane of the mitochondria is when you lose that respiratory cycle. Now you’re having to do fermentation rather than respiratory production of energy. So as energy is reduced, your vitality for repair slows and with less repair, you get, you know, an accumulation of injury. And so every time we walk out in the sun, we get billions of injuries to DNA all over the body. Every time you run down the stairs, billions of micro-fractures to the bone, you know. So we’re constantly in an injury state, which is actually good for us if we have enough repair potential, because a repair on an injury cell actually makes you stronger, not weaker, That’s when you stop repairing and the injury starts to accumulate that you get into the ageing process and disease manifestations.

Cancers are profound and state of lack of genetic repair. And so the average cancer cell is now recognised at 20-25,000 unrepaired genetic injuries, which is kind of amazing because we actually only have 20,000 human genes. And so it’s really saying that really every gene has stopped repairing and you’re starting to have misfunction of genetic programming and production into proteins in the sense and that’s why cancer cells start to proliferate because they can’t repair anymore and they’re so damaged, they can’t detox, they can’t do metabolism. Right. So their only option for survival is keep split and keep splitting. And the lifespan of a cancer cell can be a couple of days, whereas the life cell lifespan of, you know, liver cells are more like three, three months. But if it’s a liver cancer, it’s two days. And so the cancer is dying faster than any other cell in the body. So why are we afraid of it? All we have to do is give it back enough energy to start to repair itself. And so that’s where our clinic started shifting gears ten years ago. Is this why we worry about what type of cancer and what all is that stage three, stage four, stage three B stage of this that, you know, we get so fascinated by the description of cancer. We forget why it was there. And your doctors are definitely spending more money on, you know, categorising your cancer than treating your cancer these days. And so it’s this funny thing, an equivalent to go and not be too reductionist about this.

Zach Bush MD: [01:10:59] But if you can imagine walking in and saying, Doc, I think I have a cold. And they’re like, Well, I don’t want you want to blow your nose in this thing and I’m going to go way that’s not I’m going to tell you what colour it is. And, actually, I’m telling you that blood flecks are not. And then I’ll decide if you have a cold or not. You know, I don’t mean to tell you I have a cold now because I can see their snot here. I’m going to tell exactly what type of cold you have instead of being like, well, here’s some, you know, sunshine outside, here’s some healthy food, get hydrated, have two good night’s sleep, call me back in three days. That’s how we shouldn’t be addressing cancer instead of being like, oh, it looks like this and has these features and then these receptors on its surface, all that. Here are three months of phenomenal sleep. Here’s a new place to live in a completely different ecosystem. Change your microbiome radically with a new diet, with a new psychological emotional code to start programming into your cellular structure. Here’s the first phase of water to the second phase of water. The fourth phase. We use a lot of water gas in our clinic over the years because having people breathe the water, gas is an incredible way to get an antioxidant fact and get that fourth phase of water reintroduced and all kinds of stuff. So there’s a lot of things we could be doing other than weighing and telling everybody about their cancer cells. And that’s where we’ll get we have to get to this place because we go extinct one of the two. But I believe we’re here to stay in a completely different version of ourselves. We’ve got to let the current community die. There is an extinction event going on, and I want it to be the egoic mind, and I want us to rebirth that humanity where we realise we were never separate from nature.

Nature was never against us. It’s why we’re here, as nature imagined us into reality. And she did. The viruses imagine all of this gain of function. We went from reptiles to mammals in one extinction event is interesting nature. Never try to go reinvent the dinosaurs. If I had made triceratops, I think I probably would to try to go make that thing again after extinction. That’s pretty cool.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:12:48] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [01:12:49] T-Rex, What the heck? Amazing dinosaur, right? And Nature says, “I know we did that. Let’s do something cooler. Let’s do blue whales and dolphins and monkeys and humans and palms and ferns all over the planet at the time of the extinction 55 million years ago.” And then suddenly extinction happens. And what comes back? Wildflowers have never been here before. Deciduous trees had never been here before. And so we birthed a planet of beauty that was unimaginable 55 million years ago, and it took an asteroid to kill all the topsoil, the planet, to release that level of capacity and imagination of nature that would be in the virus. The genetic material left after the extinction expressed new life. This time around, the biodiversity of planet is so much higher than it was with the last extinction. And each of those species is making new viruses as we go into extinction so that there’s new potential again. We’re making more viruses on this planet today than it’s ever existed before, which is very exciting because there’s more genetic potential for life at a more intelligent, more biodiverse level than we’ve ever imagined before as a planet. And so that’s going to happen with or without us. We’re going to see more beauty, more intelligence on this planet. And it’s exciting that we have the intelligence now because of the way in which nature is expressing herself through our neurologic system and everything else to help us do pattern recognition and start to see the beauty around us to say, “Hey, we could go extinct or we could do this other thing called regeneration, and we can start regenerating the planet and we could become part of the solution by our mechanism.” Ultimately, humans are the best pollinators on the planet.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:14:24] Now, you know, again, I’m referencing Charlie Massy when he talks about the five cycles I know that’s appropriated from Allan Savory work as well, but the fifth cycle being the human social cycle, and arguably that’s the biggest challenge of all. And Farmer’s Footprints very much about that. You mentioned four principles of Farmer’s Footprint earlier on. I wondered if we might just revisit that a little bit and expand on that bit.

Zach Bush MD: [01:14:49] Yeah. So where does education, innovation policy, I think are the four you’re talking about there?

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:14:54] Say that again slowly.

Zach Bush MD: [01:14:55] Yeah. So awareness is the first category there. And this is really a story again that changes your way, that you were just thinking about the problem. Like hopefully we’ve done this with climate change today into climate crisis, into climate potential. And so I would like all of us to be running around talking about climate potential or humanity’s potential or potential rather than crisis. That’s a new narrative as a new way of looking at things. So that’s the awareness piece. Tell the new story, tell the new narrative that allows us to connect to a future that’s positive rather than just destruction second pieces.

And we need to be educated in the ways that we understand how to participate in the awareness of the new system that we just got told about wanting to educate our children differently about nature itself. We need to explain that we are part of nature, born within nature, rather than trying to control and avoid change and disaster and natural disasters. All this, it’s all natural potential and we need children to understand natural potential. Flood comes great. The house got wiped out. Fantastic. What do you want to build next? Maybe. Maybe a building that’s resilient because it’s capable of disappearing and reappearing quickly. What if we built houses that were designed to go disappear into a flood such that there wouldn’t be any waste in the ocean? But we designed out of, you know, mud bricks and straw bales and everything else that would simply just go be part of nature again and we would simply reconstruct and this is how this is in the art for tribe down in Ecuador jungle. They build out of completely natural systems and they plan for acquisition of nature to their house every ten years. The house will simply be reabsorbed by the jungle as they built and then, about seven years and they start building their next house and they chop way no rush because they know for a few years they’ll be in their new home. All one kind of falls apart in this case, and then they build a garden on top of that and the whole thing moves on. And so we can design that way. So we try to design for permanence and therefore, we get things that can’t return to nature plastics, concrete, steel. It takes hundreds of thousands of years for that to be reabsorbed into nature. And so now we have a disaster.

Zach Bush MD: [01:16:57] After education, we start teaching our children to imagine society within the context of nature, which would be basically, you know, this thing that’s now called biomimicry. You know, we can do it all Applied Sciences Engineering to city design, to sociology to psychology can all do biomimicry. And energy sectors. And so after education, then you can start to innovate. And so I’ve been on this journey. I’ll give you some examples. I go from inventing chemotherapy to what if we actually looked at the basis of cellular communication. And so we started doing that in 2012. I left the university in 2010. So in just two short years of starting to ask different questions, nature suddenly reveals this whole communication network from bacteria and fungi. And so we start extracting those from ancient soil, and we put that in the culture with cancer cells. It kills it about 80% better than are 80 times better than the chemotherapy I’ve been making. So instead of 6% dead in three days, we got 80% done in 3 hours and it didn’t poison anything. In fact, the healthy cells that stuff touches all live longer, so there is no toxicity to this communication network of nature. So the bacteria and fungi are actually producing the communication network that allows regeneration happens inside the cell.

Mitochondria reduce their stress level as soon as they get this communication from the bacteria of soil, because they’re bacteria too. And when they find out they’re not alone, in fact, they’re communicating with a big ecosystem as there to nurture them. They simply reduce their stress. And when in mitochondria reduces that stress, it stops putting out reactive oxygen species, reactive nitrogen species and all this, and suddenly there’s less inflammation in the system. So you reduce inflammation, you make healthy cells, live longer, and then you need to allow the cancer cell enough information that it eliminates itself through something called apoptosis programmed cell suicide. A cell with it with unfettered access to information, never expresses disease, a cell with unfettered communication never has disease. And so that’s where we started diving in. And so now for the last ten years, we’ve been making dietary supplements from fossil soya to extract these carbon molecules of communication network and get those into humans. And they do such amazing things under the microscope. We’ve gotten to see kidney cells regenerating, liver cells, regenerating things that have never been seen. We thought stem cells were necessary to do some of the stuff that we’re now seeing fully differentiated cells do regenerative behaviour at birth, their own stem cells do all kinds of things. We thought impossible because nature does more than we ever thought, because we’ve never allowed her to do her work in a petri dish. And that’s humbling when you’re and it’s a big warning, this whole trust, the science thing that we’ve been hearing so hard in the last couple of years, we have to remember that every Petri dish ever put into a scientific experiment was sterile. We only know human biology and isolation, which is to say we do not know what healing looks like because healing cannot happen in isolation, because we need the organic garden to be planted so that we regenerate, so that we grow, so that we can add more life rather than just be a constantly diminishing force of life. And so as we put this communication network into not just petri dishes, but humans that have been can come sterile life returns. So we’ve been doing that. There’s sinus spray and their skin sprays and there’s there’s all kinds of ways to get this in and around your body. And that nutrient delivery that comes with that communication network is basically like adding not only the wireless communication but also the compost so that cells can can do their work.

Zach Bush MD: [01:20:21] So that was a big breakthrough. That was basically biomimicry in the concept of how do we manage a cancer problem. Of course, cancer was not and is not even being the story is like, how do we create vital people that don’t need autoimmune disease, inflammation, cancer and everything else that will come down? So then turning our attention back to that mitochondria, the second biggest problem behind glyphosate globally is plastics. And so plastics are now in all of the water of the planet. And plastics have this unique way of disrupting endocrine systems, which are the hormonal communication network of the body and biology at large. And when plastics get in there, they start to bind the receptors that should be acting through hormonal translation. And now you can’t communicate correctly. So is looking at a plastics problem thinking, okay, now how do we deal with this? Because we don’t actually have the communication network of the bacteria. Fungi were the antidote to glyphosate and so we can do glyphosate injury to human cells and mitochondria. Then if you give them enough of this communication network microbiome, glyphosate does no damage. In fact, the cells repair even faster. And so antidote to the biggest toxicity ever made that was planted in the soil 60 million years ago. That’s an example of thinking differently then innovation comes.

So awareness, education and then innovation. And then looking at plastics, probably I start really carbon. How is that actually a problem? Because it’s just a long chain carbon like glucose and fatty acids. How come we’re calling plastics a waste stream and all? That’s a lot of solar energy ultimately stored in carbon. And then we start to calculate the amount of solar energy in plastics globally, you’re at like 16 gigatons of energy. And so that means we could eliminate nuclear power and say go to plastic power. If we’re making plastics, let’s digest that into its original solar form. That’s solar energy that was making the fossil fuel that make long chain carbon that would become plastic. Well, how are we gonna break down that? So we start saying, well, that’s what mitochondria do is that break long chains on a short can let the energy out. And so seven years ago we started designing for it, two foot mitochondria and that’s what we’ve done so. We turn the thing on in February of 2022 here, and it was super exciting. It’s out in Colorado and cost millions of dollars in engineering and all that’s. I’m back to engineering. I’m doing the engineering, doing the full circle.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:22:28] You’ll be delivering babies in the Philippines again soon.

Zach Bush MD: [01:22:30] Yeah. Give me 60 years I’ll be back birthing babies. So you know, now we’re building this thing where you have this thing running and it’s fascinating. It handles £100,000 of material a day. So it’s a massive volume of plastics or tires or farm waste. Any carbon material it can go back in its thing, coal tailings. And I mean, the list goes on and on. And the whole concept of breaking carbon bonds through thermal energies is not new. That’s 1970s a field called Pyrolysis. But what the mitochondria do is unique. Instead of just like heating things up, as Pyrolysis tends to work like a kiln, you heat the whole thing up like an oven to about 600 degrees Celsius and everything falls apart. Instead, mitochondria never do a one-step process, each step process to breaking carbon chains into different ways. And so we use an eight-step process to break carbon chains at different stages of the process. And by changing temperatures and variability, we can ultimately tune what’s what sort of ketones or carbon links we’re producing. And so you can produce biodiesel, kerosene heavy in light. Now there’s withdrawal for jet fuel. And then on solids, you know, if you’re digesting plastics, you’re going to asphalt. These, which is the only solid that comes out now, small teams are important for road building, so you’re producing kind of a decentralised form of energy as well as building materials for, you know, city planning or whatever you’re doing. And in so doing there’s a lot of cooling that’s associated with this transition to liquid fuels. And that cooling is done by a water tower that collects water from the atmosphere and turns it into clean potable water. So you clean and pour water, decentralise energy, and, you know, building material out of a system that’s digesting waste.

And so this is the kind of innovation that comes out of asking new questions. How do nature deal with plastic? I do a lot of mitochondrial digestion. So when we start to innovate, we can really change the way we think. And now that we have 40-foot mitochondria starting to go up all over the world, we’re going to be able to change policy, which is the last category because governments are going to stop thinking that they have to do carbon offsets in these abstract carbon marketplaces to pay for billions of dollars of things. Now, $40 trillion have been pledged to carbon offsets by 2050. $40 trillion can fix any problem ever. And here we are putting it into an abstract thing of like, well, all my carbon, but I’ll pay you for doing something that tracks carbon, that that can only create carbon neutrality, right? As if our problem of climate change was carbon in the first place. Carbon is the solution for life. Our problem was we broke the cycles, so now we have changed policy. So instead of just paying a bunch of money about CO2, let’s pay people to close the carbon loop all over the place. And so now you have a farmer producing farm ways that creates energy that no longer has to be pumped out of fossil fuel and that gets put back into an engine that then puts CO2 in the air, that gets breathed back in by the soil, that then breaks the most vital green plants that ever made. And we’ve got a carbon cycle that goes and goes and grows and creates the greatest planet on earth. And so carbon done correctly is the solution, not the problem. And so policy starts to follow the new narrative. So awareness, education, innovation and ultimately policy to bring sociopolitical systems into alignment with nature.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:25:39] Isn’t one of the challenges there. And this is incredibly inspiring. I have to say I love to hear it. But isn’t one of the challenges here that corporate capture and corporate capture I think is something perhaps our biggest challenge of all when they hear stuff like that and having such control over policy, it gets lost. You know, there’s not evidence to support, you know what I mean? Like, I just feel like that could easily get lost because what do you think of how likely is the world governments to accept that when fossil fuels and chemicals and pharmaceutical industries are so powerful?

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:19] It’s 100% likely.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:21] 100%?

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:21] 100%.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:23] Cool, cool. I love it. I love it. I love to hear that.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:25] We just have to go extinct first.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:27] (laughs) Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, it’s a clean sweep.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:31] It’s a clean sweep.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:31] Okay.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:32] So we literally have to let the old system die.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:34] Yeah.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:35] I cannot go change the old system, but I can create the new system that will survive.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:39] Getting ready for it.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:40] And so what we’re really doing is not trying to go against the oil and gas industry with mitochondria.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:46] Okay.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:46] Instead, we’re there to create a new story that creates a new dream for the reality that we all know in our hearts as possible.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:26:53] Okay.

Zach Bush MD: [01:26:54] The great book by Charles Eisenstein. And so this potential of life that’s out there and we all can feel it, I sit here and tell you that we got 60, 80 years of human life left by all the biology and infertility and everything else going on, and it won’t change your behaviour. Well, you’re for the majority of people won’t change their behaviour because they don’t know how they would do anything else.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:27:15] Mm hmm.

Zach Bush MD: [01:27:16] And that’s where activism really falls short. Telling us, telling everybody that you’re going to go extinct doesn’t help anybody. Yes. Telling people are going to go extinct because they’re divorced from nature. And it’s the remarriage of humanity to its nature. That is the solution. Now you’ve got a narrative that you can start to solve for, and you’ve got a dream to dream. And so all of us need to come together to dream that dream again, to imagine a sociopolitical system that makes the old one obsolete, that was dependent on pharmaceutical and energy and all that. We already feel this happening, and I think it’s right around the corner. I think by 2028, we could see a new sociopolitical system globally.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:27:51] Yeah, it’s interesting because we started this conversation about resistance to change bet it in doctors or farmers, but it always requires a crisis, a catastrophe. And sometimes for individuals, that’s the diagnosis of a serious illness. But for farmers, it’s a drought, a fire or bankruptcy. For doctors, it’s maybe having a person take six pills that everyone else is in PPE, you know, PPE, Gila River, you know. So there has to be a crisis. And I guess how big that crisis is going to be and how many people are carried along on that journey remains to be seen.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:28:31] Listen, I want to finish up with one thing, and that is people are listening to this and you’ve given us so much already. But what would be a call to action? What would you say to our listener who’s listened to all this and is not going to wait for the crisis, wants to be involved in this journey, this story? What’s the call to action? What would you say to that person?

Zach Bush MD: [01:28:51] Well, the good news is we don’t have to wait for the crisis that’s here. You just have to wake up to it. So that’s why I talk about the sixth extinction and everything else is going on, because you simply have to become aware that, okay, this is a catastrophic problem. We are now on our hospice diagnosis as humanity. So what are we going to do with these last few months of life? You know, to be admitted to a hospital service, you have to have a diagnosis or prognosis of less than six months of life. I think we just got put on our hospice moment in the last decade here, and we’ve been around 200,000 years. We have 60 years left. So we have just this moment left of human history as it stands today. So what are we going to do with that? So what is the call to action? And it literally begins with this new awareness.

And from that awareness, what is the new dream? If everybody tonight would go to sleep visualising a northern Africa that is blooming into green and suddenly it’s not the largest desert, it’s turning into the largest rainforest in the world, which then greens up Saudi Arabia, which then greens up Russia, Siberia, which then turns the entire world into a respiratory cycle where temperature regulation comes back in ice caps, day and picture this earth regenerating where there’s so much food per acre. Because we stopped outsourcing food production, we started becoming producers instead of consumers. And sort of backyards are actually perennial food for us. Every yard has ten fruit nut and berry sources within it. Every yard has a unique version of those ten species such that they become trading partners with all of their neighbours around that, “Oh, this tree is blooming this month. Let’s make sure everybody’s got nuts. This tree is going into full avocado production or this one’s got star fruit in this one over here. Look at those vines going off of the passion fruit. Let’s go feed the neighbourhood.” And suddenly, everybody’s a producer that’s in a gifting economy. And so there is no more food scarcity on the planet.

If we move humanity out of food scarcity, suddenly, we have space for creativity because we eliminated the main cause of fear, shame, guilt and everything else. As parents who are failing be providers and everything else, if our children can never stop eating, we’ll never have a shortage of food. The psychological relief would be so amazing globally that our potential to go create the new Earth would be instantaneous. So food force and parental agriculture within our communities again, start planning communities around food production rather than around access to beaches or access to, you know, good electrical grid or fast internet, you know. And so reimagine the dream of you within that micro-universe of abundance and a gifting economy, you have the abundance coming out of your backyard or off the porch of your apartment or whatever it is.

Zach Bush MD: [01:31:31] And let’s start shifting gears into this dream. Then take a look at what you are putting your time into. Are you working a job that has nothing to do with the regenerative state of the planet? Just shift that. So many good jobs out there that are in line with the planet and so become an educator, become a teacher, become a producer, start working in agriculture, or some so many sectors that are agriculture. I think, well, I don’t want to be a farmer. I want to be a farmer. Go, go build the software that’s going to allow farmers to do micro-economies and sharing systems and build the transportation network that would allow regenerative agriculture to meet its regional and local needs. Go, go build the distribution and the storage systems that are needed to get that. That whole food chain to be near home instead of 3000 miles away. Go reinvent shipping industry, Since that’s not running off of fossil fuels, it’s actually running off of carbon cycle and water exchange with the ocean itself. The oceans can drive ships they don’t need. There’s so much energy in the ocean, it’s obscene. So reimagine ships. Reimagine everything. There’s biomimicry waiting for you to reinvent your life. And it is so rewarding to discover what nature would do with your life and what she would express through you rather than you trying to eke out and consume more. And there’s a real opportunity for rebirth here for you and your curiosity and your creativity to express itself anew.

So it starts with the dream and ends there. It’s trust leave in the end, because right now there’s no reason for you to trust that nature is for you because you have been drilled into you that she is against you, that you’re being hunted by nature, you’re hunted by bacteria and viruses that are out to get you. The trust leaped to think this story. You know what I think she’s for me. I think my highest self is conspiring and saying conspiring against me from my highest path. And it’s going to close every door until I find my highest path. And I’m going to keep calling those failures because I love identifying with failure. And then I find out, “Oh, those were all victories on my path to my perfect journey.” And so my imperfect journey ends up being a perfect path. And all the doors that have closed, both involuntarily for the first 40 years of journey and then in the last ten years voluntarily starting to close doors that weren’t in coherence with my deeper intuition that is starting to wake up within me. Just as that patient showed me what it look like to break in intuition. I’m starting to discover how to reconnect to intuition, and the more I follow that intuition and have the courage to start closing doors that look like the only path forward by the world standards. I’ve developed a new metric for success for myself, and I think that everybody around me is doing the same thing. And as we start to echo these stories back and forth to each other and we’re more emboldened, we have more trust and more hope and faith that there is a path forward for humanity. It’s just it’s not going to be the egoic separation model and scarcity model that we’ve had for the last thousands of years. And it’s time for this new expression of beauty and abundance to happen.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:34:33] Zach, what a night to finish on. And we talked about gratitude before, but I want to express such gratitude to you not just for coming here today, but for coming to Australia, not just for that, but to share such a fabulous and inspiring message. So thank you so much.

Zach Bush MD: [01:34:48] Glad to be with you. Thank you for having me, Ron.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:34:50] A pleasure.

Dr Ron Ehrlich: [01:34:51] Well, just as his presentations are that I had the pleasure of listening to the night before the interview. And just as this conversation is, it’s there’s so much in this podcast, there’s so many points he draws, pulls together about the microbiome, about human evolution, about glyphosate, about the role of chemicals. I love the fact that there’s a take on all that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What an incredible opportunity it is and what an opportunity for us to convert this planet into the greenest it has ever been or has been for a very long time. This is about regenerative regeneration and this is what the farmer’s footprint is all about, giving voice to Australia’s regenerative food story. They believe Farmer’s Footprint International and Australia believe that regenerative farming holds some of the most powerful solutions to our increasing environmental and health challenges, which is why we seek to bring awareness to these solutions and redefine our connection to the land.

Their approach is one of progress over perfection, and I love that about Farmer’s Footprint taking the best of practices from around the world and bringing them together and giving a voice to them. Telling those stories. We seek to meet farmers where they are at. Understanding that each farmer is doing their best and that any step forward toward more regenerative farming practices is a positive one. I couldn’t agree more. It’s why the Summer Series really highlighted some of the wonderful people I’ve had the privilege of interviewing. That’s why we reissued that. And as we head towards National Regenerative Agriculture Day on the 14th of February 2023, what a great podcast to release and to share with you. As I’ve said many times, regenerative agriculture is an issue that we all need to engage with and that is why I am so passionate about it myself. And I hope you are too. I hope this finds you well. Until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. This content is not intended and should not be. Construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences and conclusions.