Zach Bush, MDs Beautiful Vision For Human & Planet

The Rich Roll Podcast. I believe that humanity's original wound, if we have one, is that we saw ourselves separate from nature. There's a lot of truth to the idea that we are quickly approaching a significant tipping point for both human and planetary health. Despite the breakneck pace of innovation and technology striving to solve these problems, some of which are truly existential, I can't help but feel

the solutions we need continue to elude us. This is a sensibility I share with my friend, today's guest, Zach Busch, who is one of the more fascinating medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of whole body and whole planet health. Today, Mark Zach's fifth appearance on the show, but for those who have yet to be acquainted with this unique and gentle soul, Zach is a

triple-board certified physician. He's an internationally recognized thought leader and educator on the microbiome. The focus of his advocacy centers on soil and food systems, as well as the need for a radical departure from factory farming, the many deleterious impacts of chemical intensive farming practices. And he couples all of this with solutions, not just for farmers and consumers, but also for mega industries, so that we can

all work together for a healthy future, for not just ourselves, but also for the animals and the planet at large. I got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first. So, I would like to mention that the most responsible supplementation, no matter how dialed in your diet, most people, surprisingly, are nonetheless deficient in certain key

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exchange traverses many important topics including in a broad sense the link between human biology and planetary biology. We discuss the microbiome. We talk about how the quality of our soil affects our health actionable ways to regenerate the planet and many other fascinating topics. Super grateful to Zach for his wisdom and for sharing today and I'm pressing out to offer up this conversation with him. So without

further ado, enjoy. So nice to share space with you once again, my friend. It's been a minute since we last did this. A lot has happened. You know, since then, even more of course since our first podcast, I think this is your fifth appearance on the show, not including what we did at the Nantucket project. Maybe third or not sure, but it was definitely about five

years ago or six years ago. Yeah, so first talk. So certainly a lot since we first met at the conscious capitalism conference many years ago. It's a no comfortable situation evolving where the audience gets to watch us age. Yes. And have lots of opinions about that, right? But in kind of thinking about what is transpired since we last sat down, you know, of course, we've all,

you know, whether the pandemic were experiencing what's going on. And the war with war in Ukraine, yes, global soil degradation continues. We're in the midst of this mass species extinction. What is it? The seventh speed extinction. You would have been called the sixth. Yes. Yes. You know, what else there? We have refugee crises, seismic climate events with increasing regularity. This loss of trust and institutions, a

growing rift in our ability to conduct civil discourse that I think is wedded to the social media algorithms that are driving separation through the siloization of increasingly bespoke informational feeds. We've got exacerbation of racial strife and class economics deepening the rift between the halves and the have knots, which of course is feeling both descent and anger and conflict and culminating in violence, which is separating us

from other regions. Others from ourselves from the planet that we all share. And finally, although of course the list is much longer, we're experiencing the in real time, the maturation of artificial intelligence, which is currently proliferating with blinding speed, most recently by dint of these new generative tools like chat GPT, which if innovation continues as it most surely will, will in time, although the timeline is

much debated inevitably give birth to AGI artificial general intelligence, which is essentially a new life form. So I guess what I'm getting at to kind of kick things off is that this moment does feel historic in the sense that, you know, we're emerging from this pandemic to kind of now immediately grapple with this immersion form of rapidly evolving technology, which, you know, look, does have amazing

use cases. You know, don't get me wrong. But it does feel like it's placing humanity upon a precipice. And you know, I don't in any way want to be hyperbolic, but there is this almost inescapable sense that we are approaching a significant tipping point for human and planetary health. And I know these are things that you spent a lot of time pondering. So perhaps we can

open with grappling with what is going on and how you're attempting to make sense of it. Yeah, that's a, you know, dismal list to take through, right? Yeah, I mean, I kind of highlighted the negative things at the cost of all the positive things that are going on. I recognize that. But well, I think it's relevant. And it's actually in echo of our very first combination

conversation six years ago, when we're taking a look at that list of catastrophic chronic disease epidemics that we were facing from autoimmune disease to cancer to autism to Alzheimer's. So we made that catapult catastrophic list there kind of at the human level. And now you've laid out the kind of macro version of that same discussion of, there's only so far you can push by it by

all logic systems in the end. And by logic systems play out in a lot of different, you know, micro macro versions. And so I've had a very blessed life. But last blessed, you know, 12, 15 years being steeped in the laboratory looking at a single cell under the influence of these, you know, toxic environments that you've laid out. And then participating in very broad spectrum visioning

of where's humanity as a whole and where we're going. And the fun thing that we find is there's true fractals in that. And that if you find something true at the single cell level, it's going to be true at the macro level. If I was going to just pick one really concrete example of that, I would say it's the phenomenon of an isolated cell. And so

when you expose a cell that is part of a large system. So you could pick an intestinal cell or something. Like that. And you isolate it from its billions of neighbors that are all intestinal epithelial lining cells. These are the barrier between you and the outside world in regard to the gut. If you isolate that cell through toxin exposure, it immediately begins the journey into cancer.

And so in the end, a cancer cell is an isolated cell that's remained that way long enough to start to accumulate injuries. Because a single cell can't actually be fully responsible for its own energy source and all that. It has to be connected to the greater organism. For that energetics of repair and regeneration happen. At the macro level, you find a child who starts to get

isolated socially, emotionally from their classroom and kindergarten second grade. And then they're easy to radicalize by the time they're 12 years old. And they become a belignant social agent. And they step into a classroom with school shootings and the rest. And so we become a ligament, i.e. damaging to our environment through isolation. And if we go from that single cell to that individual human now to

the societal level, or we could say the species level, we see the same phenomenon. I believe that humanity's original wound, if we have one, is that we saw our self-separate from nature. And it's in that isolated behavior, isolated belief system of we are separate. We somehow got rejected from nature. We have age-old religious myths about kicked out of the garden and all these things. This deep

belief, that somehow we were rejected by nature, has led to this exploitive, extractive, destructive behavior, simply because we're isolated in the same form, that a cancer cell becomes cancerous in the ligament to its organism. We have become cancerous to our organism, which is a single living system called planet Earth. That's a fascinating kind of dissection of how our focus on the micro impairs our ability to

perceive the implications on the macro. And when we think about Western progress and the scientific method, certainly we've been able to develop therapies and glean a greater understanding of our world through a method that is focused on extracting variables and looking at things in isolation. Like that's the way you kind of better understand things. And I know you, as a doctor, we're on a track. Literally

to studying one protein, and it's impact on cancer. And that's certainly a lens through which we can kind of better understand systems on the micro level. The problem enters when we lose sight of how that interacts with the macro. And that I think requires a certain humility about the reach of the scientific method to objectively understand the whole world and everything and deprecates an appreciation for

understanding the holistic nature, the incredibly infinitely complex way in which our DNA, ourselves, our particle matter is always in interplay with everything that surrounds us. And it's almost like you have to look at it through almost a psychedelic perspective to understand the that understand the non-duality oneness of our existence in context with the environment that supports us. And so perhaps talk a little bit about, you

were well along on this journey when we first talked. And that's seemed to mature over the years. But I feel like you have entered a new phase in your perspective and you're thinking about this interplay in particular. Yeah, I think the human mind is limited in its capacity to grapple with quantum physics or any infinite system because we have such a finite perspective on the universe.

It seems like you're quite far away from me, you know, six feet away there. And it's impossible for my mind to wrap my head around just how close we are compared to the distance to the moon or something simple like that. And it's just like the the misperception of being human in that we have these five senses that make it appear, give us the impression that

we're separate from the things around us. Has both been our greatest gift, I think, and maybe we come back to that in some ways. And maybe is indicative of our purpose really is why are we here? Why have monkeys that can control fire and then create technology and do all that thing? I think it and then maybe it does have to do with the ability that

we achieve through this separation that the five senses offer. But the unfortunate side effects that stepped in perhaps before we could even find our identity and purpose was this belief of separateness and the belief of the finite. This has been something that we have been witnessing in my laboratory and deeper and deeper ways over the last 12 years. And I think that one way that we

could back into this is first acknowledging that the way in which we study and any cell is in isolation. And so I told you that a cell isolate becomes cancer. But we we understand small intestine cells only in the context of neighbors of small intestine cells. We don't understand what they do when there's an immune system that lies, you know, a micron behind that, you know,

tiny fraction of a millimeter behind that 80% of your immune system exists with quadrillions of cells interacting. We've never been able to study that because in a petri dish you need that isolated single cell type. So we have come to understand cardiovascular disease, cancer, any form of chronic dysfunction or disorder in the body, only in the context of isolation. And this seemed like a really relevant

way to study it because in that reductionist approach, we could give it one stimulus and then understand what the reactions to that one stimulus are. Where we really were short-sighted or perhaps just unable to achieve that. And the way to achieve in this current version of science that we work within is that what happens if there's 10 million inputs at once? Yeah, there was no system

smart enough or question, you know, vague enough to answer that. And the only way to do that is really in a clinical setting. And in the same way that we do reductionist basic science laboratory in a petri dish, we do reductionist science in our clinical trials where we try to find the most monotonous group of people possible. So that we can have the same predicted outcome.

And so 45 to 65 year old white males was the typical science experiment and clinical research. And then you give them one drug and you control for their diet, control for everything else, make sure nothing else changes. The challenge that we quickly realized over the decades of this approach to clinical research is that it's very hard then to apply that data set from that 55 to

65 year old white man to a population of very genetics and backgrounds, ages, males, females was a big piece of this problem. We now know that female biology does not respond to pharmaceutical intervention ever in the same way that a male physiology really does. So it doesn't matter if it's a blood pressure medicine or cholesterol medicine. The female is going to respond differently just by that

simple difference of a few stimulus of estrogen and testosterone is enough to screw up your whole expectations. So then you add on to that age related changes and the deeper questions of ethnic changes and all of that, we realize we don't really know anything in the end. After 100 years of pure viewed science and Western medicine at its best, it's pretty clear that we don't have

any real strong handle on what would be good for a human entering a chemical environment. The answers we don't know, although we know it hasn't gone well so far. Our life expectancy is going down over the last few decades, not up despite stem cell innovations and everything you've ever heard of that sounds super exciting and positive genetics. We didn't have the human genome decoded when I

started medical school. We thought that we had 280,000 genes at the time to find out that we only have 20,000 genes was part way through my career. We're way simpler than we thought on the nature level and we're way more complex in our reaction to our environment. And so this is births, industries like epigenetics and things like that to understand the influence of our environment on

something that we thought was as stable as our genes. Now we find out a single gene can have 200, 400 different end points can produce 200, 400 different proteins depending on its environment. And so we're going to talk about towards 20,000 genes you find out, wow, rich, you could make four million different bodies from the genes your mother and father gave you. And the body you

have today is not the result of mom and dad, but the effects of the environment within the womb. And more mysterious than the effects of the environment on your parents at the time that you were conceived. And so their emotional status, their physical and chemical environments, all of these things were playing into that moment of conception and determined how those 20,000 genes would behave and what

body they would create in the womb. And then the moment you took your first breath, you began your journey into self-realization at the genetic level. And that changes minute by minute every day. And so it's on one hand a grim reality. Wow, we really missed the boat on our reductionist definition of what human life is and how it occurs. And it's full potential when we were

reductionists in the approach for the excitement that I have now that we're kind of steeping our patients into the opposite direction, which is let's go full on holistic. Let's get you so connected to nature. Let's see if we can get a billion inputs into you in a day instead of, you know, five different meals that you cycle in and out and just the monotony of the

typical diet or the typical daily activities. What if we give you billions of different inputs at the biologic level, how resilient and how regenerative do you become? And I think that's our next journey is out of the reductionist world and into this holistic interconnected universe that we call earth. But to break from that reductionist history and lens into science as a means of gleaning truth, to

then say we're going to expand the aperture and just, you know, expose an individual under under evaluation to a billion inputs or whatever it is. How do you then extract any kind of meaningful truth out of that that is instructional in terms of how you, you know, guide people towards better health? It's a really important question. And it's one in which we really want to expand

the aperture. Not only do we have to surrender the old paradigm of reduction of science, we also have to surrender the old belief system about a patriarchal, you know, disbursement of prescriptive medicine. And we have to let it be the opposite in which the concept of health is going to have to rebirth from inside every single person. The only laboratory that is relevant to you is

your body. And there's, you know, somewhere around 50 or 70 trillion humans in the cells in there that are working with 1.4 quadrillion bacteria, an unknown number of fungi. And then you've got 14 quadrillion mitochondria, which are tiny little bacteria living inside your 70 trillion cells. And all of those cells are swapping genetics in real time all the time, every millionth of a second new genetic

potential. And so that complex system actually gets to be interpreted every day by your senses. Do you have pain in your hip and your knee and your ankle today? If we change your environment, is that changed tomorrow? That's the only relevant scientific experiment for every human on the planet going forward. And it should have been previously as well, because we have been really flawed in our

approach to applying population statistics to individuals historically. And to this very day, there's, you know, a million doctors offices today that are telling somebody this clinical trial with 100,000 people in it showed this result of a four percent reduction in your cholesterol if we put you on this medication. So if I put you on this medication, we expect a four percent reduction in your cholesterol. If

anybody's taking a statistics one to one class, the first full day is that you can never take a population statistic and apply it to an individual. If you tell somebody, look, we, we reduced death in this clinical trial, therefore, by 20%, therefore we're going to reduce your likelihood of death if we put you on this drug. It is, that is the fallacy number one of statistics.

And we're taught that. And then we immediately forget that because we don't know what to tell people that. Well, if we can't tell them that, then why did we do this study? The only way in which population statistics is even helpful is at like the decision making tree of triaging or coming up with some sort of tactical or strategic decision at the public health level. If

I was, you know, dictating Medicare or something like that, then public health statistics would be interesting. Okay, if we make this intervention to, two million people, we would expect this population effect. And so you can't say there's been a 20% reduction in individual cells. So population studies that we call clinical trials are not applicable to the individual. It's a weird phenomenon. And so instead we're going

to have to come up with a new set of metrics where clinical research begins to be done at the individual level, which might be impossible to imagine 20 years ago, but we've had this explosion of what we call biohacking. And so we have all these new devices that people can wear on their own bodies and get their own data, you know, day in and day out

of how much REM sleep did they get? How much, you know, inflammatory markers they have in their urine? How much, you know, blood sugars in their bloodstream, when they first wake up in the morning, like this data is now interestingly readily available to an individual consumer with absolutely no medical training. I think that similar to the probiotics, which were kind of our first foyer into saying,

hey, some bacteria might be good because up until the 1970s, we just thought all bacteria were our enemy. There was a crack in that. We fast forward 40, 50 years, we find out, oh, you know what, probiotics was actually not an answer to got health. You can't actually create a diverse ecosystem by taking billions of copies of three species of bacteria as you do in a

probiotic. But at least it got us down that road. And I feel the same way for biohacking is that we've been super reductionists again and people are running around spending hours a day keeping track of their blood sugar. And their hours of sleep and all of this. And for that, I see a lot of them really missing out on life. Relationships aren't alive. Their connection in

nature is not alive. Their connection is just feeling freaking glad to be alive. Has been a forgotten goal. And instead it's my successes, my blood sugar and my resting heart rate and my heart rate variability and my my warring data. And that's an unfortunate result of what seemed to be a good idea of like, let's strive for health and longevity. When perhaps we hadn't yet answered

the question of what does it feel like to be alive? Maybe that's the goal. Yeah, I heard you once say every biohacking event I've ever been to is accelerating the death of everybody there, which is a hyperbolic statement. But an interesting one, you know, nonetheless in that, you know, I gather from what you just shared that this idea that again, it's reductionists like look at these

markers. And make decisions accordingly. But the average consumer is doing that with a limited amount of education to properly interpret not just the meaning of those data points, but the context in which they live. Right. So I don't necessarily, I mean, listen, I'm wearing these things. You know, I look at the data. I hold it loosely. I find it interesting, but I try not to let

it dictate like my decisions. So I don't know that it's a black or white thing. I think greater information in the hands of consumers is probably a good thing overall. But I think it needs to be paired with adequate information and education so that they can understand the importance or lack of importance of what all of this means, I suppose. And just kind of pulling another

thread in what you shared. Not to play devil's advocate, but to, you know, imagine the person who is more than a spective of the general practitioner or the cardiologist who is listening to this or watching it, watching this right now and bristling at what you just shared and thinking, I know that if I subscribe a statin to this patient who has high cholesterol, I'm lowering the

risk of having a significant or potentially fatal heart incident as a result. And so you can't tell me that what I'm doing is not having some kind of benefit. So how do you, you know, kind of communicate with the practitioner who is rooted in our traditional system right now in terms of, you know, how we're talking about, you know, some of the low hanging fruit of

chronic diseases that that are unnecessarily killing or debilitating millions of people every year, but are also somewhat ameliorated through simple interventions. Yeah, so I feel for any practitioner or scientist listening to this because we feel trapped, right? And so it's like deep down we were pretty sure that nature wasn't waiting to to perfect human longevity for us to discover statin drugs. It's kind of it would

be a pretty narcissistic belief that we were going to somehow do cholesterol better than the complex endocrine system with the liver of a human being. And so really the learning of a physician is around losing belief and trust that humans can change. And so we know fundamentally that cholesterol is a direct relationship to the environment, food being an obvious one, but many of anything that causes

vascular inflammation is going to call for more LDL production from your liver to reduce that inflammation. And so really fundamental to a pharmaceutical model of education, you have to lose hope that humans will fundamentally change their behavior. And we do that pretty quickly. We were trained to lose hope or perhaps humans show us good reason to lose hope in them quickly because as doctors were said,

yeah, you should tell them to change their diet too. And so we were just as well, you should eat less fatty foods or we make up these things or don't eat as much coke and you know, all these things that we say. And the results don't change in their cholesterol after a few months. And we're like, see, I told you change your diet, but that didn't

work. So I'm going to give you a drug that I know isn't like nature's answer to this, but it's my best effort. It's the thing I've been given in my toolbox to lower your cholesterol. So that's a bit of the rationale that has to happen inside any physician being given a toolbox of chemicals that certainly aren't from nature. And another way of looking that is there

any cancer in history that was ever caused by a lack of chemotherapy. You really wrap your head around that. He's straight to realize like, no, like, it's not the cause. Because of a disease is a lack of a poison on the end of the disease, right? And so same way is, is blood pressure occurring in the individual due to a lack of blood pressure medications? And

so in this simple way, we can start to realize like, okay, no, we've actually just been trained in a modality of alopathic Western medicine that simply doesn't offer the opportunity to ask root cause problems and questions or come up with root solutions. So that's been my journey as you're developing chemotherapy. 2006, 2007, to now even having closed my clinic to get my patients out of that

mentality of they're coming to me for health. And instead go to this model that we have called journey of intrinsic health, where my interaction with every single client now is that you are the healer. And we're going to surround you by resources and an environment of thought. Really, it's a philosophy school of eight weeks that's going to reintroduce you to the world. To your sense of

self identity to begin with. If you don't start at that sense of self identity, then I'm going to risk giving you a bunch of data or a bunch of exercise is the you're going to think are the purpose of your life to beat the cancer or to reduce your blood pressure or to have less depression in your life. You didn't come into a body as complex

as a human to overcome the diseases of being disconnected from nature. I fundamentally believe we are more fun, more unique to the to the interplay between cosmic dust and this thing that we call life. We have so much connectedness in our capacity to have conscious thought abstract systems of belief abstract systems of visioning and and the possibilities of the future. If we forget that and we

start to again be reductionist in our definition of of six months, the cancer strong two centimeters the last six months, that's good, right? I don't know. Is it good? Are you enjoying your life? Do you know why you're here? Are you so interconnected with your family that you just can't wait to come off the pillow in the morning? Or are you isolated and depressed and don't

know why you're here and your tumor shrink or growing? Maybe that's not the point. So that's kind of where we got in our clinic is like, wow, we got to get people way back up before we even address any of the disease or disorder going on in that body. We got to reconnect to the original question of who are you? What gives you joy? What lights

you up? What makes you want to stay? Because to make you stay in an unhappy place where you feel disconnected and you are part of the cancer of humanity on the planet, we're not helping the system in the end. Sure. And you're not you're not exactly paving a you know a solid path towards healing without having that conversation and deconstructing that and finding a path forward

of meaning and purpose and fulfillment and eke guy and all the rest, right? Like that is the difference between the, you know, the very reductionist like let's look at these cells and what's going on and how do we treat them versus the organism and the super organism that, you know, is is is really a play right here, right? And and that's a, you know, it's a

it's contrarian to our alopathic system. And I think is a pill for a lot of people that's difficult for a lot of people to swallow and absorb and and kind of contemplate. So where do you think we are right now in terms of progress towards a more expanded macro perspective on healing healing and health? I mean, particular lessons we last spoke. Yeah, it's I think we're

speeding towards it as a society because the reductionist approach is failing so quickly now, you know, and so what seemed ridiculous, you know, to my colleagues and to me 12 years ago around the philosophy that cancer can actually be predicted by the relationship to the gut microbiome. That was heresy when in 2008, 2009 when those studies started to come out like it didn't play into our

model of how cancer occurs at all. Didn't make any sense. Fast forward now we've now found every disease maps right back to a shift or a loss of diversity at the microbiome level. IE at dyslexia connect from the diversity of nature itself. So fortunately, science itself is quickly catching up here to say, Oh my gosh, not only is it not reductionists, it's not even about human

cells talking the human cells have to be talking to the ecosystem at large every single bacteria and fungi environment has the opportunity to give stimulus towards health to the individual human that's holding that ecosystem within itself. And in our lab, we get to see this quite literally and quickly. And this is where my biotech company got its support hold is understanding how do cells communicate in

relationship to the microbiome human cell systems. I was an endocrinologist, which is kind of the system of hormones that help various organ systems communicate and stay in cooperative effort towards a single healthy human body. But the hormones were understood to be very specific to human cells by and large. And we knew that the human hormones thyroid, etc. weren't speaking directly to the to the gut microbiome,

for example. And so there was a lack of understanding of what we were doing. What would be the system that would be transspecies? And we stumbled into this by accident as a lab group in 2012 when we were studying soil. And so soil, it turns out, has an enormous amount of the metabolites or breakdown products from bacteria and fungi that are a result of them digesting

macronutrients. So you can imagine like, you know, a tree falls in the forest and all the microbiome fungi, everything move in and to digest that down into soil. While it goes from oak tree down to digested composted soil, there's a lot of eating going on. And in all of that eating the bacteria making side products that we call metabolites that turn out to be the communication

network of the ecosystem. And that was our discovery in 2012 was seeing these molecules. I saw a three-dimensional model of this thing. And it turned out it looked like a lot like the chemotherapy I used to make out of vitamin A compounds, which was a nutrient from plants. And so it was that moment where I got to ask that exciting question of like, wow, we have

been for, you know, maybe 40,000 years of indigenous plant medicine going after plants for the medicinal quality. Tumoric, curcumin, these things go back. Thousands and thousands year Chinese medicine and Chinese herbal medicine, 7,000 years back at least. And so we've long recognized that the plants had it to my knowledge, you know, at least at this time. I don't know that we ever went after the soil

for medicine. I eat the bacteria in the fungi for medicine. And that was the shift that we made in 2012 was wondering, could that be medicine to humans? And we found out that was much more important than medicine. It was actually the communication network between the human cells. And this family of molecules, broadly speaking, is called redox molecules. And that's reduction in oxidation, which is description

of the movement of electrons. And so what's happening in soil systems, which is what your gut ultimately is, this is a complex soil system that you carry around inside of you. It creates a lot of liquid circuit board for the transit of information. And these tiny little carbon molecules all line up in this colloidal structure within a water state to move information, just like the chip

in your cell phone or your computer does, your central processing unit is moving information. So that liquid circuit board is allows cells to talk over great distances very rapidly. And so that was our breakthrough. And so this was the first time, maybe ever, that humans got to start to observe human cells in petri dishes in the context of nature's communication flow. And what we saw immediately

happened was resilience and regeneration. And so if you put intestinal cells in a petri dish, and you expose them to the most common talks in that soil carries, which is glyphosate, which is the main molecule and roundup, which is the most common herbicide on the planet. Currently, we use about 300 million pounds a year in the United States globally, four billion pounds of this stuff goes

into our soil and water systems. And so we can just go through our gut lining all over the place to the food. We eat to this water we drink actually through the rainfall now, 85% of the rain United States, 85% of the air we breathe. So this chemical breaks the tight junctions and gap junctions, creating isolation between the intestinal lining, creating leak. And this has now

been popularized with the term leaky gut. And medical literature is referred to as gut permeability, but that leaky gut phenomenon is the result of that injury of isolation happening to billions of cells at one studio exposure. And so this was something that obviously pharmaceutical companies were fascinated with fighting a target for. If somebody could crack that code, my guy would have blocked Buster Drug to find

out that nature had cracked the code long, long, long before pollution of amazed us too much. But it still remains amazing as we see this happen in petri dishes every day in our lab is that as soon as that communication that where goes up, all of those cells damaged or otherwise start making more and more tight junctions to the point where they're 30 or 40%. More

and integrally connected than before the injury. And so this has been a really fascinating look at the grace of the nature that we are from that we come out of, which is it repairs faster and more vigorously than it injures as long as it has unfettered access to information. We're brought to you today by calm. So let's spend a brief moment trying to create that state

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40% off a calm premium subscription at calm.com slash rich roll. So go to calm.com slash rich roll for 40% off unlimited access to calm's entire library. That's calm.com slash rich roll. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com slash rich roll and get on that path to being your best self. When you're in the daily grind of life, working,

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be able to do that. It's been crucial in helping me see what I can't see alone, breaking through denial, providing me with tools, and in turn helping me manage my emotions in much healthier ways, all of which of course translates over time into being happier, more productive, more intimate with those I care about. And just feeling better about myself, more integrated, more whole, more comfortable in

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balance with better help. Visit betterhelp.com slash ritual today to get 10% off your first month. That's better help HELP.com slash ritual. Nature finds a way, right? And in what you just shared, I can't help but think of the example. That is commonly kind of discussed, which is the ways in which the trees of a forest communicate with each other through their root networks and through the

fungal networks that connect them through the soil to create this communication network that is always operating to protect the whole over the individual. Right? Like it's kind of mind-blowing how that all works. And I kind of really understand that. And to see that pattern show up in other aspects of biology and human biology. So it's that micro macro thing. Like we see it within ourselves, we

see it play out in nature. And then in even thinking a little bit more broadly about that, I went to a screening of this movie Pi the other day. Have you ever seen this movie? Okay. So it's a Darren Aernowski's first film. And it's the story of a year young, brilliant mathematician, math theorist who becomes obsessed with trying to understand the laws of the universe through

mathematics. And he's seeing patterns everywhere. And of course, you know, the Fibonacci sequence, which recurs throughout nature in all these different ways all the way from, you know, the shells that you find on the beach to, you know, the spiral pattern of the universe and everything in between, right? And he's determined or, you know, convinced that all of this can be reduced to a mathematical number

that will explain everything to the point of madness, because it's driving him crazy. But the point being that there are patterns that recurse through nature on the micro all the way up to the macro. And to your point, like this is, you know, kind of your area of focus, like how do these things that we kind of understand in the micro play out in the macro.

And how can we better understand ourselves in our place? Within this ecosystem, in terms of how that interplay works so that we can live simpatico with it, like in unity with it, like in integrity with it, as opposed to in opposition to it or in a way in which we're, you know, and antagonist to the environment that supports us. And that antagonistic relationship is really the

catalyst or the driver of all of these maladapsions that we see in terms of, you know, whether it's disease or things that I mentioned at the top of the podcast, where our inability to live synchronously with the planet, with our, you know, kind of fellow biological creatures is driving all of these negative outcomes through disease. Through conflict, through the degradation of the environment and, you know,

on and on and on. Yeah. Yeah. It's super accurate in that, that fractal or fibonacci kind of phenomenon where you see it at all levels of nature. It's pretty exciting because you mentioned the mycelial network connecting all the trees and mentioned that, you know, all those trees are trying to protect the whole all the time. And that's gotten really trippy for me to consider in recent

years because that was our initial thought process to when we saw human cells repairing faster and reconnecting it rates we didn't know possible because we'd never seen healing happen in a petri dish. It's actually not possible because it's an isolated system. The second law of thermodynamic says any system left an isolation will increase its chaos. So why do the, why do the cardiologist or the doctors

listening to this, including myself back in the day, believe that the drug was necessary? Because we had never believed healing to be possible in a damaged cardiovascular cell or whatnot. We had never seen it really truly go back to some previous state of being. It's damage control at best in a petri dish. And so we didn't believe in healing. I didn't believe in healing until I

saw cells reconnected through this communication network of the microbiome to do things that we didn't think possible. And to introduce, sorry to interrupt, but like was there a certain inflection point in that? Where you had sort of a donning epiphany about this, that transition to you out of that traditional method or approach into kind of your current thinking? It was slow, you know, because first of

all, my thinking has started changing even when it was an academia. So it's starting to watch vitamin A compounds kill cancer really effectively. Got a clinical trial started out from my basic science around that. And so I was already starting to realize maybe when we shouldn't be poisoning bodies, maybe we should be feeding bodies. Maybe nutrition is going to be more effective ultimately than trying to

poison people with cancer. And so I was already starting to kind of go through that. You know, very uncomfortable realization. I'd been going the wrong direction for 17 years in academia. And so that had begun. And then exiting to start a nutrition center in Roe Virginia. And one of the most impoverished parts of the country with the goal of if we can figure out how to

get the low socioeconomic sectors of our communities to figure out how to be self empowered. And they're eating to get out of the chronic disease epidemic, then it would work everywhere in the world. Going to Santa Monica or something to teach wealthy people how to eat vegan. It seemed like a bit of a chasing after the wind as far as like our true public health crisis

as food. So not to diminish the importance of Santa Monica health, I guess. But, but we go out into that space and quickly in that space started to, you know, make some of these breakthrough discoveries that nutrition was really fast acting compared to drugs. Like, you start a diabetes drug. You don't expect them to go through any dramatic healing events. You expect their blood sugar to

slowly go down all this. We were putting people on these plant-based diets and everything else and finding that they were reverse type 2 diabetes in four weeks. Like numbers that I just couldn't believe obesity, resolving itself very quickly as we reconnected people to their gardens and started growing their own food and seeing the impact not just of the nutrition, but being in the sunshine, breathing real

air. So they were having a holistic reconnect to nature through food. And so that radical experience was happening. But even when I, you know, first discovered those molecules as a potential source in soil as in future medicine, I was still stuck in my Western medicine paradigm. So the first studies, cells I studied that on were MCF7 breast cancer cells and did all my old chemotherapy stuff,

you know, kind of mentality to them. And when it saw it doing crazy unexpected things, I was like, one, I just started doing that intravenously. So I was taking my own stuff and intravenously injecting into myself at leaders a day, thinking that more of the better, like, I got overwhelmed my system with healing, all this stuff. You fast forward a few years. It didn't really start

to work until we started using much, much slower, almost only a pathic usage of this stuff in the gut rather than in the vein. You can't bypass biology, expect a biologic result. And so it was this very slow evolution out of the reductionist and kind of paternal holistic. I got to do something to the cells to realize we are a living system that is self correcting,

self repairing. And that's what you described in the forest. Those, those trees are nursemaiding the whole forest into a higher state of being, which doesn't necessarily mean no death. It doesn't mean don't, don't let anything change. And that's been kind of my slow maturation, I think, in the last few years is realizing that to preserve, you know, some previous version of healing, human health is a

nature's goal. Nature is constantly moving forward on this planet for four billion years to the next better iteration of life. And it seems if we just look at the genomics of the planet, the definition of nature's version of what is better, it is more diversity. At every single moment, this nature is pressing, discovering, reinventing, creating new life on this planet. We've gone from a few species

of slime molds to thousands of species of butterflies over the last four billion years. You know, it's just like there's such a pressure in nature to create the next thing, more beauty, more diversity, more intelligence. And it's been climbing that way for the four billion years. And so we start to say, well, what really is the goal of humanity at this crisis point that you so

well began as a why are we here right now? Why are we the driving force of this sixth extinction? How did we become the existential crisis is one question. But to what end is maybe a more important question? What is the end of this extinction look like? It's interesting because I considered you an optimist to the point of Pollyanna at times, but that's a pretty gloomy

pessimistic perspective. Well, it's already happening. You know, you described it really well at the beginning. You know, the amount of just ecosystem refugees, climate refugees we have in Africa right now, Molly, the country of Molly is just being desertified at such an alarming rate over the last three years. And you know, the global governments decide they're going to build a green wall to keep the desert

from coming any further. So they they tried to raise $60 billion in plant 8,000 kilometers of trees along the southern end of the desert there to stop the encroachment because people were starving to death. The speed at which the collapse of food systems is happening there is just just never been seen before. Just in the horn of Africa. That little tiny corner of the continent right

now, we have an estimated 20 million people starving just in that little corner. When Lynn Twist used one of my great friends and most revered, you know, public health people out there. She started pochamama lions and before that with one or air heart and the rest was running the hunger project globally and towards the late 20th century. And when they were doing their work, they were

trying to get the global hunger numbers down from 14. 14 million down to 4 million was their goal. They wanted to hit 4 million, you know, decreased by 10 million, those starving over the course of the 1990s. So we are losing relationship with our environment in real time. And so the concept of we need to go by our hack ourselves back to 33 years old so

that we're healthy is missing the point that the biology is eroding right beneath our feet. Now I am a polyanna and I am damn optimistic and I don't think that is our future. But to make sure that we are able to take that something other than our future, we're going to have to do something radical, which is what I would argue the force does every day

is imagine something bigger and better than it is today. And so we don't need to go back to 1940s food systems to get healthy. We need to imagine the humanity that comes after this version of humanity. And we need to start growing that force. And so we need to make this paradigm leap over our current crisis into my eyes so that that does not become our

future. And so this is the trick of many systems thinkers around the planet. And we're working on this in our nonprofit farmers footprint. The brilliant Lauren Tucker has tackled the project, renear studios and has brought this to bear with Regenesis and groups of systems thinkers that for 30 years have been realizing that the only way to really create sea change in behavior is to create a

new field of awareness, a new thought field, a new playground to play in from a vision stand. So instead of trying to go and say we got 10 million problems, we got to go start fixing each one of those. We don't have time for that. We will go extinct trying to do the whack them all. Here's a problem. Here's a problem. Here's a problem approach. We

need to do the buck, Mr. Fuller phenomenon, which is we now need to create the reality that makes the old humanity absolutely. Right. And the new reality, which requires a reimagination of systems top to bottom, does demand an elevation of consciousness or a shift in awareness to conceptualize paradigms that don't currently exist, which is a big ask. You're optimistic about this. I look around and I

see all of the dire consequences that I shared at the outset and which you just mentioned. But we also just experienced a month straight of rain and Los Angeles. And it's never been more green. I've lived here since the 1990s. 1996. And now it's suddenly like some combination of Ireland and Kauai that I haven't experienced in the entire time that I've lived here. The planet's ability

to, you know, sort of marshal its own immune response is nothing short of a marvel, right? And in thinking about kind of like, you know, pull the final thread on this idea of the macro and the micro. When we look at the ills of the planet from a macro perspective, we see inflammation, right? We see inflammation in our politics and our public discourse. And we see

inflammation of, you know, in a more micro sense of human biology, right? It is our bodies response to disease or injury. It's like an emergency response to like repair something that is wrong. But inflammation, we're seeing inflammation in our kind of, you know, culture, right? And our, in, in humanities, you know, kind of social interaction dynamic, right? And so what is the inflammatory, like what is

the, what is the kind of emergency response to that? Like is that happening in a macro sense? I think we're being called upon to attend to that, right? Like, and it is much like the fibonacci sequence, right? Like what is happening, you know, when we cut our hand and it turns red or whatever, we're having an inflammatory response. So, there's a kind of, you know, in

a real situation in disc Orcs is demanding that we kind of look at how we're interacting in a way to try to repair it so that we can get to a healthier, more productive way of communicating with each other, which is part of your messaging, right? So all of these things back to this point of interconnectedness. Like there is nothing that is not interconnected. Everything, you

know, every microcosm is part of the macrocosm. And we can't solve if we lose sight of, you know, the larger context in which they exist. Yeah, it's really well said. You know, there's been huge books written on the problem of the victim perpetrator coin, two sides of the same coin. And it gets you stuck in a trap. And so if you are the victim in a

moment scenario, you are likely to reverse that, become the perpetrator in the next moment. And that could be, you know, Germans getting crushed at the end of World War One. And they, you know, are victimized to thirds of their land is taken away from them. And they react and become the perpetrators and try to take back way more than they ever had. Well, this is the

history of conflict and geopolitics, dating all the way back to the inception of humanity. The inception. And so we have been flipping this victim perpetrator coin back and forth at the macro level. And I would say at the micro level down to the family level down to the individual. We flip this coin back and forth all the time. All the way down to that individual level

where I can flip the victim perpetrator on on myself in a day. Oh my gosh, I'm beat myself up right now. Oh my gosh, now, now I'm, you know, the victim of that. And now I'm the perpetrator of that. You know, or the abused person becomes the abuser. That's it. So there is a freedom from that that is deeply understood. And I would say it's a

bit of a, maybe it's a trilogy. I don't know. But the third option. Instead of flipping back and forth on that same coin is to move into creative mode. Creation is the alternative to perpetrator and victim, you know, and becoming the creator rather than the perpetrator takes an effort to forgive the victim who that preceded that moment. And so we are going to have to come

to a universal moment of forgiveness in these next couple months years ahead. Forgive the journey that we've taken and stop with the typical activist approaches. The bad guys cutting down the rainforest. There's the bad guys pumping oil out. There's the bad guys, you know, doing chemical farming. There's the bad guys doing pharmaceutical medicine, whatever it is. That needs to end. We can't that doesn't work. We

have to realize that's us being self abusive as a species. That's that's not us moving to the next thing. The next expression of our possibility. So we're going to have to forgive universally and move to this creative moment as a species where we do co-op vision that radical future where we simply behave differently. And we get to see it happening out of this pandemic. You know,

you mentioned, you know, some evidence of ecological recoveries in places not expected with a green California. I agree. It's just stunning driving up to your place right here. Like the hills never been so verdant. In the same way, my gosh, I never saw such extraordinary community activation coming out of the tail end of two years of isolation and of intervention. So for every action, there's an

equal opposite reaction. And so we are now in our death cycle, which means there's never been so much opportunity for rebirth. And so this is, I think, where we're at right now is we've just spent the last 50 years debating science about our own endpoint, the demise of our species, the demise of ecology, climate change, global warming. We've used all kinds of terms for that side.

Infertility. We use all kinds of chronic diseases, cancer. We use all kinds of words on that side. It's time for us to forgive the journey and realize we have one moment to rebirth. And in that rebirth, we can move into this creation mode where we're no longer stuck in that victim perpetrator and tally. What is necessary in that leap, I think, in, in, and alongside that

concept of forgiveness is this movement from the belief of scarcity into the state of abundance. In California, the last seven years, huge drought, the scarcity of water has been so palpable. Right. You're out of water. The things are going reservoirs are out and everybody's behaving in the scarcity model of water. Not recognizing that there's a geologic system in place that if worked with, if created with,

we could simply change the amount of water in the atmosphere. Rain force moved an enormous amount of water back in the atmosphere and change water patterns globally and all this. Earth is awfully very simple. It's a carbon cycle and a water cycle. And if we bring all of our systems in line with healthy carbon and water cycles, our forestry, our agroforestry, our agronomy, our health systems,

our energy systems, they should all be based on carbon and water cycles. And they should be closed loops. And so if we were to do this, move from scarcity to a state of realization of abundance, this Earth does more abundant life every iteration after every extinction. There is more life, more diversity and more intelligence every time. And it's stunningly beautiful in its advances. Right. We go

from palms and ferns, to the last extinction, 55 million years ago, to deciduous trees and wildflowers everywhere. That necessitated a extinction to get that level of new viruses into the atmosphere to code for the new life. Viruses are not living things. Viruses are the packets of genomic information that are the possibility of the future. And so as we start to put many, many species in this

short conversation, probably five or six species could go extinct. Those species under extinction level stress are putting out new genetic information that we call viruses or exosomes or all kinds of new words out there now. And they are literally releasing the next iterations of those species that could come next as the dust settles. And this death turns into a rebirth, which again, again, happens on this

planet. The rebirth is going to be beautiful. And we just have a few years to decide whether this new humanity is going to be part of that, that new future. Are we going to rebirth with the planet? Or are we going to be that sixth extinction event? Are we the cataclysmic event that allows for all that beauty and explosion of age to happen over the next

million years? And that's our gift to the planet. Is that we were the asteroid this time. We were the thing that destroyed the Earth so that it could be rebirth in a higher level of intelligence, everything else. Maybe that's not that bad of a story in the end. Yeah, you seem neutral on whether humanity will make it or not. So we are on the bubble right

now. And so we need to shift in this decade from arguing over abstract science of climate change and human health, chronic diseases, pandemics, all that into a new paradigm where we're no longer bickering over the abstract sciences. And we now only do applied science. And this is what I do every day with a lot of joy, is I tried to imagine what is the applied science

that would clean up this Earth quick enough that we could actually start to have children again. We would have to get plastics out of our water. Because right now I think it's a credit card every week that we consume in plastics into our bloodstream or some ridiculous amount. That's largely why we're going into this infertility in fertility crisis is too much plastics disruption of the endocrine

system through toxins and plastics, all this and stuff. So what's the what's the applied science of the beauty we see out of the microscope and the science we see out of the microscope is the mitochondria dudes, these little bacteria that live inside our cells generate all of the energy for the cell to become everlasting, to really become irrepressible because if there's unfettered access to information and

energy, the cell will always repair faster than it can injure. And so to that seven years ago, we just said, well, we just need to build a bunch of 40 foot mitochondria that could chew up all the plastics of the planet. Because also, plastic is the same as glucose or fatty acids that your mitochondria are using. It's just a long chain carbon that has stored some

energy inside it, sunlight inside of it. A double carbon bond is a battery for sunlight. And so plastics, tires, agricultural waste, currently methane, off-gassing, destroying the planet, blah, blah, blah. That should be our energy sector. We can close the carbon loop and energy. So we spent seven years engineering that we built the first full scale mitochondria out in Denver last year, turned it on in February.

And now we're going global with that technology that companies called resource dynamics that we started. And it's so exciting. Each mitochondrial unit digest 100,000 pounds of waste daily into biofuel and biochar or carbon black or these others, critical commodities, closing these carbon loops and soil systems and other places. And so that's the result of an applied science out of a mitochondria in a petri dish over

seven years because we just asked the question, is it possible? And if you put a lot of smart people around the possibility, again, you create that phase possibility. So you create that space. And that's just what I do. Like in the CEO and founder of that company, but I didn't build any of that. It took so many engineers so much smarter than me to actually make

that thing real. So if I have a business acumen that I'm starting to really embrace, I can hold that field of possibility for a good long time of impossibility. That's interesting. So I'm not sure I quite understand. So correct me if I'm wrong. What you're saying is you have helped develop the technology wherein a mitochondria rich environment has been cultivated to consume waste, particularly in the

form of plastic and convert that into fuel. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Except we just blew up one mitochondria in a 40 foot version of it. So we were trying to imagine a mitochondria that was 40 foot big instead of a few microns and stuff. That's a biological thing. What do you mean 40 foot? What do you mean? What are you saying exactly? So mitochondria

uses eight steps to break long carbon chains into short carbon chains to release all the energy. And so we knew that eight step model would work for any long chain carbon, whether it's plastics, tires, farm waste, et cetera. So we developed an eight step thermal process to break double carbon bonds, just as the mitochondria use. Now they use enzymes to break that apart. And we're using

thermal decoupling or temperature shift. And so, but in the same way that they're breaking it, we just use that model of okay, long chain to short chain carbons, how do they do it? They break the double carbon bonds eight times over. And so we just use that same model. So you're trying to do biomimicry ultimately in engineering and in energy sectors. And people are now doing

this in houses. My good friend, Yoast Bacher in Australia just finished an incredible two year project right in the middle of Fed Square and Melbourne. And it's called the the greenhouse and future food systems. It was the concept. And he was a restaurant tour and she's a floor course before that and everything he touched just becomes so beautiful and regenerative just because he's one of those

guys that can hold the impossible for long enough that it materializes right right under his feet. And so he materialized this three story home, like two bedroom house that would grow more food, produce more water and more energy than it used. And he plopped his thing off grid just right down in the middle of Fed Square a couple years ago, got this thing growing and running

and had two chefs living in the house and they had hundreds of thousands of Australians who come through and students and everything else to witness this thing. It is truly spectacular. Yeah, I've heard about that through Dernolene. I think he visited. Yeah, the exact show. Yeah, I was going to show him. I connected those guys. So that is an example of biomimicry at scale because he

did it over and over again. So he used biomimicry and waste management with stool to gas to cook over. He used it at each step of the process of the biology or metabolism of a human being. In system, he mimicked in the house. So what you're really looking at is a living organism with many different organs that are specialized to the different things. So this is

the biomimicry we need to design within. If it's not water and carbon cycle at its foundation, there's going to be unintended consequences of that technology. A good example of that is lithium. Right now we're have all of these teams going into Central America jungles to try to discover the next lithium mine. That's not a solution for the plan. When I think about all of this, I

think about it in the context of an arms race with a ticking clock. Right? Like you're sharing all of these new, exciting technologies that hold extraordinary promise. We actually know how to solve a lot of these problems. But we're operating against the same thing. Time in the sense that the degradation is escalating and our inability to be efficacious in terms of manifesting solutions is inhibited by

a lack of political will, by gigantic conglomerate corporate interests invested in the status quo or in the opposite. What is the solution to all of this? All these problems to consumer demand for everything from lithium to oil and everything in between. All of these forces that create these tectonic plates that are progressing us towards the dystopian future as opposed to the future that you're imagining. And

short of some kind of systemic revolution or a complete revamping of systems, in terms of how we make global decisions and how we think about these problems and solve them from a collective perspective that requires global coordination. It seems very difficult or hard to imagine that we're going to get there in time before that ticking clock reaches its end point. And we've passed the point of

no return. I have an enormous question. This is where if enough of a population starts to connect, it starts to do this hyperintelligence thing. It starts to do something that none of the constituents could have ever imagined. This happens in petri dishes. You get enough bacteria interacting. Especially if they got a little fungi in the mix, they start to do quorum sensing right away. For us

to do this quorum sensing. For us to start to do this hyperintelligence thing of resource management, resource repair. The wildfires that tore through your canyons right here just four years, five years back, that inspired this massive communication network back in. The Mycelium came back in because there was enough carbon substrate in that soil to regenerate in a level that had been failing for many decades of

drought. And so the verdancy that we're now seeing years after that recovery are from this quorum sensing phenomenon where things get better than ever imagined before because of the initial collapse and then the recovering connectivity. And so project biome is trying to be the first ecological puzzle piece that's not out there to go and plant a bunch of trees or go fix the rivers directly. Instead,

we can be the connective tissue to get all of the people that already are fixing rivers and fixing soil systems globally to connect. And if we get enough mines connected that already know the solutions are here, then that new world just emerges. We will do quorum sensing. We will do quorum sensing as a species if we connect enough people as well and back on your podcast

again. You connect people so effectively. This is the fabric of our future. This one conversation held between millions of people right now is that possibility that we connect just enough mines to suddenly do the quorum sensing event. And we suddenly know the future that we all feel in our hearts as possible. And that known future becomes the reality. It's not something that we can't do. It's

something that we probably need to go engineer. I believe all my companies are going to be gone in 30 years because will either be extinct or they'll all be obsolete because this new future is going to dream up things that are so in league with the infinite nature of nature that even as good as a 40 foot mitochondria sounds. It's still a finite version of an

infinite reality of true mitochondria, which are ethereal and constantly rebirthing themselves. So I think that's something coming and I can feel it under my skin. And maybe I have to go die and see it on the other side of the veil, but I know it's coming as a beauty that I cannot even imagine. And this is maybe where we get back to that beginning statement of

the five senses that we were given. Creates the perception that we're separate from. I think that's actually telling of our purpose. We were uniquely equipped with a neurologic system that would interpret the input from these five senses that we were separate. And it gave us the perception of separateness for a lot of potential vulnerability of scarcity and everything else that's unfolded. But if we look to

the redemptive quality of being having that gift of perception of separateness, it may be so that we can see beauty. If you're in the water as a fish, your perception of the water is not actually there. It's it is the substrate in which you live. You can't see the water per se. You might see light and some other things, but the water itself is that thing.

You are not separate from it. This is why fish can be in billions of fish in these massive swarms that are moving through the ocean. These huge coordinated Fibonacci sequences moving as one organism is because the water is there is really they are the organism with the water they're one with the thing all of this. Being outside the substrate of life, being perceiving that we are

separate from the water, the air, the soil, gives us the ability to uniquely see its beauty. And it is teases my mind as to not is that not the gift that we bring back to this world is the capacity to see her beauty. There's something amazing in quantum physics. It's called the observer effect. And as soon as an electron is seen, it changes its direction of

spin. What is the next future of this world may only resolve because there's a species that came along to actually see nature and her full beauty. Because the moment we see everything, especially probably in a vibration of gratitude, we change the nature of the whole fabric of everything that is around us. It has to change its direction instantly and completely. And so I am curious to

see if we don't repeat another like 7,000 year desertification greening of South Africa. But we actually make a paradigm leap because nature has been witnessed on a level that she has never been seen before in. Why did we discover and develop the electron microscope? Why did we make the Hubble telescope in these extraordinary telescope images and now coming back with our version 2.0 of Hubble? Why

did we do that? What is our fascination with it? I can spend an hour looking through Hubble telescope images, just mind blown. And I just get it's a spiritual experience is better than anything. The spiritual I've stepped into is looking at the beauty through human eyes of the cosmos. And in the microscope looking at the beauty of a single cell, re-birthing itself, when connected back to

the microbiome, it's so exquisitely beautiful. And being seen for the first time by human eyes. And so was our technological journey ultimately to supercharge our five senses and to seeing the full beauty of this planet. Everything would change. The very matrix by which we live, breathe, think and imagine within is here to shift in this moment of crisis that you so well outlated the beginning. It's

a beautiful sentiment. And I share this idea that we have the capacity to marvel on a level that no other biological creature is capable of. And there's something extraordinary. About that. I think the path forward, however, requires a certain level of not only really indulging and recognizing our capacity to see the beauty from the micro to the macro, but also to develop a level of humility

about the capacity of our five senses. Because I think what humans also do, which is, you know, sort of orthogonal to what you just shared, is to believe that we are capable of understanding everything through the limitations of these five senses. Without an appreciation for the limitations of those senses, without an adequate respect for the fact that those senses are limited. And our brains are perhaps

not as evolved as they could be to recognize what is perhaps right in front of our eyes. And easily understood by, you know, brains that might be a little bit bigger than ours, right? So we think that we understand everything that we can deconstruct everything, that we can categorize everything and make sense of our world as creatures who, you know, find comfort in identifying patterns, right?

And so to step out of that and to say, we have these five senses, they allow us to appreciate the beauty. They allow us to understand certain things about how things operate. But let's also understand that maybe we're not capable of really seeing the full picture here. And we should have a healthy dose of humility about that. And with that level of humility, perhaps not be

so hasty in the decisions we make that have such vast ramifications on, you know, planetary health and human health. Oh, that's a good one. I love that feeling. And I feel like the humility is the flip side of the coin of gratitude, right? And so it's like those two things go so beautifully hand in hand, having the humility to understand that we are going to receive

this future rather than achieve this future that we can maybe believe as possible is an exciting one. But our purpose is to be in this finite existence of a human body so that we can appreciate the smell of chocolate, the touch of a baby's hand, the face, of an elder as they're dying. It is the finite nature of human life that makes it beautiful. If it

was infinite, it would be dismal. It's for the beauty of the finite that gets me excited to wake up again tomorrow. And it gets me excited about my aging process too is this isn't something to be resisted. And this is one of my concerns about the biohacking world is why have we put such fear of aging into people? Are we afraid of wisdom? Do you look

at your grandmother that died a few years back as a horrible failure because of the way she aged? Now you remember the way it felt when she spoke her wisdom to you and told you something of truth that was fractal through all of nature. And it hits you in a place that was not five senses mediated. We are resisting our own wisdom in this biohacking journey

towards a desire for infinite youth. Are we ready to be finite? Are we ready to birth into something so much more? I hope this species goes on to participate in this rebirth on this planet to realize some sort of beauty that we can't even imagine. But I know for myself, I'm not going to be here to see it. Instead I want to be the oak tree

growing in the forest right now, putting out the mycelial network. So the forest imagines that next reality. And when my oak tree falls, I want it to be just as the oak is in my Virginia landscape when oak falls in my land there. And it starts to dissolve into the soil. It is an extra ordinary explosion of life. If you genetically sequence that trunk at the

moment that it falls, it's one species, very limited few genes that make it oak came from a single acorn. If you genetically sequence that log one year after laying on the forest floor, it's 100,000 species. That's who I'm going to become. Yeah. I'm going to become on a thousand species in that root ball that I get buried under or in that ocean that my ashes get

scattered in whatever it might be. Who are you going to become as beauty in and of itself with a spirit of humility, as you said, and a deep spirit of gratitude. And this just quivering feeling under our skin of possibility. Yeah. That's really, you know, beautifully, beautifully explained. You know, just to kind of close the book on this idea of humility and the capacity of our

senses and the role of humans. And you know, to live integrated in the world, I think that you know, breath and all these other modalities have their place to grab a glimpse of something that, you know, lives just beyond the capacity of our senses to, you know, kind of calibrate in our day-to-day experience. But it's not to live out there. It's to then integrate it into

our experience and translate that into some kind of, you know, positive change, whether that's in your personal life or in your advocacy or kind of the legacy that you leave behind as the oak tree that falls, you know, in the forest. And, you know, on that note of legacy, like, you know, that's a very beautiful thought about the oak falling and, you know, the species proliferating

and all of that. I've often thought like when I die, would it be great if, if I was just buried into a garden and all these amazing plants grew out of me. And then all the people that I love, like, had a, had a, you know, a banquet. And just ate all the food that grew out of my body. And, you know, the kind of extrapolation

of your life and how it, you know, and how that energy can continue through the people that you care about. You know, which is cool. But on this idea of, I'm glad that you brought up longevity, right? Like, this is very much in the Vox Populite. It's a zeitgeisty kind of thing right now. Everybody's talking about lifespan extension. A lot of energy, excitement, money, and science,

you know, is going into this right now. The quest to live to 200 and beyond. And ultimately reach longevity, escape velocity, where, you know, in other words, like for each year that we're alive, we're able to extend life beyond that year. Which to me is fascinating. I've had a number of guests on the show to discuss this topic. And I'm certainly not again. I've experienced the

idea of exploring the capacity of human biology to be extended. But I do, of course, take issue with this idea of immortality. Which, to my mind, seems to be born out of a great fear. Or an inability to really make peace with our, with our own, you know, kind of mortality and the limited time that we're, you know, here on Earth. Right? Like, a lot of

this is being said. It's been, you know, a lot of people have been asked to be born by very rich people who have everything in the world. And the one thing that they can't control is time. Right? So how do they deploy their resources to, you know, arrest that one thing that seems just out of grasp for them. And so how are you, like, you've already

kind of stated your thesis on this. But, you know, this is happening. And certainly, you know, diagnostic tools are coming out of this that are, that are good and helpful and all of that. But I think that's what I'm going to say. How do we have a healthy relationship with our own mortality and, and, you know, at the, of course, we want to extend our, we

want to be as vital as long as we can. Right? Like, nobody wants to live their later decades to crep it or losing their minds or unable to be productive. So, of course, we want to enhance or increase the robustness of that. But we also need a healthy kind of relationship with our own demise. Yeah. First of all, I've, you know, bitten less than we talked

about it our first podcast around hospice and watching people cross that veil. The reason we scare are afraid of death is because we can't believe things could be better. And the people that cross that veil realized instantly that it is so much better on the other side in so many ways. And that there, there was no more sense of scarcity when they came back on this

side. And the abundance was on the other side of the veil, not on this side of the veil. And so that was quite a training in my own release of fear of my own death, you know, during those years and hospice care. But I want to maybe come back to that thought of, you know, some of these technologies are good and doing things. I think we

can't actually make any real honest or accurate judgment on any of our technologies being good or bad. Until maybe a few more thousand years goes by and we have different perspective because there's so many unintended consequences of human engineering that is outside of biology. And it's, it's scary for me to think that we're making judgments. And that's a good technology. Your bad technology is AI, bad

technology. I don't know. We'll find out. Human innovation is the story of unintended consequences. It's a story of unintended consequences that are born out of a fundamental disconnect from nature at its beginning. Well, and also a hubris. Yeah. Obviously the hubris is the result of the ego that steps in to protect the individual that thought it got rejected. Right. And so our original wound was rejection.

And it was, we all have an abandonment disorder at our root. And then we developed an egoic mind and, you know, social behavior to try to staunch the fear guilt and shame cycles that happened. And once you're in that abandonment disorder that keeps us addicted. Great work on addiction that I fascinated by is a TJ Woodward's workaround conscious recovery. And he he's really good at helping

people get down to this root of abandonment disorders. The reason they have addiction to anything. I've never heard of him. That's fascinating. You would love to have him on his foot. Yeah. Yeah. He's got not only books. He's got an incredible curriculum that kind of comes alongside AA as like a much more robust. Look at kind of what is the root cause and then what is

your relationship back towards addictive substances. And he changes the paradigm completely, you know, to really look at. Substance abuse as a genius, you know, tool for survival of a species that's in this, you know, deep abandonment disorder for an individual that's in deep abandonment disorder from their parents that rejected them, the father that views them, whatever it is. And so it's a beautiful model of, again,

fractals of what we've done to nature down at the individual level. But what you see when you're working through TJ Woodward's work is, oh my god, this is the whole human condition. We're all addicted to something. And right now, a lot of us are addicted to our biohacking data. And so we are so addictive because we have this fundamental abandonment disorder way upstream. What I love

about this simplicity is, is then rethinking the word technology. We think of technologies of things that we can build that are not of nature. That's our current concept of technology, which discards the possibility that a human cell, with trillions of atoms that have self-organized into this thing is not a technology. That diminishes the possibility that my 14 quadrillion mitochondria are not technologies living inside of myself.

I believe we are the greatest technology expressed by nature so far. This human body is the greatest technology that's been made by nature this far. I have a high degree of confidence of that. My trust in that supersedes anything that I can make that looks outside of nature. We've defined nature that way even. We've considered the Oxford English Dictionary. Nature is defined as everything on the

planet. Minerals, plants, animals, everything except humans or things humans have made. Really? Not only wrote ourselves out of nature. It encapsulates humans as part of nature. It's just a perfect encapsulation of the problem. The dualistic nature of how humanity, like contemplates our role. So what if the greatest technology ever made is this human body? What is it capable of doing to shift from victim perpetrator into

this two creative state where it can create universes? Is there an opportunity for me to tap into something so much deeper than my five senses or my two hands could ever create? Because I am a generative center. And if I can think it, it's occurring somewhere in the multiverse. If I can imagine it, it's occurring somewhere out there. And a lot of people that believe that's

true. From indigenous peoples all the way through, if you've dreamed it, it's happening somewhere right now in the multiverse. How would I possibly get there? How would I get to this place where I switch from victim perpetrator on a daily basis to true creator? And all places that maybe shoved a huge sign of post in my face. And this was the course of miracles. There's this

extraordinary description in there of how humans have become addicted to human relationship in the effort to complete ourselves. We see something different than ourselves. We feel incomplete and we figure, oh, that's the other half. If we put that together, then then I'll be whole. And we become codependent in those relationships. That's defined in that space, that's special relationship. The beauty that is the opposite of that.

That is this promise that kind of sits there is that at some point in the near future, two human beings could come together that have completed themselves no longer looking outside of themselves to realize that they are a complete technology. They are a complete being. They have all that was ever intended at the highest technological level of nature's whole expression right within themselves. And it says

that when those two people sell each other, for the first time, they would truly be seen. Because in the split state of the egoic mind that's protecting ourselves from this addictive abandonment disorder, we can only see a mirror of ourselves. So as much as I love you, as much as I can talk to you about all of your incredible attributes, every time I look at you,

I'm only either seeing the best of me or the worst of me. And that is the result of this schism, this split psychology of the egoic mind, which is too afraid to see you ultimately for the incredible nature that you really are. And so we protect ourselves behind these egoic shields so that we cannot be seen and we cannot see. When we stop with the addiction

to the outside world, through our relationships, through our things, and we become whole for a split second. If two would see each other, the amount of love and awe and just magnanimous sense of just amazement and wonderment that would come out of that moment, would send ripple effects to the whole energies of the planet and through the species and we will make our paradigm leap. And

so it just takes two people to finally see each other to be that next technology of humanity is what we're told in that incredible course. So is that possible that we will let go down that egoic shield long enough and heal our deep abandonment or to become whole enough for a moment that this observer effect that we talked about earlier, that if we really see the

universe for all its beauty, it will switch completely every atom will change. We only have to do that to one other human, only see one other human completely. And that observer effect will change everything I believe. Yeah, that's a beautiful and complex sentiment. In contemplating that, I think of the human condition as one of suffering born out of our inability to see ourselves as we truly

are and instead live in comparison to others and in relationship to a past and a future from which we construct narratives that lead to our own suffering and separation. And so basically what you're saying is the path forward is presence and the kind of relationship that we have in the past. And that's a great capacity to let go of those narratives and to allow ourselves to

step into a greater sense of self awareness that is much more capacious and contemplative of how we live sort of out of time. Right? Like if we can just step out of that past narrative and our neurosis about the future and our need to be calibrated in the context of a future. How we relate to externalities that we would be able to touch deeper meaning within

ourselves and connect with that kind of infinite source of love that truly allows us to then in turn connect with another human being and set off that chain reaction that you're speaking of. Is that a fair reflection of what you're getting at? Perfectly said in our in our eight week journey, we put everybody one on one with a coach historically. And then the pandemic happened and

we saw people just being so isolated and lonely and being economically challenged. We put people to make it cheaper and maybe give them a sense of community into groups of six or eight people with a coach still, but six or eight people healing instead of one person trying to heal. The results have been unbelievable. The speed at which we can heal in community. When we witness

one another's healing journeys, when we learn and are inspired by the other's healing journey is so much more logarithmic and fast than I ever anticipated. I resisted group coaching all the way up until the pandemic. I thought it was so important because I was in my old patriarchal thing of log. The practitioner and the patient that's that's the thing that really. No, it's being seen and

no wonder that six people in a room are going to see that individually differently through a different lens through a different perspective. See beauty in a different way in that. The person relate to that beauty in a different way. And so the speed is there. And so I'm convinced that we heal faster in a connected community where safe space is created. And healing doesn't happen through

the breath work, through the food interventions or all the other eight things that we healing happens when you're reconnected to your original relationship to yourself and others to yourself first, but you can't find self until your relationship to others. But as soon as you do find self, the speed at which those cells repair is just never been witnessed. It's just so instantaneous. We actually have a

word in medicine that we had to create for this because it was super awkward to write in the in the medical chart miracle happened. You know, so we had to come up with something that we could put into a CPT Medicare code that said something about the fact that disease just spontaneously disappeared. And so we call it spontaneous remission when disease that's been there for decades.

And it's threatening life itself suddenly disappears literally in a day. And it's witnessed so frequently in medicine. I've seen it in the cancer realm. So often where you have stage four cancer and tumors everywhere and met to the brain. You got three weeks to live. And then suddenly the person's condition just starts to slowly improve and you do scans. And there's nothing there. Meaning there's not

even a scar where the tumors were. It literally looks as if the tissue returned to some original design. That's spontaneous remission. And there's a medical term for it because it happens. I believe it happens when you are witnessed by yourself, ultimately. If you can really see the beauty within you, which is to take that humble pill maybe, but also to take a huge reintroduction to your

own sovereignty, your own sacred nature, your your mega mega lithic beauty within you. You can see that for a second. The speed at which you return to your original design is staggering. And we have to create something other than the world miracle for it because it's awkward. But it happens. And if that's possible, then can't we do that first species? Can't we go through a radical

remission? Can we go through a spontaneous remission? As a species and resolve that original wound of the abandonment disorder of our nature start to live within her instead of against her? You mentioned the word sovereignty. And that's really kind of a touchdown or a theme that percolates across so many of the subjects and topics that you talk about. This idea that we must shoulder responsibility for

our own path, that we need to kind of respect our intuition, cultivate that. Rather than basically divest ourselves of that responsibility onto other people who tell us what to do or you know, shirt climbing that mountain for ourselves because it's just easier to have somebody else. Say you should do this or you should do that. And I think that this idea of sovereignty is something that's

like rising in the consciousness, like people understanding, like, I do need to take responsibility for myself. Like I do, you know, want to step into self efficacy and a sense of ownership of my own path. And that includes, of course, like, what are the foods that I'm eating? Like, how am I? You know, cultivating sovereignty in these other areas of my life, which gets into regeneration.

Like we can't sit here for a couple hours and not talk about the work that you're doing in regenerative soil and what's happening with farmers footprints. So, you know, give us a sense of kind of where things are at with that. I think, you know, basically, like, when we first spoke, this was an idea, then it was sort of a content play. You were making documentaries

and, you know, video projects telling us, you know, you're making the stories of these farmers and what's going on with the soil. But the current state of your nonprofit efforts in this world have really matured, like you're doing a lot more than last time we spoke. Yeah. And it's been really exciting to see that kind of evolution, revolution, continue to catch its own momentum. And this

is again, where you kind of hold the field as a group of people and then see something you could have never imagined come out of that field, you know. And so there's so many brilliant people now. We're working within that farmers footprint context, which was our first project within project biome, which was the one I was talking about earlier. But one of our favorite quotes that's

been held so so brilliantly by our executive director David Leon and the teams that he's helped to assemble over these years is that humans are not made of cells, but we are made of stories. And that really does play true for through everything we've been talking about today. If we can envision that next story ourselves will self organize to achieve that future. And so we've been

storytelling throughout this and UNI share enormous respect for sovereign being named Liam Rassovich. She's here with us. She's like somewhere in the dark out there and the wings there. But she began with you and Julie telling stories around food. And she's now telling these stories on a grand scale. And this is now, I think her journey really emblematic of our entire journey as a regenerative family,

which is that what it worked at the small level has to be occurring at the same time at the big level. And so starting to tell really the face of global regeneration at the nation state level or the the bioregional level is our next journey into the applied science of regeneration. We've done the individual stories of farmers and we will not stop that because I believe

each farmer that is seen increases the quorum sensing for this future as well. You see a farmer they become a new generative center for their entire community. Most farmers are being unseen in our at the highest risk of fluidized sidelity for that invisibility within the matrix of our current socio economic systems. And so reconnecting farmers is critical to our future. But lay in the rest of

us are seeing that there's now this opportunity to start telling a much larger story of regeneration and its potential to heal our macro relationship to the planet, not just to the carrot on the plate, but to them the complete ecosystem we can have healing there and really a journey back into our nature at that grand level. And one piece of the puzzle that's really just dropped

for me in these recent months had the blessing of working with a lot of the the peoples out of South Africa that really built the successful anti apartheid movement and took down that that age old, you know, oppression of the British government periods so that the Dutch government, the French government, etc. And they came out of that as a nation just so recently. And those great

leaders of the anti apartheid movement that came out of Mandela's effort and the like they operationalize that through community activation. And it's taught me something fundamental that I think I was lacking from my understanding of regeneration in that I if you go to the project by on website that we made five years back or something that it says we're going to we need solutions for soil

water and air. If we can get those three systems working, then we're going to have a generative plan and all of this. Five years later, I'm quite convinced that neither soil nor water nor air need to be. They are generative ecosystems in and of themselves and they will heal in within a matter of years of the departure of humanity. They don't need saving. They they that's

abstract to their very existence, which is permanent because there's always a soil carbon water cycle on this earth. It's infinite. So this is where I'm starting realize that project biome in our focus on stories has to do with the fourth ecosystem. If you well are the fourth element of nature, which is humanity soil water and air, those are generative centers. The only piece we really need

to solve for is human expression of our nature. And so for project biome to really step into its fullness, we're going to begin. Not mapping ecosystems and everything else that we anticipated. I believe we're going to be able to step back and learn a lesson from the anti apartheid movement and so many other social movements that have been successful in India and other elsewhere at Gandhi

and the like and his messaging. The message is that the human needs to find itself again and as soon as you do, no matter how humble your life may appear, you become this creative center that can change the face of everything. And so really we are going to relearn humanity in the context of soil water and air rather than try to go fix soil water and

air. And when we see our true identity within these infinite loops of energy and creativity that this planet has given us an opportunity to mix with, we will much quicker realize that future that we all want. And so the maturation of my journey is realizing we are here to be part of a human healing that will put ourselves back in harmony with soil water and air

globally. And we will see a generative planet once again that has healed itself many times over with without humans present. And we will all heal together towards this future. And to get there, we'll have to take the little fundamental steps that you've laid out during this. Yeah. And what is the, what are the brass tax of that? Like what is the what are the logistical steps

of that human evolutionary process? I think it's one. It can have many logistics within it, but it's connectivity. And we see this in the picture dish. If you connect cells, they go into a generative thing that you can't imagine having happened. We literally need connectivity right now. And we need it around one piece of us, which is the creative potential within us. And so we're trying,

trying to start to reimagine the internet as a mycelium network and what that would look like. And really what it comes down to is can we connect humans over like curiosity? And if we do that, I think we see the whole thing shift. So what is the mechanics of everything connectivity? What is the purpose of connectivity to create more biodiversity? And so you will know that

you're part of the connected and beautiful future. If there's more biodiversity in your life every day, are there more choices on the dinner table for your children, more colors on the plate, more sources for those foods that food being sourced from the soils of your backyard. That are now growing foods that replaced the monoculture lawn that was there last year. Are you going to regrow the

gardens that fed this country and most of the world today? By reconnecting, you will find more biodiversity. And so that's your bread crumbs on your road to being part of this future. How many people are you connected to? How many parts of nature are you connected to? How many trees have you said thank you to today? How many sunrises did you wake up to see last

week? How connected are you there? And is it? If the evidence is there's more biodiversity in your life than it's not an abstract observance of that sunrise. That was a sunrise that got integrated and you took it back into the five senses world and says, I'm going to call that neighbor who looks so lonely. I'm going to reach out to the nursing home down the roadway

and see if they need to volunteer just come and sit with some elders before they die. I'm going to get connected. And if the connection results in more biodiversity of thought, experience human touch, hugs, human breath, nature, then you're on the road. On the path and we're all going to meet on the other side of that rebirth veil and we're going to come out of that

womb in an ecstatic state of existence, ecstatic state of existence. Spoken like a good guru and cult leader. Right? I mean, it is beautiful though. You know, and thinking about that, it is, it is basically trying to step into the nature of nature. We're going to have our forest root systems which are naturally driven to expand and connect or our mycelium networks that are creating these

vast and intricate webs of communication that basically provide the foundation for their survival and allow them to thrive. And this is the blueprint for humanity as well. And yet we find ourselves in an increasingly fractured and isolated state that is divorcing us from that blueprint and that birthright and the call to action, as I hear you saying, is to recapture that and to understand that much

like the meseleum or the root systems we must do the same. Right? And so maybe a good way to kind of end this is with some calls to action, you know, about how to do that. Like how to, you know, how to, you know, how to cultivate that level of connectivity in our life that can lead us into a greater sense of self-efficacy, sovereignty, eke guy

purpose, all of that, like that raises the floor of our collective consciousness so that we can solve these problems. You know, but practical things, right? For the everyday person who, you know, a lot of the ideas that we've been talking about today are pretty, you know, ephemeral, right? Sort of like, listen, I'm working two jobs. I got kids like I love Zach. I love what he's

saying. I feel inspired by his words. But tell me what I can do right now here today to help myself help the, you know, well being of my family and and and hopefully, you know, allow me to be a more productive member of my community in service to the ideals that, you know, Zach is a spell. I mean, you start by categories of experience in your

week. We can start with a big one of food. It's something we do multiple times every day, all of us. And so starting at your food and looking at where, where monoculture and monotony has stuck into your behavior, it's universal. We are all eating about five different meals and we cycle them. And so starting there and starting to ask yourself how you can diversify that. I

strong believer in the power of getting your hands in the dirt. And that can start very simply if you are doing the two jobs. And everything is not working. Get the kids involved too and just plant a mint plant in a couple pots on the front stoop or on the patio or in the apartment window. And having the kids involved in that process will change their

philosophy and their psychology very quickly as well. So grow something in a pot. If that's all the more you can handle. But we've just launched the garden club so you can go to farmersfootprint.us and enjoy that, you know, experience of the one on one on gardening really because we've forgotten and we're doing that. Two generations out in the US from knowing how to grow 40% of

our food in our backyard gardens. The garden club really takes you back into that simple step by step process that can take you from no idea how to even open up a seed packet or maybe not even know where to buy a seed packet to having a really burden and diverse food system in your own backyard that replaces the Kentucky blue grass or whatever is there.

That's the biggest third largest monoculture in the United States is backyard lawns. 40 million acres of lawn. That's 40 million acres waiting to be turned into a food system that would be so resilient that there would be no hunger left within this country, let alone the others that would follow suit. So the food is ready to be grown. The land is there to be grown and

cultivated in the soils will improve as soon as we return biodiversity to them. So learn how to garden garden club farmersfootprint.us get engaged with farmers around the area. So the simple is going to a farmer's market. Simple is checking out and see if there's any CSAs that are delivering food boxes to your neighborhood. These are ways to start to understand the food system at the larger

level. Getting out of the box of food, the package food that's coming in the box. If you have to open two or three levels of packaging before you got to your food, you're really not helping the future at this moment. We got to get you back touching real food again. Sotane carrots and onions is an insanely fragrant and just goose to Tory experience like it doesn't

get much better than carrots, celery and onions and the food. I'm a good goose to Tory. It's the sense of taste. Okay. Learned to word that kid. That's good. I always do learn like three or four from you every podcast. So there's this this opportunity to engage the senses again in our food as we start to heal the land with our reengagement of that. So again,

gauge there. And then the excitement of bringing in your government to help out with us at the macro scale is really happening. You just had Cory Booker on he and I've done a lot of work around the glyphosate message. We have a glyphosate campaign running on with farmer's footprint right now. And the glyphosate campaign is bringing an understanding that we're not just using this as a

weed killer. We're using it as a crop treatment on the food right before we harvested. And so we're using it as a desiccant drying agent across many different crops. We was the first one in the 1990s and then the debut of gluten sensitivity out of that. Then we did soybeans and now we some of my colleagues were running around saying that we're allergic to the compounds,

electrons that are in the gooms. Yeah, maybe so now that there are glyphosate heaven, but before glyphosate, we were eating these things. Don't get me started. Anyway, so the answer is really activism at that level is starting to be heard. And so Cory Booker and many of the other city on the ad committee. I've had the opportunity to sit with them. And there really is an

appetite for change at the farm bill and other places to start to clean up our food system in a way that it really wasn't there wasn't a lack of awareness science education all that historically. And I've been testifying with groups of people to the EPA for years as to the dangers of glyphosate in our food, it's pro cancer stuff, all this stuff with no effect. And

it's been really wonderful to realize because I was going through a regulatory process that it wasn't working as soon as you go through a relationship process. Everything starts to move. And so this is a good lesson to us as citizens. The civic process is not one of of railing against your politicians or appealing to your regulatory committees. It's about building relationships. Non-judgmental relationship has to be

heard. And so go and meet your legislators and start a relationship there. And the regulatory committee will be able to change. The regulatory can't be the agent of change to Washington, DC. It just doesn't work that way. You're pushing on the rock at the end of the the avalanche at that point. You got to go uphill and figure out why the avalanche happened. And I'm so

delighted in talking to all these lawmakers on Capitol Hill that they just didn't know. Didn't information that we were presenting to the EPA. It wasn't trickling there. And so they're like, that's disease. We control the farm bill. We're the ones that actually allocate all the funds from the farm bill. And we've spent, you know, $1 trillion on the farm bill in the last 10 years. So

there's a lot of capital ready to pivot here at the governmental levels, just as there is at the industry level. Just as there isn't healthcare and beyond. So instead of regulatory solutions, we need relationship solutions. And we need to rebirth our civics again. And so to this end, a group of subcreated the Institute of natural law. So get engaged that way. We'll have our public facing

nonprofit up and going with websites and engagement platforms all that in the coming months. But the Institute of natural laws, re-understanding civics in the context of these laws of nature. We've covered today because there is to imagine that politics is a result of of polarized opinions that just fight until one wins or the other. That's not nature. The nation never done anything that way. And so

our very sociopolitical methods are at a at a wonderful tipping point where we can rebirth. The Republic. That was really seen in this country a couple hundred years ago as a possibility. And of course, that was built on the understanding Confucius brought to China and the understanding the earthquake brought to 600 nations and North America before colonialism. Natural law has been running long and hard and

creating beauty and harmony and longstanding, you know, creative governments and creative nations next to one another for the really seems to be beginning of civilization as we understand it. And we can return to that quite simply. We can find natural law back into the system. And so returning to our original documents and finding that. So farmers footprint.us Institute of natural law and option journey of intrinsic

health.com. If you feel like you need a team of people around you, if you want to community around you to heal within, you can go to that website and engage. You can certainly take the eight week course. But we also have a membership program that's very cheap per month and just engage with that global community. And so even if you're not going to take the coursework

and be part of the think tanks and everything else that are coming out of it. Because as soon as somebody shifts out of that victim perpetrator mentality becomes the creator, they are a creative epigenetic change agent within the community. And this is what's happening now. So journey of intrinsic health is now an app. It's a community app. It's keeping people connected after the course. And as

a self generating space for people to create their own avenues of change and transformation. So get engaged journey of intrinsic health.com farmers footprint.us for education just Zach Bush MD.com all my stuff is there for free. Yeah. Dig deep there. If you want the soil science. And so everything we're talking about in the petri dishes and all of that, that's intelligenceofnature.com. And an opportunity really digging there.

So lots to go to. Yeah, that's a lot. I mean beautifully put. I love this idea of, you know, back to this idea of sovereignty and the notion of, you know, cultivating your inner creator and really, you know, shouldering the realization and the responsibility that you can make a change in my conversation with Senator Booker. It was all about that. It's like everybody has a platform,

everybody has relationships. How are you using your voice holding on to, you know, hope even in the face of, you know, extensive, you know, perhaps, you know, impossible obstacles, but understanding that this is what we're here to do, right? And, and you know, the fact that you have developed a relationship with him. I think it's beautiful because it is about, it is about, you know, relationships.

That's how we move forward. That's how progress is made. And, and we all have a voice, you know, and I think it is incumbent upon us to, you know, kind of use that voice and to, you know, develop, you know, on your, on your idea of diversity to develop more diversity in our lives on our plate, but also in our communities like diversity, like your point

that, you know, nature is, nature is always moving towards greater and greater diversity, right? That's a law. Right. So I think that's a lot. How can we do that in our own lives? How can we cultivate more diversity in our relationships, in our experiences? How can we step outside of our comfort zone to, you know, experience greater diversity in our life, on our plate, in our,

in our relationships, et cetera? Like that seems to be a path towards greater, greater health as a kind of golden rule, right? A lot of those lines, actually, I think you just brought it into my brain with a final little story that encapsulates this whole thing. Including the longevity piece we've been talking about, which is I was speaking at this event in Northern Virginia, probably six

or seven years back. And they flew over this couple from Icaria Greece in their 60s that live on a 500 year family farm, family vineyard, they grow grapes and olives. And they flew them over to prepare a five course greek meal for the speakers of this little event. It was pretty epic experience. This five course meal they had to foraged and back yard gardens around Northern

Virginia. For three or four days to get the ingredients for this meal for 17 people. And every course they serve was such a ritual of the description of the food itself, where they ingredients related to its ecosystem and the love that they put into each thing and stories of family with each ingredient and their memories of the onions that grandmother's and so such a journey into

this meal. And at the end of it, I stood up and and like did this epic, exact bush toast that I thought was just so brilliant. You know, probably went on for 10 minutes long and the microbiome and there's like in the beauty of the cosmos. And I guess so, so pleased with this thing. And everybody's crying. And like I was just like home run. You

were like, yeah, in your flow. And this guy from Icaria gets up thick Greek accent. Doctor, that was all very, very interesting, but you're completely wrong. It was one of these magical moments where you go from flow state to I get the brick wall because this guy just spoke his truth and said, you are completely wrong. And I had just espoused everything I'd learned through 45

years of my life to that point. And he just said, I was completely wrong, not slightly wrong, completely wrong. And he said the reason that we live long in Icaria Greece is because not the food or the soil we grow it in as you think. I don't know what the microbiome really refers to, but it's none of that. It's because every table in Icaria, there's an

empty chair set in hopes that somebody knew that we don't know will come sit and eat with us. That's why we live long in Icaria Greece. And so that's the biodiversity that we could learn in a in a country where we now eat 32% of our meals alone behind a steering wheel. It is time to reengage folks and food is here as a focus of fellowship,

not as just nutrients. And so if you're going to lay a plate of food on your table, set an extra chair and create a social environment where it's likely somebody will show up and fill that chair. And so we have the opportunity to do it at this grassroots level as simple as the meal and the person showing up. And without the or ring without the data,

we will live longer for the wisdom and beauty that we will gain from that meal, seeing that new person and being seen by that new person such that we would change every atom in our bodies to become something different to that tomorrow. I think you planted the flag for today with that thought. Thank you. It's really beautiful. It's always a gift to share space with you

and spend time with you and really just absorb your energy and share your wisdom and experience. And you know, I love you. I'm your biggest fan. I'm here to support you. So there's always a chair open for you, my friend, to be continued. Because I got an outline here full of all kinds of stuff we didn't use. We didn't get to today. But I think that's

good enough for today. As I mentioned at the outset, I believe this is your fifth appearance on the podcast. We have hours and hours of discourse between us. So if you're interested in anything from, you know, glyphosate to many of the other subjects that we discussed today, there's plenty to mind. So we'll link up in the show notes, URLs to all of those past episodes with

episode numbers. And, you know, again, so if this is your first exposure to Zach on this show, your new to the show lots there for you to kind of dig into and explore and educate yourself. Thank you. We'll be back in the ring again. Cheers. Thank you, my love. Peace. Plants. This episode was brought to you today by Roca Performance. Sunglasses and I wear unlock 20%

on the Internet. So, I'm going to go to the website and I'll be right back. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, find the

link. Social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camillo, with additional audio engineering by Kale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis

with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by David Greenberg, graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Celice, Dan Drake and AJ Akpote. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Piot, Trapper Piot and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.