Zach Bush, MD’s Beautiful Vision For Human & Planetary Evolution

We are approaching a significant tipping point for human and planetary health. Despite the breakneck pace of innovation and technology striving to solve these problems, I can’t help but feel the solutions we need continue to elude us. Today’s guest believes there is a better path forward—one that calls for spiritual evolution, and a profound reconnection with the natural world. Meet Zach Bush, MD, a triple board-certified physician, an internationally recognized thought leader, and a renowned educator on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease, and food systems. Today’s exchange traverses many important topics including the link between human biology and planetary biology, how the quality of our soil affects our microbiome, actionable ways to regenerate the Earth, how we can work together for a healthy future for people, animals, and the planet, along with many other fascinating topics. I’m grateful to Zach for his wisdom. And I’m proud to share it with you today. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: ROKA: http://www.roka.com/ Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll Calm: http://www.calm.com/richroll BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/richroll Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:19Zach Bush?

  I believe that humanity's original wound, if we have one, is that we saw ourselves separate from nature.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  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 Bush, who is one of the more fascinating medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of whole body and whole planet health. Today marks 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...

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  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 and 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've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one, but first.

• 2:55Rich Roll?

  Today's 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 proud 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 since then. Even more, of course, since our first podcast.

• 3:40Rich Roll?

  I think this is your fifth appearance on the show, not including what we did at the Nantucket Project.

• 3:45Zach Bush?

  Maybe third, I'm not sure, but it was definitely about five years ago or six years ago that we must have first talked.

• 3:51Rich Roll?

  Certainly a lot since we first met at the Conscious Capitalism Conference many years ago.

• 3:57Zach Bush?

  That's right. It's an uncomfortable situation evolving where the audience gets to watch us age.

• 4:01Rich Roll?

  Yes, and have lots of opinions about that, right?

• 4:08Rich Roll?

  But in kind of thinking about what has transpired since we last sat down, you know, of course, we've all, you know, weathered the pandemic, we're experiencing what's going on in the war with the war in Ukraine. Yes, global soil degradation continues. We're in the midst of this mass species extinction. What is it? The seventh extinction? I'll call it the sixth. You've been called the sixth, yes. You know, what else? There we have refugee crises, seismic climate events with increasing regularity, this loss of trust in institutions,

• 4:46Rich Roll?

  a growing rift in our ability to conduct civil discourse that I think is wended 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 haves and the have-nots, which of course is fueling both dissent and anger and conflict and culminating in violence, which is separating us from others, from ourselves, from the planet that we all share. And finally, although of course the

• 5:26Rich Roll?

  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 ChatGPT, 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.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  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 emergent 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 that we are approaching a significant tipping point for human and planetary health. And I know these are things that you've spent

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  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.

• 6:51Zach Bush?

  Yeah, that's a dismal list to take through, right?

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of highlighted the negative things at the cost of all the positive things that are going on. And I recognize that, but...

• 7:03Zach Bush?

  Well, I think it's relevant, and it's actually an echo of our very first combination conversation six years ago, when we were 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 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 biologic systems in the end. And biologic systems play out in a lot of different, you know, micro to 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

• 7:45Zach Bush?

  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, in 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...

• 8:13Zach Bush?

  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. He's 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 to happen.

• 8:53Zach Bush?

  At the macro level, you find a child who starts to get isolated socially, emotionally from their classroom in kindergarten, second grade, and then they're easy to radicalize by the time they're 12 years old and they become a malignant social agent and they step into a classroom with school shootings and the rest. And so we become malignant, 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 ourselves separate from nature.

• 9:36Zach Bush?

  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 and malignant to its organism. We have become cancerous to our organism, which is a single living system called planet Earth.

• 10:07Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's a fascinating kind of dissection of...

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  How the, you know, our focus on the micro impairs our ability to perceive the implications on the macro, right? And when we think about Western progress and the scientific method, certainly, we've been able to, you know, 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, were on a track of literally just studying one protein, you know, and its impact on cancer.

• 10:57Rich Roll?

  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, right? And that, I think, requires a certain humility about the reach of the scientific method to objectively understand everything and deprecates an appreciation for understanding the holistic nature, the incredibly, infinitely complex way in which, you know, our DNA, our cells, our, you know, particle matter is always in interplay with everything that surrounds us.

• 11:40Rich Roll?

  And it's almost like you have to, you know, look at it through almost a psychedelic perspective to understand that, understand like the nonduality oneness of our existence in context with the environment that supports us. And so perhaps talk a little bit about, like, you've sort of, you know, 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.

• 12:19Zach Bush?

  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. It's just like 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

• 13:03Zach Bush?

  or and maybe is indicative of our purpose really is why are we here? Like, why, why have monkeys that can control fire and then create technology and do all that thing? I think in the end, 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 in 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

• 13:47Zach Bush?

  way in which we study any cell is in isolation. And so I told you that a cell isolate becomes cancer. But 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 to do that. And 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.

• 14:31Zach Bush?

  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 in this current version of science that we work within, is that what happens if there's 10 million inputs at once? There was no system smart enough, or question 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,

• 15:13Zach Bush?

  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, you know, science experiment in clinical research. And then you give them one drug, and you control for their diet, you control for everything else, and make sure nothing else changes. The challenge that we quickly realized over, you know, 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, you know, varied genetics and backgrounds, ages, males, females was a big piece of this problem.

• 15:57Zach Bush?

  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 of a drug. And so then you add on to that age-related changes, and, you know, 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 peer-reviewed science and Western medicine at its best... It's pretty clear that we don't have any real strong handle on what would be

• 16:41Zach Bush?

  good for a human entering a chemical environment. The answer is, we don't know, although we know is 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. You know, we didn't have the human genome decoded when I started medical school. We were, we thought that we had 280,000 genes at the time. To find out that we only have 20,000 genes was partway through my career, you know. 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 has birthed industries like epigenetics and things like that to understand the influence

• 17:26Zach Bush?

  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 endpoints, can produce 200 or 400 different proteins depending on its environment. You extrapolate that out towards 20,000 genes and 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 that, 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

• 18:08Zach Bush?

  were playing into that moment of conception and determining 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 its full potential when we were reductionist in approach. But the excitement that I have now is 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

• 18:53Zach Bush?

  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.

• 19:09Rich Roll?

  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 expose an individual 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 guide people towards better health?

• 19:38Zach Bush?

  It's a really important question, and it's one in which we realize 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 dispersment 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 somewhere around 50 or 70 trillion human 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

• 20:23Zach Bush?

  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, in your knee, in 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 a million doctors' offices today that are telling somebody,

• 21:07Zach Bush?

  this clinical trial with 100,000 people in it showed this result of a 4% reduction in your cholesterol if we put you on this medication. So if I put you on this medication, we expect a 4% reduction in your cholesterol. If anybody's taken a Statistics 101 class, the first full day is that you can never take a population statistic and imply it to an individual. If you tell somebody, "Look, 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," 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 then. Well, if we can't tell them that, then why did we do this study?

• 21:51Zach Bush?

  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 dictating Medicare or something like that, then public health statistics would be interesting. Okay, if we make this intervention to 2 million people, we would expect this population effect. And so you can't say there's been a 20% reduction in individuals' health. 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

• 22:34Zach Bush?

  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, day in and day out, of how much REM sleep did they get, how much inflammatory markers they have in their urine, how much blood sugar is 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, and we find out, "Oh, you know what?

• 23:18Zach Bush?

  Probiotics was actually not an answer to gut 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."

• 23:29Zach Bush?

  But at least it got us down that road. And I feel the same way for biohacking is that we've been super reductionist 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 to nature is not alive. Their connection to 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 O-ring data. And that's an unfortunate result of what seemed to be a good idea of like, let's strive

• 24:09Zach Bush?

  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.

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  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 nonetheless in that I gather from what you just shared that this idea that, again, it's reductionist, 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 necess-- I mean, listen, I'm wearing these things. I look at the data, I hold it loosely.

• 25:02Rich Roll?

  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.

• 25:36Rich Roll?

  Not to play devil's advocate, but to imagine the perspective 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 communicate with the practitioner who is rooted in our traditional system right

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  now in terms of how we're talking about some of the low-hanging fruit of chronic diseases that are unnecessarily killing or debilitating millions of people every year, but are also somewhat ameliorated through simple interventions?

• 26:39Zach Bush?

  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're pretty sure that nature wasn't waiting to perfect human longevity for us to discover statin drugs. 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,

• 27:24Zach Bush?

  food being an obvious one, but 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're 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 should say, "Well, you should eat less fatty foods," or we make up these things, or "Don't eat as much Coca-Cola," and 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

• 28:08Zach Bush?

  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 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 at is there any cancer in history that was ever caused by a lack of chemotherapy? As you really wrap your head around that, you start to realize like, no, like, that's not the cause 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?

• 28:51Zach Bush?

  And so in this simple way, we can start to realize like, okay, no, we've actually just been trained in a modality of allopathic Western medicine that simply doesn't offer us 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 I and we're going to surround you by resources and an environment of thought, really, it's

• 29:35Zach Bush?

  a philosophy school of eight weeks that's going to reintroduce you 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 exercises that 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

• 30:16Zach Bush?

  so much connectedness in our capacity to have conscious thought, abstract systems of belief, abstract systems of visioning and and, you know, the possibilities of the future.

• 30:29Zach Bush?

  If we forget that and we start to, again, be reductionist in our definition of success, of the cancer shrunk two centimeters the last six months, that's good, right?

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:40Zach Bush?

  I don't know, is it good? Are you enjoying your life? Are you, 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 is shrinking or growing? Maybe that's not the point. So that's kind of where we got in our clinic is like, wow, we gotta get people way backed up before we even address any of the dis-ease or disorder going on in that body. We gotta reconnect to the original question of who are you? What gives you joy? What lights you up? What makes you wanna stay?

• 31:11Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:12Zach Bush?

  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.

• 31:22Rich Roll?

  Sure, and you're not, you're not exactly paving a, you know, a solid path towards healing without having that conversation and, and deconstructing that and finding a, a path forward of, of meaning and purpose and fulfillment and ikigai 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, 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 allopathic system and I think is a pill for a lot of people to, that's difficult for a lot of people to swallow

• 32:04Rich Roll?

  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, particularly since we last spoke.

• 32:25Zach Bush?

  Yeah, I think we're speeding towards it as a society because the reductionist approach is failing so quickly now. And so what seemed ridiculous 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 in 2008, 2009, when those studies started to come out. 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, i.e. a disconnect from the diversity of nature itself. So fortunately, science itself is quickly catching up here to say, oh, my gosh.

• 33:10Zach Bush?

  Not only is it not reductionist, 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 in the 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 foothold, 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.

• 33:53Zach Bush?

  And we knew that the human hormones, thyroid, etc., weren't speaking directly to the gut microbiome, for example. And so there was a lack of understanding of what would be the system that would be trans species. 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, 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.

• 34:36Zach Bush?

  And in all of that eating, the bacteria are making side products that we call metabolites. That turned 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, you know, plant medicine, going after plants for the medicinal quality. Tumor, curcumin, these things go back thousands and thousands of years. Chinese medicine and Chinese herbal medicine, 7,000 years back at least.

• 35:17Zach Bush?

  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.e. the bacteria and 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 a description of the movement of electrons. And so what's happening in soil systems, which is what your gut ultimately is, is a complex soil system that you carry around inside of you.

• 35:59Zach Bush?

  It creates a liquid circuit board for the transitive 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 cellphone 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 happen was resilience and regeneration.

• 36:40Zach Bush?

  And so if you put intestinal cells in a Petri dish and you expose them to the most common toxin 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, 4 billion pounds of this stuff goes into our soil and water systems and is exposed to our gut lining all over the place, through the food we eat, through this water we drink, actually through the rainfall now, 85% of the rain in the United States, 85% of the air we breathe. And so this chemical breaks the tight junctions and gap junctions, creating isolation between the intestinal lining, creating a leak. And this has now been popularized with the term leaky gut.

• 37:21Zach Bush?

  In the medical literature, it's referred to as gut permeability. But that leaky gut phenomenon is the result of that injury of isolation happening to billions of cells at once due to exposure. And so this was, you know, something that obviously pharmaceutical companies were fascinated with finding a target for, because if somebody could crack that code, my God, what a blockbuster drug. To find out that nature had cracked the code long, long, long before, probably shouldn't have 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 network 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 integrally connected than

• 38:03Zach Bush?

  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.

• 38:26Rich Roll?

  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, you know, the trees of a forest communicate with each other through their root networks and through the fungal networks that connect them through, you know, the soil to, you know... 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 we're only beginning to kind of really understand that and to see that pattern show up in other aspects of biology and human biology.

• 39:11Rich Roll?

  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 Darren Aronofsky's first film and it's the story of a 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

• 39:52Rich Roll?

  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 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 recur 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 and our place within this ecosystem in terms

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  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, an antagonist to the environment that supports us? And that antagonistic relationship is really The catalyst or the driver of all of these maladaptions 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

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  negative outcomes through disease, through conflict, through the degradation of the environment and, you know, on and on and on.

• 41:31Zach Bush?

  Yeah, yeah, it's super accurate and that fractal or Fibonacci kind of phenomenon, where you see it at all levels of nature gets 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 too, when we saw human cells repairing faster and reconnecting at 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 thermodynamics says any system left in isolation will increase its chaos. So why do the cardiologists or the doctors listening to this, including myself back in

• 42:16Zach Bush?

  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.

• 42:43Rich Roll?

  And to introduce, sorry to interrupt, but like, was there a certain inflection point in that where you caught, you had sort of a dawning epiphany about this that that transitioned you out of that traditional method, you know, or approach into kind of your current thinking?

• 43:00Zach Bush?

  It was slow, you know, because, you know, first of all, my thinking had started changing even when I was in academia. So I was starting to watch vitamin A compounds kill cancer really effectively. Got a clinical trial, started off with my basic science around that. And so I was already starting to realize, wait, maybe we shouldn't be poisoning bodies. Maybe we should be feeding bodies. Maybe nutrition is going to be more effective ultimately than than trying to poison people with 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 seventeen years in academia. Yeah. And so that had begun and then exiting to start a nutrition center in rural Virginia in one of the most impoverished, you know, parts of the country with the goal of if

• 43:40Zach Bush?

  we can figure out how to get the lowest socioeconomic, you know, sectors of our communities to figure out how to be self empowered in their eating to 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 seemed like a bit of a chasing after the wind as far as like our true public health crisis at its foot. 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 up a diabetes drug, you don't expect them to, you know, go through any

• 44:22Zach Bush?

  dramatic healing events. You expect their blood sugar slowly go down, all this. We were putting people on these plant based, you know, diets and everything else and finding that they were would reverse type two 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 a future medicine, I was still stuck in my Western medicine paradigm. So the first cells I studied

• 45:05Zach Bush?

  that on were MCF seven 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, well, I'm gonna just start doing that intravenously. So I was making my own stuff and intravenously injecting into myself at liters a day, thinking the more the better, like I gotta overwhelm 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 lower, almost homeopathic usage of this stuff in the gut rather than in the vein. You can't bypass biology and expect a biologic result. And so it was this very slow evolution out of, out of the reductionist and kind of paternalistic,

• 45:48Zach Bush?

  I gotta 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 nurse mating 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 human health isn't 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

• 46:31Zach Bush?

  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 when you start to say, well, what really is the goal of humanity at this crisis point that you so well began us at? Why are we here right now at the pinnacle? Why are we the driving force of this sixth extinction?

• 47:13Zach Bush?

  How did we become the existential crisis is one question, but to what end is maybe a more important question. What does the end of this extinction look like?

• 47:22Rich Roll?

  It's interesting because I consider you an optimist to the point of Pollyanna at times, but that's a pretty gloomy pessimistic perspective.

• 47:32Zach Bush?

  Well, it's, it's already happening. You know, you, you described it really well at the beginning, you know, the amount of... Just ecosystem refugees, climate refugees we have in Africa right now. Mali, the country of Mali is just being desertified at such an alarming rate over the last three years. And the global governments decided they were going to build a green wall to keep the desert from coming any further. So they tried to raise $60 billion and 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 never been seen before.

• 48:16Zach Bush?

  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, who's one of my great friends and most revered public health people out there, she started Pachamama Alliance and before that with Werner Erhard and the rest, was running the Hunger Project globally towards the late 20th century. And when they were doing their work, they were trying to get the global hunger numbers down from 14 million down to 4 million was their goal. They wanted to hit 4 million, decrease by 10 million of those starving over the course of the 1990s. So we are losing relationship with our environment in real time.

• 49:01Zach Bush?

  And so the concept of we need to go biohack 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 Pollyanna and I am damn optimistic and I don't think that is our future. But to make 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 forest. And so we need to make this paradigm leap over our current crisis and demise so that

• 49:45Zach Bush?

  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 Farmer's Footprint. The brilliant Lauren Tucker has tackled the project Renour Studios and has brought this to bear with regenesis and the 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 standpoint. So instead of trying to go and say, well, we got 10 million problems, we gotta go start fixing each one of those, we don't have time for that. We will go extinct trying to do the whack a mole, here's a problem, here's a problem, here's a problem approach.

• 50:30Zach Bush?

  We need to do the Buckminster Fuller phenomenon, which is we now need to create the reality that makes the old humanity obsolete.

• 50:37Rich Roll?

  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, you know, sort of conceptualize paradigms that don't currently exist, which is a big ask, right? You're optimistic about this. I look around and I see, you know, all of the dire consequences that, you know, I shared at the outset and which you just mentioned. But we all just, we also just experienced like, I don't know, a month straight of rain in Los Angeles and it's never been more green.

• 51:16Rich Roll?

  You know, I've lived here since 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 to 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.

• 51:56Rich Roll?

  And we see inflammation of, you know, in a more micro sense of, of, of human biology. Right? It is our body's 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, in our kind of, you know, culture. Right? In 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?

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  Like, what is happening, you know, when we cut our hand and it turns red or whatever? We're having an inflammatory response. The inflammation and, and discourse is, 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 back 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 those small problems if we lose sight of, you know, the larger context in which they exist.

• 53:24Zach Bush?

  Yeah, that's really well said. You know, there's been huge books written on the, the problem of the victim perpetrator coin, two sides to 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 and become the perpetrator in the next moment. And that could be. You know, Germans getting crushed at the end of World War I and they, you know, are victimized, two 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.

• 53:56Rich Roll?

  Well, this is the history of conflict and geopolitics dating all the way back to the inception of humanity.

• 54:02Zach Bush?

  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 level, 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 myself in a day. Oh my gosh, I'm beating myself up right now and oh my gosh, now, now, I'm, you know, the victim of that and now I'm the perpetrator of that, you know.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  Or the abused person becomes the abuser.

• 54:31Zach Bush?

  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 victimhood that preceded that moment. And so, we are going to have to come to a universal moment of forgiveness in these next couple of months, years ahead, forgive the journey that we've taken and stop with the typical activist approaches. There's the bad guys cutting down the rainforest, there's the bad guys pumping oil out, there's

• 55:15Zach Bush?

  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 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-vision that radical future, where we simply behave differently.

• 55:45Zach Bush?

  And we get to see it happening out of this pandemic. You know, you, 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, you know, intervention. So for every action, there's an equal and 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, as 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.

• 56:30Zach Bush?

  We've used all kinds of terms for that side. Infertility, and we use all kinds of, you know, chronic diseases, cancer, we use all kinds of words on that side.

• 56:39Zach Bush?

  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 mentality. What is necessary in that leap, I think, in, and alongside that concept of forgiveness, is this movement from the belief of scarcity into the state of abundance.

• 57:03Zach Bush?

  In California, the last seven years, huge drought, the scarcity of water has been so palpable, right? You're out of water, then 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. Rainforests move 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, you know, energy

• 57:47Zach Bush?

  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, as this earth does more abundant life every iteration, after every extinction, there is more life, more diversity and more intelligence every time.

• 58:07Zach Bush?

  And it's stunningly beautiful and it advances, right? We go from palms and ferns before 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.

• 58:50Zach Bush?

  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 and 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 nature 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 rebirthed in a higher level of intelligence, everything else. Maybe that's not that bad of a story in the end.

• 59:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you seem neutral on whether humanity will make it or not.

• 59:37Zach Bush?

  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, you know, 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 try 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

• 1:00:17Zach Bush?

  bloodstream or some ridiculous amount. That's largely why we're going into this infertility crisis is too much plastics disruption of the endocrine system through toxins and plastics, all this stuff. So what's the, what's the applied science of the beauty we see under the microscope? And the science we see under the microscope is these mitochondria dudes, these little bacteria that live inside ourselves, 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 endure. And so to that, seven years ago, we decided, well, we just need to build a bunch of 40-foot mitochondria that could chew up all the plastics of the planet. Because ultimately,

• 1:01:02Zach Bush?

  plastic is the same as glucose or fatty acids that your mitochondria are using. It's just a long chain carbon that has stored sun energy inside it, sunlight inside of it. A double carbon bond is a battery for sunlight. And so plastics, tires, agricultural waste, currently methane, offgassing, destroying the planet, blah, blah, blah. That should be our energy sector. We can close the carbon loop in 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 company's called Resource Dynamics that we started. And it's so exciting. Each mitochondrial unit digests 100,000 pounds

• 1:01:42Zach Bush?

  of waste daily into biofuel and biochar or carbon black or these other critical commodities for closing these carbon loops in soil systems and other, 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 were 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, you create that space. And that's just what I do. Like, I'm 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.

• 1:02:20Zach Bush?

  So if I have a business acumen that I'm starting to really embrace, it's I can hold that field of possibility for a good long time of impossibility.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. So I'm not sure I quite understand. So, so correct me if I'm wrong. What you're saying is you have helped develop a 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?

• 1:02:54Zach Bush?

  Yeah, except we just blew up one mitochondria into a 40-foot version of it. So we were trying to imagine a mitochondria that was 40-foot big instead of a few mitochondria.

• 1:03:03Rich Roll?

  But how do you do that? Like, that's a biological thing. What do you mean 40-foot? Like, what are you saying exactly?

• 1:03:10Zach Bush?

  So mitochondria use 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, etc. 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, Yost Bakar,

• 1:03:54Zach Bush?

  in Australia, just finished an incredible two-year project right in the middle of Fed Square in Melbourne, and it's called The Greenhouse and Future Food Systems. It was the concept. And he was a restaurateur, and he's a florist 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 this thing off-grid. Just right down in the middle of Fed Square a couple of years ago and got this thing growing and running and had two chefs living in the house and they had hundreds

• 1:04:37Zach Bush?

  of thousands of Australians come through and students and everything else to witness this thing. It is truly spectacular.

• 1:04:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've heard about that through Darren Olean. I think he visited that house.

• 1:04:48Zach Bush?

  Yeah, Darren, put it on the Zac Efron show.

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  It was in the show, right.

• 1:04:51Zach Bush?

  That was the one that 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 system he mimicked in a 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

• 1:05:32Zach Bush?

  Central America jungles to try to discover the next lithium mine. That's not a solution for the planet, right?

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  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 that hold extraordinary promise. We actually know how to solve a lot of these problems, but we're operating against time in the sense that the degradation is escalating and our inability to be efficacious in terms of manifesting solutions is inhibited by

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  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 these problems?

• 1:06:40Rich Roll?

  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 future, 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,

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  it seems very difficult or hard to imagine that we're going to get there in time before that ticking clock reaches its endpoint and we've passed the point of no return.

• 1:07:36Zach Bush?

  I have an enormous amount of confidence about something called quorum sensing. 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. Forests do this quorum sensing. Forests 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

• 1:08:20Zach Bush?

  to regenerate in a level it had been failing in for many decades of drought. And so the vergency 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 minds connected that already know the solutions are here,

• 1:09:04Zach Bush?

  then that new world just emerges. We will do quorum sensing as a species if we connect enough people. That's why I'm 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 minds to suddenly do the quorum sensing event and we suddenly know the future that we all feel in our hearts is possible. And that known future becomes the reality. It's not something that we probably need to go engineer. I believe all my companies are going to be gone in 30 years because we'll either be extinct or they'll all be obsolete because this new future is going to dream up things

• 1:09:48Zach Bush?

  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. There'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. It's 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.

• 1:10:30Zach Bush?

  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.

• 1:10:57Zach Bush?

  If you're in the water as a fish, your perception of the water is not actually there. 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, perceiving that we are separate from the water, the

• 1:11:41Zach Bush?

  air, the soil, gives us the ability to uniquely see its beauty. And it 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 that'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 in her full beauty. Because the moment we see everything, especially probably in a vibration of gratitude, we

• 1:12:24Zach Bush?

  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 and 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 and these extraordinary telescope images are 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 any cathedral I've ever stepped

• 1:13:08Zach Bush?

  into is looking at the beauty through human eyes of the cosmos and in the microscope, looking at the beauty of a single cell rebirthing 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 into seeing the full beauty of this planet so that 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 alluded to at the beginning.

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  It's a beautiful sentiment and I share, you know, this idea that, that we, you know, we have the capacity to marvel on a level that no other biological creature, you know, is capable of and there's something, you know, extraordinary about that. I think the path forward, however, requires a certain level of not only, you know, really indulging in recognizing our capacity to, you know, see the beauty from the micro to

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  the macro, but also to develop a level of humility about the capacity of our five senses. Because I think what, what humans also do, which is, you know, sort of orthogonal to what you just shared, is, is to believe that we are capable of understanding everything through these, through the limitations of these five senses without, you know, an appreciation for the limitations of those senses, without inadequate respect for the fact that those senses are limited and, and our brains are perhaps not as evolved as they could be

• 1:15:04Rich Roll?

  to recognize what is perhaps right in front of our eyes and, 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

• 1:15:44Rich Roll?

  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 planetary health and human health.

• 1:16:01Zach Bush?

  Oh, that was 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 is possible, is an exciting one. But our purpose is to be in this finite existence of the 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.

• 1:16:44Zach Bush?

  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? No, 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 hit you in a place that was not five senses mediated.

• 1:17:26Zach Bush?

  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 the 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 an oak falls in my land there and it starts to dissolve into the soil, it is an extraordinary explosion of life.

• 1:18:09Zach Bush?

  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.

• 1:18:25Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:26Zach Bush?

  That's who I'm going to become.

• 1:18:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Zach Bush?

  I'm going to become 100,000 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.

• 1:18:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's really 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 to, you know, 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,

• 1:19:34Rich Roll?

  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, 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

• 1:20:18Rich Roll?

  continue through the people that you care about. It's beautiful. 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, in the vox populi. It's a zeitgeist-y kind of thing right now. Everybody's talking about lifespan extension, health span 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 this show

• 1:21:02Rich Roll?

  to discuss this topic. And I'm certainly not against 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 spawned by very rich people who have everything in the world and the one thing that they can't control is time,

• 1:21:44Rich Roll?

  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 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 decrepit or losing their minds or unable to be productive. So of course, we want to enhance

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  or increase the robustness of that. But we also need a healthy kind of relationship with our own demise.

• 1:22:38Zach Bush?

  Yeah. First of all, I've, you know, bitten blessed and 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 was no more sense of scarcity when they came back on this side. And so 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 in 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

• 1:23:22Zach Bush?

  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 scary for me to think that we're making judgments on that's a good technology or bad technology. Is AI a bad technology? I don't know. We'll find out.

• 1:23:53Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, human innovation is the story of unintended consequences.

• 1:23:56Zach Bush?

  It's the story of unintended consequences that are born out of a fundamental disconnect from nature at its beginning.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Well, and also a hubris.

• 1:24:05Zach Bush?

  No. 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. 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 happen once you're in that abandonment disorder that keeps us addicted. Great work on addiction that I'm fascinated by is TJ Woodward's work around conscious recovery. And he's really good at helping people get down to this root of abandonment disorders, the reason they have addiction to anything.

• 1:24:43Rich Roll?

  I've never heard of him. That's fascinating.

• 1:24:46Zach Bush?

  You would love to have him on.

• 1:24:47Rich Roll?

  Does he have a book?

• 1:24:48Zach Bush?

  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 abused 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.

• 1:25:33Zach Bush?

  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.

• 1:25:42Zach Bush?

  What I love about this simplicity is then rethinking the word "technology." We think of technology as 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.

• 1:26:25Zach Bush?

  My trust in that supersedes anything that I can make that looks outside of nature. We've defined nature that way even. If you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, nature is defined as everything on the planet, minerals, plants, animals, everything except humans or things humans have made.

• 1:26:44Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:45Zach Bush?

  Really? Not only wrote ourselves out of nature...

• 1:26:48Rich Roll?

  It doesn't encapsulate humans as part of nature, which is a perfect encapsulation of the problem, the dualistic nature of how humanity, yeah, like, contemplates our role.

• 1:27:01Zach Bush?

  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 true 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 there's 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

• 1:27:46Zach Bush?

  to true creator? And of all places that, you know, maybe shoved a huge sign or post in my face on this, it 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 I'll be whole." And we become codependent in those relationships, that's defined in that space as 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

• 1:28:29Zach Bush?

  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 saw 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

• 1:29:13Zach Bush?

  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

• 1:29:54Zach Bush?

  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 disorder 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.

• 1:30:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a beautiful and complex sentiment. I, you know, in contemplating that, I think of the human condition as one of suffering born out of our inability to, you know, see ourselves as we truly are and instead live in comparison to others and in relationship to, you know, a past and a future from which we construct narratives that lead to our own suffering and separation, right? And so basically what you're saying is the, the path forward is presence and the capacity

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  to, you know, 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, of, you know, how we relate to externalities that we would be able to touch deeper meaning within ourselves and, and connect with

• 1:31:46Rich Roll?

  that kind of, you know, infinite source of, of love that, that truly allows us to then in turn connect with another human being and set off that like chain reaction that you're speaking of. Is that a fair reflection of what you're getting at?

• 1:32:03Zach Bush?

  It's 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.

• 1:32:31Zach Bush?

  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 logarithmically fast than I ever anticipated. I resisted group coaching all the way up until the pandemic because I thought it was so important because I was in my old patriarchal thing of, well, there's the practitioner and the patient. 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 and that 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 a safe space

• 1:33:12Zach Bush?

  is created. And healing doesn't happen through the breath work, through the food interventions, or all the other eight things that we need. Healing happens when you're reconnected to your original map. It's in relationship to yourself and others. To yourself first, but you can't find self until you're in relationship to others. But as soon as you do find self, the speed at which those cells repair has 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 medical chart, miracle happened, you know. And 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

• 1:33:56Zach Bush?

  disappeared. And so we call it spontaneous remission, when disease that's been there for decades and is 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, you know, so often, where you have stage four cancer and tumors everywhere and mets to the brain, you've 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.

• 1:34:39Zach Bush?

  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 megalithic beauty within you. If 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 for a 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 and start to live within her instead of against her?

• 1:35:24Rich Roll?

  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 shirk climbing that mountain for ourselves because it's just easier to have somebody else say, you should do this or you should do that.

• 1:36:06Rich Roll?

  And I think that this idea of sovereignty is something that's like rising in the consciousness, like people understanding like, oh, I do need to take responsibility for myself. Like I do want to step into self-efficacy and

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  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 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 Farmer's Footprint. So, give us a sense of where things are at with that. I think, basically, like, when we first spoke, this was an idea. Then it was sort of a content play. You were making documentaries and video projects, telling the stories of these farmers and what's going on with the soil.

• 1:37:06Rich Roll?

  But the current state of your nonprofit efforts in this world have really matured. You're doing a lot more than last time we spoke.

• 1:37:17Zach Bush?

  Yeah, 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. And so there's so many brilliant people now working within that Farmer's Footprint context, which was our first project within Project Bio, which was the one I was talking about earlier. But one of our favorite quotes, it's been held 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 through everything we've been talking about today.

• 1:37:57Zach Bush?

  If we can envision that next story ourselves, we'll self-organize to achieve that future. And so we've been storytelling throughout this, and you and I share enormous respect for a sovereign being named Liam Rasovic, who's here with us, who's somewhere in the dark out there in 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 works at the small level is, has to be occurring at the same time at the

• 1:38:37Zach Bush?

  big level. And so starting to tell really the face of global regeneration at the nation-state level, or 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 and are at the highest risk of suicidality for that invisibility within the matrix of our current socioeconomic systems. And so reconnecting farmers is critical to our future. But Lea and 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

• 1:39:22Zach Bush?

  macro relationship to the planet, not just to the carrot on the plate, but to 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, we've had the blessing of working with a lot of the peoples out of South Africa that really built the successful anti-apartheid movement and took down that age-old oppression of the British government, previous to 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 efforts

• 1:40:03Zach Bush?

  and the like, they operationalized that through community activation. And it's taught me something fundamental that I think I was lacking from my understanding of regeneration in that if you go to the Project Biome website that we made five years back or something, it says we need solutions for our soil, water, and air. If we can get those three systems working, then we're going to have a generative planet and all of this.

• 1:40:29Zach Bush?

  Five years later, I am quite convinced that neither soil, nor water, nor air need to be fixed. They are generative ecosystems in and of themselves, and they will heal within a matter of years of the departure of humanity. They don't need saving. 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 to realize that Project Biome, in our focus on stories, has to do with the fourth ecosystem, if you will, or 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.

• 1:41:14Zach Bush?

  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 elsewhere, 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

• 1:41:59Zach Bush?

  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 or 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.

• 1:42:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and what are the brass tacks of that? Like, what are the logistical steps of that human evolutionary process?

• 1:42:38Zach Bush?

  I think it's one. It can have many logistics within it, but it's connectivity. And we see this in the Petri dish. If you connect cells, they go into a generative thing that you can't imagine having happen. 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 to start to reimagine the internet as a mycelial 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.

• 1:43:23Zach Bush?

  Are there more choices on the dinner table for your children? More colors on the plate? More sources for those foods? Is that food being sourced from the soils of your backyards 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 breadcrumbs 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? If the evidence is there's more biodiversity in your life, then it's not an abstract observance of that sunrise.

• 1:44:08Zach Bush?

  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 road way and see if they need a volunteer to 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 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.

• 1:44:48Rich Roll?

  Right? The best of my home. I mean, it is beautiful, though, you know, in thinking about that. It is, it is basically trying to step into, you know, the nature of our forest root systems, which are, you know, are naturally driven to expand and connect, or our mycelium networks that are creating these vast and intricate webs of communication that, you know, basically provide the foundation for their survival and allow them to thrive. And this is, you know, the blueprint for humanity as well.

• 1:45:29Rich Roll?

  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 mycelium 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 cultivate that level of connectivity in our life that can lead us into, you know, a greater sense of self-efficacy, sovereignty,

• 1:46:11Rich Roll?

  ikigai, 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 hopefully, you

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  know, allow me to be a more productive member of my community in service to the ideals that, you know, Zach is espousing.

• 1:47:01Zach Bush?

  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 monoculture and monotony has snuck 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'm a 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

• 1:47:46Zach Bush?

  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 101 on gardening, really. Because we've forgotten, we're 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 verdant and diverse food system in your own backyard that replaces, you know, the Kentucky bluegrass, or whatever's there. That's the biggest, you know, the third-largest monoculture in the United States is backyard lawns. Forty million acres of lawn. That's

• 1:48:30Zach Bush?

  forty 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, and 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, 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 packaged food that's coming in the box. If you have to open two or three levels of packaging before you got to your food,

• 1:49:14Zach Bush?

  you're really not helping the future at this moment. We gotta get you back touching real food again. Sauteing carrots and onions is an insanely fragrant and just gustatory experience. Like, it doesn't get much better than carrots, celery, and onions. Gustatory? Gustatory, it's the sense of taste. Okay, I learned a word today, good. That's good, I always learn like three or four from you every podcast. So there's this opportunity to engage the senses again in our food as we start to heal the land with our re-engagement of that. So get engaged there, and then the excitement of bringing in your government to help out with this at the macro scale is really happening. You just had Cory Booker on, he and I have done a lot of work around the glyphosate message.

• 1:49:57Zach Bush?

  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 harvest it. And so we're using it as a desiccant drying agent across many different crops. Wheat was the first one in the 1990s, and then the debut of gluten sensitivity out of that. Then we did soybeans, and now some of my colleagues are running around saying that we're allergic to the compounds, the lectins that are in legumes. You know, yeah, maybe so, now that we're in glyphosate heaven, but before glyphosate, we were eating these things. Don't get me started on that, but go ahead.

• 1:50:37Zach Bush?

  Anyway, so the answer is really activism at that level is starting to be heard. And so Cory Booker and many of the other sitting on the ag committee I've had the opportunity to sit with, 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 it's 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.

• 1:51:19Zach Bush?

  The civic process is not one of railing against your politicians or appealing to your regulatory committees. It's about building relationship. Nonjudgmental relationship has to be had. 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 avalanche at that point. You gotta 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 the information that we were presenting to the EPA. It wasn't trickling there. And so they're like, this is easy. We control the farm bill. We're the ones that actually allocate all the funds from the farm bill.

• 1:52:03Zach Bush?

  And we've spent a trillion dollars 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 is in 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 us have created 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 Law is re-understanding civics in the context of these laws of nature we've covered today. Because there's, to imagine that politics is a result of polarized opinions that just

• 1:52:46Zach Bush?

  fight until one wins or the other, that's not nature. The nature never done anything that way. And so our very sociopolitical methods are 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 Iroquois brought to 600 nations in North America before colonialism.

• 1:53:12Zach Bush?

  Natural law has been running long and hard and creating beauty and harmony and longstanding, creative governments and creative nations next to one another for, really since the beginning of civilization as we understand it, and we can return to that quite simply by applying natural law back into the system. And so, returning to our original documents and finding that. So, farmersfootprint.us, Institute of Natural Law and Option, journeyofintrinsichealth.com. If you feel like you need a team of people around you, if you want a 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 to 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

• 1:53:56Zach Bush?

  soon as somebody shifts out of that victim perpetrator mentality and 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 that's keeping people connected after the course and is a self-generating space for people to create their own avenues of change and transformation. So, get engaged, journeyofintrinsichealth.com, farmersfootprint.us. For education, just zachbushmd.com. All my stuff is there for free. You can just dig deep there. If you want the soil science around everything we're talking about, the Petri dishes and all of that, that's intelligenceofnature.com and an opportunity to really dig in there. So, lots to go to.

• 1:54:37Rich Roll?

  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 cultivating your inner creator and really, you know, shouldering the realization and the responsibility that you can make a change. And 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, you know, the fact that you have developed a relationship with him, I think is beautiful

• 1:55:22Rich Roll?

  because it is about, it is about, you know, relationships. That's how we move forward. That's how progress is made.

• 1:55:30Rich Roll?

  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 somewhat, that's a law.

• 1:55:58Zach Bush?

  That's a law.

• 1:55:59Rich Roll?

  So it's like, 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?

• 1:56:21Zach Bush?

  Along 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, 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. They flew them over to prepare a five-course Greek meal for the speakers of this little event. And it was a pretty epic experience. This five-course meal, they had foraged in backyard gardens around Northern Virginia for, for three or four days to get the ingredients for this meal for 17 people.

• 1:57:03Zach Bush?

  And every course they served was such a ritual of the description of, of the food itself, where the 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, their grandmothers. And so such a journey into this meal. And at the end of it, I stood up and, and like, did this epic Zach Bush toast that I thought was just so brilliant, you know, probably went on for 10 minutes long, and microbiome, and it was like in the beauty of the cosmos, and I got so, so pleased with this thing. And, and everybody's crying, and like, I was just like, home run.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  You were like, yeah, in your flow.

• 1:57:44Zach Bush?

  And this guy from Icaria gets up, thick Greek accent, "Doctor, that was all very, very interesting, but you're completely wrong."

• 1:57:55Zach Bush?

  It was one of these magical moments where you go from flow state to like hit 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, or 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 new 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

• 1:58:37Zach Bush?

  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, 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 aura 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 today, tomorrow.

• 1:59:23Rich Roll?

  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, you know, really just absorb your energy and, 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 even 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,

• 2:00:07Rich Roll?

  you know, glyphosate to many of the other subjects that we discussed today, there's plenty to mine. 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, you're new to the show, lots there for you to kind of dig into and explore and educate yourself.

• 2:00:30Zach Bush?

  Thank you. We'll be back in the ring again.

• 2:00:32Rich Roll?

  Cheers.

• 2:00:33Zach Bush?

  Thank you.

• 2:00:33Rich Roll?

  Much love. Peace. Plants.

• 2:00:47Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, 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, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a

• 2:01:29Rich Roll?

  review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on 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 Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg.

• 2:02:11Rich Roll?

  Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. 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. [music] [music]