557 | The Context

​​T. K. Coleman speaks with Zach Bush, MD, about why context matters more than content, why relationships are more important than possessions, how we learn to be dissatisfied, what disconnection from nature has to do with addiction and disease, how social media distorts our sense of enough, and much more. Discussed in this episode: What is antibiosis? (3:09) How did boxed apple juice compromise the last remaining indigenous culture? (7:41) What have we really lost in our loss of ancient technologies? (29:06) What's it like to watch a cancer cell under a microscope? (45:14) Listen to the full Maximal episode on Patreon: patreon.com/theminimalists http://patreon.com/theminimalists Detailed show notes: minimalists.com/podcast http://minimalists.com/podcast

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing you think that you need. Every little thing that's just feeding your greed. Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yes, this is the very first episode of Where's Ryan? And where's Josh? Starring TK Coleman. Please show your support by going to the comments section and typing in where's Ryan? Where's Josh? And we'll tally up whose name gets inquired about the most, and that'll be the winner. No, today, this is The Minimalist. Unfortunately, Joshua Fields Millburn cannot be with us today for a personal emergency, but we have the one and only Dr. Zach Bush filling in. Dr. Bush, welcome to the show.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  I am so thrilled to have you to myself.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I'm so thrilled as well, man. You know, I talked to Josh this morning, and he said, normally, I would have forced my body through the motions of just showing up and doing it, because that's how I'm hardwired. He says, but I actually read Zach's book. So we owe you today for him listening to his body. So thank you for that.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  That's a big maturation for all of us, that moment that we give ourselves permission.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So I like to give some context, which is going to be a big word today for where I like to take this conversation with you. Since I've joined The Minimalist, almost every single episode, someone, somewhere raises this question, no matter who the guest is, no matter what the topic is. What does this have to do with minimalism? And I always smile when I hear that, because I used to be one of those guys who would ask that question. When Josh first had me on the show, he said he wanted to talk about education. And I'm nervous the whole time, because I'm thinking, is this okay? Is this okay to talk about education on a show about minimalism? But one of the things I learned from him and Ryan is that clutter is not about content, it's about context.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  It's not about the thing, it's about your relationship to the thing. My favorite example of this, you can take a garbage can, and you can have it in the kitchen, in a place that's easily accessible to throw away a banana pill. Or you can sit it by the front door, so that it gets knocked over every time you enter and exit. In one instance, it's a beautiful thing. In another instance, it becomes clutter. But it's not the garbage can, it's the relationship to it. And you are one of the most profound thinkers of our time when it comes to understanding health in terms of our relationship to things, rather than simply divinizing or demonizing things. This is a good thing, this is a bad thing. No, no, no. The goodness is in the relationship that we have to it.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And I love to have a conversation with you about simplicity, or the simple life, as the health that comes from being aligned with nature and with the things that we possess or that perhaps possess us. What do you think about that as a direction?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  It's the direction of life, for sure. Life is a phenomenon of relationships, and the word biosis has come to really define it. Biosis refers to the interconnected relationships that make life possible. It's a concept that humanity has to realign with, because we have just survived, barely, the antibiotic era. Biosis, the interconnected relationships that make life possible. Antibiosis, which became renowned as an antibiotic, is against the relationships that make life possible.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And so every time we engage with alcohol, hand sanitizer, or an antibiotic from our doctors, or an herbicide or pesticide residue within soil, water, food, air, rain now, we are surviving the last hundred-year epoch of the antibiotic era of humanity. It's the first time that we put ourselves in warfare-scale opposition to the relationships that make life possible. And the results are very predictable. When you start to cut away the relationships, which sounds like minimalism, it must be good. And that was the argument, honestly.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  It was like, oh, why do you have cows and pigs and chickens and 15 veggies and pumpkins and all this stuff growing? You should just do corn everywhere. It'll be so much simpler. You can have one machine. It was a minimalist argument of like, this is going to be simpler. What it turns out is that as we start to try to create life without relationship, complexity becomes inevitable. And so ultimately, your question hearkens us to this moment where we start to understand the concept of simplicity or minimalism is not how many things are there. It's exactly what you're speaking to, is what are the relationships between those things?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  An example of this, in some ways, is Los Angeles, that I've just survived a few hours in now. And it's phenomenal that we've devised systems that are in fact relational, that can allow 25 million humans to pile in on each other at this density without constant death. People are dying all the time in LA, but I would argue it's still a miraculous phenomenon that these highways that the car just drove through, it's just like 16 lanes, millions of cars. But there's taillights and headlights and all of these systems that were built, turn signals, red light, green light, stop sign.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  These were all systems that were built to allow for relational capacity. And so life is that. Life is a system which increases the capacity for relationships. And the more capacity for relationships, the more life you can have. And so when we start asking these questions about what does the future look like in which humans actually still exist? Humans don't have to move into some sort of transhumanism and chips in the brain and robotic limbs and all of this. And what if there's a biological future? It's going to keep coming down to exactly your question, is what is our relationship with all of the things we've created?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And when we start to contextualize all the things with relationship, within relationships, we will find that there is nothing against us. Everything is perfect. Everything will reinvent itself naturally to become into alignment with our health and our nature when it's understood within its context. So you nailed the intro on that one. Context, interconnected relationships, and the contextualization of what could be clutter becoming participate. And so clutter in its right relationship becomes a participant within an intelligent system. Does that make sense?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  That makes plenty of sense. You gave me what I take to be the perfect symbol for consumerism, which is different from consumption, and misalignment. And that is boxed apple juice. I would love to use as a segue for some of this, to have you tell the story of how boxed apple juice, when introduced into the last remaining indigenous culture, compromised the purity and beauty and all that there is to love about that culture, and what that has to say about the things we introduce into our lives.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an extraordinary demonstration of this phenomenon of losing context or a divorce from relationships. I had the blessing of traveling with Lynn Twist and her teams from the Pachamama Alliance down into the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest on the edge of Ecuador and Peru in 2021. So we were on the tail end of this pandemic and lots of social and psychological stress and change. And so to be thrust into this environment was like the perfect extremity of experience. Like, you couldn't get to a more connected, more relational system than we were suddenly

• 9:01Speaker 02

  dumped into, because the Achuar tribe has been, like the many other hundreds of different nations and tribes that exist throughout the Amazon, have been there for roughly 30,000 or 40,000 years. And they have at no point seen themselves separate from the nature that they live within. And so that's ultimately what we mean when we say there was an indigenous people or culture, is this is a people that have not lost the context of nature as their home.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And for that, there has been an incredible synergy of life. The Amazon rainforest is not a natural phenomenon in the sense that it was waiting for humans to show up. It was a human co-creation with nature, fully natural for sure, but it only occurred because of the symbiotic relationship of hundreds of tribes within a forest system that began to love food. And humans have this extraordinary capacity to craft their reality through co-creation. And so a tribe 40,000 years ago finds a food they really love, but it's so far away. It takes a long time to hike to it in hunter-gatherer mode.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  And so they start to create early agricultural techniques of let's, let's grow that food closer to home. And so somebody dug up a plant and stuck it in the soil near home. Before long, they were crafting food forests around every tribe. And each gather, each village is allowed to grow to about 120 people. And then the teenage boys are sent off to start new villages. So they never grow past 120, you know, structure. And for that, there's a lot of adaptation and change that happens. So an idea goes out from the tribe, but it's not, no longer restricted to the experience of those 120 people. It just got a new ecosystem again.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  So the seed of a young man goes out and gets planted to create a whole new idea of what happens. So as that continued to happen over and over again, what was devised was a realization that each family within that 120 cell should have three different micro ecosystem gardens each year. Because it was discovered that some years there's less rain, sometimes there's too much rain. Sometimes it's just right. And so you create a dry, a dry garden, a wet garden, a medium garden. And so you had these three little ecosystems. So each family will hike into the jungle and find their three micro ecosystems and plant food forests there. And the beautiful thing about food forestry is it's not like you gotta plant the seed and then come back and harvest the lettuce and plant the seed again.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  It's a perennial food system. And so they plant it once and the tree grows, the bush grows, the vine grows, and it will always keep growing. And so they grow perennials, which means they come back every year. And the result is the Amazon rainforest, which is the largest single agricultural system in the world that's still intact. And so we have this body of forestry that is larger than the entirety of North America. The scale of the Amazon is something that everybody should experience. You fly in a bush plane for 12 hours into the forests. And so you're just droning along in your plane. You cannot find a break in the canopy. It is a continuous canopy. And then you look at a map to see how far you actually got into the jungle.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  And you're still like at the edge of the Amazon rainforest. And so it's, it's an extraordinary place. The, the scale of what's happened there with thousands of people who have been living in Harmy, fed by its system and co-creating what they like to eat and no fear of running out of food. So much so that they don't store food. This was my favorite like aha moment. And it took me actually weeks after returning to the United States before I even realized what I had seen. Their houses are spectacular. They're beautiful. They're like 30 foot vaulted ceilings with these big sloping grass roofs. And they cover, you know, as much as like a quarter of a football field. They're enormous and they're open air around most of it.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And then on one end, it's enclosed for the family to sleep in and all of this. And it's, and then they have the fire pit and their food preparation area that kind of takes up the position outside of the, the living quarters. And then this community and craft space is the rest of it. And so they've got a table dedicated to basket making, another table dedicated to, you know, shelling, you know, out jewelry, whatever they're doing. But their makers place is these homes. And the striking thing that I came home and, and was in my refrigerator literally like looking at this and then my cupboard, when I suddenly realized this doesn't exist. And the entire Amazon, there is not a fridge and there is not a cupboard.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  And there's actually not even a container to store food in. I was like, that is almost unbelievable. This is such a high level of trust in nature that it doesn't dawn on them that they should store some food in case something goes bad. Because every day they've woken up for 40,000 years, the food is, the forest is feeding them something. You cannot have a deeper relationship to nature than these peoples have experienced and are generally generationally connected to. And then a group of individuals started dreaming these faces. And 1996, you know, one of these women that started dreaming these indigenous faces that she'd never seen before was invited down to Ecuador. Her name was Lynn Twist.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Wait, when you say a group of people started envisioning these faces, these are people that are in the Amazon or they're?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  These are Americans, Europeans, and a number of people around the world started to dream new faces.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  They're having dreams when they go to sleep where they're seeing faces of people that they associate with the Amazon.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Don't even know where they are. But these very distinct faces, some tribal art on the face, and they're speaking to them in a tongue they don't understand. And so there's this like transmission, they wake up from these dreams, like, you know, these, we've all kind of had, I hope everybody's had the experience of having one of those dreams that feels more real than reality. Where you suddenly wake up from the dream and like all the colors are less vivid. The texture is maybe a little less clear.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  We might be having one right now.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so we call these, you know, dreams, you know, these reality experiences. So there's these lucid dreams that started to happen for Lynn and a few others. And she didn't know where the faces were, where, why it's happening. She was working all over the world and working on global hunger. She was running the hunger project that had been started in the 1970s and 80s. And so she was working in, you know, India and Central Africa and all kinds of predictable places. These faces were notably different than any of the groups of people she was working with. Finally, a friend of hers invited her away from her project, like you gotta have a, a break from what you're doing. You need to just go into like a place of abundance. You're always in these starving places of drought and war.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  And Lynn declined a couple of times and then, you know, finally accepted the, the invitation. And she does the journey. You fly into Quito and into Ecuador. And then you get on a long bus ride to the edge of the Amazon. And then you get on a bush plane and you fly for hours out in the bush. And then you land on this little machete cleared strip and, and deep in the Amazon bush.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  There is no driving through that or walking through that.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  There's no, no, this is dense jungle, larger than North America. It is a vast system. More recently, China's been cutting massive roads in there to create wind power. Ironically, they're, they're mining the balsam trees out of the entire Amazon to build the wind blades for green power. So ironic kind of background to that. But in 1996, no roads anywhere. And today, you can go today and there's still no roads. The Achuar, you're on this journey, bus to plane to ultimately canoe. And so you walk through the forest from the landing strip and you get in a canoe. And now the canoes have little outboard motors.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  But when she arrived there, there was a paddle in a canoe. And so she was there though, with a little group of people. And they were traveling up through the headwater tributaries to what becomes the Amazon River. And they had to take a break. They stepped out on a muddy shore and the faces she had been dreaming walked out of the forest and said, we've been waiting for you. And so that was first contact in 1996 with the Achuar tribe. It was the very last, you know, indigenous peoples to make contact with what we call civilization. And that changed Lynn's life. And so she ultimately left the hunger project, started Pachamama. And she's one of the most extraordinarily successful agents

• 17:56Speaker 02

  that have created these bridges between the mind of the Achuar, the reality of the Achuar and, and the West. She's been taking teams into that area for, you know, since 1997 or something like that. So incredible story of, you know, Lynn and Bill Twist. Her husband's the CEO of the organization. And they've just been so dedicated to exposing our minds there because what they were told by the Achuar upon arrival through a lot of effort towards, you know, reconnecting to this language, translating through some of the other area tribes that had been made contact with the West. They had learned Spanish, et cetera. So there was a few degrees of separation through the translations. But what came back is the Achuar had started inserting themselves into the dreams of Westerners

• 18:41Speaker 02

  because they had collectively, in their dream work, started to see the end of the world coming. And they realized if our little brothers don't realize a new dream, they will destroy the whole system and it will take us down with them. And so they started to insert themselves into dreams of other people. The Achuar are called the dream people. They do most of their shamanic work and their spiritual work through dreams.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Now, in, in their world, they are thinking, we need to make contact with the so-called civilized world so that they can learn something from our ways about harmony with nature, simplicity of life in order to save civilization from its inevitable downfall. But along the way, and I would like to know how that's going. But along the way, civilized society introduced something to their society.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And that changed the game.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  And that was the setup. And so, you know, what ultimately happened is, you know, missionary groups started traveling through this whole area in the coming years and.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  The sad reality of civilization is that we have come to believe that schools and hospitals are the way to turn backwards or undeveloped peoples into developed peoples. Schools and hospitals are the technologies. So missionaries, including myself, I was part of missionary hospitals, missionary medical systems all over the world, Asia, South America, Mexico. And I also was heavily steeped in this belief that education is how people come out of, you know, living in tents and poverty and all of this stuff.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  The sad reality is these people had no concept of poverty. There was absolutely no need in a civilization that's this interconnected relationally to life. There isn't any morning they wake up feeling short of food. There is no morning they wake up feeling unaware of what's resourcing their health. Nature's resourcing their health. Somebody's got a fever, they go into the forest, they walk the paths until a plant talks to them and says, "Try me." And so literally, they're in this telepathic remembrance of how to communicate with nature all the time. In over 40,000 years of relationships with jungle, they had found every medicine you could possibly dream of.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  The medical field of pharmaceuticals have been traveling into those jungles for the last couple hundred years, trying to figure out what they're going to exploit from that forest to turn into a chemical to inspire a drug. And so this is, you can't really picture a more autonomous, more sovereign system than existed at the moment of 1996. And this is the very first indigenous culture that ever reached out for contact to a colonial system. But they were willing to take the risk. And the first result of making contact was, you need schools and you need medicine. And so this missionary group set up these British-style, you know, kind of education

• 22:00Speaker 02

  programming, STEM, you know, you need science and math and language and all of this. And technology, of course, STEM tech. So they're teaching these kids, you know, K through 12 kind of education in the jungles. But as every good school does, you need to feed the kids to school lunch. And so the missionaries set up a delivery system for these school lunches, which were prepared by the tribe. There was a few women that would prepare their food and everything else, but they had this innovative thing that they thought they could get the kids to school with, which was boxed apple juice.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And so if you're a kid in the rainforest and the Amazon is your backyard and your playground and your 40,000 euro university, what's the likelihood you want to go sit in a classroom all day? And you're going to choose that over just being in the jungle with all your friends that are the animals and the trees and everything else? And so what they really did was use the boxed apple juice as a carrot, as the attractive drug to get the kids to come sit down. And so every boxed lunch had this apple juice. Immediately upon touching the palate of a human being, high fructose corn syrup that's

• 23:22Speaker 02

  injected into a box and mimics the taste of an apple with all these neurochemicals that we call natural flavorings in the boxed apple juice. You've got chemicals that this brain has never seen, and you've got this high fructose corn syrup that delivers this cocaine-like effect on the brain. When you do a MRI scan of the brain 30 minutes after a Happy Meal, the high fructose corn syrup, fat, sugar combinations of the Happy Meal look exactly like a cocaine hit. All of the same areas of the brain light up like Christmas tree. And so that apple juice became the drug to get the kids to comply with this new plan of sitting in classrooms. In the moment that the boxed apple juice was tasted by the adults, they realized they

• 24:06Speaker 02

  were missing something. This was something they did not have and the forest could not provide. And in the months and years that followed, they realized there was all kinds of things that the jungle could not provide them. Motors for their canoes, gasoline for the motors, solar panels to run televisions, solar panels to charge cell phones. 25 years later from contact, first contact 1996, I show up in 2021. And so 25 years after contact, that's what I arrive at. Boxed apple juices scattering, littering the sides of the Amazon River.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Plastic candy wrappers around everywhere. TVs hung on the sides of trees, connected to a solar panel, little rabbit ear antennas like we used to grow up with. Starlink satellite connections, Wi-Fi in the jungle, cell phones in the hands of all of the men. 25 years, started with boxed apple juice and a realization that the jungle can't provide you everything. And so this is the beginning of our separation from nature, is when we are enticed with

• 25:29Speaker 02

  the belief that a technology that is non-living is more attractive, more valuable than the life that would make it relevant.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And is it interesting how you can move from contentment to dissatisfaction? You can learn to be dissatisfied. It's similar to how on an everyday level, you, you know, for us, growing up as kids, we had a very limited awareness of what other children had, and there was still a capacity for jealousy, you know? There's the kid that has five Super Nintendo games and maybe your dad can only afford, you know, a cheaper console or something like that. And so you know what it's like to be jealous of that kid or their family has a bigger house. But even then, your vocabulary was kind of limited. You only had the 20, 30 families from your school to compare yourself to.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  But then you take it to TikTok and you see, well, there are people your age that have written books, that have created video games, that have way more friends than you do. There are actually thousands of people better looking than you, thousands of people funnier than you, thousands of people more loved than you. And you learn very quickly, I am a loser. I am ugly. I am imperfect. I'm unhappy. I'm poor. I'm so lacking in things. And one of the themes that comes up in your work is you talk about abstraction and you say, if I quote you correctly here, abstraction is the disorientation that occurs when context is lost.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  And so we lose the context for making sense of our humanity and we buy into all of these ideas about, I've got to go out there and get something to improve my life, the life that I had to learn to be unhappy with. And I think that boxed apple juice is such a great, it's just such a great example of the, I guess, the modern Trojan horse, if you will.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And then the frightening thing is, like, everything you just spoke to on social media is such a terrifying thing that we're all living into. And the bizarre thing is, it almost doesn't matter what age you are. Like, those same things are going to happen to a 14-year-old and a 44-year-old, you know, those same social senses of lack and, you know, FOMO and all these other things kicking in. But the deeper tragedy, perhaps, that has defined and allowed for and perhaps made inevitable this last epoch of abstraction for human systems, because now all human systems have lost the context of nature. Our healthcare system is the penultimate example, maybe, but our education systems,

• 28:07Speaker 02

  our information technology, our energy systems, our transportations, all of them have lost context of nature. And we used to have those things and we built incredible things through the context of our technology of living systems within our bodies and around us. So we built things like pyramids and extraordinary capacities to see through the stars and maybe even travel the stars through these pyramidal structures. And we had amazing communication networks that were beaming energy around the world through large structures of stone and metals and alloys, all kinds of things. This was 12,000 years ago.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  So we went through this deep loss of context somewhere around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. And that set us up for what we think of as human behavior. But we don't even remember what it was like as a global civilization before abstraction, before the loss of context. It's been too long.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Can I, devil's advocate question on that. Whenever I encounter anything on ancient technologies, like lost technologies, they're presented in a positive light, like we lost something that was good for us, that was an expression of our brilliance. And then when we kind of focus forward on things like the iPhone or the microwave, it sort of characterizes like a bad technology? And I'm wondering if you could help me out here. What makes a technology a sign of progress versus what makes it a sign that we have lost context?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's actually quite simple in that it's just about relationships. So does the technology, A, rely on relationship for its occurrence? Is it a co-creative technology? B, does its existence and use promote deeper relationships? And finally, what is the capacity of the society or peoples to integrate this new thing without harm? You know, so those are the things. So living systems are phenomenal through their relational framework at integration.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Nature is so explosive, the universe is so explosive in information. Energy is infinite. These are the three things I learned in the jungle with the Achuar, actually. So it was the first time that I'd ever experienced anything in my body that was mind altering as far as, you know, a, an alteration of my neurochemistry at extreme levels. I'd never smoked a cigarette, I'd never been drunk. Went to the Achuar and was told that there was an opportunity to do ceremony with the Achuar, with their plant medicines and all this. And I was like, absolutely not, there's no way I'm gonna do that. The morning of this, deep in the jungle, we'd been out there for many days and

• 31:08Speaker 02

  my dreams at this point, everybody's dreams are so vivid when you're around the Achuar. Like you're, I consider myself somebody who doesn't dream at all. I don't remember my dreams. I wake up, I go to sleep, the little thing, and maybe I vaguely remember a dream, but I was living a whole other universe around the Achuar. Like they, they open up these capacities for you to see beyond the, the finite reality and they remind you, the dreams remind you of the infinite reality that you're within. And so in many ways, what was unfolding there was this recollection of what my body feels like in relationship to, in, back in context of a nature deeper than I had ever been exposed to.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  And so the relational intensity of the forest, the relational experience of traveling with 25 other people and to this kind of extreme too, you have this sense of camaraderie and there's a sense of like, nobody else at home is gonna understand these stories. Nobody is gonna be able to feel what we're feeling right now. So it creates that new family. So you're traveling with this new family of 25 people and you're deep in the forest and you're so immersed in energy and the whole system just starts giving you information. And initially in those first few days, you don't have the ability to integrate the information because you don't have the relational complexity. But after a week of eating their food, breathing their air, walking through the forest, your relational intelligence is going up rapidly.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And so my microbiome was accelerating its complexity minute by minute, the moment we arrived in the jungle. I had more bacteria, more fungi, more protozoa, more yeast, more everything in my body than I had ever had in my body because I was in a place that had never been touched by the antibiotics. And so I was steeped in this relational environment that was quickly updating my capacity for, for relational diversity. And with that, I started to be able to integrate more information. And by that morning, that ceremony is gonna happen that night, I'm getting so much information from the river that we're on. I was on a canoe and the river was like, the medicine is coming to you.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  You're going to see this, you're gonna experience this, you're gonna do this. And there was such a sense of harmony in the whole thing that any sense of fear or loss of control, which is why I never had gotten drunk and everything else, not because I'm a good person, I'm just a control freak about my mind. And so I don't like the sense of I'm losing control of my mind at all. This is the opposite of my, my zone of comfort. Any rate, long story short, my very first experience with a mind altering experience was 12 ounces of ayahuasca with this shaman that night. And all kinds of experiences happened over the next eight, 10 hours.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  But what I came away with was these three extremely deep understandings. And these were three things I could have told you before I went to the Amazon, which I think is everybody's experience with any sort of ceremonial experience, whether it's breathwork or plant medicine, whatever it is. You already know everything, but now you get to trust it at the cellular level. And so the trust came through with these three amazing things. One, energy is infinite. Number two, all energy is information. And number three, all information is for the purpose of connection. That was the fabric of the universe that was revealed to me.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Energy is infinite, all energy is information, and all information is for the purpose of connection. So what that revealed to me, and there was a whole experiential side of that, and it wasn't words, it was also fully experienced at the cellular level, is that the literal fabric of reality is information that is energy for the purpose of connection. This made sense of my cancer research and how a cancer cell occurs through its steady isolation from the energy systems of the mitochondrial networks and everything else. In its isolation, it starts to lose energy. Energy is information, so it starts to lose information.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  As you lose information, you lose intelligence, you lose that consciousness of reality. Consciousness is the capacity of a finite system, one human cell, for example, to sense and, and connect to its infinite reality. As soon as a single cell becomes isolated, its consciousness of I am Zach goes away and I am the last thing standing takes over. And it just starts to replicate in fear that there is nothing left of life, it's the last man standing. And so that cell now becomes a tumor, becomes a cancer, becomes something that will destroy me.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  And so that is the phenomenon of nature is this ever connected, infinite grid of energy that's information entirely for the purpose of connection.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  That, that seems to, to kind of overlap with what we see at an individual level with, with, with ourselves, right? When we are kind of stuck in these unhealthy patterns where we find ourselves almost impulsively committed to doing things that we know are not good for us. Or, or we find ourselves pointing to the people in society that scare us. And, and one of your ideas is that, I'm paraphrasing here, that, that you can't, you can't heal what you refuse to understand? And that by, by understanding these things, you're not endorsing it, you're not celebrating it, you're not saying, yes, I love this dysfunction, but what you're saying is by understanding

• 36:54Speaker 01

  this dysfunction, I can, I can redeem it, or I can reconcile it in a certain kind of way. So, so what you're saying about the, what did you say, the malignant?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  The cancer cells.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  The, the cancer cells. Do you think that maps on to individual behavior as well?

• 37:10Speaker 02

  I think it maps on to everything. Because once you understand that the fabric of reality, whether you're talking about the interaction of sodium with chloride that would then make salt, or a human cell with its environment, which would then make an organ like a liver, or the liver's capacity to understand its relationship to the vascular system and the body as a whole, or the human to understand itself in the context of a family, community, et cetera. At every single fractal level of reality, from chemistry to biochemistry, to biology, to social systems, to economic systems, to political systems, all of it has to obey

• 37:50Speaker 02

  this phenomenon of energy, information, connectivity. If we do anything to undermine the relationships that all of that energy makes possible, all of that connectivity, if we start to decrease connectivity primarily to diversity, so decrease your relationship to something opposite of you, you just decrease the life force of the system. And so the economy becomes fragile. The human body becomes cancer prone. The immune system becomes confused and turns into an autoimmune disaster and starts to attack the very body it belongs to.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  All of these breakdowns of systems that we're seeing are symptoms, not diseases. Cancer is not the disease of the body, it's a symptom of loss of relationship. Economic crisis is not a financial problem, it's a loss of relationships around what we value. And so these things are, these, the fragility of all human systems that we see today, perhaps most obvious in American sociopolitical, you know, headlines today. Isolation is the driving force of all of it. It is this loss of connectivity, which then makes the infinite and informational energy of the universe unavailable to us. And in that isolation, chaos has to increase.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  So the second law of thermodynamics, any system left in isolation increases entropy, which is a word for chaos. Any system left in isolation will increase its chaos.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So I, I think about, I want to bring this to the, to the level of, of finding the proper context for, for human flourishing, because one of your observations is that every, every element is more likely to flourish when it's in the, the ecosystem that is most compatible with it. We can, we can take a wolf and put it in one environment and no matter how well it tries to wolf, it's just not going to be able to thrive.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  We call those zoos.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point. Actually, before I frame this up, do you want to say more about that?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  No, that's good.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Okay. So when I, when I think of, of the, the ills that plague humanity, I think of them in terms of the four As. Apathy, agitation, addiction, and attachment. Apathy, the kind of like loss of hope, the, the loss of purpose and meaning. Agitation, just feeling like we are at effect, constantly being pushed and pulled around and subject to the annoyances imposed on us by circumstances or people that we can't control. Then addiction, just feeling like we're bound to things that we don't necessarily want to be bound to.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I think most people report that they're spending more time on their smartphones than they want, you know? And, and that's without anyone preaching to them. It's like, I, I probably should spend a little bit less on there, but I just can't, right? I'm, I'm a, I've got that sort of like socially acceptable addiction going on, or addicted to soda, or addicted to fast food, or attachment. You know, who would I be without this relationship, without this job, without this identity? What is the proper context for a human being that causes those things to kind of?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  To suppress us less, to hold us back from being the kind of self that you're describing here?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  It's another A. And so preceding all four of those is abandonment. And so the sensation of abandonment leads to apathy, agitation, addiction and detachment. And so the clinical condition of addiction, whether it be drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction, whatever it is, the last 120 years of psychotherapy have clearly demonstrated that at the root of it is an abandonment disorder, usually from our parents. But it turns out that if you then recontextualize the family unit and the parent, you realize the original wound is actually the abandonment of nature. Humans uniquely believe ourselves to be abandoned from nature.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  This is what I believe suddenly happened five or 7,000 years ago, is we suddenly lost the sensational capacity, we lost the sensation of an infinite reality that we were interconnected with. We somehow lost telepathy, we lost this interconnected thing. Didn't seem to be 100% of all peoples all at once, but anybody that was living in concentrated regions of civilization, large cities, temples, you know, all these complexes, the Aztecs and the Mayans and the Egyptians and everybody else that had, the Japanese, the Chinese, all over the world, North America, had built these massive systems of temples and pyramids.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  And that had led to these trade routes and early economies and all of this stuff, pre-memory, like all of this stuff we have archeologic evidence of. And then something happened in which people that were living in concentration suddenly lost the sensation of being connected to nature. And so this became our predominant mythology in almost everything, is we did something to get kicked out, we sinned, we, you know, something happened and we started carrying this weird fear, guilt and shame towards nature.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  We're banished from Eden.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  We were abandoned from the, we were kicked out of the garden ultimately. And so this strange story snuck into the subconscious long before it snuck into our mythologies and all of this and our religions. But something happened where we, I believe the biology lost its sensory connection to this infinite information stream that is for the purpose of connection. And so our biosis started to suddenly declined and allowed to collapse of civilizations, Aztecs, Mayans, all the rest, Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians disappeared. When we talk about Egyptian history 5,000 years ago, those were the peoples that came and inhabited the places that had been built before in their recovery.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  So that was a recovery period where people started to be able to procreate, repopulate and move back into the civilization structures and technologies that previously had been built. So the hieroglyphs that you go read in Egypt today, the painted ones and everything else, are stories of moving back into pyramids, not building the pyramids. There's not a single hieroglyph that shows how pyramids were built. And so something happened for this decline in our sensory capacity to understand our context. And so that led to this universal wound of the abandonment disorder.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  So you believe that we at some point lost our oneness with nature, where we're kind of divorced from her and until we can reconcile to that, we can't heal our deepest wounds.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  This, this is a connection that is not obviously related to my inability to put down a cigarette or my inability to say no to the can of cola. And I know that's such a mundane way to describe it, but if this is kind of where the battle is being experienced, like I can't let this go. How is it that reconnecting with nature heals that?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Because the word connection happened. And so as soon as connection is reestablished, then a participant, then somebody who is suffering isolation becomes a participant again. If that makes sense. And so it only takes one connection to begin the reintegration back into a living system. And this is actually where my cancer research really started to blow up the paradigm for me and ultimately ended my academic medical career because I had to go create my own lab and my own clinics to ask questions that I wanted to because I wasn't being allowed to ask the questions and find the answers I discovered in academia there.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  And what was happening really was, you know, this, under the microscope, what I was told was that cancer cells are attacking healthy bodies. We need to kill the cancer cells. That was the paradigm I was trained in as a medical doctor and as a biomedical scientist. And so I was devising chemotherapy, 2005, 2010, and I was doing drug development and chemotherapy.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  When you watch a cancer cell under the microscope, it's a very interesting thing because it's so dysfunctional, it's so deformed, it's lost so much of its inherent structure that a healthy cell would reveal. And so you're staring at the most damaged cell existing in a body at that moment. And its only capacity for survival is replication because it cannot repair. So it just has to repeat itself. And so when a single cell starts to repeat itself without the mechanisms of connection, so the cancer cell began in isolation. So the tight junctions of fiber optic cables, all the things that tied it to its other liver

• 47:28Speaker 02

  cells started to break because of exposure to chemicals in the environment, herbicides, pesticides, or the alcohol, or the statin drugs, or the HIV drugs, whatever, you know, the drugs of pharma are classic for breaking connection. Pharmacy largely just undermines relationships at the cellular level. And the best at this is chemotherapy. And so we, we use chemotherapy as a mechanism of poisoning, you know, protein systems heavily and within the cellular system. And we're trying to kill the cells, you know, in a way in which we're exploiting this vulnerability of the inability to repair. And so since a cancer cell can't repair it, the theory is like, if we poison the whole

• 48:12Speaker 02

  human body, it will damage every single cell, no doubt. It will decimate the ecology of the gut, it will wipe out all kinds of interconnected relationships, but we hope and we try to get just the right dose of the toxin so that the cells that can't repair disappear faster than they're replicating. And that's the problem with cancer is their tendency to replicate is based on their desperate sense of survival. And so when you take an isolated cell and start to push it harder towards death and its only mechanism of survival is replication, the tumor just starts replicating faster. Not because it's bad, not because it's trying to survive, the tumor does not know it's hurting

• 48:57Speaker 02

  you. The tumor does not know that it is sucking the energy from the entire body and the person's losing weight and they can't eat and they've lost appetite. They have no idea, this isolated system has no idea that it's extracting the energy of the whole organism because it doesn't remember it belonged to an organism because it's been so long in isolation. And so I was trying to find new compounds to poison these highly damaged cells in a way in which they couldn't just speed up replication.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  You're operating under the pest control model.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  You're trying to find a better pesticide, you know, you're going to poison your home, you know, you're going to make yourself a little more sick, but you're just hoping that it's strong enough to not kill you, but also kill whatever pest it is you're dealing with, making sure the ants aren't crawling around.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. You literally believe that there's like a threshold effect of it's okay for me because I'm a big person, as long as it kills the little mosquito, like it would take so much less to kill mosquito than a human, right? Until you find out that, you know, the fruit fly that you just wiped out has 13,000 genes, the human has 20,000 genes and the flea that just died in the mall has 30,000 genes. You're not more complicated than any of those creatures. You have less genetic information than, that we would call human genes than a fruit fly, or I'm sorry, than a flea. And so you've got this like belief that because I'm bigger, I'm different, therefore I can have more toxin. And that's what we're doing to the human body in cancer is, well, the human body is

• 50:30Speaker 02

  bigger than the single cancer cell, so there must be a dose of toxin that will get that, but leave it, let the other, the rest of it be okay. And so that's what we're doing with chemotherapy. Sometimes, you know, the human decides to reconnect and go on and live. Most of the time, the human being declines its health and dies of something other than cancer or dies of the cancer despite our efforts.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  But the reality is that we've got this, well, let me finish that experience because it's so profound. I was using vitamin A compounds, these retinoids, trying to poison cells. And by some deep fortune, I'm a terrible, terribly ineffective, basic scientist. I am so bad on the bench top at following exact protocol every single time. I'm a little too imaginative, like I don't use recipes for the same reason, I just cook. I like just being creative in the kitchen. So I was not good at following the protocols exactly. I would get distracted and my mind would think about something else. So one of these days where I screwed up the protocol, I gave a fraction of the vitamin

• 51:35Speaker 02

  A compound that I was supposed to, so tiny dose of the, what should be a chemotherapy. At that point, it's just vitamin A, it's a nutrient.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  And over the next few days, the tumor that I was treating disappeared. It didn't die, it literally disappeared. This process is known as apoptosis. And so it was this apoptosis is like a programmed cell death. It's a gentle release of cellular structure and the cell will literally dissipate, almost like, you know, an effervescent sparkling water or something like that, where the bubbles just kind of come up. So the cell like starts to bubble out and disappear. And I watched this whole tumor go into this apoptosis process over the next couple of days.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  My initial reaction was like, you know, I messed something up. I didn't know. So I went back through my lab notes to try to figure out like, what was different and realized, oh my gosh, I was a thousand times less than I was supposed to give the cell. Like, what happened? And so I tried repeating it, just as I had done with this tiny amount. And again, saw apoptosis is all over the tumor. And so slowly, it would take years for me to integrate this information because I didn't have a place to put this information, didn't fit into my models that I've been training. But over the next few years, I would suddenly realize that if you give a nutrient at the

• 53:00Speaker 02

  dose of nourishment, instead of the dose of toxicity, you can actually, if you've got a pathway that's related to that mitochondrial energy production, you can actually begin the process of improving the availability of the body to make energy. And that's ultimately what I proved is these low doses of vitamin A were increasing the metabolic potential of all of the damaged mitochondria inside cancer cells. And so suddenly the cell was producing more energy. Energy is infinite. All energy is information. All information is for the purpose of connection. So what was happening is there was enough energy to produce enough information to reconnect the cell to its outer environment. And it

• 53:45Speaker 02

  suddenly realized, oh my gosh, I'm the most damaged cell in a completely normal human being. I'm Zil Zach, and I'm just damaged. Zach's still here. I'm going to disappear. And when apoptosis occurs, all these neurochemicals or cytochemicals go out and call in stem cells to replace the damaged cell and all is well. You're now stronger and youthful and more energetic than you were before the cancer injury. And so this was my slow journey back to, nature has never had to kill cancer, but she nourishes cells all the time to make cancer obsolete. So that was 2009, 2010. And that was ultimately led to my leaving

• 54:27Speaker 02

  the university in 2010 and starting a nutrition center to start to really be able to study deeply, the opportunity for food to reverse chronic disease, rather than poisons to save us from disease.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Did you leave because your ideas were, you were being harassed because of your ideas, or they were being rejected, or because you felt like, look, I just need to like, go all in and focus on my thoughts in a different space?

• 54:54Speaker 02

  There was a perfect storm going on, but I tried for a year to create my nutrition center that I ended up creating outside of academia. I tried to create it at the university and talked to my deans and my department heads, my division heads. I was one of the largest endocrine departments in the whole world. We had 75 endocrinologists and really successful research programs. And our general clinical research center where I was doing my drug research actually got all the way to clinical trial that I was running the first clinical trial with these vitamin A compounds. So I was like, winning the game. I was like, I must be like, this is what every doctor dreams of, is like, find something for cancer and take it to patients that need it. And so I was winning the game. And then suddenly

• 55:36Speaker 02

  was going through this moment of like, oh my gosh, we've got to start nourishing everything because most of my clinic was full of not cancer, but diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease. And I slowly started realizing the whole thing is the same thing. Somebody coming in with diabetes is just 20 years ahead of their cancer. I'm upstream of it. Their sugar's off and they don't have cancer yet, but you starve a body long enough through its inability to move sugar from one compartment into the cell, you're going to get cancer eventually. So you'll get heart disease somewhere between the diabetes and the cancer. Started to see the whole thing as like this continuum. And that's now how I understand all diseases. It's a continuum of metabolism. Metabolism is the ability of nature to interrelate to

• 56:21Speaker 02

  produce more concentrated energy. And this is an extraordinary thing that this gives us the definition of life ultimately is life is the concentration of light energy that is the result of interconnected relationships between the microbiome in your gut, the mitochondria living inside your cells, the miracle of deliveries and nourishment that happen between the two, the relationship, the mitochondria inside of your cell to one another. There's maybe as much as 25 or 30 different species variants of mitochondria inside every single human cell. And so there's a massive variation of life and diversity of life and all of

• 57:00Speaker 02

  this produces metabolism. Interconnected systems produce their own energy and never need it from somewhere else. When a system becomes isolated, loses relationships, it can no longer produce its own energy. So before a cancer cell starts to develop all of its behaviors, a cancer cell, its mitochondria lose their capacity to produce energy. This is why a tiny tumor in the lung can suck all of the energy out of the whole system and collapse a human body and multi-organ failure and death. It's no longer able to produce its own energy, so it has to become extractive. When a tumor starts to become extractive, it will starve out its local resources very quickly. And so that's when

• 57:45Speaker 02

  it metastasizes. You have to go, you gotta send little teams out to go find new areas of potential things to extract. And so pretty soon, the tumor has spread all over the body just in search of more foods because it can't produce its own energy. And so soon you have stage four cancer and it's sucking the life force out of the whole thing.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  To your point earlier, this is exactly the description of sociopolitical systems. That, what I just described is exactly how colonialism functions. You get a collection of people, they build complex systems, they start to build systems that isolate them from their own nature. They no longer want to be farmers. They no longer want to be in interconnected relationship to everybody. So they start building abstract relationships. Well, I'm a lawyer. You can't talk to the judge. You have to talk to the lawyer that then talks to the judge. Well, you can't talk to the politician because I'm the lawyer. That's the judge. And the judge will talk to the politician. You build these systems that ultimately are breaking down the interconnected relationships that lead to coherence. And pretty soon that government has become extractive unintentionally. The sociopolitical system

• 58:49Speaker 02

  is now extracting energy. And so you're building supply chains far out into the distant countryside. And Rome built 600, 3,000 mile supply chains for food. They were extracting, extracting. And pretty soon they couldn't do it. So they had to start sending metastases. Well, here's a military and some farmers. You go start setting up farmland in North Africa. We'll send some over to the Middle East. We'll send some up into Persia. We'll send people everywhere to extract more energy. So the supply chains, and pretty soon the Roman Empire is collapsing, the entire European countryside, farm fields everywhere collapsing. And they collapsed the entire body and it died. And so a colonial government is a malignant process, no different than a cancer cell.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I love, you know, when it comes to the scientific stuff, I would like to have some further conversation on how your ideas are being received by the broader scientific community. Because I know sometimes when you have a counterintuitive idea, which is really the history of science, you know, someone comes along with an idea that seems absurd, and you're wrong and you're ridiculed at first, but then it turns out that the truth was some weirder way of seeing it that becomes the next generation's normal. But sometimes when you're kind of in that stage of being in the minority or the fringe, it can be easy to kind of like, you know, sort of like ignore the institutions. And I think

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  we have a moral obligation to like, fight to advance like, new ideas and new ways of thinking. So I'm curious to hear more when we come back about what is your approach to pushing the envelope, to pushing the conversation, to pushing public discourse, to make more room for this point of view where we see ourselves as living organisms, systems, part and parcel of broader systems, and approaching problem solving, not with the sort of like, eliminating what is unwanted point of view, but rather reharmonizing with the systems of which we are a part and like reconciling ourselves with that. I want to

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  hear more about like, how you're pushing the public discourse on that, what kind of pushback you're getting, how you're handling it, what's your mission there. And then the second thing is, I love how this relates to attachment and addiction, which are really like the two As of minimalism, right? I can't let this habit go, or this story go, or I can't let this relationship go, or I can't let this material possession go, and I don't know why. And I think what your perspective has to offer, anyone who's facing those kinds of struggles, is an invitation to step back and say, what if we didn't allow this thing

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  to be the center stage? And what if we allowed you and your wholeness to be the center of the story? Because if we can get you connected to who you really are, then those appetites that seem to control you will fall away of their own accord. But we're going to get into some more stuff. We're at the end of page one right now. So we're going to take a little pendenticulation break, but I'm looking forward to more.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  All right, y'all. That's the first 33% of episode 557. We'll see you on Patreon for the full two hour maximal episode with Dr. Zach Bush. And that is our minimal episode for today. On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, Joshua Phil Milburn, Audio Ben, Spire Jeff and Dave, Professor Sean, and Savvy D, this is TK Coleman. If you leave here with just one message, let it be this. Ask not yourself what the world needs, but rather what makes you come alive. For that is what the world needs, people who have come alive. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll see you next time.