Soil Crises, Gut Microbiome Epidemic, Dangers of Tap Water & Healing Disease | Dr Zach Bush DSH #344

you think there is a fix for the soil problem?

You said 97% has been compromised, right?

Yeah, there's a revolution that's been afoot for, you know, an equal amount of time, the last 50 years, but so it's poorly defined yet.

But as a movement, it's super successful.

And so when you create biodiversity on a farm, an inordinate amount of recovery and healing happens.

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And here's the episode.

All right, all right, guys.

Welcome back to Digital Social Hour.

I'm here with Dr.

Zach Bush today.

We're going to be talking about a lot of interesting things.

You ready to do this?

Let's go in.

Let's do it, man.

So, I recently saw you on another show talk about the problem with the soil right now.

Is it a worldwide problem or is it in the U.S.

mainly?

Yeah, global now.

It began as kind of a North American crisis, I believe, just with the patterns of industrialization of the food system.

It dates back, you know, 100 years ago to the Dust Bowl events that really started to define the crisis in the United States, leading to some of the deepest financial crisis we've ever had.

Starvation was widespread.

There were soup lines, you know, in many states to address the deep hunger that was going.

And we had the Dust Bowl as dead soils started blowing across the country as we completely lost the soil infrastructure.

And that has been palliated rather than fixed.

And so we brought in some band-aids in the 1940s and 50s coming out of World War II in the forms of basically chemical fertilizers and ultimately chemical herbicides and pesticides to try to manage those weakened crops.

And so we band-aided the whole thing up.

And then by the end of the century,

by the 1990s, we're looking at a full-on ICU-level care for our soil systems that were super sick and dying, really.

And to do that, we were intravenously feeding food and everything else to the crops, trying to get them to grow.

And with that weakened immune system, just as you find an ICU in a hospital, you're putting antibiotics and all sorts of band-aids on top of that.

And the antibiotics that we use in the food system are called herbicides.

And these function as weed killers on one side of the equation, but they really function deeper than that as a band-aid to a failing immune system to the plant life therein.

So we've been kicking the can down the road within the United States around this issue.

And as chemical industries started to realize they could make trillions of dollars in this space of ICU care for soil, they started going global with it.

And so in the 1960s, 70s, we started exporting industrial chemical farming to the world.

So in answer to your question, soil's never been in a deeper crisis than it is today.

97% of the global farmable soils on the planet are depleted or severely depleted of nutrients now and are failing.

So 97%

globally.

And in the U.S., we're really leading the charge with this devastating effect.

And the cost of that.

palliative or ICU-level care for our soil systems is feeding back on our farmers.

So our farms are going bankrupt.

50% of farms today are one crop failure away from bankruptcy.

We're losing 8,000 farms a year on average in the United States now.

And so it is a complete deluge of tragedy really that's unfolding.

Farmers in the United States have five times more than any other industry in the country.

And so we're really looking at the extinction of not just soil, but the economies that would come out of those soils.

And as far back as the 1940s and 50s, Franklin Delanor Rosenevaled, our president of the time, FDR, said any country that hopes to have a future knows soil as its source of homeland security.

So it is a crisis that is getting ignored by our country, our lawmakers, and everything else.

And it's time for us as consumers and as activists for human survival to get in on it.

And that's ultimately why you have me sitting here on a podcast is: I'm not a farmer.

I'm a medical doctor who, going into my medical career in 1992, was unawares that I was about to be witness to the explosion of disease in humans that was directly resulting from a dying soil system.

So it took me

20 years of being in medicine before I found my way back to soil.

And I did that through research in cancer that led me to the microbiome, which is this description of an ecosystem that lives inside of humans.

And we now find out that that soil system in our gut, when that collapses, sets us up for all kinds of human disease.

Interesting.

And so that's how I find myself back now at the intersection of human health and planetary health is of our Did you know 70 to 80 percent of your immune system resides in your gut lining?

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Because those are synonymous, intertwined, and inseparable.

And so we will not solve the crisis of human disease until we get back into the soil systems and recognize it as a national asset, a global asset, a human asset that is necessary for life.

Yeah, you've been able to find the root cause of this disease where as people are focusing on the disease and like just putting a band-aid over it, you're able to find out what's actually causing it, which is soil, right?

That's exactly right.

Yeah, if you look at ask that critical question of how did our care system go from $1 trillion a year of cost to $5 trillion of years in cost in a single generation, 25-year period?

How is that freaking possible?

Well, you just yanked the rug out from underneath the

table that we call biology.

Biology depends on the same things, whether you're an earthworm or a human.

You have the same nutrient requirements.

You have the same

dependence on healthy systems of communication throughout that whole thing.

So I left the university in 2010.

I was doing chemotherapy development at the University of Virginia.

I'm an internal medicine doc, trained in endocrinology and metabolism after that.

And endocrinology and metabolism is a study of basically energy systems and the coordination of life around that energy.

And what we were witnessing in the cancer story is cancer is the last thing to appear on your journey to complete collapse of energy.

And so to run around and treat cancer is kind of like running around and trying to fix the roof on houses that the foundation was long washed out on.

So

you're treating these symptoms downstream that can never, never be fixed, that you can't actually cure cancer without fixing the foundation, which is this relationship to soil within your gut.

The gut maps back to soil systems globally.

And that

ecosystem collapse.

Because you see patients get chemo, right?

And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

But then they'll get cancer two years later and they got to repeat the process because they're not treating the root cause.

Yeah, there's a couple of really unfortunate, untold truths in my field of cancer management.

Number one, we haven't done a randomized placebo-controlled trial against chemotherapy since the 1960s.

And what that's allowed for is an ever-lowering bar on the threshold for a successful chemotherapy.

And so where we're at today is that if you have a chemical compound that can

kill cancers faster than it kills the patient at about 10 to 15% success rate, then you can get to the market with that drug.

A 10 or 15 percent success rate is considered a successful chemotherapy drug.

The reason why that's a bit of an issue in the world of reality is placebos consistently perform at 30, 32 percent success rates.

And so, if you're a third of a placebo success rate, you obviously have absolutely no incentive to go up against a sugar pill to treat cancer.

And so, unfortunately, we are two generations down the track of scientists starting to be normalized to very poor outcomes and then it be defined as success.

So problem number one, no placebo-controlled trials to enter the marketplace.

Problem number two is they aren't required to map that success to all-cause mortality.

And this brings up your point, which is, sure, you got rid of my breast cancer, but now I'm dying of colon cancer or neurodegenerative disease two years later.

All-cause mortality is a measurement of did you actually change the course for that patient's moment of death?

You may have changed the cause of death, no longer dying of breast cancer, therefore successful chemotherapy, but you didn't actually change the all-cause mortality moment.

And the unfortunate reality that we have in the cancer realm is we have not, through surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy, changed all-cause mortality in any of these clinical trials.

Wow.

And so, unfortunately, what we're doing is kind of shuffling the deck chairs at the end of life and saying, well, you've got this disease, we're going to do these things.

And for that, we built a $5 trillion a year health care expenditure just in the U.S.

alone.

Globally, we're at $9 trillion.

That's the largest business that's ever been created.

Wow, so we're half the world?

Yeah.

The U.S.

is more than half the total world's cost of health care.

That doesn't make sense.

We have 4% of the population or something ridiculous.

So we've got 300 million people that are accounting for that level of disease expenditure, basically.

And unfortunately, we're kind of stuck now now as a country in that the largest predictor of our GDP is healthcare.

And so that $5 trillion a year is logarithmically more effective at moving GDP than anything else.

To give you put it in perspective, our entire oil and gas energy sector is around $2 trillion.

Wow.

And so you think energy's got to be the biggest thing.

And then you find out healthcare is two and a half times.

Our entire military, which has always been kind of the measure of empire, how big is your military?

If you spend more on your military than anything else, you're the biggest empire.

Our empire is no longer fighting wars.

We are fighting human health and we are fighting human disease as our primary war because our entire military is only generating about 800 billion a year, which is shy of a trillion dollars.

So 5x, 6x, 7x more on healthcare than military.

Wow.

And so it's been two generations that healthcare has started to outpace all other industries and income, which makes it very difficult for lawmakers and other peoples to start to ask the healthcare industry to change because they just threaten, well, we're going to make less profit.

And then the lawmakers, well, wow, if we lessen the profit of our largest sector of our economy, then GDP is going to drop and we're going to be in a financial crisis.

So we got ourselves into a pretty vicious cycle here in the United States in that disease has become our primary method for creating GDP.

Wow, that is crazy.

So to get out of it, it's going to be tough then, basically, because money at the end of the day is the root problem here.

It's impossible to get out of this, what I would call the death spiral of health care or healthcare insurance being another way of looking at this.

We're in the death spiral of that situation.

That's why the Affordable Care Act got put into play by Obama back in 2009.

I was leading think tanks at the University of Virginia on this issue in like 2004-05 and bringing in experts from around the world, CEOs of healthcare industries, healthcare insurance companies and the like.

And we were already aware at that point by 2004, it was clear that for every 1% increase in

your health insurance costs, 1% of the population would drop out of health insurance.

They'd say, ah, it's not worth my, why am I paying $800 a month for health care I'm not even using?

I'm not going to do it.

Well, the person who's deciding not to pay for their health care is obviously the person that's healthy and not needing it.

So you take the healthiest group, 1% out of that population, suddenly the cost of the 99% gets more expensive.

And so what we were seeing is for every 1% increase, 1% would drop out, consolidating the sicker people.

And so we were in this death spiral because at this point, healthcare was going up by 4% to 8% a year.

And so 4%, 8% of the population is dropping out every year out of health insurance.

And so suddenly you've got 40% of the country insured instead of 100%,

and the 40% are sick.

Wow.

And so the healthcare industry as a whole, led by the health insurance companies, was going out of business by 2010.

Really?

And so we had to put something in place.

And so Obama got a lot of recognition and

kind of victory of that thing.

But I can guarantee you, no matter what president was there in the United States at that time, was going to get the Affordable Care Act, as it was termed, passed because it was the solvency of our country.

And so we had to pass a law that said everybody has to be health insured.

so that we could afford the cost of the sickness that we were starting to burden.

And And that cost is extraordinary.

It's about seven times higher than any other industrial country.

You look at Japan, you look at any other country, they don't have the disease we have, and they certainly don't have the disease costs that we have.

So, we've really put ourselves in a predicament, and I think your generation is starting to show the only path forward, which is a new paradigm.

You cannot, with the current paradigm of GDP, the Fed,

these instruments that are currently managing our fiscal marketplace have run out of options.

The Fed would like to change things.

The Fed would, I'm sure, love to make the U.S.

dollar more attractive.

But with some $90 trillion of debt kind of hiding in different pockets of our economy,

we're stuck in this trap where we can no longer lower interest rates, which is the Fed's main mechanism of booing up the value of the U.S.

dollar.

We're out of that tool.

We've dropped to zero a couple of times on interest rates, and the economy is still stagnant.

When your main producer of money is disease, you have guaranteed that your productivity next year is less because you have to have sick people to create the dollars for the healthcare industry and the sick people can't work.

And then you start to see diseases like autism come into reality.

And autism is an interesting phenomenon in this predicament because one autistic child typically knocks out two or three full-time incomes because of the amount of adult care that's required.

So it's mom has to quit job, aunt quits job, grandpa quits job to help support the kid.

And so you've got two or three adults losing productivity in support of the child.

Right.

And autism has gone from one in 5,000 children to one in 30

over your lifetime.

And then we are on target to hit one in three children with autism by 2035.

Oh my God.

Just 11 years down the road.

And so when one in three children have a condition that requires an enormous amount of resources to maintain the home, taking productivity out of the equation for at least one other home, you suddenly see that we just don't have an economy by 2050.

And so, this is the predicament that our current linear path has got us on.

And so, now we need a paradigm-shifting path.

And your generation has been showing some of those methods: what if we created new currency systems that actually were founded upon real assets that were relevant to our outcomes.

Health being one of those.

What if we had a new currency that mapped to your health rather than to the stock market?

And so

those are the challenges we have in front of us now is we have to reimagine global economics so that we can reimagine American economics so that we can reimagine a healthy America because we're stuck right now depending on our own illness to buoy up our economy.

That is scary.

Do you think there is a fix for the soil problem?

You said 97% has been compromised, right?

Yeah, there's a revolution that's been afoot for an equal amount of time.

The last 50 years, there's been a revolution of

in the agricultural scene that has loosely been termed regenerative agriculture now.

There's issues with that term, and that it's pretty easy to kind of co-opt that and claim, you know,

greenwash that thing a bit for large industry.

So it's poorly defined yet.

But as a movement, super successful, especially at the individual farm.

So when a farmer decides they're going to take farm out of the ICU and reconnect it to ultimately nutrition, the farm starts to thrive.

And the nutrition for soil ends up being defined by and created by biodiversity.

And so, when you create biodiversity on a farm, an inordinate amount of recovery and healing happens.

Got it.

And that was really the method and mechanism of industrialized farming: let's grow corn, soybean, or wheat over millions of acres and call that success.

There's only one county that grows more than 10 food types in the country now.

Most are at three.

But there's a few counties that go up to 10.

There's only one that does more than 10, and that's Fresno County in California.

Only one in the country, and they grow over 300 food types.

And so our food system in the United States relies on one county, not one state, one small county within one state, to provide provide us any sort of biodiversity on the plate.

Most of our biodiversity now has to be shipped in from South America, Mexico, and elsewhere.

So we've really destroyed any reliable food system here in the name of economy.

If you grow lots of corn, we'll turn it into ethanol for your gas.

We'll turn it into plastics for

single-use things, or we'll turn it into plastics called polyester for your clothing.

But we're not going to pay you to grow food anymore.

We're paying you to grow commodities, ultimately oil.

And so, canola, oil, corn, oil, all of these things are really turned into non-food commodities.

And that which stays food, that small percentage of corn, soybean, and the rest that stay food, are not food for humans.

They're really food, feed for cattle, pigs, and poultry.

And so we're feeding those animals

dead and dying food, genetically modified, no nutrients, full of chemical residues that cause cancer and elsewhere.

We feed that to our animals.

Our animals have to be slaughtered at younger and younger ages before they die because they have such disease in them.

A chicken now has to be killed at six weeks, else it just dies.

And by six weeks,

a third of the flock is already dead.

What?

From invasive disease.

Six weeks?

They used to live years, right?

Chickens?

Chickens do live years, yeah, if you let them.

But a broiler chicken used to come to age at three months to six months and then be there.

But we've just had to keep shortening that because so much of the flock is dying from salmonella and other invasive

bacteria by the time they're six weeks of age.

So we've had to put chemical growth factors into that chicken feed and into the chickens themselves, antibiotics and then the like, so that they can survive to the six-week mark where we can get a semi-decent chicken breast out of them.

So when we buy factory meat today, unfortunately, the reality is we're buying dying flesh, you know, and that was debuted in the famous film, you know, or infamous film maybe.

It was called Food Inc.

It was put out about 15 years ago.

It was the first real kind of expose on the fact that all of our protein industry is actively dead and dying animals, and we're turning it into food and expecting some sort of healthy result.

And of course, that's not the logic that follows through, and we end up becoming sick from the very...

proteins that we're producing from monoculture.

So

that being a long, dismal answer to, is is there a way out of this and the answer is yes we need to start at that root injury of monoculture and go to biodiversity.

And ultimately I think we're going to find that that is actually the secret not just to farming.

It's the secret to human health.

It's the secret to societal health.

It's the secret to a planetary health is biodiversity.

And so this I think sneaks into everything out there and for this I'm a huge fan of the concept of natural law.

There are simple laws of nature that we must start to follow if we want to stay in play as a human species.

And the first among those is everything you do should be driving biodiversification of everything.

And I think this trickles all the way up to this industry that we're sitting in in the midst of here, which is media.

Your intelligence and your decision-making capacity as a human being to participate in a future survival and thrive state of our species depends on the biodiversity of thought, ideas, and perspectives that you take in in a day.

And if you've developed a monoculture of input, your behavior is ultimately somewhere in the mix, absolutely feeding back to support monoculture in the fields of our country, to support monoculture in the antibiotic-resistant bacteria inside of a hospital.

What we do at the macro level absolutely defines what we're doing at the micro level.

What happens at the micro level absolutely defines what's happening at the macro level.

So there's this beautiful biologic feedback loop of life, ultimately, that says, says just in case a species steps out of line and decides it's going to dominate and destroy diversity, that species is going to die.

And nobody has to go kill that species.

That species will eliminate itself through the failure of biodiversity within it.

Interesting.

Do you believe this is affecting animals as well outside of humans?

It's affecting animals worse than humans, unfortunately.

Wow.

We've seen a 10,000-fold increase in the rate of extinction of species in the last 50 years under this chemical environment.

And so we have lost innumerable species over that 50 years.

The rate of extinction has accelerated 10,000 times.

We are extinct about one species every 20 minutes now.

What?

And those, unfortunately, most of those species, we don't even know what they're here to do.

Right.

What was that nematode supposed to do?

What was that earthworm doing?

What is that flying insect doing?

Most of those we may not even named yet or categorize yet, but we're losing these species very quickly now.

And so over the course of this podcast, two or three species will go extinct.

Crazy.

And when we look at the bigger story, we're like, well, what about the animals we can see?

Are they dying?

You know, cancer being maybe the best example of this.

Right now, one in three women in the United States will have cancer before they die.

Wow.

One in two males.

50% of males will have cancer before they die.

It's so high.

Dogs are even worse.

So dogs now are at, there's one case of cancer for every 1.6 dogs in this country.

And so we're nearing 100% penetrance of cancer in dogs.

Oh my God.

And we're probably only five, ten years away from realizing that result.

And so our animals are suffering horribly.

I mentioned the chickens, but you know, our cattle and

I think almost the most horrific story is that of the pigs that we raise in industrial farming.

It's just

it is a holocaust of life that is being perpetrated in the name of food production.

Wow, so you're a vegetarian, aren't you?

I have been for 15 years, and interestingly, I've looped back now working with indigenous cultures all over the world.

I'm starting to add back some sources of meat, particularly in the fish space.

But what's happening to me personally is a realization that becoming monoculture on the plate isn't also part of the solution.

It can step back.

You know, you certainly want to stop buying your factory-grown meats and everything else.

But ultimately, you need to become part of the whole loop of the biologic life cycle of a farm or a river system or an ocean.

And what we can see as we look back through time is these animals were were necessary parts of the cycle of life for soil.

And so regenerative agriculture, one of its real foundational elements is getting animals back on farmland.

Because most farmland in the country had to decide, are we going to become a ranch or are we going to become a farm growing food, row crops?

And so you were either a row cropper or you're a rancher.

And that divide happened in the 1920s, 30s, 40s.

And so we're 100 years into this experiment of losing multi-specialty or

multiple flows of economics onto a single farm.

So now you are wholly dependent on corn instead of 10 or 15 different types of food and the annuals and then 10 or 15 stone fruits and citrus and other trees growing.

So you had a food forest and then you had pigs and chickens and everything else.

So a typical farm 100 years ago had

15 or more income streams from different crops or different animal sources.

Now you're down to one.

And so that loss of economic diversity led to great vulnerabilities on the farm and a loss of expertise.

So our farmers today who are row croppers growing 10,000 acres of farm, you say you need to get cattle back on this land to restore the

the soil systems.

A lot of times the answer is we have no idea how to do that.

Wow.

And so we have to go through a whole re-education process of how do we get herd animals back onto the plains of North America and to every continent ultimately to start moving that.

And right now that dumbs down to cattle, but what we need to do is start to reimagine a whole food system that's rewilded.

What were the original animals that ran up and down the farmland that became so verdant in North America?

It was bison primarily.

And so bison, antelope, deer, elk, moose, these animals were really the ones that defined the resources that would become the richest farmlands in the world, which would be throughout our Midwest and up into Canada.

Fortunately, there are examples of great success of getting these animals back in.

And so you start moving bison back into the plains, and the restoration of land is extremely quick.

Not only does the soil recover, rivers start to flow again, things like this.

So the hydraulic water cycle is also kick-started, not just the microbiome of soil systems.

And it's animals you don't necessarily attribute, or at least my mind doesn't, to farmland.

Something like the wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park.

As soon as they were reintroduced, the rivers recovered.

Really?

And so to see these keystone species

doing something to the land to create life and life abundant and biodiversity beneath their feet shows us something of what human potential is.

humans could eat in a way that diversifies the flora and fauna beneath their feet and creates a more beautiful earth, not a denuded earth.

And that's what every other keystone, lions, wolves, you know, all your predators out there,

even the ones that are not predating on

land, beavers are a good example of it.

Yeah, put beavers back on rivers where they were trapped into extinction.

Those rivers start to flow again.

The farmland around it improves and all that.

So

you've got

a really fun story that this earth became wild for a reason.

Yeah.

Not just because it was cool to be a beaver, but because being beaver made the whole system more wealthy.

It increased the wealth of everything.

And so I honor what you and your generation are doing here, again, with money, is how do we start to create a monetary system that reflects a biologic possibility that our existence improves life on earth.

And we can do this.

We know how to do it.

We know what it looks like in a farmland.

And through the last 30 years of my medical career, I can tell you, I know what that looks like in a single human.

If you biodiversify the flora within a single human, they get healthier and disease disappears.

Not because they needed to heal, but because health is the opposite of disease.

And so healing becomes an essential part of the journey of recovering health.

And you don't have to put energy into repairing cancer and autoimmune disease and obesity.

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The energy that would go to heal those things comes straight from the phenomenon of health.

Yeah.

And so it's time for us to end around on the chronic disease epidemic and start teaching our children, grandchildren, and one another what it feels like to live a daily life that sustains all aspects that would feed back to that biodiversification of experience and ultimately health.

And so that's been my long journey.

Wow.

I mean, we need that.

I have friends of mine, you know, having kids right now born with autism, and it's super sad to see.

Like, that wasn't common when I was a kid.

Maybe two kids in my whole school had it.

And now it seems like, like you said, the numbers are staggering.

Staggering.

And I never realized how important animals are.

It seems like every animal really has a purpose on this planet.

Every animal has a unique gift to give.

And, you know, if we look into natural systems again, there's a really beautiful story that starts to unfold that life

is a biologic phenomenon that is dedicated to ascension.

And the word ascension might sound a bit on the spiritual vibe there, but the concept of ascending is very innate to nature, it seems.

Nature is constantly looking for a way to express more intelligence, more connection to itself, and more witnessing of itself.

It's creating beings that can see the beauty of itself.

It's a very strange and interesting phenomenon that happens in nature.

It's working to find ways to create species that can actually look back at itself and see beauty.

And that's ultimately what humans have become.

We are the species on this planet gifted with five senses that give us the belief that we're separate.

All the other animals have a different umpfeld, which is a German word for perception of reality.

Other animals, when they perceive reality, don't see separate things.

They see an interconnected, vibrational environment that they're part of.

And this is probably why when you go out to the coast of California here, you'll see hundreds of humans lined up on that coast watching the sun drop into the ocean every sunset.

It's astonishingly beautiful to a human eye.

The birds seem to be completely oblivious and ignoring it.

The monkeys in Africa are not watching the sunset in the bush, but the humans are.

And so we continuously witness beauty differently than any other species for the intelligence that we've developed that are put behind the veil of these five senses that have given us the ability to categorize everything as separate and different.

And so, our very superpower of being intelligent and witnessing is also our great vulnerability.

That in thinking ourselves separate from everything,

when we are in fear, guilt, and shame, we will destroy everything in the name of self.

And so, it's this catch-22 where our greatest gift and the reason we're here is to see the beauty of nature and participate in its diversification.

But the manifestation of human behavior, when it's founded in fear, guilt, and shame, those same five senses believing themselves separate now become the destroyer of the earth instead of the birthplace.

Right.

Yeah, I get really upset when I see nature being destroyed for business, for money.

I used to grow up reading about it in Africa.

They would destroy the rainforests.

They probably still are, but it's sad to see for sure.

Faster than ever before.

Yeah, the Congo is kind of the last place in Africa where we see some of those verdant greens still, but the rest of Africa is denuding very quickly.

Wow.

Desertifying.

A region of the earth about the size of the country of Poland turns into desert every single year.

Dang.

And so we are losing land very quickly through the green belt of the planet right now, which is South America and Africa, Central Africa there.

So we're losing land very quickly in these spaces.

But again, there's always this opposite and equal reaction, and we're seeing regenerative agricultural practices starting to move in North America, Europe, and beyond.

And what we're seeing is the regreening can happen faster than we can possibly imagine.

And so I really want to emphasize to your crowd here is that for all the clamor about climate crisis, what I can see as a biologist is all we have ahead of us is climate opportunity.

This earth is ready to do a rebirth process that has not been witnessed in the 300,000 years of human history.

Wow.

This earth is ready to do a more generative rebirthing process than ever because of the very mistakes we've made.

And this is, I hope, kind of a story of life itself is when you start to make grave mistakes, you're really setting yourself up for the greatest success of your life.

And anybody who's had a company fail or something like that knows that it was the failures in there that taught them the things they needed to know to become super successful with their next effort.

In my clinic, on a daily basis, I hear

breast cancer was the greatest gift that's ever come into my life because it reorganized my whole life and I changed everything.

And not only did my breast cancer go away, I became a different person and I changed my relationships.

I changed the way I was spending my time.

I would have died in a life that I didn't want had not cancer come along to wake me up.

And when I woke up, I realized there was a different life for me.

And that's basically where we're at as humanity now.

We are in a dream.

And we are ready to wake up.

The dream has to turn into a nightmare before we are inspired to wake up.

Because for as long as the dream feels comfortable, we'll stay in it.

And so it's in our discomfort within this dream, the failing world that we've created within this dream of separateness, we're going to find the need to wake up into the abundance that the universe has coded into everything.

Absolutely.

So when it comes to cancer and other diseases, do you believe there are ways to treat it holistically?

I've seen you talk about the power of nature and how nature is healing.

Do you believe with certain diseases, even like stage three, stage four, it is possible to treat it naturally?

Yeah, that's not so much a belief, that's an experience.

Like, I've seen you know, stage four cancers go away, and we actually have to have a code in medicine for this, a Medicare code for miracle, basically.

Oh, yeah.

Writing miracle in the chart doesn't sound good, and the government's not going to give you funding for miracles.

So, we had to create a medical term for it, which is spontaneous remission.

Spontaneous remission is a medical diagnosis or a medical phenomenon that we can chart and then put a code next to and say, hey, this actually happened.

And spontaneous remission is a description of a pretty extraordinary phenomenon, which is somebody's got stage four cancer, metastasis in their brain, bone, et cetera.

You prove that by scans, you try everything,

nothing worked.

So you put them in hospice and say, you know, you're done.

Right.

You get comfortable, you're dying.

And then they come back nine months later and they have no trace of disease.

And that disease probably went away in a day because it's not a healing process in spontaneous remission.

If we give chemo, radiation, surgery, and get tumors to go away, there's always scar tissue left behind.

In spontaneous remission, there's no scar tissue, there's no evidence that cancer was ever there.

And that's kind of that miraculous thing that we've gotten to see over and over again in healthcare:

somehow people know how to revert to a completely disease-free state without a healing process in between.

You simply manifest or simply re-express the original design of your body.

And so that that gets to be seen and not become normal is the gap and bridge that I would love to help bring humanity on.

That's possible, y'all.

We had to create a term for it and the Medicare code.

That happens.

So should we make that the norm?

And what happens in that process is really people reconnecting to information that gets them out of their relationship to fear, guilt, and shame.

Because ultimately we find that every incurable disease is buried underneath an an emotion that cannot clear.

And that emotion that we are stuck under is fear, guilt, or shame, or in some constellation of those three typically.

And so we are starting to realize that biologic processes of dysfunction are following emotional wounds and not vice versa.

That is so cool.

Yeah, you see it with people like Dr.

Joe Dispenza as well.

Just shifting that mindset can cure almost anything.

He cured paralysis.

Yeah, Joe Dispenza is a good example of somebody who's putting into practice the last 10,000 years of Chinese medicine or Qigong, Tai Chi, or out of India, Ayurveda, these phenomena that understand that nature already solved your problem.

Nature already cured you.

You just need to realize it.

You need to wake up to it.

And so it's instead of sending you on a long health journey, it's you reconnecting to the original information of self.

and rewiring your body to that.

And so for our clinic, we closed the clinic ultimately about a year ago and have launched an online program called Journey of Intrinsic Health.

The realization that I had over the 25 years of my medical journey was that disease never heals from an external source.

Wow.

Disease always heals from within.

And so your

intelligence that is innate to your biology already knows how to heal every injury that you've ever had, including your emotional injuries.

You just need to be empowered and then given the tools to uncover that capacity within yourself.

And so that's an eight-week program that we now kind of reintroduce you to the eight elements of you.

And ultimately, you reflected in the different ways in which you interact with the world.

You change your relationship to food, water, breath, exercise, movement, all these different elements of biology, and then you become a different being.

You have to, because you've changed your relationship to all elements that build you.

Wow.

And that's, in a nutshell, what Ayurveda was teaching for 9,000 years of nutrition is you literally are going to become the elements that you eat.

And our arguments over vegan versus paleo versus keto and all these things,

it's a mistake thinking that some element or some reductionist, you know,

few elements within our food system are going to make us better or whatever it is.

What's really going to make us healthy is A, biodiversity, and B, an understanding on how to balance

the four elements of nature within our own bodies.

How do you balance fire, earth, air, et cetera, into a human body that has resilience and regenerative capacity within it?

And Ayurveda has been teaching that for 9,000 years.

So pretty well-tested science there.

Yep, it's got a track record.

Western medicine's only been around for a couple hundred, right?

Yeah, and then our food, our food pyramid that the industry created in the 1970s has only been around for 50 years, and that was the worst 50 years of human health ever.

So there may be a correlation there.

Yeah.

Did you face a lot of backlash from your peers in the medical space?

Because none of this was taught in medical school or anything.

Yeah, it was interesting.

You know,

the most powerful way to,

you know, I think defeat something is deny its existence.

And so the denial that's built into academia is very dense.

I certainly lived in it for years.

I was able to create chemotherapy thinking I was saving the world.

Honestly, I honest God thought I was

going to save humans from cancer.

Wow.

And so I was part of the delusion.

I was living that delusion in my own life.

And as suddenly, you know, chinks in the dam started to form and water started actually coming pouring through, A, it was overwhelmingly fast that it destroyed my previous worldview because it's the amount of energy pent up behind

the pharmaceutical delusion.

The energy behind that is the entire universe.

We have a whole universe crushing in on us right now saying, please re-engage.

Please wake up.

Please reconnect before you disappear.

You're important.

You're vital to the intelligence of the universe for some reasons that you don't realize yet, but we can see it.

And the universe can see it, knows why we were developed, knows why we are here, and has deemed it important enough to keep us here, despite the fact that we are an existential threat to all biology on the planet at the moment.

And so there's something in us ready to wake up, ready to stay and play in a universe that knows that we're ready.

And so that's my encouragement to all of you that are listening thinking, well, climate crisis is here and the world's going to crap.

No,

the birth of the earth is going to redo itself here

with or without humans.

If we stay in play and become regenerative in our food system, become regenerative in our economics, become regenerative in our education systems that need to completely dissolve and we need learning systems to replace education systems.

Education is a process of programming.

Learning is an experiential model of discovery.

We need an experiential model of discovery for our children, specifically our children with autism, who cannot be programmed with the old paradigm.

That's, I believe, why we called in autism into our human experience.

This is the generation.

These are the children that cannot be programmed with a belief of GDPs based on extractive economics.

It doesn't make sense to them because they can see too clearly.

These children can see so clearly.

This is why when you start to see an autistic child recover biologically, they express some of the most extreme intelligence you've ever seen.

Wow.

And so Asperger's and the rest of the spectrum are famous for it, but I believe every single autistic child is an uncovered genius, is an unfiltered genius.

You and I have genius within us, but we're filtered behind a dense cloud of ego and belief systems and all kinds of things that we memorized or came to subconsciously believe.

That autistic child can't receive that level of brainwashing or education.

And so this is the generation that is learning, relearning the human condition.

And to get an autistic child to start to perform well biologically, where their health is improving and they're starting to really embrace their own voice and embrace their own intelligence, you don't have to do anything to the child.

You typically have to help the whole family let go of their belief systems, their fear, guilt, and shame, and become aligned to themselves.

The child is often suffering for the malalignment of the individuals in their family.

who were malaligned because they were part of the social dream that was collapsing everything.

The autistic mind is unfiltered and can see the disaster of the cognitive dissidence that exists for its parents and its siblings that are believing the dream of destruction.

It can see it.

It knows there's another option.

And when you help that child start to decrease the cognitive dissidence around it and the whole family starts to become regenerative in its mindset of, okay, I can't work a job that's killing the planet and expect my child to heal.

I need to find a job that is aligned with my child's journey, that is aligned with this child's perspective on the world.

And I've seen so many families go on that journey, and it's absolutely beautiful because the parents become completely new people.

The siblings become some of the most incredible people.

Being a sibling to an autistic journey is a very special calling.

Being a parent to an autistic child is a very special calling.

And I believe that whole family constellation is choosing the opportunity to transform humanity as a whole.

It's going to take the aunts, the uncles, the grandparents, and everybody else to come around that child and be like, how do we live a life that is coherent with this child's perception of the world?

And whatever they create is a good model for where all of us will need to go.

Fascinating.

So you see it almost as a superpower rather than a hindrance.

All disease is a superpower.

Dis-ease is a flag that says you're going the wrong direction.

Let's pivot.

And it will lead us into ease ultimately, if we are willing to go into the wound.

Interesting.

And what we tend to do in Western medicine is put band-aids on the wounds and drugify the person until they can't feel their symptoms anymore.

And so by numbing people out, we are not doing them a favor.

You cannot heal in a numbed state.

Nope.

Major depression is a numbed state.

A lot of people picture it, and I did as a doctor.

I was treating tons of depression in my own family as well as all my patients.

And I just assumed it's being blue or, you know, quote-unquote depressed.

When I finally got major depression towards the end of my academic career in the university setting, when I finally experienced major depression, I realized the horror of major depression is numbness.

When you cannot feel what it feels like to be alive, you just assume you should be dead.

Wow.

It is a response to numbness that maybe comes on the tail end of depression as a mood, but it's really, I think, the loss of sensation that comes towards the end of that phenomenon that breaks our relationship to life.

And I'm afraid that everything we're doing right now, numbing ourselves with food that is functioning as drug, not nutrient.

So fat, salt, sugar combinations, processed foods, all the chemicals in the processed foods, natural flavorings, which are all drugs to numb your brain.

And so all of the things that we're doing in the food system are contributing to a $5 trillion pharmaceutical industry that's eagerly throwing band-aids on all of our symptoms.

And so you put those two together, the food system and the pharmaceutical system in the United States, you're at $7 trillion.

That's numbing out our human experience ultimately.

And for that, we're going to die.

So scary.

Yeah, my dad.

So my dad had Asperger's, and they put him in a psych ward.

And they put him on all these medications, and he just lost all his emotion.

Yep.

And it was just so sad to see, honestly.

Devastating.

Yeah.

And I've seen it all the way through the psychiatric diseases.

Unfortunately, so much of what we call schizophrenia and some of these other psychotic diseases begin with truth.

And it's in our insistence that they are seeing something not real or having an unreal experience that they really start to lose their

underpinnings of life.

Yeah.

And so it's, and I think it must feel similar for an autistic child being told the world is actually this way when they can see, honest to God, it is not like that.

That makes you insane.

That's a special kind of insanity.

Yeah.

That geniuses forever have been dying young in.

You know, you look at somebody like Nikola Tesla,

he could see a future that few could see around him.

And

he's hearing voices, seeing things, doing the things.

His mind completely cluttered with the ideas of the future that could be.

And he was desperately trying to get all of those information out.

And as the world told him he was, you know, insane, he lost his sanity.

And I think that that's the danger we run.

with genius on the planet today is if we are all so insistent that the dream is right, that this destructive separate scarcity dream is the reality, we are going to drive to insanity those that have come to change the path.

And so, again, diversity is the path forward.

Desperately start looking in your life for new ideas or people that would carry those new ideas into your life.

Look for the opposite ideas than you're currently carrying in your head, because those in your head right now are likely heavily programmed by an education system

that took away any experiential learning from you.

Your success didn't come from your education.

No, it actually delayed it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I know exactly what you're doing.

I'm celebrating you for leaving it.

Yeah, and you did even double the amount of schooling I did becoming a doctor.

Yeah, it took me twice as I'm twice as old as you because it took me twice as long to brainwash myself out of it.

You know,

it is hard to actually forget.

It's interesting.

And

a Mark Twain quote that I love is it's far easier to fool somebody than convince somebody that they've been fooled.

Wow.

And that's worth sitting with for a minute as a people of like, what are the things that we are afraid of finding out we were fooled about?

Right.

And for Americans, we're afraid we were fooled that we're the greatest country in the world and we're this or that.

Are we willing to admit that we have been living a lie as a country for hundreds of years and we've actually been destroying life, not manifesting life?

We've destroyed to 97% not just our soils.

all of the indigenous peoples that lived in North America.

We have been systematically destroying any diversity around us and within us for our fear, guilt, and shame paradigms rule this reality that we're in.

And so the reconciliation of a farm isn't going to happen until we have reconciliation of the peoples that used to farm that land.

And so we're going to have to start to embrace the fact that we have wounded this world in the deepest, deepest way, as yet the most young empire here.

Certainly the British Empire before us and every empire back to the Babylonians 5,000 years ago.

This is our story as humanity, is

rise and fall of empire, which is the rise and fall of control.

When are we going to surrender control and allow nature to rewild us?

We're ready to be rewilded.

Right.

They don't teach that in school.

Yeah, let's rewild the classrooms.

Absolutely, Zach.

It's been so insightful, man.

Anything you want to close off with or promote before we wrap this up?

Excited for all of you to engage.

You guys represent a future that I can't create, and yet I feel like I have an enormous amount of resources with all the teams around me to allow you guys to do the future that we all feel is possible.

So get engaged.

We've got an enormous amount of information.

If you want to do a deep dive on how soil health becomes relevant to your health, intelligenceofnature.com is that website with a ton of science from my bio laboratory that's been working for the last 15 years in this intersection of human health, soil health.

If you want more education in the space, my website ZachBushMD.com get you there.

But we have an enormous amount to plug you into.

If you need a health journey, Journey of Intrinsic Health is our eight-week program.

We'd love to have you guys there too

because we find every person that goes through that.

And if you don't want to go through the eight-week program, just become a part of the global community.

And in that, you get weekly and monthly experiences with that community that I think can start to help you co-imagine with us what is the future that we can all create together.

Absolutely.

Thanks so much for coming on, man.

It means a lot to me.

Thanks for watching, guys, as always, and I'll see you tomorrow.