Shawn Stevenson: Welcome to The Model Health Show, this is fitness and a nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson and I'm so grateful for you tuning in with me today. I don't think a lot of people realize that the United States has a $4 trillion a year healthcare system. $4 trillion each and every year is invested and utilized and absorbed in this huge industry. And within that, a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, so JAMA, analyzed where some of these funds are going. And they uncovered that nearly one trillion of those dollars is effectively wasted. Alright, it's crazy. A trillion dollars are just getting lost in the ethers. Some of the reasons were ineffective care, fraud was a big issue, unnecessary treatments, the list goes on and on, but a lot of money is getting effectively wasted. We have resources that can be invested into real healthcare and not sick care, which is the system that we're currently existing in. Because here's the craziest part of this situation, this $4 trillion a year healthcare system is yielding some of the worst results in developed nations.

We are near the bottom of developed countries, as far as our health outcomes, our rates of obesity and diabetes and cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer’s and autoimmune conditions. The list goes on and on and on. Here in the United States, everything keeps getting exponentially worse. Clearly something is wrong. Clearly, we're not treating the real issue at its core. What is the root that's causing the expression of these fruits? What are the roots of these issues that are being expressed as obesity, as heart disease, as diabetes? What are the underlying mechanisms that are causing these symptoms to manifest? Because we're talking about disease, these are just classifications of a body of symptoms, and then we give it a label, right? So, if there's insulin resistance, if there is issues with the pancreas and the beta cells and the alpha cells and the liver and the blood sugar management, all these things, boom, you can get labeled with this classification of diabetes.

But the truth is, your symptoms, your condition within your own unique cellular matrix is radically different from any other person on planet Earth. There are no two people that have the same disease construct or same disease manifestation, it's impossible. However, the similarities enable us to give it this very micro-managed label. And that's part of the problem. We don't understand our uniqueness, we don't understand that we have a system that's obsessed with the treatment of things and not addressing its root cause. Now today you're in for a truly, truly expansive analysis of this and get ready for a truly deep conversation. Because what if we stop accepting what we've seen recently in modern medicine and these poor results that we're experiencing, and the absolute overwhelming amount of unnecessary death and destruction and divisiveness, what if we reimagine that? And that's at the core of today's conversation. Again, get ready for a deep conversation. We're about to go deep with our special guest, Dr. Zach Bush.

Now, when I was talking with Dr. Bush, for some reason, it just popped into my awareness that I need to set up a little tea spot here at the studio. A little place where we can get the kettle going, little variety of teas for ourselves, for my team, for the guests. I can create a vibe, any vibe that I want. That's the vibe that I want here at The Model Health Studios. And you better believe one of the options is going to be Matcha green tea. But not just any Matcha, Sun Goddess Matcha green tea. Because it's shaded 35% longer for extra L-theanine. L-theanine is a really remarkable amino acid that works to manage our mood, is associated with focus and with calm and being able to remain calm even under stress. And also, this 35% longer shading, creating this L-theanine content, this is crafted by a Japanese tea master, and there are only 15 Japanese tea masters in the entire world. And also, the Sun Goddess Matcha is quadruple toxin screened.

This is one of the biggest issues in the tea industry. There's centuries worth of documentation on the benefits of various teas, but today with our industrialization and really big lean towards all of these synthetic chemicals, it's very rare to find a tea that isn't contaminated. And most people have no idea about this. It could be contaminated with heavy metals, with molds, with pesticides, with microplastics. It's a big issue, but we can supersede that when we get tea from companies like Pique Tea. Go to piquelife.com/model. That's P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E.com/model. You get 10% off their incredible Sun Goddess Matcha green tea and also, I love their Pu'er, their fermented Pu'er tea as well. They've got 20 award-winning flavors, and they have an exclusive patented crystallization process for their teas that make them incredibly easy to brew and to utilize, and also to retain all of the valuable micronutrients that are found those teas. Again, go to piquelife.com/model, 10% off store wide. And now, let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

ITUNES REVIEW: Another five-star review titled, "Listen Up" by Annie Taylor 211. “If there's one podcast that has transformed my thoughts, habits, and values, it's this one. Shawn has an incredible way of articulating his words that has caused me to think deeper, and him and his guests inspire a lasting change. I'm truly grateful for his time and this content.”

Shawn Stevenson: Amazing. And thank you so much for leaving that review over on Apple Podcast. And that is exactly what we're doing today. We're going to venture into thinking deeper. Sometimes we just have to push the entire system of things aside, and experiments, to run some thought experiments, to analyze things in different ways, to check our own biases, to explore. And to really understand the bigger picture. And not just this very compacted view of science through the lens of conventional medicine, this very compacted view of the expression that we're seeing right now with again, a $4 trillion healthcare industry that's yielding such poor results, by thinking about the bigger picture.

So, thinking globally, thinking universally, thinking about where we come from, and all of these things need to be a part of the conversation and not just, again, this very limited perspective of kind of Newtonian science, which is this kind of mechanistic way of viewing reality when things are so much more than we can even imagine. So again, this is a deep conversation with the amazing Dr. Zach Bush. Zach Bush, MD is a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, hospice care, and internationally recognized educator on the microbiome, as it relates to human health, soil systems, food systems, and a regenerative future. Again, buckle up, get ready for this journey with the amazing Dr. Zach Bush. Welcome to The Model Health Show, it's so good to see you.

Dr. Zach Bush: I'm so glad to be here. And with the audience as well.

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome, awesome. The first thing I want to talk to you about, and it just so happened that you've been working on this for a course, is the connection between microbes and human health.

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: So, I know this is a big topic and there's a lot to unpack, but where does this association, where does this connection really start?

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah. So, this first response will take three and a half hours, but I'll see if I can put it in a nutshell. I mean, literally, you could give a PhD level dissertation on that one question, 'cause there's 20 years now of extraordinary answers to that question that are really bending our understanding of human physiology. And I think more recently bending our understanding of what consciousness is. And I would say in a nutshell, what we are finding in the 20 years of science is that what we thought used to be a human body, and we believe the human immune system was keeping that body sterile, and it was us against the world. We had to fight off the germs, we had to fight off the viruses, we had to fight off to keep our territory clean, so that limited resources within the body were preserved for human use.

That was our model for, at least the last 150 years of kind of Western allopathic medicine history, which is of course a blip in time compared to 4000 years of Ayurvedic Medicine, that said, "No, no, no, it's all what you eat is what you are and that there's no... The blend is complete." Like, you can't... It's complete oneness and biology can't separate out a single species and say, "This is that, and this is that." So, we're finding our way in allopathic western medicine to an unfortunate conclusion that we were wrong, and all the other ancient sciences were right, because they iterated over and over again for 4000 years to find the truth, and they found that truth, I think really good about 2000 years ago. I think there was a couple of thousand years of iteration towards that process, but man, when Ayurveda really matured, and when Chinese Traditional Medicine matured a couple of thousand years ago, it hasn't changed, because it didn't need to change because it worked. And it had to do with exactly what you're asking me, is "What's the connection between a microbe and a human? And how are those related at the health level?

And so, the train theory of life has really leapt forward in the last 10 years, in particular, in the basic science. It has had almost zero impact on our public health perspective, right?

Shawn Stevenson: Right.

Dr. Zach Bush: Our public health perspective for the last two years really remains dominated by the philosophy of Louis Pasteur in the 1880s, and 1840s to 1880s, that science of Pasteur had developed the whole theory on germ theory and said humans are always under attack from disease. And the other scientists that were in the other camp maybe led by Béchamp at the time, but he was saying, with his colleagues said, "No, it can't be a germ theory because, else we would have never existed. If it was us against them, they were here long before us. We emerged from this environment of microbes, and so, there's no way they're against us." And they were witnessing that disease isn't a phenomenon that simply attacks human body. Disease is something that emerges from a weakened body.

And so, that is kind of where we now stand. And in the last 10 years or so, we're realizing that this thing that we thought was a human body is actually not. It is actually an ecosystem. This is a terrain for an ecosystem that is more complex than a coral reef in regards to its biodiversity. Hence in the 1970s and '80s, as we started to popularize probiotics saying, "Oh, there's good bacteria," we started to embrace the reality of like, "Oh, there's lots of microbes in the gut." But even then, we thought, "Well, the microbes in the gut, the human body is sterile. You go inside that gut into the organ system is super sterile, else you have sepsis, or you have cellulitis, or you have a brain infection, or whatever it is.

Now that we have genomic sequencing and we can take a section of brain, genetically sequence it, we find out, "Oh my God, there are thousands of species of bacteria, and fungi, and yeast that are in the human brain when it's healthy." That is super disruptive information to a world that thought we were human, and thought the immune system was human. Now we understand both the human body and the immune system to be one of a cooperative relationship between many species. And so, in the end, we are an amalgamation of life rather than a single species. And we can dive in as you want, to anything from, what does it mean to be a mammal? How do you go from... Going from an egg to birth, from whether you're a reptile or avian, how do you make that jump to being mammal where you can have live birth. What does that take? Or we can talk about what's the difference between a monkey and its level of connection to the knowledge field and its ability to co-create within that space versus the Homo sapien.

Like, what's the difference between those two mammals that seem so close genetically, 99.99% identical, or 99.97% identical to a pig? And so, it's like, we're so close to these other animals genetically, so what is the difference of this capacity of humans seemingly to very uniquely be able to plug in? And if we want to go beyond humans, I would say mammals, pretty obviously, deeper than many of the other species. But as we dig deeper, we find out that other species have the ability to go there too, the octopus being a good example. Octopi have this intense connection to this higher conscious. Whales, dolphins. And even in our land animals, looking at dogs, cats and their relationship to the human consciousness and psyche, emotional field, all these things. And so, excitingly, the microbes have a foundational role in something seemingly as disparate as the immune system, human reproductivity and consciousness all coming back to the microbes at this point.

Shawn Stevenson: That's so remarkable. I'm just sitting here in awe listening to this, because we're so wonderful and amazing, and... But at the same time, we can be very limited in our thinking. And this was one of the things that really opened my mind up even further to this relationship with viruses, for example. Being a catalyst, going from laying eggs externally to having a live birth, viruses, these... And I want to ask you about this as well, right after this statement, because even if we look at something we might think that our blood is sterile, the vast amount of viruses that... And virus particles that are in and on our bodies, but also just, again, viruses with the human genome sequencing, finding that a part of our genome itself is viral. And so, we've got that aspect, but one of the things that really got me, that I dug into more the past two years was the theories around how our immune system evolved.

And the biggest theory, the leading theory is that our immune system itself is basically a virus or a conglomeration of viruses that faced off against other viruses in order to create this kind of hyper-intelligent complex immune system that we have. So, the question I want to ask you is, what is our immune system? I mentioned our blood having different bacteria and the like within it, but we would think that our immune system is going to fight these things, right? But what is our immune system really? Because what we've been kind of indoctrinated with, I went to a conventional university, is very different from what our immune system actually is.

Dr. Zach Bush: Absolutely. Yeah, the classical model of that is that it's a battlefield. You've got human against everything else. And so, the immune system has all these capacity for antibody production from T cells and B cells. T cells are kind of like are the ones that are the scouts, and they go find a problem, and then they bring in a B cell. Once they find a problem, the B cell cranks out billions of copies of an antibody to eliminate the enemy. That was our classical model. What we now realize is the immune system is not at all a battleground. In fact, it's the most refined system of communication that's ever existed. And it's specifically designed to be interspecies communication.

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, so our immune system isn't us against the world, it's integration. Is that what I'm hearing?

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah. There's... I've got a great friend that I've been hanging out with recently in these different projects around regeneration and the concept of how do we look beyond farming or food systems to define the word regeneration? And she's always asking everybody in our group, "What if the universe and life itself is always conspiring in my best interests?" And that's a cool concept of whatever looks like a block, whatever looks like a bad thing is actually just an iterative process towards nature conspiring for our best interest that we don't even understand. And it's finding pathways for our enrichment. And I think that's exactly what the immune system does. It's always conspiring for the best interests of all those involved. And it's not exclusive of another species.

So, we're not attacking Staph aureus to eliminate it. We actually vitally need Staph aureus on our skin and within our sinuses, within our upper pharynx, within our lower airways, and parts for liver. We are realizing now that we are... That whole microbiome is iterating opportunities for relationships that are always in our best interests, always raising us up. And when we have conflict with them, which looks like cellulitis or you get some wound that's not repairing, suddenly there's a little infection, or you get an upper respiratory infection from a virus, is that virus against you is the old model. The new model is the only reason that virus is expressing itself in your body at that moment is because you need it. Your immune system was starting to get stagnant. You were having a failure of cell turnover. You were starting to express pre-cancerous cells in your body.

And so the immune system, recognizing this slow down and stagnancy in biologic function throughout a system has 70 trillion cells that's starting to decrease its function, poor sleep, poor nutrition, poor stress patterns, lack of stress release, you know, all these things starting to build up on a collective stress on the organism, it will take on whatever opportunity it sees from a virus to express that virus to create a regenerative event, which is to say a cell turnover event. And so, it induces a huge inflammatory response so that the whole immune system, which again, is not about warring against the virus, it's about communication. Whole immune system revs up, and suddenly communicates across all cell structures and be like, "Oh my God, there's a whole cell population over here that's damaged and pre-cancerous, let's wipe that out. Let's clean this up."

And one of the most powerful tools that that immune system triggers is a fever. Fever is something we actually now do therapeutically to cancer patients. We'll raise their body temperature through heat blankets and everything else to 104, 105 degrees and then give them tiny doses of chemotherapy and find it to be extremely successful versus a normal body temperature that's in a low metabolic state. As we see disease emerge, the core body temperature always drops, because our ability to make energy is really the definition of health or not. A healthy body is failing to make energy, the vital body is producing a massive amount of energy. One of the best markers for that is what is your core body temperature? 97.3 degrees Fahrenheit is that classic. Core body temp...

And so, you've got this... Oh, I'm sorry, 98.6 is the Fahrenheit, Celsius is 37. But the Fahrenheit there that 98.6 or whatever degrees Fahrenheit. You're in this process of a high energy state to maintain that much thermogenesis, heat production. When you see somebody getting sick or chronically ill, it's not unusual to find their core body temperature down 96 degrees, 95 degrees. In clinic, in chronic fatigue, chronic pain syndromes, it's not unusual to see a 94.8. You can get very low core body temperatures in these metabolic collapse states that then manifest. These kind of global weird everything is dysfunctioning kind of syndromes is basically just a symptom of collapse of energy.

And so, when we see the immune system take advantage of the opportunity to integrate a virus and rev up one of these inflammatory processes, is to boost core body temperature, which then leads to a bunch of turnover of senescent cells, which are basically kind of zombie cells that are just like, hanging out, not any longer participating in the growth of the thing, and they're not cancer either, they're just taking up an enormous amount of energy and drag on the system, 'cause they haven't turned over, they haven't kicked off. And they have enough damage. They're not being productive part of the society. And so, we can get that turnover system, senescent cells, we can get to turnover of cancer cells and suddenly there's all of this new abundant opportunity for putting energy in those cells that still have the capacity to participate in society and community of a human body.

And so, this new understanding that the immune system is always conspiring for our best interest, I would say that for every single time you've gotten sick, that is your body's effort to conspire many different organ systems simultaneously, and interestingly to mobilize mitochondria, which is a vast system of microbes that live inside of our cells. Mitochondria, tiny little bacteria that about three billion years ago, a small archaea bacteria absorbed in even tinier methane-producing bacterium. And when those two bacterium came together and amalgamated, they developed the capacity for respiratory energy production, which is 10 times more effective than fermentation, which was the only form of energetic expression in the single-celled organisms.

And so, when we got that first mitochondria and then that mitochondria was able to dwell within a larger system of a protozoa, we suddenly made this jump to parasites, worms, and ultimately reptiles and work your way up towards hominids and homo sapiens. So, we have this iterative process of energy production, the more energy you can produce per cell, the more successful. So, when your immune system conspires and you shoot that fever up, that's mitochondria that are producing that fever. The human cell has no way of generating enough heat to create anything. And so, it's only the mitochondria that can create energy in the body, whether it be thermal energy in the form of the fever or your core body temperature, or it be energetic output as far as electron pulse and light energy that's coming out of the carbon molecules that are breaking apart to release sun. So, the mitochondria, this brilliant like other organ system that is in cellular population, logarithmically larger than the human system. So, our human cells, 50, 70 trillion, depending on how you read.

Let's say 50 trillion cells, that's a huge number. It's one of the few numbers that is equivalent to our national debt today, but the 50 trillion cells is dwarfed by 14 quadrillion bacterium inside our cells called mitochondria. So, you go from trillion to quadrillion, you're a thousandfold, right? So, a thousand trillion is a quadrillion. So here... Whoa. Now you're 10 times that, so you're really 10,000 times more cellular population in mitochondria than you are human. And that's the population that determines are you vital or not. And so, when we ask, what is the relationship between microbes and human health, it's very simple; without the microbes, we don't exist. Without cooperative interaction and iterative behavior with those microbes, we don't thrive, we live short, we develop chronic disease. And unfortunately, we, in our human nature, in our belief that we were separate from everything else, we've developed a society, a technological environment that destroys the microbes at every turn. And so, it was our belief of being anti-everything that led to the pending sixth extinction here.

Shawn Stevenson: Man, that is profound, so profound. The problem is, Zach, as I'm hearing you say this, is we think that the body is ignorant. In our ignorance, we think that it's malfunctioning when a fever manifests or we have symptoms, and we seek to put those fires out as quickly as possible. We want to get back into comfort. And in reality, you said one of the most profound things in an idea that's kind of been a thread through this is that things conspiring for our good. I think we really need to sit with that because even our idea of what a disease is, is really the body making an adaptation under unideal circumstances. Like if we talk about insulin resistance, we're bringing this abnormal amount of sugar into the system that's really never existed before. And the body in its infinite intelligence is like, "You know what? I'm not going to keep shoveling this into these cells, even though it can tear stuff up being in your bloodstream. So, what can I do? What adaptation can I make so that I can keep this person alive under these unideal circumstances?"

But again, we think that the body's malfunctioning, and even with a... And this is what I want to ask you about, even if it's a viral infection, you said something really profound, which is, it's not that this particular thing is so bad, it's happening within a weakened body. And so is this why, for example, we would have circumstances where somebody is asymptomatic versus someone who isn't. Because that's the part of this conversation that hasn't really been talked about, why didn't so many other people get sick? Versus this much smaller percentage who did, especially if we're talking about severe symptoms, versus mild symptoms, versus completely being asymptomatic. What's really the underlying mechanism that's causing people to have this range where the majority of people are asymptomatic?

Dr. Zach Bush: Is it though? It's so important for us to consider that carefully because for all of the fearmongering around social distancing and all that, we failed to recognize the most obvious thing is that in a single family, one person gets a syndrome that is called Coronavirus and two other people in the family get that same thing three to seven days later, and two other people don't get anything. And so even in a single-family unit, we saw over, and over, and over again, exactly what you're talking about. So, you don't have to look at a population level to recognize, "Well, that's this is weird." Like, if it was really an infectious disease that was highly infective, and had this high rate of transmission, then we should see that thing happening very uniformly. And it should be exactly equal to your level of contact rather than not being. And so then the reality is, no virus has ever been contact-specific in its ability to express disease, and this has been one of the real hang-ups that we've been suffering with since the 1950s and '60s when we started to try to prove... Discovery of virus is recently, 1950s and '60s is where we started to be able to theorize their presence, 'cause we figured out what DNA was.

Before there was DNA there was a vague concept of germs, or... So, the whole fight between Louis Pasteur and Béchamp in the 1800s is 'cause they didn't have any of these works, they didn't wonder, or weren't arguing about, "What is the nature of a virus?" They didn't have that term. And so, the words that we've put to this, these observational forces are relatively new, but one of the challenges to the germ theory, which said that viruses will attack everything equally, basically, and put everybody at the same threat was that we were trying to... Once we started to be able to isolate viral stuff, and then introduce it to another organism, we couldn't get infection to happen. And some potent examples of this was kind of the common cold type viruses. It turns out that horses get a very specific, few strains of viruses, very typically they get upper respiratory infection, develop something similar to humans in the seconds they have snot, and they have all of these... They were collecting snot and they were having the horses breathe into these huge bags to collect all of their respiratory secretions, which were understood to carry these viruses and everything else, and so they're collecting snot, and all this and then have another horse go breathe that air, introduce the snot into their nose, and we could never get the damn horse to be sick.

So, we cannot go and figure out who to infect with this thing. We don't seem to be able to transit it as we've been told it works. Another big example of this is HIV. We assumed HIV is super penetrant, and you start to get sexual transmission of this disease, it has high penetrants goes in this iterative process towards AIDS, and so if you pick up any document, any peer-reviewed science journal article that's studying HIV, the first sentence tends to be, "HIV is a virus that causes the syndrome of AIDS." And yet that sentence never has a reference on it, in any article ever. Because not once have we actually been able to show that an HIV virus causes AIDS. We've tried infecting monkeys and humans; it just does not cause the situation. So, HIV is being expressed in the context of what we would call a syndrome of AIDS, but we can't prove any causation, it just doesn't work. And a big study that was just done... Again, genomic sequencing is changing the game, 'cause we're getting all kinds of new really disruptive data points, and this is one of them, is that they did a universal screening for 140 different common viruses in 5,000 subjects that were extremely healthy across six continents, including West and East, and so the beautiful spread of population, 5,000 subject, and they did broad genomic sequencing for these viruses that would have been integrated into our own human DNA at this point.

And retroviruses, such as HIV, are really good at doing this. They insert themselves into us and so, into our DNA. And then we carry it through our lifetime. It turned out that 6% of the subjects in the study were carrying some form... Carrying HIV in their DNA, and these are asymptomatic people that test negative for HIV. But if you genomically sequenced their DNA, somewhere in there they've got it. And so, it was this stunning thing of like, logarithmically beyond what we thought the penetration of HIV was. It's there, and we've got this population of 5,000 people that don't have any of the testing positive for replication of HIV, but they've seen it, they've absorbed it, they've integrated it in their DNA, and they just keep it quiet, no need to express it. And then the deeper realization is that HIV, when present in the context of AIDS, isn't responsible for any of the symptoms of AIDS that actually causes the death.

Symptoms of AIDS are metabolic wasting, the immune dysfunctions, the Kaposi's sarcoma, these cancers that come up, like some unique Leukemias, lymphomas. Those have all been shown to be caused by a whole myriad of different herpes viruses. And so, when we say that HIV is the virus that causes AIDS, we're very inaccurate in that statement, and we've proven it over, in our 30-year, or 40-year effort to find out what is AIDS and what is HIV in all this. And our very fundamental premise, despite the fact that we've proved ourselves wrong over and over and over again, we just can't let go of the damn premise, which is like, "We have to have a single causation to this syndrome, because we believe in the germ theory, we believe one viruses causes this thing called AIDS."

And the fact is AIDS is a demonstration of a complete loss of decision-making at the cellular level as to what to express and what not. So, it becomes a dysregulated expression of many different viruses, EBV, CMV, herpes viruses. It goes on, and on as to all these viruses that start to really proliferate in the cellular structure of human cells. So, what we can say about AIDS is there was definitely... There was a poisoning of the human system that allowed for a dysregulation between what to express and what not to express. That's much different than what we see in the household where two people don't get sick and three people do get a Coronavirus-like syndrome. What happened there? All five of them decided they were going to, or all five of them had the opportunity to decide how they were going to use this virus to their highest conspiring purpose. So, nature conspires against us for our highest purpose. Three of those people were in a weakened state and we're going to benefit from four or five days in bed, or maybe four weeks in bed. Your level of weakness was going to be matched by the response the virus was going to give you. And so, it's the classic, you going to b*tch about your partner and blame them for your relationship and everything else, but the fact is you're looking in a mirror and everything you're blaming on them is happening internally. You're projecting that outward. It's the same thing with us and the microbes.

If we're having a problem and we keep blaming Lyme disease or Coronavirus or HIV, we're missing the boat, the story is a collapse within ourselves. And ultimately that collapse is very interesting. It's a loss of sense of self-identity. The immune system, as a system of communication, its purpose is to maintain human identity and you can't do that in a vacuum. You do not know who you are if you are isolated. And so, the whole purpose of the immune system is a system of communication that brings us into this broad ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and the like, and for that, we discover ourselves.

Shawn Stevenson: Amazing. Amazing. So, the question is, you just shared some... For some people they might not have heard anything related to HIV and AIDS, this connection not being what is popularized, what's really become dogma. Why is it that these ideas can carry on, carry so much weight and just be accepted in popular, not just popular culture, but in scientific communities for so long. Again, this has been seen throughout history. If we talk about the earth being flat and to say otherwise, you can actually... Can you talk a little bit about that, about just even dating back in time some of these things...

Dr. Zach Bush: How do these dogma happen?

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah. I can actually. And in a simplistic way, it's the old adage of, "follow the money," but the deeper thing is it's not really a story of greed, it's a story of reductionism. And so, as an academician I was in academic medicine for 17 years in different ways. Most of that time as a student or training in post-doctoral work or all this briefly in faculty positions, things like that before I left the university in 2010. But in that 17 years, what I was steeped in was that to make money, I.e., to get a grant to fund you so that you can stay on eventually be on faculty and run your own lab and have staff to go ask citing questions and go discover the root cause of human health and disease, if you're going to be successful in that journey you got to make money.

And the only way to make money through grant systems is to be reductionist. And to be reductionist has to get really severe these days, 'cause it's no longer enough to be, "I'm a kidney doc," that used to be enough to say, "I'm going to do research on the kidney." It's gotten so down in the weeds now that my grants... To give you a perspective on how pathetic this is in my life, my grant's focused on COUP-TF1. You've never heard of that. Nobody's ever heard of that. Nobody cares about COUP-TF1. Nobody should care about COUP-TF1. But to get a grant I had to be so specific that I was going to be the world expert in one single protein that was in the cascade of events that occur in mitochondria when cancer occurs. And so, I didn't get the chance to say that I was going to be a cancer doctor and find out the root cause of disease.

I didn't get to say I was going to be a cancer doctor and find out how to kill cancer cells. I had to say, "I'm going to do cancer research specific to COUP-TF1, and this mechanism, some mitochondrial metabolism within the construct of a cancer cell versus a normal cell." At that point, you've reduced yourself to seeing the entire world through a single protein. And so, all of the science that has been generated around AIDS, for example, was triggered through or done via grants that required the investigators to define one single lens to look through at this complex syndrome of AIDS. And the lens that got determined was we ended up at the very beginning of a sequenced DNA, somebody finally after almost 10 years of process in the 1980 to 1990 time period, 1991, '92, we finally stumbled upon a new genetic sequence that we would eventually call HIV and we would call it a virus.

And so, we've got this new genetic sequence that was showing up in all patients with AIDS. And so, we thought, "Oh, we found, thank goodness, now we can write a ton of grants and get massive funding acceleration." That's exactly how it happened 1991, '92 you suddenly see huge logarithmic increases in the amount of money that was going to global research towards HIV because there was finally a name for it. There was finally a reductionist viewpoint on this complex syndrome called AIDS. And so, in the end, we did that. So why does dogma develop? Because now you have trillions of dollars in medical research that is based on the belief and the necessity for that belief to say that HIV is the virus that causes AIDS.

There is no number one on the end of that sentence which would be your first reference in your first start, if that's your first sentence and that's a scientific statement, you should have at least one scientific peer-reviewed science reference to say, "How do you know that?" And you cannot prove that anywhere, and so we can't put that reference on there. And so that first sentence, this statement of funding, I got this research funded because I said, HIV is the cause of AIDS, and I'm going to tell you something about HIV. And so, it's a reductionist approach to funding, which then leads to a reductionist approach to thinking which leads to a reductionist approach to your willingness to ask new questions. And so, we have failed to ask new questions in the area of AIDS since about 1992. And when somebody does come along and threaten that, they're now threatening billions of dollars of research globally and all those academicians through just normal human defense mechanisms say, "That guy's got to be wrong. We all agree... That's old news, HIV causes AIDS, don't... You're a fool and you're an idiot and you're stupid and you're evil 'cause you're trying to take away our knowledge that would save all these people with AIDS." It gets really nasty when the human psyche gets involved. The ego will kick in at higher and higher levels as the threat factor keeps going up.

So, the threat factor of HIV doesn't cause AIDS is extremely disruptive, and they will go through all kinds of iterations to torture you and figure out to get your funding lost and undermine you, and we do this through a process called peer-reviewed science. And so, we get bully activity all the time in academia because the funding is done through peer-review. And so, if I put in for a grant that says, "I'm going to challenge the concept to HIV," they're going to pull five experts to look at my application to that grant, and those five experts have to decide whether or not my grant is viable or not. And if those five experts of HIV all wrote the word "HIV causes AIDS," on every single one of their 14,000 articles they've collectively written, they're never going to let my grant get to funding stages. And so, you cannot ask a disruptive question in academia, which I think is the end of academia. And so, when we matched curiosity with challenge or when we saw curiosity as a threat to the economics of science, that was the end of our scientific process. And so, all this rushing around the last few years of governments pounding their chest, "Listen to the science, listen to the science, listen to the science," what you're saying is, "Trust the dogma, trust the dogma, trust the dogma, don't challenge it, don't challenge it, trust the dogma," because, ultimately, we uncoupled curiosity from the scientific process.

Shawn Stevenson: And I want to ask you about this too, about what science really is as well. But that's one of the tenets or the underlying fabric of what we would perceive science to be, which is questioning things, exploration, discovery. But in reality, like you said, you cannot ask a disruptive question because the entire system is created in such a way that doing so undermines the entire system. And there's lot of money involved, there's a lot of prestige and accreditation and all the things. But like I mentioned, this is a much stronger phenomenon because of all the industry around it, but this has been happening for thousands of years, like with... Was it Galileo?

Dr. Zach Bush: Mm-hmm.

Shawn Stevenson: And these discoveries, and that's going to threaten the paradigm in which we live when we ask a disruptive question or make a disruptive discovery.

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah. I mean, you can go back as far as Pythagoras, as an easy example. Pythagoras 2,000 years ago came up with the mathematics of geometry and trigonometry that allowed us to somewhat point a new reality that the Earth wasn't flat. It was super disruptive information 2,000 years ago, 100% people knew that earth was flat. We weren't falling off of it. So, it certainly wasn't a ball, 'cause we would just fall off the bottom of it. So, we didn't understand gravity, we didn't understand any of these things that would allow a spherical planet to exist, and so we had this model in our heads collectively of a flat planet. Pythagoras comes around and said, "Dude, that's not working. The math doesn't work out. This thing is freaking round." Here we are 2,000 years later and we have a thriving, in fact, growing over, especially over the last five years, a growing flat-earth society. 2000 years, we still have a very...

Shawn Stevenson: Still hanging on.

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah, hanging on to the belief that that math has got to be wrong. And so that's going to happen, I think, 2,000 years from now, unless there's a real change in consciousness, we're going to have articles being written that HIV causes AIDS. No matter how many thousands of years of seven, there's going to be a small group that just keeps hanging on to that information. And so...

Shawn Stevenson: And the earth is flat as well.

Dr. Zach Bush: Galileo. So, earth is flat or round.

Shawn Stevenson: That in 2000 years, it's still going to be around.

Dr. Zach Bush: 2000 years, still flat. Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: But it's going to be tougher because we're going to have pictures. We're going to be out in space, being able to take pictures.

Dr. Zach Bush: We do have that. We thought the first spacewalk was going to be the end of that conversation. We thought 2010... My God, we got Mars rovers, we had taken how many pictures of the planets.

Shawn Stevenson: If you look up into the sky, you could see the planets and the sun, everything is a sphere... The Moon, except us. We're a carpet. We're a floating carpet in space.

Dr. Zach Bush: Also, the belief that the moon is actually just a prop that's up there. You find a lot of people in flat earth that don't think the moon is actually a planetary object, it's actually just a prop that the aliens have put there to give us an impression of a moon. There's a lot of interesting ways to tell the narrative about what we see. And at some point, you can lose judgment, is it stupid, is it smart? That's irrelevant. Scientific process is cool 'cause it says, "Okay, let's go with that thought. It's a prop from the aliens, and there is no backside of the moon, there's only one side, and that's why we only see one side of the moon, that rotates and so... It's because it's a fake thing, it's just green screen and Air Force, whatever it is." So, then we can start to our experiments around that. "Okay, what would that mean for the gravitational field of something that large? 'cause something that large is going to have a gravitational field. Does the surface of the moon express something that would mimic a flat object or round object? So, in many ways, fraction of light, different phases of the moon.

The ways in which the light shines across a waning moon and you can suddenly see the definition of craters, and you can see all this definition, and you can see the curvature of the moon and the waning move because there's lots of ways to go scientifically check that information, but to go check that information, you have to be allowed to ask the question. And one of my concerns about, again, this failure of science is science is not a body of knowledge, ever, and that's really concerning to me is that what got defined in last year’s makes people believe "Trust the science" would suggest that science is a body of unified knowledge. Science is a process in which we explore truth. Science is never a book of truth, and that's a very dangerous PR campaign. When we allow somebody to co-op science and say it's a known body of knowledge, then we're not allowed to challenge anything.

And so that's very dangerous time that we're in now, where people have been deluded into thinking that science knows what the hell it's talking about. I can guarantee you as a scientist who's... Work now, I still run my own basic science lab, it's 10 times cooler than the one that I had at the university. This is a private lab, and we do all this research on the microbiome, human systems, and all this, and we've got sequencers and all kinds of massive amount of information we get to look at in a given week or month, whatever it is. We know absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, because the complexity of life is so far beyond our imaginations and a scientific experiment. The reason is because science was designed to be reductionist. So not only was our funding reductionist, our science was reductionist. I'm going to go into that in a second, but I want to point out one other thing about this... HIV causes AIDS is the first sentence of every paper. Okay, so let's acknowledge that there's no reference on that sentence, nobody's ever proved that. So now we can consider that a hypothesis.

Okay, let's go ahead and say, "Okay, that's fine, go ahead and put that as a hypothesis at the beginning of your paper. But let's acknowledge it's a hypothesis." But then let's go and look at the scientific process, which tells us in week one of your statistics one-on-one class or in your clinical and trials course that you're taking, whenever, you never start an experiment with a hypothesis because you will screw up the results of that experiment every single time. To get a valid answer to your question, you have to start with the null hypothesis, and the null hypothesis is the opposite of your theory. And so really, every single paper should start with, "HIV does not cause AIDS. We are going to inquire here as to whether we can prove that or not." We should still be in the null hypothesis of HIV causes AIDS, because if we get away from the null hypothesis, then we're always going to see our results in the belief system of our hypothesis.

You have to have the discipline to believe the opposite before you can get an answer that you would hope to see, which is a big, big truth that we need to apply to our entire socio-political and socio-educational systems. You have to begin with, you are wrong, and the other person is right. If you don't start every communication with that fundamental start point, then you lose curiosity. And if you aren't engaged in curiosity during the pursuit of knowledge, you will fall into dogma all the time. You'll fall into somebody else's belief system instead of find the truth for you. And so, we need to start with the fact that the opposite story is true. And so, if you feel like you're anti-abortion, you need to start with the premise that abortion is a civil right to women. And then, go down that avenue and prove yourself wrong or prove the null hypothesis wrong so that you can sustain the hypothesis. Until you've proven the null hypothesis wrong through your scientific inquiry and through your curiosity pursuit, you will come up with the wrong answer.

And so, first of all, we need to live life by null hypotheses. Number two, coming back to that concept of reductionism and this reductionist system of asking a very simple causative question so that you write your grant and get funding, the other reductionist problem that we have in science right now is that we developed our petri dish concept of human with the philosophy that human cells were just human. And so, every time we grow a petri dish of human cells to then go study and explore, what happens if we give the human cells this chemical or this drug? What happens if we give the human cell this stimulus? And then we study the hell out of those downstream things, launch a bunch of grants and we start to name it after single proteins, and we get very reductionist about that. But the whole premise we now know is completely erroneous, which is human cells are never alone in the human body. And so, the fascinating thing that we've discovered over the last ten years in my lab is that human cells, when in isolation, are always dysfunctional and they are always pretty much psychotic, like they behave in these very intensely reactionary methods, and so all the cells signaling is abnormal, everything else. That same patient that you took those cells from is not just human.

It's a huge ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, Candida, and yeast and all these things that are feeding back to give new information to those human systems which make them resilient. And so, by studying human cells in isolation, we have no idea what human health and healing looks like because you cannot have human health and healing without a diverse ecosystem. And so, everything we know about cardiovascular disease, cancer, everything we know about major depression, everything we know... These have all been done in isolation models of basic science. And so, our biggest flaw, perhaps in the entire peer reviewed journal environment is that the premise that we've proved this thing was always done in isolation. And the second law of thermodynamics tells us over and over again that any system in isolation increases its level of chaos. A system that resolves its isolation, becomes part of a community, always expresses syntropy, is the opposite of that. And so, it turns out that human life is syntrophic, meaning it organizes itself in lesser and lesser states of chaos rather than increasing chaos. But as soon as you isolate that human being through a huge course of antibiotics and you lose the microbiome, it's going to start increasing its chaos.

As soon as you take that human out of its social environment and put them in solitary confinement, we use to just do that in prison. Now, we do it in the voice of public health. We say everybody should go into solitary confinement. As soon as you go into solitary confinement, you increase your chaos. And it's going to express itself as domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual violence, child abuse. The whole thing exploded when we went into 7.8 billion people, telling them to make themselves alone. We destroyed the fabric of sanity, really. And so now we have 300 million new households in poverty over the last two and a half years, we have an explosion, 1000%, 2000% increase in substance abuse, domestic violence, going down the list. Any system in isolation becomes more chaotic. An exciting reverse of that is, nature has never done isolation because she's always expressing a higher level of syntropy, more beauty, more complexity, more biodiversity for the purpose of adaptation that would then lead to more biodiversity, and the biodiversity feeds back for more adaptation. So, there's this beautiful feedback loop between bio diversification, adaptation, biodiversity, adaptation, adaptation, adaptation. The whole matrix of nature itself is constant iterative change, and the whole construct of human technology is to resist change, is to make life as reductionist as possible.

I don't want to show up as a new person today, 'cause I'd be complicated. I would have to listen into myself, I'd have to let go of all my old constructs 'cause myself worth is built on the fact that, I'm a dad or I'm a husband, or I'm an employee or I'm an employer or I'm a doctor, I'm a... This or that, or I'm on the PTA and we meet each other. We're like, "Hey, what do you do, man?" Like, "Oh, cool, you're a graphic designer," or "You're an artist, or... " We define ourselves in reductionist ways because it's simple. And unfortunately, life doesn't seem to like simplicity, it loves the complexity of beauty. And so, we're going to have to start to embrace a more deliberate process of understanding who we are each day and start having the curiosity to understand the null hypothesis in the other person, "What's the opposite of my perspective? What do you get over there? Enrich me, brother. Show me how you see this thing." And so that would start to build a society that's biomimicry as the immune system.

The immune system is to ultimately find the self-identity of the human within the context, within the rich biodiversity of an ecosystem, to find myself as a social agent of being human, or having humanity within me, is going to require a biodiverse garden of experiences and relationships around me, to give me as many perspectives as possible that are opposite of mine. And so that's going to lead to a really clear self-identity of who I am. And that self-identity is going to be not based in biology, it's going to be based in the quantum physics, because ultimately, I'm not a cellular being, I'm an atomic being. Every single molecule that... Billions of molecules in a single cell, every one of those is made by a billion different atoms. And so, billions of billions of other things at the fabric level is the atomic structure of you. And atoms don't obey any of the Newtonian laws of biology. It's always quantum physics and quantum physics says, the next reality is one millionth second away, and it's going to be the opposite of what you're experiencing right now, especially if you're witnessed. The Hadron Collider and all these efforts to really determine what is the behavior of a single electron, the unifying answer to that is, electron always reverses its spin as soon as it is seen.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, the observer effect.

Dr. Zach Bush: The observer effect. So, what does it mean to be an immune system? It means to be in constant observation of one another in a complex ecosystem, such that we do the opposite. And so, what's the real hypothesis of life? It's disproving the null hypothesis, which is, it's humans against everything.

Shawn Stevenson: You blew my mind today already. Already, you blew my mind. I really... It hit me in an entirely new way that our idea of science is the complete opposite of what nature is. It's the opposite, this reductionist perspective versus this continuous move towards integration. And it's just like, I gotten sit with this for a minute because it's really profound, because again, we're still harping away at minor details within science, and debating about these things and missing the point completely, that it's so much bigger, so much more expansive, so much more interconnected, and by isolating these parts, we become obsessed with this, to the degree... The discovery of bacteria, for example, was huge. We found the thing that's making us sick, right? And then we go an all-out war, us against them. And then we, of course, go way too far. And from there, then we get a powerful enough microscope, and we could zoom in, we could see all its viruses. We could fit thousands of viruses in that one bacteria. This is the little sh*t that's making us sick, right?

But we're going to get a powerful enough microscope, we might already have it, we're going to see the viruses have viruses, and it's going to be like, that's the little sh*t, it wasn't the original sh*t, it was this sh*t that are causing us to get sick. But this leads us to, there's also a growing community that are of the opinion, and by the way, this is one of the things we do here, we're very inclusive and we can have these conversations, and we can talk about the earth as a rug, Flat Earth Theory. And you're still invited to the party, not to say that there's a lot of grounds for that idea, but you're welcome to carry that idea. And with that said, there's a growing community of folks who are of the opinion that viruses don't exist. So, let's talk about that.

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah, it's beautiful. So, the question, is there viruses, dates back to a lot of work that was done towards the beginning of the 20th century, so about 100 years ago. There was a lot of evidence starting to collect that every cell exudes this genetic information. We didn't have the word genes at the time, 'cause we didn't know what a gene was, we didn't know what a DNA was. We had some theories as to how those things were occurring through Mendelian plant studies of how to create genetic sequences or change traits of plants when we breed them differently and things like that. So, the old pea plant experiments were the classic development of the Mendelian kind of genetic selection for different physiological traits and all this. So, we had some theories as to how genes were working, what they were and all that, but it didn't really concrete till later.

So, when we hear somebody saying, there's a big body of science that says there's no such thing as viruses, we need to understand that was based in an era where there was no understanding of DNA or no way to measure or sequence DNA, all of that. So, it's an old theory, but it's a good one, in that this is supported again by the opposite of the germ theory from Pasteur, and that Béchamp was saying, "No, it's actually the environment. It must be differences in the environment of the organism that allows it to either express or not express an illness when exposed to a germ." And so, he was witnessing in twin studies, that you could expose two twins to the same risk of illness, tuberculosis or cholera, things like that, that were a problem at the time.

Two different twins raised in two different households or environments. So, twins separated at birth, blah, blah, blah. You can study them in different sequences and find out one has completely different exposure response to tuberculosis than the other. And so, he was saying, "Okay, here's two people that are identical. And yet, they have completely opposite responses to these stimuli of a germ. So, the germ theory must not work." Damn good science there, really cool. There's kind of a reiteration of that in the early 20th century, people were saying, "There is no such thing as infection because else we would see it really consistently happening." And so, I think those premises are good, and more recently, they've starting to integrate into that same theory of there's no such thing as a virus, into the idea that genetic sequences that are exuded from the cells, 'cause they have to agree that that's happening all the time 'cause now we can measure that stuff, like there's so much genetic sequence that's... Emerges from the bloodstream or from my snot. We are churning genetic information out of ourselves and that's very easy to measure and demonstrate.

And so, the theory that there is no such thing as a virus is holding on to is, all that is just waste that's being exuded by the cell. It's not actually infectious agents, it's just waste product that's being exuded. And so, in some ways, that's spot on except for one real deep lesion in that theory, which is nature has never done waste. There is no waste in nature. Everything is an opportunity for an iterative, more rich process of information gathering and resource management. And so unfortunately, the fundamental flaw, I think, in that argument is this issue of, show me the other system where waste occurs? We now know that urine is not a waste system of the body. It's actually a way in which to refine and transit information back into the soil systems and all that. And so, when we reiterate urine back into plant systems and soil systems, boom of abundance in that garden. And so, a lot of the regenerative agriculture systems are asking people to collect their urine so it can be applied back to soil systems to get this recovery from chemical agriculture quicker.

Shawn Stevenson: Wait, you're saying we're a part of nature?

Dr. Zach Bush: It's a bizarre theory. And then the null hypothesis is pretty obvious, we're not of nature. And that's actually how we appropriately defined ourselves. Oxford dictionary, look up nature. It is landscapes, rocks, animals, everything as opposed to human or anything humans have developed.

Shawn Stevenson: The stuff outside.

Dr. Zach Bush: All the other stuff, as opposed to humans and anything humans have created. And so, we wrote everything that... We wrote ourselves and everything we've created out of nature, which would include our sociopolitical systems, our technology systems, our education systems. And the definition is correct, is we did choose to exit nature in these human constructs, forgetting that our biology can't exit nature, no matter how clever we think our education system is, no matter how clever we think our telescopes and microscopes have become, we are probing the wrong question, because the null hypothesis has not been asked. So we need to reiterate our understanding of biology within nature and therefore ask the tough questions to realize we are wrong about our department of transportation, our USDA, our EPA, all these regulatory environments. We're asking the wrong questions. We're not supposed to be protecting humans from chemicals. We're supposed to ask what happened before chemicals? How did nature make humans? And this classic thing that I get all the time is I get tons of people contact me all the time. Like, my doctor just told me that, should I trust this information? My God, like you're going to trust your doctor? Like, it's just a dude, man. That's just a woman that went through this education process in a reductionist environment to believe a very tight, narrow perspective on your biology.

Trust instead that you were born. The fact an embryo forms inside of a woman's womb and then gives forth this other entity that has completely different genetics so much so that the womb has to be this bizarrely walled off environment that has no communication with her immune system else she would kill that thing, that's a freaking miracle that happened in your mother's womb. And there's not one doctor, scientist, or anything else that has any clue on how nature's intelligent to do that over and over and over again so well. How is it that it's so precise?

I anticipated amazing things when I had my first kid. I'd been... Delivered babies in the Philippines that got me into medicine, and I was on my OB rotation in medical school when my first kid was born. So, I was like, "I'm always... Had this. I'm so good at this thing. I got this down." My kid born; nobody had told me what it feels like to look into the cosmos through somebody else's eyes. And that's when my son born at home, in this little apartment in Colorado. As young kid myself, I'm just curious and amazed and also really freaking cocky about everything I had learned in medical school and everything else. And so, so sure of myself. Man, when that kid came out of the veil and looked at me, huge, brown eyes, it just undid me. I knew I knew nothing at that point. It's like, there's something that happens energetically between souls that have been in each other's presence in this level of intimacy. You were within the woman that I made love to make that possible.

That level of intimacy is insane and will not be iterated or copied in any other social construct. That is an intimate relationship. And in that intimacy, for a moment before that kid gets programmed into an egoic realm, they're a pure soul. They are just sole incarnate at that moment. Incarnation just happened. They're in the body and they have no preconceived notions right now what it means to be human. They have no preconceived notions of what it means to be them. All they can be is "I am." That kid is freaking pure, and the Course of Miracles says something just mind-boggling cool, which is, when we walk around with these split minds that are protected by ego for... And the reason we develop a split mind is because we start to fear that we're separate from everything. And so, when we believe in separateness from nature and all other things, we develop this scarcity mentality about everything. And so, we think love for ourselves must be scarce. Our value must be scarce. Our own intelligence must be scarce. You said earlier...

Too often we think that our bodies are stupid or unintelligent systems. For that fundamental belief system ultimately, we have to include that we are unintelligent, that we don't know anything useful. And up in the head, that may be true, but when you look into that kid's eyes that is just in the I am state, the Course of Miracles says something rad. When you're in an egoic split mind, when you look at another person, you see a mirror and you see all of your own stuff. And so, we walk into a relationship in this realm to figure out who we are because we got to keep looking in these mirrors of like, "Oh my God, that person has a problem." And then you're in that relationship long enough, you're like, "Oh my God, that's me that has a problem." Your therapist finally breaks through with you one day like, "Really? You think that's that person who's doing this to you?" You are doing every relationship so that you can see the mirror, so you can find out your own stuff. The moment you finally escape that egoic mind, you become whole in your divine state, you finally see the other person. That's the Course of Miracles conclusion.

Someday, we may reach a level of wholeness, completeness within the individual, that that individual would look around and only see the extreme beauty of all the other souls, no longer needing the mirror. That's what every baby comes out of the womb as. So, when a baby looks at you and gives you extreme goose bumps, like, "Oh my god, what is happening right now?" You are being witnessed by a soul that has no ego yet. And if something witnesses you that purely, every electron in your body is going to switch directions because the observer effect that you mentioned. So, to be looked at by a baby is to be completely reversed in your electron spins for every cell of your body. And so why does your first child change you so much? Because they reverse the pattern, and suddenly you see everything from a different lens, and suddenly you just disproved the null hypothesis that I'm alone, that there's not enough, that there's scarcity, we're not connected to God, we're sinners, we have to work our way back through some sort of penitence and self-abuse and guilt and shame till we find God again.

You look into that baby's eyes, and you have to acknowledge right away, "Oh my God, we were never disconnected from source. We were born from source, we were always... We are right now connected to source, or else we'd be expressing such high chaotic state in the second law of thermodynamics that I would simply stop iterating 70 trillion cells to repeat a human body. I would just stop repeating the human body. I would disappear in front of you. The fact that I am here again this millionth of a second, suggests I am not an isolated system. I am in a cohesive-syntrophic system of witness. I'm being witnessed by something. And if you start to iterate further and further out in the universe, is the Moon in a chaotic state? No, that's not in a chaotic state. Alright, so it's actually iterating some sort of general process, even though there's no life there, whatever. It's got a life to its own self. It's got this generative quality that goes through phases, and it goes through different gravitational forces and it's in direct relationship to our ocean. If the moon was just a flat thing, we would have no tide, because the gravity that is required to move our oceans has to come from a very well-known sphere.

Shawn Stevenson: Wait, so you're saying it's something outside of our planet affects our planet?

Dr. Zach Bush: I'm saying that something's observing the moon to let it keep iterating as Moon. So, what's that? Maybe is Earth observing the Moon?

Shawn Stevenson: It's both. It's both.

Dr. Zach Bush: It's both. We are observing each other.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Dr. Zach Bush: So, the system is observing itself, but let's go to the universal scale. If our universe was in isolation, then it would be a system of entropy. And yet, we see a universe that is doing syntropy, which means that our universe is not alone. Universe is in the shape of a black hole, that's been demonstrated again and again by astrophysicists mathematically. So, we live within a black hole that we call the universe. Nature of a black hole is, no life can escape it, I.e we can't see past the boundaries of our black hole that we live within in this universe, and past that boundary, there must be something observing us, observing this universe. And so, is there a multi-verse? Is there parallel universes? There has to be something out there observing us, or else we would not have a syntropic universe.

Shawn Stevenson: Got a quick break coming up, we'll be right back. It's no secret that processed food manufacturers have a team of scientists chemically constructing Frankenfoods that are incredibly addictive, but also causative agents of degeneration and disease. It's one thing to tell yourself to stop eating these processed foods, it's another thing to our biology that can actually become addicted to some of these chemical and sweet elements. Well, researchers have recently discovered that there is a natural food element that's able to help our brains and our biology resist the urge to eat hyper-palatable, fake processed foods. A study published in the Peer Review Journal Appetite found that chlorophyll can actually aid in weight loss and reduce the urge to eat hyper-palatable foods. What's really interesting is that it was also found to increase the release of glucagon-like peptide-1 which according to research published in the Journal of Endocrinology has a potential to trigger body fat redistribution. This means that it's sparking the release of visceral, AKA belly fat and increasing the ratio of subcutaneous fat, which appears to be more protective against metabolic diseases.

Pretty cool stuff found in chlorophyll. What are the most chlorophyll-dense foods that you can find? Well, anything green is going to have chlorophyll. It's the indicator of the chlorophyll content, but specific foods like chlorella, getting its name from chlorophyll is really taking things to another level. Chlorella is actually 50% protein by weight, it's complete protein and one of the most protein-dense nutrient sources ever discovered. It also contains carotenoids like lutein and zeaxanthin that have been found to protect our vision from things like macular degeneration. And to top it off, a double-blind placebo-controlled study published in clinical and experimental hypertension, found that chlorella was able to significantly reduce blood pressure of test subjects with hypertension by the end of the 12-week study period. So being an actual source of treatment for people experiencing hypertension. Something remarkable about it. Chlorella, combine that with spirulina, another nutrient-dense super algae, which is 71% protein by weight. And spirulina, of course, is also another remarkable source of chlorophyll, along with being rich in B vitamins and copper and iron. List goes on and on in the micronutrient ratios. I get them combined together with other powerful super foods in the Organifi Green Juice formula.

Go to organifi.com/model, that's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com/model. You get 20% off their incredible green juice blend. Their red juice blend is amazing as well. My kids love it. Their gold is remarkable. Just everything that they carry, they're doing things the right way. Organic, low-temperature-processed to help to retain the nutrients, and they taste fantastic. Go to organifi.com/model for 20% off. Now, back to the show.

One of the coolest things that I just marvel in, and it's been a rare experience as I'm sitting here with you, to... And again, you kind of alluded to this, that potentially I couldn't even see this if it wasn't in me, and it's this... I'm witnessing a man who has this vast knowledge. At the same time, one of the most committed things that you've shared since you've been sitting here is how little you know and how little we know. And when I was... Privy to understanding this, the observable universe, that there are billions of other galaxies in the "observable universe." There's so much more that we don't have any ability, in a sense, to observe. There's so much more. And it really helped me to understand how small we are, how unimportant we are in one sense, but how deeply important we really are as well, because we're part of it all. It's this really remarkable balance, and you seem to be dancing within that, and it's really special. And I want to ask you how this happened, because as you mentioned, you went through your conventional training, so I want to ask you, number one, what got you inspired to work in the field of health? What made you interested in health, in the first place? And when did you transition from this kind of conventional dogmatic education, Cut, Burn, Poison paradigm, to transitioning to a much wider understanding of how stuff works?

Dr. Zach Bush: Yeah, it actually happened through birth, and so I was going to engineering, was the plan. I was a mediocre student growing up, junior high school. I didn't like school at all. I was pretty bored most of the time, and so me and my friends solved that by doing stuff outside of school that we loved. And so, by the time I was 14, 15, I was working with my hands all the time, so a bunch of my friends and I got into cars, and so we were restoring old classic cars and building cars from scratch and sand rails and four-wheel drives, custom four-wheel drives in Colorado. And so, we got into all this fun mechanics, and it was just a freaking blast, and the bigger the engine, the more of air you could blow in there, whatever it was. We were just always iterating for more power, more speed, more fun, more crazy adrenaline, whatever it took. So, we were having a freaking blast, and I just was having so much fun there in contrast to everything I was learning from school. I was like, "My future must be to build stuff. I'm going to be an engineer." So, I thought, "What's the coolest thing in engineering?" I was like, "Robotic seems really cool, 'cause you're basically building these human bodies that have autonomy and they're doing their thing."

So that was my goal. So, applied to University of Colorado engineering program, blah, blah, blah. And then in classic life-changing left-hand turns that happened, my very first girlfriend cheated on me, broke up with me, blah, blah. 19 years old, so heartbroken as only a 19-year-old can be. I was like...

Shawn Stevenson: Playing those break-up songs.

Dr. Zach Bush: "Oh man, oh man." I was just like, "I'm unlovable, I'm... " Garth Brooks was huge at the time in Colorado, and I was doing swing dancing every Friday night, and beers in your tears, and tears in your beers and all that. So just like, it was perfect drama to changing my life, because in that drama, I thought, "I got to take a year off to really just find myself and recover from my heart," which was absolutely truth. And so, I needed to go find myself before I dived into robotics. And moments, literally like 30 minutes after deciding, "I'm going to take a year off," an aunt of mine called and said, "What are you up to?" "Oh, I'm actually going to take a year off." She was like, "Oh, really? Why not move to the Philippines and help us, 'cause our midwifery clinic needs help." And I was like, "Midwifery, what's that?" Like, "Birthing kids," and I was like, "I know nothing about that." I was like, "But that sounds super interesting." And I wanted to go abroad in my year off anyways, and if I had a free place to stay and lodging and food, that's great.

And so, they told me how much money I would need to contribute to the household and all that, so I went and got a job at the discount tire company, I busted tires for six months. I just worked many hours I could possibly get busting tires. It was a dirty job. And so covered with just rubber and dirt and exudates about every day, and just a mess, but loved it, loved the camaraderie of working in the shop, loved the guys, good times, made a bunch of money living with my parents, saving every dollar I got from the tire company, bought my ticket out of the Philippines, had enough money to kind of live over there for six months, and birthed babies. And within like three births, I was like, "I can't go into robotics 'cause there's no robot that I will ever make in this lifetime that's going to mimic the miracle capacity of that little newborn kid." So, awe inspired. I was just dumbfounded the first time I got to see one of those kids come out and they look at me and they changed my physiology, because I was willing for a moment, just out of my awe, to come present with them.

If you're not present with a kid, you can't be witnessed, but if you're willing to be witnessed, if you're willing to come into just the awe-inspiring thing of being witnessed, it will change you. And so those kids changed me over those six months, and came back knowing I had to go into medicine or something like that, and so... A long story of how I go from mediocre student to finally getting into medical school, and was not a linear path, because obviously you don't get in with mediocre grades. So, I had to do a lot of volunteer work and got my EMT and worked in oncology wards, volunteering, all this stuff. So finally got into medical school. And as soon as I got into medical school, suddenly the doors blew off and I just got everything. And so, I went from being like a B student to honoring every course it took, because suddenly, I was given a system that made sense and it started with gross anatomy where I was allowed to dissect for four months, every last little sinew of a human body. And I just have a three-dimensional mind, it turns out, I understand 3D systems really well.

So, I was decent mechanic and all that. I was like, "Okay, we need this to connect to this. We can create something here." So, we were building cars from scratch because you kind of get A to B and know what alphabet needs to fall in around that. And so, once I had gross anatomy and systems of the body, really a three-dimensional thing, then every little nuanced fact that I learned in the textbook could fit into that three-dimensional model. And so now, 30 years later, I walk around with this huge model in my head where if somebody asks me a question, I just go over there and be like, oh yeah, livers connect there. And I can see patterns really easily. And that's just how my simple mechanical brain works, is just organize systems.

The rupture happened when I started to believe we could change the system, that we could micromanage that system. And so, I fell out of love for myself, ultimately, got very depressed towards the end of my academic career. Fell out of love with my career, fell out of love with my own science, fell out of love with all of it, because at some point I had decided that we could figure things out to micromanage this thing that I knew at my core, was a miracle. Because my first reason for entering that field was witness of a miracle. Childbirth is a miracle every time. There is no physiology to explain how quaternary protein structure happens. Nobody has figured that out, how protein knows how to fold into the complex, functional way that it folds, beyond any science we have today. And yet, that happens billions of times, correctly, perfectly for a fetus to occur, for that infant then to emerge from its mother.

And so, I witnessed miracles. And Einstein's classic quote, and I don't think he probably was the first one to say it, but he always gets credit for it because he had cool hair and seemed really smart. So, we love crediting things to Einstein, but he said in perhaps an iterative way, "There's only two ways to live life. Believe everything's a miracle or believe that miracles don't exist." And there's deep truth in that, because to segregate the concept of miracle to, "Oh, it's okay to do a miracle over there. HIV and AIDS? No, no, no miracles over here. We can't. It's not a miraculous system. It has to be very causative. It has to be this equals that, it has to be Newtonian A equals B, equal... A square plus B square equals C square, every time. It's geometry. The fact is miracles occur and we've seen it in medicine all the time. You see stage four metastatic cancer. They come in for their two-week follow up, and suddenly, everything's gone.

Shawn Stevenson: And what do they call it? Spontaneous remission.

Dr. Zach Bush: Spontaneous remission. They had to find some sort of scientific-sounding name for miracle. Because it sounds bad on your chart where, "Patient had a miracle on February 22nd." So, we had to come up with some words to be like, "Holy sh*t, no idea what the hell happened there." Apparently, biology can't go back in time. That's really difficult. Let's go with spontaneous remission. So yeah, it's that thing that happened to me, which was a career that started in miracles. And then I got the miracle engineered out of me, and it was through this reductionist understanding of science, where I started to read peer review science over and over again. And I developed a reductionist belief of what it means to be human. And in that, I found myself being a reductionist COUP TF1 expert, which is super depressing, because that was absolutely nothing to do with value. Nobody on their deathbed has ever died saying, "My God, I'm so glad I studied COUP TF1," never happened in the history of humankind. So, my third subspecialty... Internal medicine was my first one. Second one was endocrinology and metabolism, because I was really hungry for understanding, why does it happen? How does it happen? How does a liver communicate with a kidney, communicate with skin, communicate with the freaking human brain, and how does it happen down? And the endocrine system shows us how the brain communicates with the endocrine system and how the endocrine system then coordinates all these different organ systems to manifest a life.

So, I thought, this is getting at the root of it. Endocrinology, hormones, yeah. Studied that for oblivion, research, blah, blah, blah, only to find out that, "Oh my God, no, no, no. This is not the coordination system. That's just biological consequence of a much deeper system of communication, which is energetic." In the physics field, there's atomic structure that is obeying some law of nature that says, this will be human. And then this human will live in community with billions of other organisms, and in so doing, it will know itself, and in so knowing itself, it will witness beauty. And so, witnessing beauty, it will feel love. And therefore, it will be the highest expression of all nature. Right now, we need something in the form of human biology. And I believe if we find ourselves in a whole cosmic community of extra-terrestrial life and planets all over the place the next few years, okay, aliens exist. Then we have to... We're going to find out they all have similarities to the hominids, our size in particular, this size of 4 feet to 6 feet in height, or 4 feet to 8 feet in height, that general size of biology. And then the general structure of neurology within that is the expression of pattern recognition and information processing that's necessary for us to get to the state of consciousness that we can obtain possibility that we're not alone. And that only by being observed by another will we find our humanity.

And we are getting to that place where we're starting to believe our last 20 years of like, "Oh my God, we're only human because of the microbes." Now we need to understand that on the social level, we will only stop warring and trying to steal everything from one another when we find out that there's others out there that are not human, that can communicate and commune with us in communication, in a cosmic species experience. So, in a bizarre way, I expect extraterrestrial contact to be the cataclysmic event that will lead to a change in our humanity that will prevent the sixth-grade extinction, allow us to stay to play. If we refuse contact and we continue to be abusive and lower our vibration by polarizing our socio-political systems, polarizing our education systems, radicalizing our children into school shootings and drug abuse at three, and everything else that we do today, if we continue to lower our vibration, we will not get the opportunity to plug into a higher form of communication to life throughout the cosmos. And so, there is this opportunity to either ignore the fact that we are a syntropic planet. Every single time we've gone through a great extinction, more syntropy occurs. Life has gotten more bountiful, more bio-diverse and more intelligent with every one of the last five extinctions.

The last one is so remarkable. 55 million years ago, asteroid hits, wipes out our entire topsoil system, chokes out topsoil, we get an excess amount of gas in the atmosphere that gets absorbed in the oceans, the oceans die from acidification. We lost 90%-92% of life on earth. And then what happened? Left behind that extinction event was a viremic database of information that led to all kinds of new potential of life. Because when you put a species under stress, its biology allows for it to start misspelling its genes, and it then sends those genes out, not as waste products, but as new opportunity. Do viruses exist? Yes. Are we right about what viruses are? No. Viruses are not germs. Viruses are genetic possibility. Viruses are the genetic possibility of life beyond what it currently iterates, what it currently does.

So, when the extinction event happened, all of those species that were thriving on the planet sent out new possibility for life after extinction number five. And what happened is we moved from ferns to flowering wildflowers, to deciduous trees. We moved from reptiles to birds, to mammals, to humans, because of all of the potential left behind from the stress of a planet that was going extinct. So, in the end, the real fundamental change we have to make as humans is to lose the fear of death, because nobody feared death at the last extinction. Everybody simply said, "Oh, this is the end of this iteration of myself. I'm going to send out a billion other opportunities for new life to occur that's more resilient, more adaptive, more biodiverse than has existed at this moment, and life becomes more abundant, more intelligent and ultimately expresses a human."

Human then engineers our sixth-grade extinction by killing the topsoil, just like the asteroid. This time we're the existential threat to the soil systems, water systems, the planet, and through our chemical dependence and our agriculture systems, chemical dependence in our transportation industries, chemical dependence in our industrial technologies of cell phones and lithium-ion batteries in our cars, all this poison the planet. Solar panels poisoning the planet. Go on and on, anything that we say is green is not green. We are... Because we continue to believe in scarcity and separation from all things, we're not using biology as our template for design yet, and so we are dying. And in that existential threat, we can celebrate because left behind already on the planet right now is more genetic potential for life here than has ever existed before.

And for every year that we continue to pile on the stress and believe in waste and keep piling up our waste in our oceans, piling up our waste on things, we will lead to the demise of humanity for a rebirth and not a death. Every hospice space that I've sat in, which was my last subspecialty after endocrinology, hospice, and palliative care. I was the Social Medical Director on a hospice company in Charlottesville, Virginia, we were admitting 80 patients a week to my hospice service. So, when you're around that much death and dying, it's inevitable that you're going to bump into a lot of truth at some point. And in that death and dying process, sitting at bedsides over and over again, you realize, "Oh my God, death is not an end point, it is a complete re-birth." And the reason is 'cause too often, those people start going back and forth across the veil of what we call death and coming back to tell us what's on the other side.

And what's on the other side is all their ancestors and all of the collective wisdom of humanity as a whole, and angels and saints, or whatever they can come up with as human words for, but they're experiencing entities on the other side that immediately recognize them, see them and they're... Every electron in their body changes for having being seen. So, we will be seen by the baby, and we will be seen at the transit into the veil, to see the other side of human physiology, to see really the ethereal world and what actually exists in the world of souls. And in being seen there, we are changed again. So, when they get brought back into the body for a moment, their reaction like, "Oh my God, it's dismal here. Why did you bring me back? Why this?" 'Cause the reality over there is so much brighter than the reality here.

The experience of I am loved and received, and I am accepted, is a common word that you hear when people go to the other side of the veil. "I feel accepted, I feel home." That sensation, "I am accepted, I am home," is a much higher expression of self than we get here, where it's an egoic realm of split. So ultimately, it is a rebirth, not a death. And if in fact, we need to leave behind the genetic possibility of life beyond humanity, we'll do that. It's not an end point for the earth. Imagine the difference between triceratops and a group of humans that are sitting in fellowship, reflecting on the concept of God and sitting still in meditation and appreciating silence until they find the hyper-intelligence that they're connected to, the hyper-knowledge field that they can actually get connected to, so much so that you don't know anything, but you have access to everything.

And so that human in fellowship, having that spiritual enlightenment experience versus triceratops who's fighting it out in a state of being reptile, in a state of being in its own expression of self, is a pretty big jump. So, I love thinking about, "What's triceratops to human to X? What is the X thing that's coming in 50 million years?" It's about the timeline we'll see it if we let nature do it on our own.

But there's a possibility that we decide to shift and co-create with nature. And when we co-create with nature, we get to accelerate nature's adaptive capacity and we might stay to play with the new genetics of the new humanity that will update itself, upgrade itself through the stress that we've caused so far as we're halfway through this great extinction. We have the opportunity to create something and be a part of something radically different, not just at the genetic level, but therefore at the energetic level. What's that critical update that's going to make us 10 X our energy, again, hold more light energy per cellular unit than we currently do? And that seems to be right. The button we're holding right now in humanity. So why 7.9 billion souls show up right now? 'Cause it's never been more exciting beyond this planet because we're about to go through a metamorphosis and that metamorphosis might be the completion of the sixth extinction.

In which case there's more energy being released from this planet than ever in history 'cause there's more biodiversity and species development on this than ever in history. Therefore, more energetic information, more genetic information, more spiritual consolidation of possibility. Right here. We are seeing a rush of souls onto this planet right now to be part of this journey. And so, the miracle is that you got to participate. You showed up right now. Each of you showed up right now because nature iterated you in the womb of your mother in a miracle event that would be the most obvious effect of syntropy. From nothing came you. From nothing came you and you are here to witness the beauty that is between my words, that is between the thoughts, that is evident in the nature around you. So if you doubt any of the words I say, go out and watch the sunset tonight and think what would've created, not just the sunset, perhaps more importantly, what level of intelligence within the universe who know how to arrange the rods and cones in the back of your eye, such that you would be the species, be able to appreciate pinks, reds, blues, deep purples in that sunset because there's no other species that sees that sunset that way.

You're the only one that sees it that way. A bat cannot see that sunset. You are here to witness the sunset, see the beauty and you'll know the love of the design of a human being gifted with six senses, the five obvious ones and then that deep sense of who you are coming in your gut. And so, in the end, good gut health equals good self-identity. When you have good self-identity, you learn to listen into the sixth sense, which is that north star, that compass within you that says, "Yes, this is my path. I'm on the path." And what path have you ever hiked in the mountains that didn't have the right destination? You start walking the path and you know damn well that thing's going to end up at the top of the mountain, else they wouldn't have put the path in.

You were born. Therefore, the paths got the right destination. You are on the path of life. It has the right destination, which is re-entry into the divine at the top of the mountain. And the view that you will have in those last couple of seconds of life is stunning. And that's what you get in hospice care, is get to listen to what it looks like from the top of the mountain. And over and over again, people told me, "It's the relationships mother*cker." Get in touch with more people, love more, spend more time together. I never heard anybody say, "I wish I'd studied COUP TF-1 more." I had never heard somebody say, "I wish I had a bigger bank account." Nobody ever said, "I wish I had passed more money onto my children." Nobody ever because they're watching their own money just tear their kids apart already.

Nobody ever said any human construct was important. They only recognized the importance of relationships from the top of the mountain. And so, your path is going to the right space. My path is going to the right space. It happens that they all meet at the top. Every path meets at the top of the mountain of a human experience that is brushing this thin boundary between a human expression, a finite moment of human life expressed from an infinite soul. That classic knowingness that a light wave can be a particle and the particle can be the light wave at the same moment. That's to express that the light wave, which emanates forever all the way through space, how stars get to us billions of light years away, light never stops. You can't block the power of light, but it can pick moments to express itself as a particle, which is now a finite existence.

And so, your body is a finite particle expression of an infinite soul that showed up right here to witness beauty because the infinite soul has no eye to see the sunset. We picked this finite moment to see the beauty of God, to see the beauty of the universe, whatever we want to call it. And in that witnessing, we will shortchange every electron in space and time. You will change the sun and the atmosphere between it that would collaborate to make that sunset. You will see the ocean change every electron in that ocean if you will be still enough to witness the ocean. But right now, all you're seeing is, you look at the ocean, you see a reflection of yourself, which is, "Gosh, that thing is so big. And I feel so small, and I feel hopeless." In your best state you're like, "Well maybe I'll put my worries on the ocean. I'll go surf for a while and try to dump my emotional jazz. I'll try to ground myself." The aha moment when you find out is, "Oh my God, I can change every electron in that huge ocean simply by watching the fricking sunset over that ocean. If I can change every electron in that ocean, what makes that separate from me? Oh, that is a part of me. I am the observer of that, that limb of biology that is a ocean." And this is the miracle that we get to witness now is that we're here on purpose. We're here to witness beauty and seeing the beauty, we may just find out what love is.

Shawn Stevenson: Wow. I'm blown away. Dr. Zach Bush. You've taken us throughout time, throughout space. You've helped us to analyze what reality is. Our true power. You're basically like a conglomeration of an infinity gauntlet. You're like Thanos, but like a good version of him. Alright. This is what I'm really feeling, and I just appreciate you so much for doing the work and making the decisions that you have that brought you here to this place, because we're so much bigger than we give ourselves credit for and it's such a special thing just to understand that we are part of it all, and we have the ability to affect our reality. And you said this powerful word, and this is really just sticking with me. Is co-create. And I'm grateful to co-create this moment with you. And if you could, can you let everybody know where they can follow you and get more information and just be able to potentially put on the infinity gauntlet themselves.

Dr. Zach Bush: That's awesome. Yeah, you can connect through a whole myriad of ways now, but ZachBushMD.com is my favorite way to connect just because it eliminates the static of social media. So ZachBushMD.com. All my educational material is there, the Global Health Education Summit I do every couple of months now. It used to be every month during the pandemic. And there's deep dives there if you want to do three hours of what is a virus and how do viruses work and why we need to lose the fear-guilt paradigm of the pandemic and everything else. That's there in the very first lecture, the Global Health Education Summit called The Virome. And then it goes through many other different topics, some exciting ones, the breakthroughs that we make in our understanding of addiction and mental health in that particular Global Health Education Summit is phenomenal.

Many of these, I have panels of doctors, some of them you'll have to suffer through three, three and a half hours of me talking about the virome, but in general, I've got panels of experts that are unexpected, and these are not the experts of our academia. These are the experts of life. These are the ones that have observed and been willing to dismantle themselves over and over again, their belief systems until they find the miracle of life. And so, I love having people who have re-embraced miraculous nature around us, and I interview them as to how we start to understand these complex systems of disease and health and how we might iterate something different as to a future of healthcare that might actually foster health rather than manage disease. So that's ZachBushMD.com. If you are finding that social media is the easiest way to connect Zach Bush, MD on Instagram, Facebook, but I really welcome you guys to go deeper in on that.

We have an incredible eight-week program if you want to really step into your nature. The whole premise of the whole thing is you are a miracle, and we take you through all of the processes to align yourself with that understanding. And when you start to understand your relationship to food, breath, movement, fasting, like in the context of the miraculous nature that you have, you suddenly release yourself. And the fact that you are a co-creative element of the divine, you are not some pixels within some unintelligent biologic system. And so, we elevate each person that goes through that to that miraculous status, not for what we do, but for the space we hold and the mirror that we offer up to you. It's a coaching program. You got a committed coach that walks through that eight-week journey with you. You can do it one on one, or you can do it in group to reduce the cost.

But it's an extraordinary experiment in revealing human nature to ourselves. It's the eight-week projects. That one's journeyofintrinsichealth.com, journeyofintrinsichealth.com. So, your pile doesn't show notes that people aren't scribbling those down right now, but anyway, lots of ways to connect outside of that, that I won't bore you with right now. Our nonprofit that takes you deep into biologic systems of regeneration is farmersfootprint.us. We would love for you to join that. We have a lot of exciting programs that are connecting community over this exploration of what is the true definition of regeneration. We can't boil it down to regenerative soil systems. We can't just expect farmers to go fix our problem as humanity, because no matter how good you grow your food, if you still believe you're not a miracle and you still believe you're disconnected from the divine, you're going to still be a consumptive destructive element within the nature.

And so, we have to reconnect everything. And so, Farmer's Footprint is working to go beyond our understanding of regenerative food to regenerative humanity and what is that going to look like. So farmersfootprint.us. If you're in Australia, we just launched farmersfootprint.australia down there as well with an incredible team down there. We're in the process of getting the UK revved up too. So, we really need to help the Western world re-dream itself back into our divine state. And so, Farmer's Footprint taking one aspect and Journey of Intrinsic Health taking another aspect of that. And the exploratory co-creative process that we see is coming out of all these environments is pretty exciting.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah.

Dr. Zach Bush: The community's building something new.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, man, so powerful. Thank you so much for sharing your incredible wisdom and wow, so much to take part in. And also again, we'll put those resources in the show notes and again, man, I'm just... If people only knew even just the timing of things working out to have you here at this moment is really special.

Dr. Zach Bush: Proof of a miracle.

Shawn Stevenson: Yes, right. And again, I just appreciate you so much for coming to hang out with us.

Dr. Zach Bush: Thrilled to be with you. All of you are here on purpose. It's wonderful. We witnessed all you.

Shawn Stevenson: Let's go. Dr. Zach Bush, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into the show today. I hope you got a lot of value out of this. Sometimes it's incredibly valuable to just look at things from a different perspective to change the lens that we're viewing our reality through. And so, I hope that you were able to do that today in some capacity. And also, I don't know about you, but I'm trying to find a newborn baby so I can get some eye-gazing and going on and get reconnected, get my electrons reoriented, but it's such a powerful understanding because we're so much more than we give ourselves credit for. And we're connected. We're connected to the bigness of all of it. And even in our little microcosm that we exist in, our little micro world, we have an entire galaxy within our own bodies, an entire universe.

And it's such a special thing because once we get into this paradigm where we are negating how much capacity or how special we are or how much potential we have. Immediately we're just giving up before we even get started. So again, I hope that this conversation helped to spark a reanalyzing of things, a different perspective, and also holding a hope for the future and remembering how remarkable we truly are. Thank you so much for tuning into the show today. If you've got a lot of value out of this, please share it out with your friends and family. Of course, you can tag me. I'm at @Shawnmodel on Instagram. You can tag Dr. Zach Bush as well and let him know what you thought about this episode. We've got some amazing master classes and powerful interviews coming up. So, make sure to stay tuned, take care, have an amazing day. I'll talk to you soon.

And for more after the show, make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com. That's where you can find all of the show notes. You can find transcriptions, videos for each episode. And if you've got a comment, you can leave me a comment there as well. And please make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that the show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much and take care. I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.