The Dr. Hyman Show - Why Healing Our Soil Is the Real Healthcare Revolution

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Our health and the health of our soil are deeply intertwined. Modern agriculture has become heavily dependent on synthetic inputs and industrial practices that strip the land of vitality, and the farmers of agency. Many farmers no longer eat what they grow, suffer from poor health, and experience alarming rates of depression and suicide. But there’s a path forward: regenerative farming not only restores soil health and increases nutrient density in food, it also revitalizes rural communities and offers economic resilience. By reconnecting with natural systems and rebuilding diversity in our soil, food, and microbiomes, we reclaim both ecological balance and human well-being. In this episode, I discuss, along with Allen Williams, Dr. Daphne Miller, and Ian Somerhalder the many facets of modern-day farming, including what we need to pay attention to and why we need to reclaim our soil. Allen Williams is a founding partner of Understanding Ag, LLC and the Soil Health Academy, and is a partner in Joyce Farms, Inc. He has consulted with more than 4,000 farmers and ranchers in the US and other countries, on operations ranging from a few acres to over 1 million acres. Allen and his partners pioneered many of the early regenerative agriculture principles and practices and now teach those to farmers globally. He is a “recovering academic,” having served 15 years on the faculty at Louisiana Tech University and Mississippi State University teaching genetics and physiology. Allen has been featured in the Carbon Nation film series, Soil Carbon Cowboys, on the Dr. Oz show, ABC Food Forecast News, and in Kiss The Ground, A Regenerative Secret, The Farmer’s Footprint film series, and the Sacred Cow film series.  Dr. Daphne Miller is a practicing family physician, Clinical Professor at the University of California San Francisco, and Founder of the Health from the Soil Up Initiative. She is the author of two books: The Jungle Effect: Healthiest Diets from Around the World and Farmacology: Total Health from the Soil Up. A pioneer in the “Healthy Parks, Healthy People” initiative, Miller helped build linkages between our medical system and our park system and writes her patients “park prescriptions” to get outdoors. She also developed a soil learning lab for health professionals at Paicines Ranch in Hollister California. Ian Somerhalder is an American actor, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. Best known for his iconic roles on "Lost" and "The Vampire Diaries," he is co-founder of The Absorption Company (a revolutionary supplement company formulated for increased absorption) and co-owner of Brother's Bond Bourbon. His recent work includes executive producing the documentary "Common Ground" (2023), which highlights regenerative agriculture's innovative solutions to combat climate change. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: Can Regenerative Agriculture Reverse Climate Change And Chronic Disease? Why Your Health Depends on the Soil Why Our Farms Hold the Key to a Healthier Future

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Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day, so I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive, for live Q&A's, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated, doctor-trusted supplements and health products at DrHyman.com.

And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hymen Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap Try free to start your seven day free trial. We became increasingly reliant on inputs and own products that what I now call band-aids on a gushing wound. You know, that that's all those products are. The vast majority of our research, the vast majority of the things that we, the practices that we implement in agriculture today and the products that

we utilize and apply never address the root cause of the things that are truly impacting us from the diseases to the past to the lack of fertility to the soil degradation to the animal health. They never really address it. So again, it's putting a bandaid on the gushing wound. And here's what's happened over the last several decades in farming. Farmers have been encouraged and led through federal policy, through crop insurance program subsidy, and many even lenders and everybody else to become more and more specialized. To the point that today, and Mark, this may be very surprising to a lot of consumers, but today the vast majority of farmers do not eat anything

of farmers do not eat anything that they produce on their farms. They go to the grocery store just like everybody else. Now, how sad is that? That we're not as farmers. We don't even know. Now, obviously I do because we're very different. We're regenerative in what we do. We produce a lot of what we eat today again, like when I was growing up. But look, the vast majority of farmers today, they themselves have no clue what really good nutrient-dense food tastes like. They are also entrapped and ensnared in the same food cycle, in this highly processed foods foods and so on and so forth that every other consumer is ensnared in as well. And you said that you know farmers when you grow up are skinny and now they're all overweight. Right, right. Well they don't do it. Farmers today bite because of our highly specialized equipment GIS you know GPS know, GPS guided equipment and so on

and so forth, basically they're very, they're like a truck driver, they're very sedentary, so their butts are seated in the seat of a tractor, a combine, a sprayer, whatever the case may be, you know, for long hours every day and they're not even having, on many of these tractors and combines today not even having to physically steer. They're just listening to podcast or listening to the radio or whatever. And so the honest truth is I find that got awful boring. Okay. Yeah. And mind numbing to think that you have to farm that way now

because in almost all of them have consultants that are provided by major agribusiness. They're called crop consultants. And so what we find is farmers today are making fewer and fewer of their own decisions. Those decisions are made for them by their lenders, by their suppliers, by their consultants. And their ability to think and to reason about what they're doing and why, their whole decision-making capability has basically been co-opted and their decisions are

being made by others. So even though they take all the risks, they own the land or they lease the land, they have to own the equipment, they have all of this incredible debt, what's happening is that they still are not the key decision-makers on their own farms. They may think they are, but in reality they're not. And so what we're seeing, and I wrote an article about this last year relative to the significant amount of depression and suicide in the farming community. Again, what a lot of consumers may not realize is that depression is rampant in the farming community right now because of the significant financial stress and even environmental stress that's on these farmers. The suicide

rate is among the highest of any profession in the world, not just in the U.S. but in the world. So it's also from a health point of view, it's one of the most dangerous professions. So it's also from a health point of view, it's one of the most dangerous professions. Parkinson's rates are extremely high. We know that's very much linked to pesticide and agrochemical use. So there's a lot of health consequences from dealing with all those agrochemicals as well for these farmers. You know, the cancer rates have skyrocketed, you know, neurological disorders have skyrocketed, and then of course, all types of inflammatory disease due to obesity and just their diet, their daily diet, you know, because again, they're not eating any better than the average consumer.

So the very things that you deal with on a daily basis as a medical doctor with a lot of consumers are the very things that the farmers themselves are dealing with as well. And the most discouraging thing is the lack of hope that we experience and encounter out there among the farming community. And that is why we do what we do because we want to restore that hope and we want to give them an opportunity to not only be much more viable and profitable in their farming operations and be able to remove and separate themselves from all of these dependencies, but we also want to restore

their quality of life. And that's what they're really missing today, Mark, is the quality of life sucks for many of these farmers. You know, it's just sort of seems like they're very similar to what I do. You know, I see patients come in, their health is so degraded, just like the soil and the farms degraded, they're stuck in the, you know, pharmaceutical trap, as opposed to the agricultural chemical trap and diabetes on piles of medications, and they feel hopeless. And yet within a very short time of people changing their diet, they can unhook from the medical industrial

complex, get off the medications, use food as medicine, lose tons of weight and reverse their diabetes and all kinds of chronic illnesses pretty quickly. And it gives them hope. So I think you're offering the same message. I think of what you do as sort of regenerative agriculture. And what I do is regenerative medicine. I mean, functional medicine is ecosystem medicine.

It's about treating the whole ecosystem and creating health within it as a way of creating a healthy person. We don't treat the disease, we treat the person's own constitution using natural principles to help restore function. And you do the same exact thing with agroecological systems and restore function.

And as a side effect, you don't need the agrochemicals, you don't need the specialized seeds, you don't need the fertilizer, and you have all these beneficial side effects. So the side effects of eating healthy and fixing these diseases are all good ones. And the side effects of doing this agriculture are all good ones, right? You can conserve water, you can restore soil carbon, you increase biodiversity, you increase the phytonutrient density of the plants, the mineral content of the plant. I mean, it's just all these

beneficial ripple effects and the farmers make more money, they're happier. But it seems to me there's this barrier we have to overcome where people who are farmers don't see the situation that they're in. They're sort of locked in it and they can't see where the horizon to go. There's a different way. And how do they unhook from that incredible burden of debt and loans and crop insurance and their way their farms are set up and the sort of the scale of it is so big. And I would love you to talk about, you know, how you work with these farmers to get them to one, see the light and two, have the confidence to actually start to transition and what you're experiencing out there in the field because with your Sarl Health Academy and Understanding Ag, you are actually out there running around the country, meeting

with farmers in rural communities, helping them understand that there is a different way. And you shared with me before that 10 years ago, you couldn't get 10 people in a room, and now your rooms are filled with 60 or 70 farmers looking for a different way. So how do you get them to cross that barrier? And what does that look like for the average farmer? Yeah, so excellent question. And the first thing is always education. You cannot implement and practice what you don't know so they have to learn and that's why we created the soul health Academy as

that Vehicle through which they can begin to get that education. And the academies are designed specifically to be able to help farmers go back to their farm, to their ranch, and implement these practices immediately. So our schools are designed, they're multiday, number one, because there's a lot of ground that we have to cover. Secondly, they're very hands-on. Third, we always host them on a regenerative farm or ranch so that those in attendance get to see these practices actually being implemented and they get to see and

experience the result of what happens and obviously be able to interact directly with those regenerative farmers and ranchers so that they can learn from them. So the educational process and that component is critical and so we do a three-day school initially for these farmers and ranchers with half the day in the classroom each day, half the day out in the field. I often say that all farmers are inherently from Missouri, the show me state, because they always want you to show them, right?

Yeah. And farmers are very visual, very hands-on. So that practical component is critical. But when we get them in the field, though, we re-teach them how to be keen observers. You know, as a medical doctor, you have learned that observation of your patients is one of your key tools, and being able to properly assess and diagnose and treat. And we have found the same thing in working with the soil and working with repairing ecosystems, that observation is absolutely crucial. So we teach them how to observe and we actually go through observational exercises with them

each and every day. And you will be amazed at what happens here. It's almost like the cartoons where, you know, people have an idea and you see the light bulb above their head in the cartoon. You can almost see that, you know, and then you see their eyes light up and get big and they're like, oh my God, I get it now. I get it now. And these are people that have been out on the land their whole life, Mark, okay? But yet, their eyes are open, their ears are hearing, and their noses are detecting the aromas. It's like for the very first time in their lifetime,

these are things they've never observed. But then the second thing that we do, we started at the school and continue it afterwards, is we develop a network, we provide a network of support for these farmers, because often what happens, their local communities do not support them. Because peer pressure in the farming community is far worse than it is in any elementary or junior high school. I promise you. What's that weird stuff that Joe's doing down the road on his farm? That's kind of weird. Exactly.

I didn't feel his field. It looks terrible. You know, it's kind of a mess. Right. So if you're not doing everything like your neighbors, they're going to let you know it. And they're going to say, what in the heck do you think you're doing? And even your own family members will do that to you. And then of course, everybody that sells you something is doing that as well, right? They're telling you, you're an idiot for making any changes. And so we have

to provide these farmers for them to be successful, they're being bombarded with that all the time. So we have to provide for them a brand new network, a network of support and encouragement and mentorship. And so that's the other thing that we provide through the Soul Health Academy and Understanding Ag. And then the third leg, we call it the three-legged stool. The third leg of what we provide to help them be successful is that ongoing mentorship and consultation. Because as they start down this path, down their journey to regenerative agriculture, they are going to hit some roadblocks and some issues and challenges just like anything else that you may change in your life. And they're going

to need that a little bit of ongoing support, just like you support your patients on an ongoing basis. So take like former that you met because we've got 5,000 acres of a soybean field who's tied into Monsanto, now Bayer, full-on fertilizer, agrochemicals, tillage, big equipment, locked in the banks. He goes home, he goes, here's your course, he gets so excited. He's like, I'm going to do this. What are the barriers and obstacles and how does he go from a monocrop or maybe two true crops to a diversified, resilient, regenerative, organic farm. Yeah, so excellent question. He may want to do it, I just imagine there's a lot of barriers that are set up within the system that prevent him from doing that and they don't support him with financial supports on the back end like crop insurance that

make him feel secure to do it because as a farmer you're not making widgets in a factory you can do any day any night 24 7 you deal with mother nature and weather and droughts and storms and floods and fires and all kinds of stuff so how do how do they how do they make that transition because i think that seems to me the biggest barrier well the the very first thing that they have to understand and then start implementing or what we call the six principles of soil health and obviously they get that sort of drilled into their heads during the academy. I'll give those to you and your listeners very very quickly. The first one is context. You've got to understand the context of your farm. That includes goals

and objectives, profitability, targets, quality of life, even spiritual aspects, the whole bit. And location. Absolutely. Environmental, everything. If you grow in Saskatchewan or Mississippi, it's a little different. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So you have to understand your context, and believe it or not, because of the constraints and the influences that many farmers have, you'll find that they truly do not fully understand their own context, and you have to help them

with that. The next is we teach them to minimize disturbance. So one of the first things, the very first steps they can take when they go back home, is to start significantly reducing the amount of tillage they do, because the vast majority of farmers are still what we would call full-till farmers. In other words, they're going out there and they're doing multiple rounds of plowing, you know, moldboard plowing, they may do chisel plowing, you know, disking, those types of things. So they're steadily churning up the soil and creating a lot of bare

soil release on a lot of carbon. So the second step, beyond understanding context, is to transition them from full tillage to no-till. And that's actually a relatively easy transition, and most farmers can make that transition even within their first year on the vast majority of their land. So we teach them how to switch from full till to no till that minimizes disturbance in the soil, and that's absolutely critical. The third thing is we teach them to keep that soil covered or armored. So again, the majority of farmers only have plants growing in their soil and covering that soil, an average, believe it or not,

of only about 120 to 140 days a year. And the rest of the year, that soil is bare. And that's creating enormous problems that we can talk about here in just a moment. But we teach them to keep the soil covered. So you're keeping it covered when you have your cash crop in the ground. But after the cash crop, you've got to follow that with diverse cover crop. And that cover crop then grows and keeps the soil armored and covered. So that's easy enough to accomplish as well. So we can help them in their very first year identify their context, minimize soil disturbance, and then plant cover crops to keep the soil covered or armored. And that allows us to keep living roots, which is the fourth principle,

living roots in the ground year-round. So that allows us to accomplish that. Now what that does is that starts them down the path of reducing their reliance on synthetic fertilizers and on all of the chemicals, the fungicides, the insecticides, the herbicides, and so forth, because the living roots are the thing that stimulates and feeds the microbes in the soil and then allows those microbes, it fuels those microbes to be able to recharge the nutrient cycle, that mineral cycle in the soil,

so that we can then start gradually reducing these required inputs. The fifth principle is diversity. And so we teach them to increase the diversity of their cash crop rotations and to also have highly diverse cover crop mixes that they're planting in between their cash crops. Diversity of plant species is critical. The work of Dr. Fred Provenza. Yeah, it was on my podcast, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Fred's wonderful, isn't he? And his book, Nourishment, is just fantastic. So I'd recommend that for all your readers as well as another book to read. But Fred's work has

highlighted the critical importance of diversity and producing this broad array of phytochemicals, phytonutrients that are vital to soil health, plant health, ecosystem health, animal health, and of course, ultimately, our health. And then the final principle, the sixth principle is integrate livestock. So we teach these farmers, you know, the vast majority of row crop farmers today no longer have livestock. And for some of them, it can have been decades since they've had livestock. So we teach them to reintegrate livestock into that system to more quickly recharge and re-fertilize that system in a natural manner. And when you

combine all six of those, Mark, together, that's the magic. You combine all six of them together and now they're making very rapid progress. So we start them, all these six principles, going down those steps, we encourage them to do their own own farm research, and we help them with setting that up and doing that. It can be very, very simple, but, and I'll give you one quick example, I'll give you many more, but one very quick example of how rapid this can be, and how impactful it can be, is a farmer by the name of Adam Grady, located in eastern North Carolina, the coastal plains of North Carolina.

They're Adam's 10th generation. Their farm has been in their family since the 1780s. In 2017, that was their first year of regenerative agriculture. And they dove in with all six of these principles. In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit them, and they ended up with nine feet of water, flood waters, covering their farm. In just two years of regenerative agriculture. The resiliency, biological resiliency created in just two years is what saved Adam and his family's farm. All of their

neighbors' farms were just completely destroyed. All the crops, all the pastures, everything turned completely brown from the floodwaters. Adam's green back up immediately. He was even able to get back in his fields two years after the flood waters were seeded and plant diverse cover crops. He was the only farmer in his region that was able to graze his livestock actively through the winter. Everybody else was feeding hay and feed supplements and everything else because they had nothing to graze. But also in 2018, in spite of the flood, in spite of Hurricane Florence, they still saved on a 1,200 acre farm $200,000

in input cost in just their second year. At the end of his third year, at the end of 2019, right after Thanksgiving, and i still distinctly remember this adam called me up all excited he said alan alan i just came back from a bike i want to share something with you what is that adam and he said i just paid off all my loans at the bike and i just bought another farm paying all cash wow you bought another farm paying all cash Wow, but another for a no cash Exactly. So he and so let me tell you what's happened. Oh farmers are afraid of the economic Yes of transitioning because It'll cost them more they'll lose money. There's a risk to it, but you're saying that the risk is just more

Theoretical it's not actually true that if farmers follow these principles and are assiduous about it, they can actually quickly turn a profit even in the first year. That is exactly right. This is not a prescriptive or formulaic system that causes you to have to experience losses in the first one, two, and three years, you still have all the tools available. You just learn to use them much more judiciously. And what this system does is it's adaptive rather than being formulated, prescriptive, or like a recipe, it's adaptive. So you're constantly flexing and changing according to conditions. And just like with Adam, so he transitioned from all genetically modified crops to now

he's planting all conventional seeds, so no more GM seed. He completely cut out all seed treatments, so no more neonicotinoid treatment on any of them. Those are pesticides. Exactly. And you know, and just so your listeners know, there's enough, according to the work of Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, there's enough neonic on a single kernel of corn to kill 100,000 honey bees. Wow.

Yeah. It's amazing. Not a corn, a cob, but honey bees. Wow. Yeah, it's amazing. Not a corn, a cob, but just a single kernel. A single kernel, a single seed of corn that you would plant. Enough neonic to kill 100,000 honey bees. So Adam's been able to totally do away with seed treatment. So that's no longer an issue.

He has been able to reduce his fertilizer use by 75% in just three years. He's reduced his fertilizer requirements by 75% and continuing to reduce that. He has done away with all fungicides, no more fungicide treatments, no more insecticide treatments. So all of that has gone by the wayside. And so everything has improved and we've done a lot of tours and he's even hosted two soil health academies and the benefits are just incredibly experiential. When you go there, you can see, smell, hear, taste the differences

that it's known as far. I'm all about food first, but some nutrients like magnesium are nearly impossible to get enough of through diet alone. Our soils are depleted and things like sugar, caffeine, and stress drain our levels. Magnesium supports over 300 functions in the body. Think metabolism, sleep, energy, pain, and more. That's why I recommend magnesium breakthrough by bioptimizers. It's the only supplement with all

seven forms of magnesium for full body support. Get 10% off at bioptimizers.com slash Hymen with code HYMAN10. The story of how our internal microbiome, all these billions of bacteria and fungi, nematodes, how they are linked to soil is still trying to be understood and told. It's not the sciences, you know, in its infancy. And we know, of course, that our microbiome is a unique microbiome. You know, each one of us has a unique microbiome.

It's like a fingerprint. It's a fingerprint. It's not the same microbiome as soil, but we know that there is a lot of crosstalk. We evolved as these single cell creatures out of soil. We all grew up in the dirt, right? Hunting and gathering. And over millennia, what's happened is that different microbes have found their distinct

niches, but that they in fact do communicate. And this research is slowly, slowly coming out. And food is probably one of the really important shuttles that goes back and forth in terms of informing the two microbiomes and influencing them in different ways. But it's not to say that our microbiome is the same as soil microbiome. But there's crosstalk, which is the concept of meta- There is absolutely genetic crosstalk, and that is one of,

there is some interesting studies coming out. And in fact, fermented foods, which probably are the most important intermediary because in fact, what these foods are fermented with is soil bacteria that's on the food and then different forms of usually fungi and yeast that ferment the food. So like controlled food rotting, right?

Controlled food rotting. And researches. Otherwise you're gonna sauerkraut. Right, and researches are showing that, it doesn't change our microbiome, but it can temporarily affect it. And maybe on the- It's like tourists going through an economy, they improve the economy.

They improve the situation. And Justin Sonnenberg's lab at Stanford is I think about to publish a paper. I know that they're in the final parts of the study looking at fermented food and its health of patients with different kinds of bowel symptoms and I think it's actually IBS that they're looking at and what they're finding is that they're probably more effective than all the packaged probiotics that people are trying to sell.

And it makes sense, because these foods actually, they co-evolved with us, unlike things that are invented in a lab. And what's interesting you point out is that kids who grow up on farms or ranches don't get the same problems with allergies and asthma. Their immune system is developed in different ways that there's less problems with these kids' health and they don't have ADD because they're out in nature all the time, right?

So yeah, there's, you know, people are referring to it as the farm effect, but there's a big multinational collaborative called the Gabriela Collaborative that was started by researchers in Europe, but there's actually research happening in the US now between the Amish and the Hutterite, two different farming communities. And what they're trying to understand is why it is that children who are raised on sustainable farms have much lower rates of asthma

and allergy as compared to children who are more conventional farming systems, where they're using more chemicals and so on, and children who are raised in urban areas. And the thought is once again that it is this microbiome. And one could argue that the soil is probably the mother microbiome that's inoculating these sustainable farms, but they're finding

that even the animals on these farms are probably influencing kids and dust and the hay and potentially even things that we typically think of as allergens in the city, but for some reason on these kids, they are protective. Who grow hay, don't get hay fever. There you go. I mean, this is something that's been noticed

all globally that, you know, in developing countries, they don't have as much asthma or allergies or autoimmune disease, all these inflammatory diseases that are rampant in the United States really don't exist there, or at least in the same amounts. And the hypothesis is that we're just too clean, right? The hygiene hypothesis. It's actually a little bit more complicated punchline

than that. Yeah, good, okay. And that it really has to do more with diversity. So we're plenty exposed to bacteria and bathed in bacteria and fungi and so on. When you read a sample, this room or urban environments in general. But what's happened, it's the same thing. You remember I talked about from the macro to the micro.

We're losing diversity on the planet of our animals and our plants, and we are also losing diversity on the planet of our animals and our plants and we are also losing diversity of our microscopic creatures, of our fungi and our bacteria and our nematodes and so on. That's happening in lockstep with the macro loss of diversity. And just to stop because it's an important point to emphasize. It's happening in the soil, but it's also happening in human microbiomes.

And the diversity of our gut bacteria is dramatically different than it was 100 or a thousand years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's happening on plant microbiomes, it's happening everywhere. And so, and it's all from the same cause, which is, you know, overexposure to bactericides you know, overexposure to bactericides and antibiotics

and basically us growing very few types of crops so that we're just getting too much homogeneity in terms of our plant kingdom and, you know, pollution and, you know, encroaching on wild areas and all of these things. Yes, all the chemicals, the antibiotics, the pesticides, herbicides and so on. But that is probably more the reason why we're seeing asthma and allergy

than just cleanliness per se. It's the loss of diversity. And that's a really important concept for people to have, because the way you protect diversity and maintain that health resource is different than just getting dirty. It's really about thinking like an ecologist or a conservationist and trying to think, how do I preserve natural niches? How do I preserve them on farms? How do I preserve them in urban areas? How do we build cities that actually have, you know,

places for butterflies and different kinds of insects to flourish and different kinds of plants and different kinds of animals and so on. So it's a bit more of a complicated concept and the danger of us just talking about hygiene. Yeah no I think you're right I think that's a very important point it is the complexity and you know you bring that home also to medicine right you're not just a farmer or gardener you're a doctor

and and you treat patients and the the insights that you've had about disease are are quite unusual for a, which is that you've moved from the reductionist view of disease to a more deeper understanding that disease is really complex, that there's a complexity of biology, that we are a complex, adaptive, dynamic system that's constantly changing, and that things like redundancy and diversity are important for our own health.

And it's not something we learn about. How do you kind of hold that in medicine? What do you do with that information? Absolutely, I mean, I wish that everybody who decided to become a doctor or a nurse or a nurse practitioner or just any kind of healer in healthcare spent two years working with ecologists or farmers or someone who works with natural systems.

By the way, we are one. Yeah, we are one and being able to actually see it, you know, sort of display itself, you know, because it's actually hard to understand our natural system. A lot of it's tucked inside of us and quite invisible and we have to take other people's words for it. But when you were when you when you're in nature and understanding how complex those systems are and the trophic levels and unintended consequences and how everything interacts it gives you an enormous amount of humility and

respect an enormous amount of humility and respect, uh, for these, you know, these structures and makes you realize that, you know, the, the true meaning of first do no harm. Yeah. So the, you know, the biology we have is really complex, like you said, and I learned a fact recently that kind of blew my mind, which is, you know, we all learned biochemistry and all the pathways. Well, we think we learned all the pathways, but we didn't.

There's 37 billion billion chemical reactions in the body every second. That's 37 with 21 zeros. It's hard to even. I'll have to take your word for that. I don't know if this is. It's hard to fathom and the complexity of that and everything, cross-talking and everything else, we're an ecosystem. So in a sense, doctors need to be ecologists is what you're saying.

Absolutely. And so when we do these soil labs for health practitioners, that's exactly what we do and they start the lab in a soil pit on a farm in the central Valley in California, which is by the way, in ecology or an ecological niche where, you know, our, a lot of our food comes from. And it's a very challenging place. It gets seven inches of rain a year and has that amazing topsoil,

which is what generates our food, is incredibly thin. And it's- And getting thinner. And we dig these soil pits so they can see the soil layers and get in there and start to experience like this is what's pumping out nutrition, not only for the United States, but for the world. I mean, grow so much of the almonds and other stuff that gets exported to other places.

That's the true nourishment, not just the corn and the soil. But California is really where our nutrient-dense food is grown. And for them to start to understand that this is something that A, we have to absolutely protect, and that we need to get involved in working with farmers to make sure that we can increase this lifeblood for our country. Because right now we're under producing the amount of, even with the current population we have in the US, we are not producing enough fruits and vegetables. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is right, but I heard or read once that if everybody in America ate the five to nine Recommended servings of fruits and vegetables a day that we'd only have enough for two percent of the population

It might not be that low But we're we're probably in terms of just what we're producing the u.s. It's we are falling a Short by about two-thirds just for like the Harvard recommended. Yeah, five to seven a day. And even with imports, we're still falling way short. So we are not nutrient secure as a nation. We're plenty. We're producing tons of, you know, sugar in the form of, you know, corn and soy and and so on, way more than we need.

But not enough of a lot of the macro-micro-nutrients. Yeah. And by the way, the soil that you talk about is the source of the nutrients in our food. So even if you're eating the best organic food, we're on the best organic soil, the nutrient levels in our soil have declined 90% last 100 years and organic is better and they're more nutrient dense but even still we're not. I don't know if I agree with that. Where did you get that data? I'll send you the references. You might be referring to a piece that was actually done right here in Austin at University of Texas and his name is Ronald Davis I think but if you read that study he does not say

that it's because of the soil it's because we've changed our varietals of fruits and vegetables so dramatically we are now choosing seeds basically for their ability to produce a lot, to be able to travel long distance and to not go bad on the shelves. So the kinds, the varieties of carrot that were growing are different than they were in the 30s and 40s. But I have not seen a lot of evidence

that our soil in the US has been depleted enough to actually change the nutrient content of our food. I would, I have to view to the science. I'll share with you the studies because I literally just gave a talk about this. Yeah, but you might need to go back and look at the actual research because it is, I will be amazed if you find out.

Okay, I'll share with you. There were scientific papers, I'm not making it up, I promise. Yeah, but a lot of people read those studies and they blame it on the soil. And believe me, I would love to- No, no, the studies are of the soil, looking at the soil nutrient content.

Uh-huh, oh, I see. So not translating it into the nutrient content of the food. Well, the food gets its nutrients from the soil, right? Yeah, but they're not the same at all. Of course, they're not the same. Yeah, so you can actually have a big shift in the nutrient contents of the soil and end up with the exact same nutrient density in the food

because these plants are actually unbelievably, microbes in the soil and the plants themselves are really efficient at scavenging nutrients. But isn't the problem that most of our soil in this country has become more sterile? Has it become more like dirt instead of soil or? It's hard to say and we are at a point where that certainly might happen in the future and there are parts of the world where massive amounts of soil depletion have gone on. But it probably is incorrect to say

that we are at that point in the US. We still actually have some of the richest soil in the world and it's more a matter of starting to use the right practices now to really protect it. But to say that food is less nutritious because of the soil in the US is not exactly what it is. All right.

Well, we'll dig those studies up and share them and we can continue the conversation. I think that the concept of a doctor being an ecologist is a really kind of new idea, right? And I think that science is sort of catching up with that. I recently got a new textbook called Network Medicine about the body as a network, as an ecosystem, and how we need to rethink science and how we research things

and the complexity of the human body and these biological networks that are driving health and disease, we don't think like that as doctors. We think, okay, I'm this specialist and I take care of this disease or this siloed problem, instead of really understanding how everything connects together.

And that's- Yeah, sadly that is true. I'm finding with a lot of the students and young doctors that I work with though though that there really is a very different way of thinking and I'm hopeful for the future of medicine. Especially if I can get a lot of them into those soil pits. Yeah, I think that's right. I love the idea of having doctors go out and work on a farm.

In fact, I actually took a course in biological agriculture when I was in college and got to grow food and learn about food and learn about ecosystems and learn about sustainability. And I was kind of a weirdo, but it was a really important part of my education because I began to understand that relationship. But I think your emphasis on the idea that farm is medicine

as well as food is medicine, as well as parks are medicine, is a really important contribution to our conversation because the average person's not thinking about it, the average doctor's not thinking about it, and then when you follow it down the chain, what are the implications of this, right? How do we change what we're doing so that we actually can get it right on track?

Basically what we uncover on film is how Monsanto has effectively been secretly microfinancing most of the university agricultural curriculum in this country for 40 years. Now, we uncover the money pipeline. Because if you think about it, if Monsanto or anyone wanted to write, you know, whatever, $75 million check to university,

like whatever, Texas A&M or UT or something, people would know. That's right. If they wanted to write, you know, 10, $7.5 million checks, people would know. Even a $750,000 check, people would take notice. But no one's looking at 10, 20, 30, $50,000 checks. Yeah, so they're doing it slowly, slowly.

So you just feed the system, and then you buy the best science money can buy. And then the congressional lawmakers allow it to go through, because listen, I mean, I'm not defending their practices, but think about this from a numbers perspective. There's 23, you would know this better than me, because you really are the policy guy. There's 23 agrochemical lobbyists per member of Congress.

Yeah, that's crazy. So think about it. So you're a congressional lawmaker, right? Hey, Mark, listen, man, let's just go to the Bahamas this weekend, we've got a great house down there, my wife and I, you know, your wife's gonna look really great in this mean coat we got from, you know, whatever, sacks, or whatever it is.

And so, from a numbers perspective, that's two people a month that are coming at you for something. Well, even if it only takes up a week or two, a month, think about how much noise that is as a lawmaker. No, no, they really hear from industry. They don't really hear from people like you and I. And that's, you know, why it makes a difference. And when we go in, they go, wow, I didn't really understand this,. They don't really hear from people like you and I. And that's why it makes a difference.

And when we go in, they go, wow, I didn't really understand this. And I didn't know about this. And the level of awareness and education is very low. And once they start to hear the stories, like Rick Clark, they start to shift. Now that's why we have this change. And it's amazing.

Listen, this is all not doom and gloom. This is really powerful stuff. And it has to, and the policy has to happen. You know, one of the things that you're talking about, just to give people context, is land-grant colleges, which were established by Abraham Lincoln to build a curriculum for building an agricultural nation. And so these land-grant colleges are funded,

in large part, by the government, but they're also funded by Agrochemical companies. Agrochemical companies, who are highly influential in determining what the science they do and what the studies they do are and what the results are and so what the curriculum is because then the students of these land-grant colleges come out thinking that industrial farming is the only way to go. And I was talking to Michael Pollan recently about this.

And he was like, when I wrote Omnibor's Dilemma, I was supposed to give a talk at Caltech, and they canceled my talk because one of the ranchers who's a cafe, industrial meat farming, meat factory basically, funded huge amounts of money to Caltech, and he just said they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like,

they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like,

they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were like, they were And the farmers are, you know, like,

I don't know if you know Fred Provenza, do you know Fred Provenza? I don't know. He's an amazing guy. He studied behavioral ecology and looked at animals and plants and soil and humans. He's an incredible, he wrote a book called Nourishment, which everybody should get. He's been on the podcast a couple of times.

Oh, I gotta read this book. And he, he's talking about how he was going around teaching about this to farmers, and then it used to be like one or two people in the room, and now it's just filled. And the farmers and the ranchers are desperate to change, because they see the failure of the system, the failure of the goods.

There's no resilience. To actually make money, to make a living, and they're struggling. And they understand that something's broken, and they're looking for a different way. By the way, that was another thing. You know it, you do it too. We're formulators, right? So when we were building out the formulas

for the absorption company, we started with just four use cases, right? It was restore, calm, which really chills people out, and it just gets you to that place where it quiets the noise, and I needed that too. Energy, which I live on. And then sleep. And the reason we started with those four things was,

how can we get people to have better days, so that they have better weeks, they have better months, and then eventually those months string out into years, and then the years string out into a lifetime. And this is something you and I have talked about at great length, happy, healthy people build happy, healthy societies by making happy, healthy choices.

It's unimpeachable information, right? So again, man, it goes back to, and I'm putting together this amazing program for farmers where I'm gonna start sending these to a lot of these hardworking farmers because you just, like, you feel the lift and better sleep, especially when you're stressed about crops, finances, all that stuff.

You need to get that good sleep. So I'm doing this program and I'm gonna put some spin behind it where I just get it to farmers. Just get it to farmers. Just get it to people who are busting their asses in the field. You know, if you've ever been on a combine

or if you've ever been on a harvester at, you know, 5.30 in the morning after you couldn't sleep all night, and this is now, you know, three, four weeks in a row, you start to deplete in a way. Listen, a very dear brother of mine is building a bank, and I was really fortunate enough to consult with him. Not non-paid, but I got to work with these like Nobel Laureate behavioral psychologists.

I mean, these people, they know a lot about humanity, right? And one of the things we were talking about was there's, and this is a term you know, because you're a doctor, eco-anxiety. Eco-anxiety. It's a real diagnosable term at this point. And there's 27 million young Americans that are basically, think about it, you're young,

you're trying to figure out what you're doing with your future, there's famine, wars, droughts, there's a broken food system, broken water system, broken political systems, everything's broken. You're going to college, you're gonna end up with a $200,000 debt, but you're gonna end up with a $30,000 job. And so they feel this wait, wait, wait,

and then they just end up doing this. And then what do they do? And it's eco anxiety. So the idea is to lift them back out of that, where you realize, this is what I always say to people, it's not all doom and gloom, because I see the data. I know it's coming down the pipeline. We are actually about to balance our climate.

We're gonna rebuild our food systems. We're gonna rebuild our economy, and we're gonna do it all through food. And that is the most amazing thing. I always hear people joke, sort of like, coastal elites talk about the flyover states. There are no flyover states. Dude, those states are, they are the rock stars of the country.

It's not just the breadbasket. They're gonna be the greatest bio sequesters of carbon dioxide that we have. They're our life's blood. And the people running those farms and those businesses are our brothers and sisters. And they're crushing it. And so what we're gonna do is arm them

with all this amazing, not even technology, it's old technology, since it's old as dirt. It's a really powerful thing. I'm sure you heard Gabe Pound tell the story, but he had this farmer who's been on the podcast. And he, we'll link to that show. One of our greatest heroes. Show, but he's an incredible guy

who was a traditional farmer in North Dakota, spraying chemicals, doing all that for years, which is probably why he got ALS, to be straight about. 100%. And. Well, I can't say 100%. You know, he had all these bad years of drought and hail. Five years of hell.

It was just a mess, and then somehow he got Thomas Jefferson's journals about farming practices and started to incorporate some of these practices that- Isn't that amazing? Yeah, I was like, restored his farm and restored the soil. And he's such a hero and he's really a key part of these films, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground, which everybody really should see. You gotta see these films.

They're really powerful moving films to help you understand. Thanks, Bill. What the food system is, why it's broken, why it starts on the farm and the soil, and how if we change that, we change everything, right? Change everything. We're kind of linking all together,

but not only do we restore the soil ecosystems, restore biodiversity, protect our water resources, not only do we prevent the chemical pesticides that are harming humans, but we also produce food that's more nutritious, that solves a lot of our chronic disease epidemic. We help the farmers have more economic kind of health and wealth.

And inclusive with farmers. By the way, we haven't even touched on the fact of the social dynamics and the ethnicity of farming. The amount of young farmers coming into the fold, indigenous, black, brown, purple, it doesn't matter who you are. And one of the more exciting things is too, the indigenous cultures are about to thrive.

A lot of these reservations are gonna become these regenerative giants. Yeah, going back to their indigenous practices. Going back to their indigenous practices and allowing them to make a ton of money. And, oh man, who was I just talking to? He's amazing. He's such a powerhouse, but, um, you know, I want to say in 1930, I'll have to go back. I've, I have such dad brain, dude, I was up every hour.

You got little kids every hour on the hour last night with my son, uh, screaming into the monitor cause he's not feeling great. But I think in 1930, there were a million black farmers. And now there's 50,000. And now they're coming back and they're bringing this incredible indigenous knowledge that they have into the food system and thriving and growing. And that's what makes America so incredible. When we all come together,

I'm not trying to sound like some cliche out of some like, you know, newspaper clipping. When we all come together and we lift each other up, that's when we win. And getting farmers off the drip of the agrichemicals, and then, you know, the other side of my life is keeping them fueled with things that actually work, you know, the other side of my life is keeping them fueled with things that actually work.

You know? Um, geez, dude, like the future is bright. Get your sunglasses and you're doing this. Like you're living this. You, you, you have a farm, you have animals and food and tell us about your kind of what my wife, she's the animal whisperer. It's like green acres. You went from like Hollywood.

Beverly Hillbillies, yeah, Green Acres. That's dating me actually. I used to watch that. This is why I called my mom on the way here to thank her for that base. And one of the things is too, I realized, we can't build a great society without unbelievably well-rounded, grounded children.

My experience as a child, I had the big, my farming uncle and aunt, cousins were very successful. They were the ones that always had all the money. It's also where my love of flying came from, because he had Beechcraft aircraft that, you know, that he had aircraft that I used to fly in, and that's where I, my great love of flying. But yeah.

You died in a Beechcraft and lost. I know, I was like, I felt so bad. I was always saying to you before we were rolling, I said that to J.J. Abrams and Damon. I was like, guys, this is embarrassing. I fell 30,000 feet out of an Elton 11 and survived. And then I fell 30 feet out of a beach craft and died. But you know, those experiences as children,

now I'm 46 in a month and change. All of those systems that I was exposed to are now playing out. Supplements, health and wellness. I have a whiskey company, a lot of connection to bourbon in the South and the familial component. But that also spans, that's into my agriculture side. Between my wife and I, she's got jewelry

that she created this closed loop, basically completely sustainable model for luxury jewelry, crushed it. Launch did their first deal with Michael Dell and it just crushed it. That sounds great, yeah. Well, he had all this gold because Michael Dell just said, hey listen, all of these computers and landfills

and my name on it fixed this. So he started using a hot water process to extract all sustainable, but to extract all the heavy metals from microprocessors and gold and silver and stuff. And they ended up with all this gold and they didn't know what to do with it. So my wife, so Nikki Reed at like 27 years old,

28 years old, calls Michael Dell and says, I know what you can do with that gold. You're gonna give it to me. You're gonna sign a multi-year deal with me. I'm gonna build a sustainable luxury jewelry line out of it. And it's gonna sell out in like a week. So they did that. She went to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, representing Dell.

That's crazy. On a stage, and it sold out, the whole collection sold out in 36 hours. Wow. So that's when they knew, like, so she created that whole system, much like we did with building a regenerative whiskey company. And now we have Absorbs.

So we have these two parents that came from the entertainment world. By the way, our daughter still doesn't know what we do. Um... And now we have absorbed. So we have these two parents that came from the entertainment world. By the way, our daughter still doesn't know what we do. Who are now between two parents, yeah, right? Two parents running, building three companies simultaneously, very successful companies, simultaneously, which I'm gonna do 110 flights this year.

I am your model, I'm your anti-model patient. I am, you know, my adrenal, my system is broken down. And to be honest with you, it's not like some shameless plug. Because you're working too hard. But I wouldn't be able to do what I do had I not built this company. Yeah. If I didn't have the absorption company,

I'm not even kidding, there is no possible way you could do what I do and then still get up and maneuver at this level and pace. You got a farm, you got kids, you got. Oh man, 26 animals or something crazy like that. And we just released, my wife, we just released, we just got another, introduced another horse into the herd yesterday, and so worried

that they were treating him well throughout the night, you know? The other horses. The other horses, yeah. And they did, fortunately, you know, checking on him early this morning, but like our daughter, rather than worrying about eco-anxiety or some digital, you know, BS,

that was her biggest worry last night was, is our horse gonna be okay? And I'm gonna check on him in the morning before school. And you know what I mean? Like, that... It's connected to nature. It's connected to these, you know, these incredible needs. I mean, that's the sort of what we need. Our kids are so not connected to nature. to these, you know, these incredible beings. I mean, that's just sort of what we need.

Our kids are so not connected to nature. There's like nature deficit disorder, not ADD, you know? But exactly. But that's about to change, Dr. Mark. What we're doing, when we launch Common Ground, you know, we repackaged Kiss the Ground, now Common Ground is going out. This film changes lives. And with your help and your hard work and ours,

we're changing policy. And this is what I said in Vegas, not Vegas, sorry, DC. Very similar in a way, but that's what I just said in DC, which is, because any time you go and you do all the circuit in DC, it's all about policy. It's policy, it's policy, it's policy. Yeah, policy is important, but this isn't just about policy. This is about good policy, helping good people.

And that's where we win. And that's what I said. Well, it's a triple win. There's money to be made. The earth wins, the farmers win, people win, the government wins. Everybody wins because when more people make more money, they pay taxes rather than just a few big

agrochemical companies that don't pay any taxes, most likely. This is how we build our society. This is how we build our communities. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hymen Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try Free to start your 7-day free trial.

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