The Rich Roll Podcast - Zach Bush, MD On A Pandemic Of Possibility

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

The pandemic presents an opportune time to get re-acquainted with Zach Bush, MD. A triple board-certified physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care, today's guest is ...an internationally recognized educator, speaker and authority on all facets of well-being. Focused on the relationship between the microbiome, disease and food production systems, Zach is the founder of Seraphic Group, an organization devoted to developing root-cause solutions for human and ecological health in the sectors of big farming, big pharma, and Western Medicine at large He is also the founder of Farmers Footprint, a non-profit coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists, and business leaders aiming to expose the deleterious human and environmental impacts of chemical farming and pesticide reliance -- while simultaneously offering a path forward through regenerative agricultural practices to rebuild living biodiversity and ultimately reverse climate change. To me, Zach is a master healer. A man I call friend. And a critical voice in the conversation we need to have in this unprecedented moment of global calamity. Without minimizing the profound severity of our current situation, I cannot overstate the unique opportunity we are being gifted. Like an addict’s moment of clarity, the pandemic presents a singular occasion to break the chains of denial that imprison us. A moment to objectively examine that which no longer serves us. The behaviors that repeatedly lead us astray. An economic system that demands constant growth at the cost of the collective good. A political system that preys on fear to divide. A conglomerated food apparatus that foments disease. A pharmaceutical complex that relies upon that disease to create dependency. And and ultimately a collective obsession with ego, power, money, and material consumption that is rapidly eroding our biosphere, degrading our integrity -- and separating us from others, ourselves and our innate divinity. I aspire that we emerge from this planetary wake up call not as victims, but empowered -- armed with greater clarity to reimagine and actualize a better, more sustainable, purposeful, intentional and fulfilling life experience for ourselves, our loved ones, future generations and frankly the world at large. I can think of few people better equipped to traverse this terrain than Zach, alongside me for his fourth appearance on the show. Well worth your undivided attention, today he shares his unique perspective on the coronavirus epidemic in a conversation that goes behind what is happening. How to best navigate it. And what the pandemic signifies for humanity and the future of planetary ecology. Audio Note: This podcast was recorded remotely. My first since the earliest days of the podcast, I admit a severe allergy to this dynamic. Being physically present with my guest is crucial to providing an optimal listening experience. However, sequestration demands I adapt. So this is my fairly reluctant attempt to do just that. Therefore, please excuse the audio quality, a somewhat eroded version of what you’ve come to expect. Sub-par bandwidth and latency issues impeded our ability to converse as naturally as I would have preferred -- more staccato back and forth than my hallmark organic flow. Zach has a knack for landing our podcasts with unmatched profundity. And today he delivers a master class in thinking both deeply and broadly about this unique situation we are collectively experiencing. I love this man. I’m grateful for his wisdom. And I’m proud to share it with you today. May you find it equal parts instructive, enlightening and moving -- especially the end. Peace + Plants, Rich

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Starting point is 00:00:00 If we're here for anything, it's to experience beauty and to recognize it and shout it from the rooftops when we see it and to celebrate it. And if you just do that in your day to day, if you dig into beauty and you start making sure that everything you do is grounded back to a pursuit of beauty, you're going to find a different life. And you will save the American people from collapse in the process. And you will show the world that we can build a nation that's not about empires and sequestration of power and wealth and resources. We're about great co-creation. I think that's one of the shining lights of the American people is we are a profoundly creative group because we've been empowered at the self level. If we start to mimic the communication network that we found in the microbiome and we start to build societies like that, that's how we're going to escape this extinction event that we're headed towards. And we can start doing it by just being a co-creative society again,
Starting point is 00:01:06 connecting humans to be co-creative rather than consumptive. And the world is our oyster. It can all open up to bring more beauty into our lives. That's Zach Bush, MD. And this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing?
Starting point is 00:01:37 Are you hanging in there? How is the sequestration going, the physical distancing? How are the loved ones holding up? How is the close proximity impacting your relationships with those with whom you have sequestered? I'm Rich Roll, and I hope you're taking care of yourselves because this, my friends, is not a drill. This is not the moment to slack off. It is indeed self-care go time now more than ever. It's time to eat the good foods, get the sleep, drink the fluids, move the body, and to get creative with your families, with your kids, and of course, with yourself.
Starting point is 00:02:15 And I think without, of course, minimizing the extreme severe hardship so many of us are currently facing, at the same time, I really can't overstate the unprecedented opportunity that we're being gifted with right now to go inward, to confront and overcome the fear that accompanies our inability to control what is happening and instead invest in the things that we can control, our minds, our bodies, our emotional state, our spiritual state. And I think of it much like an addict's
Starting point is 00:02:51 moment of clarity, this truly singular and shared moment that we find ourselves in that presents us with this opportunity to look at and hopefully break the chains of denial that imprison us, this occasion to examine and reimagine behaviors that don't serve us, an economic system that demands constant growth at the cost of the collective good, a political system that preys on fear to divide us, a conglomerated food apparatus that foments disease, and then the pharmaceutical complex that then relies upon those diseases to create dependency. And ultimately, this collective obsession that we have with ego, with power, with money, and material consumption that is rapidly eroding our biosphere and degrading
Starting point is 00:03:47 our integrity and separating us from ourselves and from others and from our innate divinity. And my hope is that we can emerge from this collective experience, this hardship, this massive planetary wake-up call, not as victims, but empowered, armed with greater clarity to reimagine and ultimately actualize a better, more sustainable, purposeful, intentional, and fulfilling life experience for ourselves, for our loved ones, for future generations, and frankly, the world at large. And look, it's hard. I know there's a lot of suffering right now. Lives are being lost. Jobs are disappearing. Layoffs are happening everywhere. The economy is teetering. And we just don't know what the future will bring, which is admittedly, truly scary. And yet, when you cut through all the fear, the anxiety, and the uncertainty, I see humanity rising. I see incredible creativity everywhere I look. And I'm uplifted by the heroes that walk among us, so many selfless souls putting themselves in harm's way, sacrificing their own personal well-being to treat
Starting point is 00:05:06 the ill and provide us with food and the critical goods and services that we need to survive. So please don't let this pass without reflection. This is not the moment for Netflix and chill, but to engage your imagination, to recognize the opportunity for reinvention, to find the sliver of joy that it presents to celebrate our shared humanity, to confront and accept and embrace and find grace in the essential truth that despite the chaos, amidst the chaos,
Starting point is 00:05:40 that control is and has always been an illusion. We never truly know what the future holds. All we have is this moment and the choices it presents. With that being said, I can think of few people better equipped to traverse this terrain than my friend, Dr. Zach Bush, alongside me today for his fourth appearance on the show. It was recorded just a few days ago. It is well worth your undivided attention, and it's coming up in a few. But first... We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had
Starting point is 00:06:32 that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal
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Starting point is 00:08:06 option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well
Starting point is 00:08:38 just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders,
Starting point is 00:09:18 depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.
Starting point is 00:10:10 Zach Bush. You know this guy, right? He's a show favorite. Longtime listeners are well acquainted with today's guest by way of his many past appearances. In addition to being a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care, as well as a recognized educator on the microbiome, Zach is also the founder of Seraphic Group, which is an organization devoted to root cause solutions for human and ecological health. He's also the founder of Farmer's Footprint, a nonprofit coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists, and business leaders aiming to expose the human and environmental impacts
Starting point is 00:10:55 of chemical farming and offer a path forward, helping farmers with the transition to regenerative agricultural practices. To me, beyond the resume, Zach is point blank a master healer. He's a friend. He's a critical voice in the conversation we need to have in this unprecedented moment of global calamity. And he's here today to share his unique perspective on the coronavirus epidemic, what is happening, how to best navigate it, what it signifies for humanity, social, economic, and political systems, and the future of planetary ecology. Two quick things to mention before we dive in. First,
Starting point is 00:11:41 I've been receiving a lot of questions about the fact that Zach's Instagram account, which I've always found to be consistently wise and insightful, was recently deactivated. And from what I've been able to determine talking to Zach, the cause is unclear. It's certainly possible it was flagged for occasionally somewhat controversial takes on Big Pharma and Big Ag. Although he was told by Instagram directly that this was not the case, that it was instead the result of phishing attempts on his account, which is also plausible given that he has recently traveled to multiple continents, during which time he connected to countless public Wi-Fi outlets, perhaps without a VPN. to countless public Wi-Fi outlets, perhaps without a VPN. Either way, he seemed relatively unperturbed by all of it and confident that his account would soon be reinstated. Second, this is my first attempt in many years, since the earliest days of the podcast, in fact,
Starting point is 00:12:41 at recording a podcast remotely. And I admit to a great aversion and almost allergic reaction to this dynamic. Being physically present with the person I'm speaking with is at the very core of what I do. However, sequestration demands I adapt. And so this is my fairly reluctant attempt to do just that. Therefore, you're going to have to excuse the audio quality. Although our voices are perfectly understandable,
Starting point is 00:13:12 it remains a somewhat eroded version of what you come to expect. The bandwidth at my home is subpar, a function of living a bit in the middle of nowhere. Zach was recording from Oahu, which also doesn't have great internet. And this combined produced a latent delay and required that we avoid talking over each other, which impeded the natural conversational flow and our ability to communicate organically and making for more of a staccato
Starting point is 00:13:44 back and forth kind of exchange. But disclaimer aside, and is always the case with Zach, I think you will find this to be equal parts instructive, enlightening, and moving, especially the end. So please listen all the way to the end. Zach has a knack for landing our podcast with unmatched profundity in what is essentially a masterclass in thinking both deeply and broadly about this unique situation we are collectively experiencing. I love this man. I'm grateful for his wisdom, and I'm proud to share it with you guys today. So without further ado, this is me and Dr. Zach Bush. In thinking about who I wanted to talk to
Starting point is 00:14:32 about what's happening globally and the plight and the opportunity that humanity is currently facing, I could think of no better person to host this conversation with me than yourself. So thanks for coming on the show today. And perhaps we can just open it up with, you know, how are you faring and, you know, navigating all of this? I know you were in Fiji and now you're in Oahu. Yeah, it's been a very smooth process for me.
Starting point is 00:15:05 I know there's a lot of people that are under more severe duress around the world right now. But the last month of travel has been interesting for me in that I've gotten to see a number of different peoples and cultures responding to this global emergency. And Australia was an interesting space to be in there's certainly a sense of we've been there done that in regards to apocalyptic disasters there in australia they just came to the fires and i think that they're very aware that there is you know a stressor going on on this planet in regard to ecologic and physical stress that's unprecedented in scale and they've lived through that and many have died in that and the tragedies at the humanitarian level one side but then just the the loss of life of animals and everything else was
Starting point is 00:16:00 just of a scale that really has not been seen. And so I think this feels like a much lesser evil in some ways than the apocalyptic fires had. And so I think there's a different energy there than we see in the United States. And then in Fiji, you're looking at a developed country or developing country that has no infrastructure at play. And I started my medical journey in the Philippines and did six months of work with an international group of midwives there, birthing babies in the squads of the Philippines and was routinely in hospitals that never have any resources. And so I think when you're in a Fiji or a Philippines or Africa or parts of Central America, these war-torn countries, Honduras and the like, this is a daily plight for them.
Starting point is 00:16:51 They never have the resources to deliver the healthcare that modern technology would be capable of. They never have adequate supplies. They never have adequate beds to address it. They don't have the expertise to address just the usual. And so what we're experiencing in the United States, particularly in New York City right now, is intense. And my heart and gratitude goes out to those doctors that are in the midst of overwhelming demand on their system there in New York. But I think as a country, we do need to be cognizant of
Starting point is 00:17:27 just how dire the situation is day in and day out just to deliver normal care in so much of the world. And running out of hospital masks and things like that is, I think the rest of the world might look at that and be like, well, join the party. Right. Here is our version of what it's like to be in the developing world. And being very much caught off guard, you know, there's the perspective of us just being, you know, horrifically unprepared to manage what's coming at us and what's developing at such a rapid pace, but also this sense that it's a trial run for something much worse. And I hold out hope not to minimize what's happening at all because it's absolutely horrific, but that it will be a wake-up call for
Starting point is 00:18:27 us moving forward to get our act together, not just in the United States, but globally so that we can unite and be better prepared for when a more virulent version of what we're experiencing right now inevitably visits us. Yeah, I think that that's the unfortunate reality. And I've gotten some flashback for some of the comments I've made towards that end on social media and such, just reminding ourselves that not only is this not as bad as it could be, it's going to get worse if we continue on our course. And people have said, you're downplaying this. And I think my point is, no, I'm actually upplaying this. This is literally a symptom of collapse of biology on the planet. And if we do not pay heed, and if we just continue to blame this virus as if this is our problem,
Starting point is 00:19:20 then we're going to walk into the collapse of civilization. We're going to walk into the collapse of an entire species over the next hundred years. And what is that going to look like? It's certainly not going to look like intact supply chains and intact electricity and plumbing and everything else that we're enjoying right now in this country. I really think that if we continue to walk by these warning signs of climate change, fires in Australia, all the way down to our public health crisis with chronic diseases, if we continue to walk by these and bemoan our problems or whatever and not start to really fundamentally change who we are and how we act on this planet. This is just the slightest of warm-up curtain calls for what's to come. It's heartbreaking that this is all preventable. We know how to change the course of history, and we're not doing it.
Starting point is 00:20:23 I agree with you that we need to be sobered by this. We need to take the full impact of loss of life that we've seen across the world, the full impact of the economic and financial crisis that's upon families, certainly in the United States, but again, just having been in a developed country, Fiji is really concerned because they are a cash society that lives day-to-day subsistence. And they're all being told there's not going to be any of your primary industry of tourism coming into your country for probably six months. And so you can't measure that on the U.S. mindset scale of what's happening around the world as we make these decisions. So I think that we have to be constantly putting the current situation in the perspective of the greater context if it's going to be teaching us the lessons that I really believe this virus is trying to teach us.
Starting point is 00:21:26 What is uniquely distinct about this situation is that no life is left unaffected. or even 9-11 on some level. In the current scenario, whether you're the shopkeeper or the billionaire or the homeless person or the average soccer mom, there is no person who is unaffected by what's happening. And what makes that interesting is its incredible power to unite us around a singular cause. And the optimist in me is hopeful that not only will this be a wake-up call, but it will be a trigger that will set in motion a series of events that will hopefully change
Starting point is 00:22:25 our current operating system and how we're treading on the planet. And yet at the same time, I juxtapose that against the power structure that currently exists. And I see the opportunity for a tremendous consolidation of power in this moment, which causes me concern. And so I'm interested in how this sort of
Starting point is 00:22:48 war between optimism and pessimism works in your mind. As usual, you frame things so beautifully. That's a perfect description of the situation we're in. I have been struggling to explain that situation in other spaces and social media and everything else without upsetting people because the natural reaction, unfortunately, in our current vibration as humanity is not to go to that space of singularity of, oh my gosh, we are all one. We are all in this together, whether we're an earthworm or a human or Chinese or American, we're in this together is not the reaction. And I still am amazed that that doesn't work because it seems so obvious. This is the thing. This is our opportunity. Let's rise. Let's break down the boundaries.
Starting point is 00:23:46 Let's break down the barriers. Let's break down the nationalism. Let's break. And yet the vibration we're still stuck in is that fear resonates better than hope. And we're in a state where retracting to likeness rather than wholeness is what we tend to do. And so I got totally attacked last Friday on social media for mentioning that China's actually successfully getting on top of their situation and they're seeing a massive reduction in the crisis on their side. And the amount of negative energy towards China was unbelievable.
Starting point is 00:24:25 And on the comments, they were saying, well, I don't believe anything coming out of China. They're draconian measures, blah, blah, blah. They're a military state. Well, they have made some really drastic changes that they felt like were necessary to protect a population of 1.28 billion people. And it's not done how things are done in the United States. And people may protest on some level, but they successfully got on their problem. And there's a lot of evidence that they got on it very quickly in the sense that they started six new hospitals in the capital of the epicenter there. And all six of those hospitals have already shut their doors
Starting point is 00:25:09 because they were able to empty them out. So it was just an incredible speed at which they were able to achieve those results. And they're really looking to the fact that, yes, the measures that they took were probably helping it, but they also are doing a lot of work right now, brilliant Chinese scientists right now doing the more important work in some ways of saying, why were people dying? Who was dying? And it wasn't from the virus because the virus didn't affect most people severely. And so they're really working hard and some great papers are coming out
Starting point is 00:25:41 just when a couple of days ago came out and and was brilliant looking at the microbiome of those that died. And it seems to be a unifying effect more than even age as the collapse of the microbiome in the gut was predicting vulnerability to this virus. And so I see our Chinese compatriots in science and in you know real critical thought here be really leading the charge on helping the rest of the world and yet the world is making these you know horrifically closed-minded statements and belief systems about you know this country that's working so hard to recover from what is undoubtedly the biggest economic blow they've ever had. And interestingly, at the same time, we have in the same series of comments, you see people complaining that because Chinese supply lines have been shut down, their hospital doesn't
Starting point is 00:26:40 have enough masks and everything else. And so it's just interesting that as a country, we go into this nationalistic mindset. We go into this, you know, everybody else is evil and we're the white horse and we trust our media, but Chinese media is lying to us all the time. And how can we possibly be trusting our media? And all of a sudden, because certainly right before this happened,
Starting point is 00:27:04 we didn't trust our media. And so why in a time of crisis do we suddenly blindly think that the United States is the harbinger of all truth and everybody else is lying? And the same thing's happening in Russia. Russia's actually weathering this storm quite well right now. And everybody just says, well, Putin's lying. well right now. And everybody just says, well, Putin's lying. Well, if that's your response, then why did we do what we did as a country? Why did we outsource all of our supply for medical and beyond, our food system, et cetera, our waste system to China? If we're that distrustful of them, if they're that incompetent, and why did we outsource our space program to Russia if they're always lying and incompetent and blah, blah, blah? It's just not true. These countries have incredible assets, attributes, truths that are not familiar to us in a lot of ways, and therefore we doubt them and we are suspicious of them, we should always question the data. We should always ask, are we seeing the objective data? And oftentimes we're not. But I would say that the likelihood of us seeing truth and objectiveness
Starting point is 00:28:17 from US media more so than Russia or China is no longer the case. Maybe there was some golden age in American journalism that that was the case, but we all have to know that our media is fully bought and paid for just as our politicians are fully bought and paid for over and over again. And so I don't understand why we collapse away from the opportunity of that singularity you described there. why we collapse away from the opportunity of that singularity you described there. I think we have the opportunity to do that. And I think there's large sectors of our population that are doing that and are ready to rise and are ready to say, we are one. And I see that so true in your audience, Rich. You've inspired people. That's why they tune in over and over again to your show is because they feel the
Starting point is 00:29:05 gravity of truth, the gravity of real experience being shared and viewed and difficult questions being asked on your show all the time. And we are hungry for that truth. We're hungry for that. And so I know that society is rising. And so I think that's my optimism is that the people are rising. However, we're rising against a mechanistic system that has become extremely powerful at suppressing the common sentiment or the common vibration and replacing it with fear and domination. And the fact that we, since 9-11, have gotten very used to our civil liberties being taken away from us in justification for safety is interesting.
Starting point is 00:29:59 Is it wrong for us to be sequestered away? No. I think it's totally appropriate for us to take the appropriate public measures to reduce the speed at which this virus is going to travel through our system. And we should not be mistaken. This virus is all over the world. It's going to continue to infect every vulnerable person out there. It will just go slower as we do this. We can't stay sequestered in our houses for the next two years. And the last coronavirus that hit us, I don't know if people remember, but we already saw a global coronavirus scare with SARS back in 2001, 2003. And that went out way
Starting point is 00:30:38 after two years. And the science people still don't understand why it went away. It doesn't make sense that it did, but it did, which we can get into later. It's like, where are these coronaviruses coming from and why? But two years is too long for us to hide away and stay away from work and everything else. So we're going to get back in the game. And all of our immune systems are going to be challenged with this virus. And some of us will get sick, and some of us will get severely ill, and some of us will get sick and some of us will get severely ill and some of us will die. And in the meantime, you know, where do we stay lucid? Where do we stay aware of civil
Starting point is 00:31:17 liberties? And so I think that that balance is going to be extremely tricky just as it was in the wake of 9-11. It was very difficult for people to question the story that was being put out by our media for 9-11. They would get just trashed by everybody, politicians on down to the man on the street. And so I think we're in another one of those situations where if you raise your head slightly above the current approved journalistic message of fear, you're going to be shot down. And that's just dangerous for us as a people if we continue to tolerate that level of suppression of questioning. It doesn't mean we're disobedient. I think that we can be very respectful and compliant with the social distancing and the quarantines and everything else we're going to call this stuff. But we have to also be very cognizant of personally,
Starting point is 00:32:11 why are you doing that? Are you doing that for the greater good? And where are you maintaining your sense of civil liberties in the midst of that? And I think that that civil liberties comes in and the ability for us to question while we're being compliant. And we should really question everything all the time when it comes to massive efforts like are currently being happening. you know we are in this post-truth fake news era and that is a breeding ground for fear and suspicion and conspiracy a level of distrust that i think also foments the nationalism to which you were speaking about. And by dint of autocratic rule, China really was able to marshal resources quickly and effectively.
Starting point is 00:33:14 And by all accounts, they are on the other side of this. I know economically, they're starting to get back to normal. Things are starting to ship from there once again. And we've all seen images and videos of protocols that they put in place at the airports, et cetera, to effectively test people. And I think that part of what's informing the fear response here is we don't know who to trust or what's true and what's not true.
Starting point is 00:33:45 What we do know is there aren't enough tests. The tests aren't accessible. So the numbers are probably higher than what we suspect because of that. And also it's illustrating the fragility of our systems. Like when one cog suddenly breaks, the whole system of global infrastructure quickly begins to become dismantled. And I think that also breeds fear when people look at the economic landscape of what's happening now and what is surely to come, the domino impact long term of the stoppage and the slowdown that we're experiencing right now. So I'm empathetic
Starting point is 00:34:26 to the fear response because on some level, that's a very human response and it is frightening right now for people to be feeling vulnerable about their personal health and also about the prospect of how they're going to sort of make their way in the world once the, you know, sort of initial threat of this begins to lift and we have to kind of reckon with the economic wreckage and how to put that back together. So, I think it would be helpful for people to kind of provide a little perspective or guidance on the opportunity aspect of this for those that are sequestered right now and are trying to figure out how to make productive use of this moment of isolation. Awesome. Yeah. There's a lot there. The opportunity has never been bigger. I really feel extremely excited about
Starting point is 00:35:28 that. And the opportunities are multifaceted here. On the topic of supply chains and everything else that you just described, the United States needs to wake up to what it's done in the mission of making more money. We created Chinese supply lines for our hospitals and for many facets of our economy to make more money. We exploited cheap Chinese labor and efficient and intelligent production systems that the Chinese have put into place over the years. We exploited that so that our companies can make more money. And now hospitals are like, why don't we have masks? It's because you wanted to pay half a cent or one cent less for each mask that you were going to buy. So you outsource that to China and the companies in the US that used to make those masks went out of business. And so our
Starting point is 00:36:21 businesses and their supply lines in the mission of making more money have made us very vulnerable. As consumers, we've driven much of that. We continue to be very short-sighted and really blind to the reality and the impact of our consumer decisions. We want the 99 cent chicken breast. We want, you know, the $1.49 six pack of sodas, whatever it is. We continue to want these extremely subsidized and artificial price points on our food system is probably the best example. But it's really every product out there from your respirator in the ICU all the way to
Starting point is 00:37:03 the strap on your purse. You know, it's just like these things got outsourced because we wanted things to be cheaper and we wanted more things. And so the opportunity that we have right now is to re-evaluate that of like, what do you actually want? Do you actually want a 99 cent check in breast or would you like health? Do you want that hospital system to be the biggest economy in in breast or would you like health? Do you want that hospital system to be the biggest economy in the U S or would you like to see our farmers regain the, you know,
Starting point is 00:37:32 the status of the largest economy on the planet? Cause just, you know, we are, our food system is like $1.2 trillion a year. Our medical system is, is $3.7 trillion a year. And so we're three times out spending our food with just the cost of chronic disease cares. What do we want? Do we want cheap food or do we want good health? And so the opportunity here is as we sit at home with our loved ones, let's start reevaluating our supply chain. And in the household, how do you start to reclaim autonomy? And it's super cheap and awesome to do it. Some simple things are buy a cabbage or even better, start to grow a cabbage. We have spring coming on, which means the end of flu season, the end of coronavirus season is going to be here just out of the nature of the Northern hemisphere going into
Starting point is 00:38:22 warmer weather is going to be good for everything. But we're about to see spring hit. And so as spring sets in right now, this week, sit down with your kids, your family, and start mapping out the garden that you never planted before or, and start with a couple of containers. If it's intimidating to do anything else or you don't have the space, start with a couple of container plants and put them on your porch or put them on your, in your window and let's start growing stuff again. And that's where this
Starting point is 00:38:50 shift is going to begin is where is your supply line? Do you know it? If you're not going to grow your food, then start to know your farmers. Our work with Farmer's Footprint the last couple of years has just been so sobering to see how devastated our national food system is. And nowhere is that devastation felt stronger than the farmers themselves that are losing 6,000, 8,000 family farms a year now. And suicide rates have never been so high. The dairy industry is an interesting one for you and I that are plant-based fanatics. We were part of this movement of changing demand, but then the bottom fell out of the dairy industry the last year as we went into these trade wars with China and everything else. The bottom dropped out, and the American Dairy Co-op, which is the largest co-op of dairy farmers in the country, you know, all the milk gets shipped to their distribution centers and then
Starting point is 00:39:51 they send back checks to the farmers. And those checks got so small this past year and a half that they started the practice of sending out suicide hotlines with every single paycheck because farmers are killing themselves at unprecedented rates as the crisis really hits them full force. And so we need to know those farmers again. We need to reconnect and tell them what we want, which is we want real food and we want really healthy food. And so if there's no dairy industry demand, we're going to help you make the transition to making oat milk or making whatever it is that is in demand. And we would like to actually see some real fruits and vegetables and unprocessed foods coming into every state again. We stopped growing food in the United States.
Starting point is 00:40:37 If you think we have a serious crisis on our hospitals right now, wait until our food system is disrupted. It's one thing when you don't have hospital masks to take care of the critically ill. It's another thing when literally every single household doesn't have food. And that's the scenario we've set ourselves up for in the United States. In Kansas, which is our most agricultural state in the country, 90% of the acreage in Kansas is agriculturally managed. And they import 90% of the acreage in Kansas is agriculturally managed and they import 90% of their food as a state. And one in four children in Kansas is going hungry for lack of calories today. And so when we started this chemical farming mission in the last 30 years, the whole mission
Starting point is 00:41:21 was to feed the world. And we wake up 30 years later to find out, no, we just made multi-megabillion dollar corporations much richer through buying all their chemicals, but we completely lost our autonomy to feed ourselves, let alone the world in that process. The world is feeding us today and the supply chain is tenuous the the reservoirs are low and so you know every city is now an island it cannot produce its own you know you know electricity let alone its own you know food system so it's time to start taking that back again and you know my wife and i and and one of our friends that's on quarantine with us from coming back from travels sat around last night and there was candlelight sitting here burning in the living
Starting point is 00:42:12 room. Lights were off and I was kind of getting myself into a space where I could talk coherently, I hope, today. And in that process, it was just so peaceful. There's just a sense of like, man, I don't need the lights on. I've got a candle. I've, you know, we need to grow some plants on the back porch. We need to, you know, it's so simple, the moves we need to make to completely change the vulnerability that we have at a health level, at a food supply level, at a
Starting point is 00:42:42 healthcare crisis level, we need to take these steps at the individual level and the whole system will change around us very rapidly. And I'm very excited for, you know, our, our companies to have to, to change with us. I'm excited that the dairy industry is being called to change. I'm sad that the American government is, continues to subsidize collapse rather than foster change. But nonetheless, I think if we connect with those farmers, they're going to show us the path. If we connect with the energy sector on a more personal level, instead of just flipping on our lights, start to really think about what is energy and where does it come from? What does it mean to
Starting point is 00:43:25 live in an air conditioned space 24 seven, where the temperature is always 72 degrees to 75 degrees, no matter what time of year, what does that mean for my health? Is it actually good for me to have windows closed and heating and air conditioning on year round? And the answer of course is, well, no, it's you're completely isolated away from nature there and so what does nature start to look like in your daily life again and we have this awesome opportunity right now to do that and you know i was excited when san francisco asked their population to voluntarily restrict their activities and restrict themselves to the homes or parks and national parks trails nature areas so I thought that was brilliant for San Francisco to say,
Starting point is 00:44:06 stay away from each other to reduce the spread of this virus, but get out in nature whenever possible. And that needs to be our mindset. So take a look at your requests from your local governments and see if they're saying that you can't go outside at all, which is really not happening anywhere. They're basically saying, stay out of public places, stay away from one another, and let's see where it goes. And if it gets more dogmatic than that, then we should raise concern to our public officials and
Starting point is 00:44:33 say, look, it's really important for the health of our children that they're outside. And if we just put them inside for the next three months or whatever is being demanded, their health is going to really be undermined. And we're going to see younger and younger people coming under the effects of this virus if we make ourselves unhealthy in the mission of isolation. Human isolation is a horrible thing. And it's been maybe the silver lining of the social media world is that people are really reconnecting in a million unique ways. And I'm a little bit disturbed by just the amount of human effort
Starting point is 00:45:08 being put into creating clever memes right now. But if that's what we need to do to stay connected, maybe that's the vibration we're in. But I hope that as you get bored of making memes, you start to really turn your attention towards these bigger opportunities that the time is providing you. Sit down with your loved ones whether that's you know by zoom my sister just implemented a clever thing that our family has never done before she just implemented a sunday afternoon family zoom
Starting point is 00:45:36 conference and so me and my three siblings and everything else get the opportunity now to start to engage in a way that we usually don't think to. Like we go about our busy lives and connect every couple months, but now we can connect every week and spend time really talking about what's important to us as a family. So think about how you're going to reconnect to your family in a more deep way than just a text message or a meme or something, and let's really start to talk about what's important. I mean, I think that there is an interesting
Starting point is 00:46:05 recalibration that is taking place with this sequestration that's compelling us to take inventory of our daily habits and to get clarity on what's truly important versus extraneous. And with that, I'm seeing an increase in the level of social connectivity in my own personal life and just observationally with other people. Your example of the Zoom call perfectly encapsulates that. People are discovering Zoom, and despite our geographic separation, I'm seeing a more coherent social conversation happening right now. There is a unification occurring because of the fact that this is impacting all of us in such an unprecedented way. And there is something beautiful about that. And my hope is that,
Starting point is 00:46:59 you know, a wonderful flower will come out of that that will precipitate a change in the systems that cohere to create the scenario that we find ourselves in right now. I will say also that you're probably not aware of this because you're in Oahu, but San Francisco and also Los Angeles just closed their parks today. So, that's no longer the case. Although I would say, today. So that's no longer the case. Although I would say, I have trails, as you know, that surround my house. And that's really where I'm finding peace every day, being able to go out and trail run or get out on my bike. And generally, when I'm out on the trails, I might see one or two or three other people. But recently, it's been the most socially congested aspect of my day. So many people are getting outside and going on these family walks, so much so that you have to kind of, you know, take a wide berth around them when you're running to maintain that social distance.
Starting point is 00:47:58 But it's been interesting. I suppose there's a great positivity in that and that people for the first time ever, it was like a log jam of cars parked in the little parking lot at the trailhead that I go to typically, and I've never seen that before. So that's a great thing. My hope is that despite parks being closed, that people will still find ways to get outside.
Starting point is 00:48:20 I think that's crucial in this moment right now. But I think to your point of the food supply being imperiled by what's happening, you know, in Los Angeles, when you go to the grocery store, they're only allowing people in a few at a time to make sure that there's no overcrowding in the grocery stores. And there's plenty of aisles where the shelves are bare. of aisles where the shelves are bare. And my sense is that restocking is coming and we're not in any imminent threat of our food supply being in peril to the extent that we're not gonna be able to eat, but it doesn't take much imagination
Starting point is 00:48:57 to understand and realize that we're a hair's breadth away from that actually becoming a reality. And when you grasp the fact that the food that we produce a hair's breadth away from that actually becoming a reality. And when you grasp the fact that the food that we produce in this country is going towards animal agriculture or it's getting exported overseas or being used to create- Ethanol for food.
Starting point is 00:49:17 Processed food and snacks and all of, yeah, or fuel or things like that, you realize once again, it goes back to the fragility of our systems. We're not in a situation in which we're robust enough or things like that, you realize once again, it goes back to the fragility of our systems. We're not in a situation in which we're robust enough to weather a crisis like that. Again, the wake-up call and the conversation that needs to happen is how do we create robustness
Starting point is 00:49:38 in our food system, in our energy supply, in our sort of popular unity, in our kind of commercial consciousness that drives markets to uh you know create the systems that we need and deserve to basically you know survive as a species while also maintaining the integrity of the planet sustainability i guess is what i'm getting at i I think that's all very well said. And I think we need to be coming to terms with the fact that whatever fear and anger we have around this virus and all this, if we keep projecting that at the virus, we're not going to realize that what we're really afraid of is that our system is collapsing and our vulnerabilities
Starting point is 00:50:25 are profound and get worse every day. And so we need to fundamentally change all that. And we so easily can. And again, I really think it begins the food, like, you know, the healthcare system will right itself as soon as we fix the food system. And so the regenerative effort that we have at Farmer's Footprint has been interesting because the ripple effects are not what I expected. When I set out to make that documentary film, I didn't even set out to make a nonprofit initially because I didn't know that the problem was so big. I was just set out to tell a story of how damaging Roundup was to ecology of the rivers and ocean system and how it was affecting human health along those water systems. rivers and ocean system and how it's affecting human health along those water systems. And then as soon as we got on our first farm, we realized, oh my gosh, there is a crisis and a vulnerability here that goes far beyond the poisoning of our water systems.
Starting point is 00:51:14 It's the poisoning of the minds of humanity here going on. And so the story changed. And as soon as we started watching regenerative soil management practices come in on these farms, it was, again, the unexpected happened. It wasn't that, oh, great, the food's healthier and the nutrients are denser in the food. That's, again, the story I thought I was going to tell. All that happens, but it pales in comparison to the human journey in there. These farmers wake up with such optimism suddenly know, optimism suddenly that it's been missing
Starting point is 00:51:46 for generations. And they're like, I can, I can be an independent autonomous farmer and I can make money again. And my farm can make money. And my kids are coming back to the farm because they're seeing success and they want to be a part of that. And, you know, now there's a, you know, a plan for me to be able to pass off this farm to my children and it's working. And like the, the joy just eclipses even the economic or everything else. Human joy is just the most powerful of things that I've ever seen. I just am amazed by it. When, when you have true joy in your, in your being, it changes.
Starting point is 00:52:24 You become this, this radical force. You, you become this, this entity that just is so much larger than your body at that point. And you, you can change everything. Most of all, your mindset and, and your, your vibration. And when you put yourself in a really high vibration state, good stuff comes. It's just so obvious. When you put yourself in a high vibration state, you could experience success and joy and human impact on levels that the current status of society isn't ready to let you know you can do if you just embody that joy at a level and then surrender your expectations on what's going to come out of that.
Starting point is 00:53:07 And the joy is engendered not by big things, but it's engendered in the tiny little things. It's in the candlelight with your lover that you've called your wife for years or your children or your new girlfriend or whatever it is that's in your space right now, that small human touch, that small human experience of being sequestered away for a moment and light those candles, look into each other's eyes and just express your gratitude to one another for being alive right now. Because the reality is we are just the tip of biology on the earth. The microbiome is always for life. It's never against life. If it appears that the microbiome is threatening us or killing us, it's because we have misaligned ourselves with nature at a large level. And we need to
Starting point is 00:54:00 realign ourselves with that. And we need start to to think about what what it looks like to be within our moment living in as light beings at a high vibration in space and time with high consciousness with a respect for human life with a respect for animal life that's not happening on the planet you know people are right now you know saying again oh china makes this happen every year because they have all these animal markets and food markets and everything else. And the reality is, yes, that actually is a problem. When we're killing 60 billion animals a year for human consumption, that's a global problem. And that's not a Chinese problem. That is a global problem that we're killing 60 billion animals. But a bigger problem that those 60 billion animals are largely being held in captivity in these extremely toxic, inhumane levels of management. And so if we see viruses
Starting point is 00:54:53 coming out of that, well, that's the microbiomes check on the reality that we live in. There are checks and balances in biology, certainly that work better than the checks and balances in our government. And life is going to have to be redirected if we oppose health and ecology on that level. Really, what you're getting at is developing a healthy dose of humility. And the recursive theme in everything that you've been talking about comes back to having in there being like equanimity in terms of our relationship to the planet, whether it's our food systems, whether it's how we interact with each other,
Starting point is 00:55:34 we are out of whack and it's nature's way of reminding us that we need to reset and pay attention. And again, I keep saying this, but I don't wanna minimize what's happening. There are a lot of people who are scared and there are many people who are suffering and people are dying. But I think if we can really connect with this humility,
Starting point is 00:55:55 we have an opportunity to embrace the opportunity to return with a more sort of synergistic relationship with our planet. I mean, Farmer's Footprint is a perfect example of that. By returning to what is natural and cyclical with the planet, these farmers have been able to find new life. And with that, a new happiness and a new lifeline for their families. And the domino effect of that is profound. And if we can extrapolate on that example to reflect back upon our own relationship to the planet and our behaviors and our consumer choices, I think it can be highly instructive going forward.
Starting point is 00:56:40 At the same time, many of these things that we're talking about involve systems that are out of the control of the average consumer. How much impact can I really have on our global supply chain, on our food system, on policy, on economics, on what big pharma decides to do, et cetera. But what we can do is seize this moment of solitude and sequestration to really inventory and reflect on our own behavior patterns. Because the ecosystem that resides within each of us is just a microcosm of the macrocosm that we're experiencing externally right now. And for me, I've been kind of thinking
Starting point is 00:57:26 about this in terms of, you know, through that lens, like, how am I living? What in my life is not in balance? Where can I live more in alignment with nature's cyclical rhythms? Where can I, you know, find more balance in my day-to-day routine? And where am I blind or in denial about things that I'm doing that are perpetrating a problem that recurs in my own life? And I think the more that we can all adopt that practice, I think we all kind of emerge out of this, assuming that we can emerge out of it healthy, more empowered and stronger and more capable and humble and in a better position to create that world that we all can imagine for ourselves and yet seem so out of grasp at the moment. Yeah, I think there is a danger of a sense of hopelessness or helplessness on the level of the moment. Yeah. I think, I think there is a danger of, of sense of hopelessness or helplessness on the level of the one, but I want to again, bring it back to maybe just, you know, one,
Starting point is 00:58:34 one small family farm in Minnesota that you can, you know, that farmer's footprint, 20 minute documentary was, you know, feature this one family. And watching Grant and Don on their journey of self-empowerment was, you know, profound to see what this one little family decided to do. And the speed at which new community came to them when they had been completely ostracized and lonely because they had, you know, made the decision in the middle of Minnesota to go into some sort of organic process or something like that. As soon as they kicked the common paradigm, they were literally ostracized socially and everything else. And so they were in one of the deepest states of loneliness and isolation and depression
Starting point is 00:59:18 that you could put a family in. And then with just the simple decision to take care of mother earth under their feet and say we're going to do the right thing for this 300 acres and it's not our responsibility to figure out to do with the other 125 million acres in the united states we're just going to take care of this little 300 acres and as soon as they did that they found new community around the world that had been you know taking care of soil for decades and had new insights and resources and information and experience to share with them. And they now find themselves, you know, embraced by a global community and, you know, their kids coming back to the farm and, you know, the layers are so good. And all they had to do was the right thing at the small level and you know now we see their story impacting an entire world of farmers i just came out of australia because we were launching a
Starting point is 01:00:15 parallel program to farmers for print in australia in the next couple of months and you know just to watch the impact that that film has had here to these, you know, farmers who've never been to Australia probably and everything else. And yet they're impacting every sector of agriculture all over the world because they did the right thing on the small scale. And so that's what you can do with your family. At the end of World War II, we were growing 45% of our food in our backyard gardens, 45% of our food. Now we grow less than 0.1% of our food in our backyard gardens. You can be so powerful in regrowing that garden. One of my favorite success stories, my clinic when I set it up back in 2010 was in one of the most impoverished areas of Virginia,
Starting point is 01:01:03 fifth generation poverty, no grocery stores in that county. People were eating out of gas stations as their primary food source most days. And it was the penultimate food desert, penultimate processed food nightmare. And I went in with my clinic to teach plant-based diet and to help people start to regain their health. And what I found out know, start to regain their health. And what I found out was it was not just their health that was, you know, had the opportunity to shift. It was actually their sense of autonomy and their sense of independence that
Starting point is 01:01:33 they've been lacking for perhaps generations. And the way that they did that was through planting a garden. And as soon as they planted a garden and found out they could produce their own food and that the immediate consequences of that was a reduction in their medication costs and co-pays for hospital visits. It was just like this unbridled sense of capacity. One of the African-American pastors that was coming to my group, he was a fantastic reverend within the Black Baptist community in my area. And he got a hold of the message that if he regrew his garden, he could really have an impact on his own health. Here he was in his late seventies when he came to
Starting point is 01:02:11 my clinic and stage heart disease and diabetes, all the typical stuff. And he heard this and remembered that his grandmother had the largest garden in the entire community. And so he replanted this four acre garden with three generations of his kids and grandkids and great grandkids. And within two years, he was feeding over 40 families out of their, their garden. And yeah, it's just like, you just can't underestimate the power of doing the right thing in your backyard, on your porch, in your window, do the right thing just at the tiny level. And again, this raises your vibration and bigger stuff will come. Surrender the expectations of
Starting point is 01:02:52 what it's going to look like and just do the right thing. And you're going to enjoy it. One of the coolest things that you could do with your kids right now, it's not a great time for you to be growing perhaps, and it takes a little time to get a crop in the ground or plant in the ground. So start with this, start with salt, water, and a cabbage and get your kids involved or get your grandkids involved or whoever you're not sequestered away from right now and make a saltwater brine, chop up the cabbage, drop it in the saltwater, open it up to the microbiome of the air, and let the bacteria and fungi at millions of species potential come floating into that crock over the next day or two with just a towel over it. And then after a couple of days out, you can then decide to jar
Starting point is 01:03:37 that or whatever you want, or you can just leave it in the crock and keep swiping the top every day and to keep the water clean. And over the next two weeks, you'll create one of the most amazing sauerkraut experiences you've ever had. And you can just let it keep going and take a bite every couple of days and experience yourself what the microbiome is doing to that food. And it will taste different every couple of days. And that experiment will cost you maybe a buck and a half. And it will totally change your perspective on your food system because right now you're spending 12 bucks for a little few ounces of sauerkraut that's vacuum where autonomy actually comes from, is just this journey. And your wife is doing such an amazing job with her cheese company right now because she's doing the right thing. She's saying, let's just ferment non-dairy and turn that into delicious food.
Starting point is 01:04:42 And it will change our family. It will change our community as they realize this is in our grasp. We can actually create artisan food in our kitchens. We can create artisan food, you know, in our backyards. And this is where you guys became so successful in your plant-based movement is really bringing the autonomy back into the household to be creative in the kitchen. Again, the colors that are in your cookbooks are just such a joy. And it's, it's a sense of beauty to the whole thing. And ultimately, if we're here for anything, it's to, to experience beauty and to recognize it and shout it from the rooftops when we see it and to celebrate it. And if you
Starting point is 01:05:23 just do that in your day to day, if you dig into beauty and you start making sure that everything you do is grounded back to a pursuit of beauty, you're going to find a different life and you will save the American people from collapse in the process. And you will show the world that we can build a nation that's not about empires and sequestration of power and wealth and resources. We're about co-creation. I think that's one of the shining lights of the American people is we are a profoundly creative group because we've been empowered at the self level. The Chinese people are not empowered to be individualistic in their pursuits. But they come to America to participate in that. And they
Starting point is 01:06:14 come to dig into a city like San Francisco or Chicago or New York for the opportunity to pursue creativity and beauty on their own terms. And so let's be that again. Let's be the Ellis Island of the world again. And we can do that if we stop trying to take everything from everybody and make them do all our work. And we can start doing it by just being a co-creative society again, connecting humans to be co-creative rather than consumptive.
Starting point is 01:06:45 And the world is our oyster. It can all open up to bring more beauty into our lives. The pearls that are there waiting for us to see are the other cultures. There's such beauty in the Fijian people. There's such beauty in the Filipino people. There's such beauty in the faces of Honduras and El Salvador and Peru and South Africa. And we are missing the beauty for what? What is distracting us? It's our social media. It's our Instagram page and everything else.
Starting point is 01:07:21 So it's our 10,000 selfies. If we stop looking at our own face and go to see ourselves within the faces of everybody else, we'll see a much more beautiful picture of ourselves. And it begins with sauerkraut. I'm listening to you eloquently deliver this beautiful speech and all i'm doing is thinking about how i haven't been able to get it together to grow a garden at our house i'm listening because julie and i always revert to the excuse that we're so busy and you know in in in hearing you you know, it really is about the simplicity of all of it. And also, connecting with your neighbors. It's not about the global economy as much as it is about
Starting point is 01:08:14 your local community. That's right. Yeah. And I think that the American mind is quick to find failure and then use multiple excuses in our failure. And so I think it's because we have such rigid belief systems about what a garden should be. It should have tomato and basils and eggplant and cucumbers and squash and peppers and blah, blah, blah. And if we don't get the time to do that and we don't do that, then we're like, well, we've been intending that for years. And then we hold that against ourselves. And we don't do that. Then we're like, well, we've been intending that for years. And then we hold that against ourselves.
Starting point is 01:08:45 And I've started opening up my own definition of garden so that I stopped seeing myself as a failure here. In our property in Virginia, we have six acres of beautiful woods that have really been untouched by chemical agriculture for its entire history. And so it's just like it feels like this national treasure whenever I'm in that space. We have like ancient, you know, ground covers growing in the woods that date back, you know, 50 to a hundred million years in the fossil record. And so we have like this incredible thing. And then I chipped out this garden, this little quarter acre garden over the last 10 years. And I never have that thing in good repair, but growing in that is an extraordinary amount of wildflowers now that have self-seeded and found their way in there. And when I go out there in the summertime, now the amount of butterflies, caterpillars,
Starting point is 01:09:37 birds are just berserk. It's like every single millimeter of that, that garden is crawling with life. And so I've expanded my, my concepts for my own psyche in some ways, but also to expand past the concept of the tomato plant to realize, you know what? Mother nature doesn't need more tomato plants. Mother nature needs biodiversity. And so in your backyard, you could just start a butterfly garden and let the butterflies bring life in and, you know, the moths at night bringing life in there. And these pollinators are going extinct at extreme rates and really are, you know,
Starting point is 01:10:12 are harbinger of the extinction of life as we know it on the planet. And so you may not need to feed just you. You might be able to expand your ideas to feed mother earth again in her biodiversity and nature in her biodiversity and so growing in my garden right now is gruesome artichokes which grow in the ground they're kind of like a potato but this literally looks like tiny little sunflowers at the top of these tall stalks and in the middle of summer and they're beautiful to to look at and then they always flop over and kind of ugly i think think, in the fall. But then I realized that that biome mass that's now flopped over on the ground is now protecting my soil and it's creating all these microclimates for earthworms and everything else underneath there.
Starting point is 01:10:54 And then you get to dig up the Jerusalem artichokes. And literally these things will take over large amounts of space. Plant one little tuber of a Jerusalem artichoke and you're going to end up with a massive patch in a few years. And so my garden, totally unattended to everything else, has this biomass and this food source that now covers 15 square feet or something of these incredible things. And you pull all these sunflowers out of the ground and on their root systems are dozens of these little potato-like you know nuggets and those jerusalem artichokes also called sun chokes are some of the most delicious food i've ever eaten so i would just encourage everybody listening to think you know beyond just the little manicured cucumber tomato patch to think about how do you create
Starting point is 01:11:40 biodiversity out there and let it be messy because nature is messy. She loves the, you know, the kindergarten approach to life, which is, you know, the finger painting and colors everywhere and no particular, you know, order except that in its disorder, we realize a beauty that could have never been done in any form of symmetry or, or careful planning. So, so be raucous in your gardening. Let it go wild if you need to. And if it quote unquote fails because you get too busy
Starting point is 01:12:12 because your time is demanded by all the good things you're doing for the world, that's okay. Let it do its thing as well and let it realize its full potential as it would plan it, not as you would plan it. And let's not think of that as a failure.
Starting point is 01:12:24 I like that. It feels like it gives me permission to begin because I do have in my mind like what it's supposed to look like. And to me, it's very intimidating. And I start to think about all the time it's gonna require. But the idea of just starting with one thing
Starting point is 01:12:41 and being more in the allowing process and not beating yourself up, I feel like that is a good motivator for me to finally get over myself and commence that process. So thanks for that. I think it would be good to share with people a few things that they can do to buttress their microbiome in the meantime
Starting point is 01:13:02 and boost their immunity as much as possible? Other than, look, the social distancing or the physical distancing, the getting a lot of sleep, staying hydrated, washing your hands, all the things that you're gonna hear time and time again, what are some perhaps less intuitive things that people could be doing to make sure that they're taking care of themselves
Starting point is 01:13:23 to the best extent possible. Yeah, it's critical for us to think about this. It's an extension of the garden we just talked about, really. And so the data coming out of China, again, in this great paper that just was released last week, is intriguing that they're finding that the unifying risk of fatality from this virus is not the virus itself. It's the vulnerability that comes in the pneumonias and other conditions that come after the virus infects you. And so their unifying feature that they're finding in the victims is this dysbiosis, which is a term to describe an unbalanced microbiome in the gut. And so if you haven't been up on the last 10 years of medical science, every single condition on the planet has now been tied back to the microbiome. That's the nutshell of the last 10 years of global science.
Starting point is 01:14:17 And it's obvious in the end that what would grow a healthy tomato plant is going to be what's going to grow a healthy human. There's no way that biology can't be founded in the microbiome because it's literally where all of the nutrients and the fuel production and ultimately the communication for cell-cell and trans-species communications come from. And so to prepare yourself for resilience in this time as, you know, and again, if you don't continue these things thereafter, we're going to see something much worse than our current coronavirus situation. So this, again, is a template for long-term life, not just what you're going to do for the next few weeks while you're thinking about it. So how do you start to build this into your life? And this
Starting point is 01:14:58 is literally what my companies have been doing since our origin in 2010. So for the last decade, I've been steeped in this mindset of what is nutrition? How is it found in the microbiome? What is the microbiome? How is human biology founded in it? And so what we've discovered over the years is that a couple of really important aspects have gone missing from our daily experience. And a lot of it has to do with carbon, which is interesting because carbon is actually the backbone of biology. To become a doctor or a microbiologist or anything in the health sciences, you have to take organic chemistry. And the word organic chemistry means carbon chemistry.
Starting point is 01:15:38 The word organic refers to life built on carbon structure. to life built on carbon structure. And so it may seem very foreign to you at the moment, but I want you to start to re-envision life on earth as a series of carbon molecules. That being the case, you need to start to think about carbon as the most important thing that you can do for yourself. And carbon in the human experience
Starting point is 01:16:01 is the nutrients that we consume. And so sugar is a large carbohydrate string of carbon molecules. And so it can come in the form of glucose, fructose, galactose, all these different carbon chains. And then they get cleaved down to just the same little carbon molecule of CO2 in the end. Fatty acids are the other form of fuel. There's only two forms of fuel for cellular biology as we know it, the multicellular organisms from earthworm to human. It has to do with the carbon chains of carbohydrates and the carbon chains of fatty acids. And all these diets that fight over should you be high carb, low carb,
Starting point is 01:16:41 high fat, low fat, all that. The mitochondria just sit here and laugh at us, I think, because they're the same thing. They're carbon strings that as soon as they go into a mitochondria, which is the only thing that can use either one, is going to cleave that down to release energy as it cleaves those carbon chains and release CO2. And so the mitochondria are going to do the exact same thing. In fact, a fatty acid and a glucose molecule become the exact same molecule, acetyl-CoA, in a two-enzyme step for it to enter the mitochondria. It goes to acyl-CoA. And so in a single step, actually, it goes to the same molecule.
Starting point is 01:17:17 So glucose, fat, single enzyme turns into acyl-CoA. Second enzyme, acetyl-CoA. Acetyl-CoA becomes the entire energy source. And in producing the energy that would then produce CO2, it releases electrons and the electrons become our communication system. And so that's where we've been focused as a company is understanding how do bacteria take the carbon, turn it into bioactive agents and communicate through that system to engender health, longevity, regeneration, all of these things that are so fascinating.
Starting point is 01:17:50 And so in the nutshell, what you can start to do is look for the most clean sources of complex carbohydrates and fatty acids that you can put your hands on. And so that's going to again, come down to the garden. So seeds, nuts, and legumes are your fantastic sources of fatty acids. Your complex carbohydrates are easy in that it's anything with beautiful color in it, basically on the plate. And so it's your vegetables, your fruit, but also think, you know, under the ground is an important one so that your root vegetables are really rich in these carbon sources and their skins in particular. So the skin of a carrot, the skin of a potato, these have basically the entire periodic chart, but they're also very rich in these soil carbon compounds. And so think root vegetables as a source because not only do they have that micronutrient and carbon density, they also have
Starting point is 01:18:41 this very important aspect of fiber. And fiber in your diet is really the building block for micro ecosystems within your gut. And the fiber supports diversity of microbial species. And the microbes that are missing from the guts of the Chinese people that are dying from coronavirus in this paper last week are the very bacteria that go missing when you eliminate fiber from your diet. And so I'm intrigued by the paper because it's basically pointing to what we've seen over and over again through all human diseases. If you eliminate fiber from your diet, you start to suffer. If you eliminate complex carbohydrates from your diet, your microbiome shifts and it
Starting point is 01:19:21 shifts to a fermentation rather than an aerobic digestion. And the fermentation, the firm acute bacteria are very closely linked to this chronic inflammatory state of the gut and immune system. And so it's very exciting when I see that paper, because the first thing that we can do is get people eating from the ground as fast as possible. So let's get our plant-based diets revved up. Let's go to the root vegetables. We're looking at sweet potatoes. We're looking at your radishes. The daikon radish is a super interesting one there that doesn't get recognized much, but your red radishes, your black radishes, the white radish of the daikon looks like a giant carrot. Your carrots themselves, the heirloom carrots, the purple and the white and
Starting point is 01:20:05 the orange carrots, and leave the skins on these things. For goodness sakes, we just go and skin these things immediately and then just eat the starch out of the middle of a potato. Leave the skins on and get the whole experience here of the complexity that you need. And so that's where it begins. The other thing that then is lacking after all of that is in the current human experience is the microbiome itself. And so this is a little bit more complicated because it takes a little bit more effort on your part than just putting the right vegetables on your plate. But what's been missing increasingly because of our antibiotic environment is the carbon communication network of the microbiome.
Starting point is 01:20:46 And so now that we're in the U.S., we put about 38 million pounds of antibiotics into our animal feed a year. We put about 8 million pounds of antibiotic into our humans through physician offices and prescriptions. And then we put 300 million pounds of antibiotic in the form of Roundup and glyphosate into our soils and water systems every year through chemical farming. The scale of that antibiotic is really, you know, multiplied by the fact that the chemical of glyphosate and Roundup is water-based. And so it now ends up in the air we breathe, 75% of the air we breathe in any agricultural state is contaminated with Roundup. 75% of the rainfall in our agricultural states are contaminated with Roundup. And when I say agricultural states, that's most of them, right? That's one of the main economies of any state.
Starting point is 01:21:39 And so we're all breathing and being rained on and eating and drinking these antibiotics. And so what's happened is we've lost biodiversity in the gut. And with that, we've become very vulnerable in many, many ways. And the primary thing that we've been working on as a science group in our laboratories for the last eight years is to understand how did the soils do this historically and how can the ancient soil give this back to us? you know, do this historically and how can the ancient soil give this back to us? So for the last decade, you know, we've been working on the nutrition side, but then for the last eight years, we've been working on the soil secrets and we've been extracting for the last eight years, these small carbon molecules that act as the communication network because they can exchange electrons once they're activated with oxygen and hydrogen, you can exchange electrons, which means
Starting point is 01:22:24 you can create communication between cells, importantly, between species. And so we've been extracting that. That product is now called Ion Biome. And so my company produces that. So this is the most biased part of this entire podcast. And take this with a grain of salt if you want. But for the last eight years, we've showing that when you you take these carbon molecules and get oxygen hydrogen buying them again in our production center and then put that into a bottle and then give that to a human something amazing happens it's it gives me goosebumps every time somebody is about to put this in their mouth because humans have only been around 200,000
Starting point is 01:22:59 years and the the molecular intelligence the biodiversity that we're tapping into is actually 60 million years old. So we're taking soil that's 60 million years old, has been compressed into an ore called leonardite. And then we extract the carbon molecules, small carbon molecules. And then we make oxygen and hydrogen bind those carbon molecules again so that they become non-reactive and non-inflammatory. And then we put that into a human system.
Starting point is 01:23:23 And suddenly you have billions and billions of versions of these little carbon snowflakes, each species of bacteria and fungi from 60 million years ago, sending their own little signal, their own message of intelligence into this system. And then you put a human species that's only 200,000 years old into this level of intelligence. And what happens under the microscope is mind-blowing because it's never been seen. You see fundamental healing repair and three-dimensional structures
Starting point is 01:23:51 coming back into rapid function. That doesn't happen in petri dishes. Petri dishes are where we study disease and collapse because we can't study health and healing because that usually takes complex systems of biology and intact immune system. It takes messaging from distant cellular types in human biology to make healing happen. It started happening in a petri dish in 2013 with our first studies. And it blew our minds because
Starting point is 01:24:17 it wasn't supposed to happen. You aren't supposed to get healing in a human cell system in a petri dish isolated. And the answer that's come out over the last seven years is exciting is we keep thinking how human biology is human. Human biology is based in the microbiome itself, the biology itself. And so it's extraordinary to realize that if you put back in the communication network of bacteria and fungi, human cells know how to repair themselves, know how to start building cooperative three-dimensional structures with one another. It's not a sterile petri dish anymore. There's no bacteria and fungi in there because it is a sterile liquid that we extract. But the communication of that vast ecosystem is intact and firing. And when the cell has unfettered access to information, it always goes into a regenerative state.
Starting point is 01:25:05 And I think that's a lesson for life right there. Biology, at its foundation, is grace. Grace, in my mind, is extending the opportunity for healing faster than the damage happens. And so biologic grace is realized here as we see biologic systems collapse under the pressure of decades of roundup. And then you put back communication network. And in a matter of not years or decades, but in a matter of minutes, you start to see this regenerative capacity come out of the human gut. And the way in which that happens is the human gut starts to cooperate as a single organism again. Human biology really begins at this inside-outside understanding of an intact gut.
Starting point is 01:25:49 Your gut lining is two tennis courts and surface area. And when you consume Roundup, it destroys that structure. Interestingly, alcohol also does that. And so if you drink excessive amounts of alcohol, it will also do the Roundup injury of destroying the tight junctions, and you get a breakdown in this primary barrier between you and the outside world. And so with that collapse of that system, we lose self-identity at the biologic level. And we get chronic inflammation, we get major depression, we get hopelessness, we get suicide, all of this from
Starting point is 01:26:22 a collapse of that gut lining. When that gut lining goes back up and the microbiome helps us rebuild that, we get to accelerate into this journey of self-identity, self-hope, anti-inflammatory capacity, reservoirs of resources to repair. And we go into resilience and we go into regeneration because the microbiome is talking to us. The teachable moment there for me is the simple truth that there is no separation between us and the world that surrounds us. That in fact, our microbiome is outward facing. It is technically outside of us, right? And the fact that it is premised upon these age-old principles that predate humankind is not only humbling but instructive in the sense that if we can find a synergistic relationship with our environments, that our complex systems of biology tend to respond in kind to maintain our health and well-being.
Starting point is 01:27:26 You're spot on. And I think I'm constantly more amazed and intrigued by the macro consequences of that. And so when we repair this at the microscopic level, we repair this amazing boundary of the human gut and self-identity becomes real again for the immune system and for this, we see an immediate, you know, within weeks or months, we see an immediate shift in the human psyche to healthy boundaries. And suddenly people who have been in abusive relationships will come back to my clinic and say, you know, doc, I'm just in total joy and amazement because I just left my husband who's been abusing me for 30 years. And I just finally saw my self-worth.
Starting point is 01:28:07 And it took me years of hearing these stories before I made the correlation of like, oh, my gosh, isn't that obvious? When we build our microscopic boundaries, our macroscopic boundaries become possible again. When we're in the overwhelm of microscopic injury and loss of self-identity at the microscopic level. And we have to react to everything outside of us. Suddenly we're in, you know, we're sensitive to food, we're sensitive or allergic to food. We're sensitive to the environment or we're allergic to the environment. And all of these things are becoming a reality for so many of our children, one in four children are now either allergic to their, the air they breathe or the food they eat. And so we are losing that self-identity.
Starting point is 01:28:45 And when we're in that collapse, we get chronic inflammation, and there is no reservoir for creative thought or sense of self-protection or sense of self-opportunity. We're just in chaos control, damage control all the time. And so to move somebody out of that damage control strain at the microscopic level moves them into this potential at the macroscopic level, at the consciousness level, to into this potential at the macroscopic level at the at the consciousness level to become you know have a moment to breathe to have a moment to to listen to self to see why are you actually here what are you here to do what is your deep soul
Starting point is 01:29:15 purpose what are you going to do with that it's coming out of this gut intelligence and so that's that's why we rebranded our products and everything else was intelligence of nature became our tagline and so ion product line was to emphasize that intelligence is built into the fabric of nature and it's how nature works so well you know right now i'm looking out at this extreme expanse of green stuff there's palm trees bent over in the wind right now and rain blowing by. And it's so perfect in every shape and every sign. And there's all of these cascading mountains that have been biologically intact for millions and millions of years. And the ecosystems are bountiful. You can't have all of that beauty if not for the intelligence of the system beneath it.
Starting point is 01:30:07 The coordination of the beauty that we see is communication. And so as humans, we need to learn from that. Our communication networks need to change. And so maybe a future podcast will talk about this because it's one of my biggest passions about what we're going to do with the internet in the next couple of years. But we need to fundamentally change the internet to start to mimic nature, which is everything should have unfettered access to information. And if it does, then we're going to build beauty. We're going to build cooperative structures and everything else.
Starting point is 01:30:38 When every interaction is exploited by a third party for advertising and otherwise, we don't have unfettered access to information our information is fact warped and it's telling us only the reality that it wants us to see and we're not seeing the reality for what it is and so we behave in a certain way so we it reinforces our consumptive behavior this is the kind of stuff that we get excited about as a company is if we start to mimic the communication network that we found in the microbiome and we start to build societies like that, that's how we're going to escape this extinction event that we're headed towards. We can go extinct in the next 70 to a hundred years on our current course, or we could literally become a different society. We could literally become a different species as we start to embrace the template that the microbiome is
Starting point is 01:31:26 revealing to us. So once we get this carbon substrate going here and we start to build an infrastructure of communication within the guts of our patients and our families, we then ask them to do the bigger thing, which is now go plug back into nature and let the microbiome re-manifest in your gut. And when this carbon substrate is rich in the gut and the communication network is there, it allows micronutrients to quickly develop. And so you can get within just days of supporting that carbon communication system, you can see a bulking of the stool, you can see an increase in biodiversity within the gut, and you can see resolution of longstanding imbalances that have been present there, not because the product is
Starting point is 01:32:10 changing. It's just giving back communication and unfettered communication leads to balance, leads to biodiversification. And I think that we need to start to mimic that across all systems. But the next step then is to do it at the macro level, which is get back in touch with nature. So as soon as you put this product in your mouth, then we're asking our patients to get outside into environments that you don't usually go to. National parks, to my knowledge, nobody's closed the national parks yet. That's probably coming next 24 hours or something like that. But while the national parks are still open, think about hitting a national park. And if you have to wait till after quarantine, then wait until after quarantine. But the point is, is you need to go into an
Starting point is 01:32:49 ecosystem you haven't breathed recently because breathing, just like the sauerkraut that we talked about earlier, is the result of the microbiome air interfacing with a water structure of a crock or whatever you're making your sauerkraut in, you are a water structure that is calling for the same microbiome support and interaction. And so go out and breathe. And so the hashtag breathe your biome that I created a couple of years ago remains one of our most successful campaigns we've ever done because people got so excited to take pictures of their children themselves interacting with new elements of nature.
Starting point is 01:33:23 And it's just a beautiful, you know, series of pictures. If you scroll through all that hashtag breathe your biome, you're going to see, you know, kids in waterfalls and you'll see, you know, people on horseback out in the middle of nowhere. You'll see all kinds of just beautiful reconnection happening. And when you do that, you will, you will get fed by nature and you'll plug back in and you'll have that microscopic experience of biodiversity. And you're going to have the macro experience of biodiversity because you're going to meet new people. You're going to see new faces. You're going to realize that humanity is even bigger and more beautiful than you thought just a day ago.
Starting point is 01:33:58 And you're going to re-engage. And so ultimately, how are we going to be resilient to this virus? We're going to eat from the ground. We're going to experience the intelligence of the microbiome. We're going to really go after nutrient density to support biologic systems. But more than that, we're going to change our environment. If your health is not at its full potential, it's because your environment has limited your potential. And so you need to expand your concept of what is your daily life and what kind of microbiome is advancing. You and I have talked about it before, I think on some of our previous ones, but the typical experience of the American consumer right now is you wake up on a mattress
Starting point is 01:34:39 that's off-gassing carcinogens and you go and you wash yourself down with a bunch of chemically infused soaps and skin products that have on average 180 different chemicals. By the time you've gotten out of the house, you put on makeup that's got another 185 chemicals in it. And then you stumble into your car and the car is off gassing plastic and air conditioned and you're driving down a highway that's steeped in air pollution. Then you get to your office and you take a few steps outside into the office and now you're in a closed air-conditioned space and you're in a carpeted cubicle and off-gassing
Starting point is 01:35:18 junk again. And then you go to the grocery store and you pick up food that you have came from half a world away and got transported picked unripe and transported under ethylene gas so it ripened and then now you're eating what looks like a kale salad but it's actually loaded with roundup and you know it just goes on and on that's can you believe we're even surviving that should we be surprised that we're the human being like that is incredibly resilient to be able to not only survive really speaks to procreate and thrive in that environment so far um you know interestingly we're not thriving and we're not procreating very well anymore right it's now that you bring that up it's worth saying that the sperm counts in all western countries have dropped by 52 to 57% in my short lifetime. And so we are now seeing
Starting point is 01:36:08 one in three males with sperm counts less than 15 million per milliliter, which is the infertility level. And so that curve hasn't flattened at all. That's a straight line towards the bottom and has not leveled off. And so that's the extinction event is we're losing the capacity to procreate. We're losing the capacity for human life. And when we are alive, we burden it with chronic disease levels that have never been seen before from autism in our children to Parkinson's and Alzheimer's of our elderly, our cancer burden now at 50%. It's just like, we are failing as a biologic species because of the collapse of biology beneath our feet, beneath our gut, beneath the soils that dwell around us. And so we're in the throes of an extinction event. We're losing 10,000 time increase in our
Starting point is 01:36:59 extinction rate to the point where we're losing a species every 20 minutes. And that's all happened in the last three decades. And the dominant feature of that is certainly chemical farming. So I can't push hard enough for you embracing farmer's footprint as an audience. Take a look at everything we're doing. This touches your backyard again. We're just scaling up non-toxic neighborhoods. That was created by brilliant brilliant woman Kim Conti. And she was just a concerned mother in Irvine, California. And she came back from living abroad for many years and brought her young kids back in Irvine, California, and then started seeing signs posted about, you know, stay off the grass for 24 hours because it's been sprayed. And she was alarmed. She's like, why are we spraying on these? Find out that we're spraying all of our playing fields and parks with Roundup.
Starting point is 01:37:47 And she was extremely dismayed and started to non-toxic neighborhoods and has done a beautiful job. Over 35 cities and counties around the country, including LA County and now San Diego County, just in the last couple of weeks, Miami, many others around the country have gone Roundup free or are implementing Roundup bans in their public places, parks and city spaces and playing fields, et cetera. And so that's part of the farmer's footprint. You can dig in at farmersfootprint.us and realize that the third largest crop we grow in the United States right behind corn and soybean is lawn. And so the backyard lawn is our third largest crop
Starting point is 01:38:26 covering 40 million of acres at the United States. And it's one of our most chemically demanding crops that we do. And that starts in your backyard, but extends to your children's soccer fields, football fields, playing fields. And perhaps the most toxic thing we see in all of that acreage is the golf courses.
Starting point is 01:38:44 And so if you're a golfer, you need to start to really work to revise the practices. We need to redefine our aesthetics of golf back to where it was in Ireland, where a rough was a rough. It was a cover crop out there. There was multiple species. It was grassland. It wasn't a monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass growing a little bit longer. We need to start to redefine these nature spaces that we spend time on and get them clean.
Starting point is 01:39:13 So join non-toxic neighborhoods in the fight there. It's exciting to see consumers making real success with local government when the federal government continues to be so resistant to change. The EPA just again proved roundup for another 13 years of use in the United States, saying that the evidence is not strong enough to say that it's dangerous to public health, which is just ludicrous at this point. But I'm just grateful that our local leaders are not agreeing with that and are taking strong stands with our concerned parents and cleaning up our environment. So we've got a lot to be excited about there. And in the end, I think that all of us are going to create the change we want to see
Starting point is 01:39:53 if we can see the problem at hand. Well, I'm grateful for the work that you're doing, that you will do, that you have done. And this has been as edifying and illuminating as I predicted it would. And I think I want to close just by saying, you know, kind of calling out to the audience to really remind everybody that we are in an unprecedented moment right now. And my hope, my aspiration is that it will provide us with the necessary world that I think is well within our grasp. Absolutely. That's beautiful. nurse practitioners and PAs that are out there right now on the front lines in New York and Philadelphia and all the other cities that are starting to see the impact of this situation we're in right now. And I just want to acknowledge your effort and the fear that you're feeling and
Starting point is 01:41:17 the exhaustion you're feeling and the state of overwhelm that you sense and the vulnerabilities that you're so poignantly aware of right at the moment. And I just want you to know that we so deeply appreciate your commitment and your efforts in this time. We know the extremity of the situation you're in and look forward to the end of that in the coming weeks as this passes over us. in the coming weeks as this passes over us. And in the meantime, I just want to reflect for a moment about, again, redefining your role just like we did with the garden. We need to let go of maybe the expectations that you're going to heal everybody and you're going to save everybody's life.
Starting point is 01:41:59 And we need to really look at both sides of the physician or care team's experience. On the one side, we are all trained to be technicians. We're trained to adjust the knobs on the ventilators. We're trained to adjust the drips on the IVs. We're trained to read all the data and we're trained to write all the notes and look at all the risk factors and fill out the insurance forms. All of that is coming to a crisis point that's not working. And that happens every day in an ICU where all the technology at hand finally fails and there's nothing more we can offer and the patient's dying. And then there's a second half to the journey that is
Starting point is 01:42:38 the definition of that being a physician state or being a caretaker, being a nurse, is when you set down the machinery and you sit down with the patient and say, we've done our best. We have done everything we know how to do. And we acknowledge that you are alive and we acknowledge that you are here with us in this moment. And we acknowledge that you're going to likely expand to the other side of this rebirth that we call death. And in that time with your patients right now, I want you to know that we see the greatest victory right there. Because ultimately, as physicians and practitioners, we don't actually save lives. We don't have that level of capacity
Starting point is 01:43:18 or responsibility. Life is something much greater than human. Life is a gift and it's not your responsibility to maintain it. It's your responsibility to show up and bring the highest level of compassion, skill, capacity that you can, but you will do your highest work when you recognize that this miraculous life that we live, this miraculous gift of life is transient. It is temporal. And it is our calling to be present with that and acknowledge it and see the beauty in every phase of it. And when you've got a young person who's dying or an elderly person who's dying, it's easy to get caught up in the emotions of the loss, but we need to get better and celebrate the moment of acknowledging the gain. get better and celebrate the moment of acknowledging the gain. This is a life well lived. This is a person who is created in their lifetime. This is a person who's loved in their
Starting point is 01:44:11 lifetime. This is a person who's really in it for the big story of what it means to be human. And this was a soul that came in on purpose and has lived some version of that purpose. And we acknowledge that. And so I hope that in the same way that the mess of a messy garden can start to look like a victory, the mess of healthcare can be very victorious if we recognize each other's humanity in it. And if we really embrace the beauty of human life and consciousness, that becomes often most poignant and most obvious when we're about to lose it. And we let go of that human consciousness to plug into something much, much bigger. And I hope that you get to see as the veil thins with your patients right now,
Starting point is 01:44:57 I get to see that other side and realize that they have no fear on the other side of that veil. And so as they're coming back and forth out of consciousness and back into consciousness in those last few minutes and hours and days, I hope that you get a glimpse of the beauty on the other side and a state of being that's free of fear, free of a sense of loss and only sees opportunity and expansion and light. And so take this opportunity to let down the expectations on yourself and give up on a sense of failure let go of your sense of failure in those moments when the the ventilator's failing the auction's failing the numbers are going south don't let that define your your success
Starting point is 01:45:39 be present with your patients right now let let them not die in vain. Let them be part of the message that this virus is trying to teach us. Let their journey be part of you. Reach out to them and hold their hands right now and give them a sense of deep purpose in this extreme thing that they've been called to. If they're called to pass right now, let them know it's not in vain that we're going to learn from this, that we are realizing that we have taken too many steps away from our purpose, our real nature, our real potential, and that they are doing their highest work right now in walking the journey of dying in this situation to teach us a deep lesson of what it means to be connected and disconnected and a pathway towards reconnection and let them know that their highest victory is at hand and that
Starting point is 01:46:31 they are part of the rise of human consciousness and not the collapse of biology on the planet. That's what I want you to grab right now. And just know that I just am in deep gratitude for your courage to keep showing up. Love you, brother. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you, Rich. I don't know. I never know what to expect whenever I do one of these with you.
Starting point is 01:47:09 It never turns out like I expect. That was beautiful. Thank you for being so present. And a lovely love letter to the people that are on the front lines who are seeing the suffering firsthand and suffering themselves. So that's much needed in this conversation right now. And so thank you for that. I think that's going to be very helpful to a lot of people. And more will be revealed.
Starting point is 01:47:42 More will be revealed. That's hopeful. Right. So perhaps we'll do this again. I'd like to check in with you and see how you're doing. And let's stay in touch. I look forward to it. All right.
Starting point is 01:47:58 Thank you, Rich. And thank you, everybody in this audience. You've had such an impact on my life. Thank you for the hope you've brought me and the joy you've brought me in. Thank you for your continued engagement. Until next time. Thanks, man. Thank you. Peace.
Starting point is 01:48:15 Plants. Mind-blowing as always, how much do we love Zach Bush? Hope you guys enjoyed that and that you take Zach's wisdom to heart. You can learn more about Zach at zachbushmd.com. For his written perspective on coronavirus and recommended resources, visit zachbushmd.com forward slash coronavirus dash statement. And for those interested in regenerative farming md.com forward slash coronavirus dash statement. And for those interested in regenerative farming and Zach's nonprofit initiatives that we discussed today,
Starting point is 01:48:51 visit farmersfootprint.us. Zach also wanted me to mention that his biology base camp home health programs, including a new program released just this week at a lower price called Biology Basecamp Community can be found at intrinsichealthseries.com. As always, links to all the four mentioned and much more can be found on the episode page
Starting point is 01:49:14 at richroll.com. And if you would like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate.
Starting point is 01:49:32 I wanna thank my team who worked hard to put on today's show, Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin, who typically video the podcast, although today is audio only. Jessica Miranda for her beautiful graphics.
Starting point is 01:49:47 Leah Marisovich for her portraits of Zach and myself. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with our regularly scheduled programming. Until then, be safe, stay safe, take care of yourselves
Starting point is 01:50:09 and seize this moment to go inward, to grow and to love more deeply. Peace, plants, namaste. Thank you.

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