The Rich Roll Podcast - Zach Bush, MD On The Science & Spirituality of Human And Planetary Transformation

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

In my humble opinion, Zach Bush, MD isn't just one of the most compelling medical minds currently working to improve our understanding of human and environmental health. He's a virtuoso healer. A master consciousness. And a gift to humanity. Today Dr. Bush returns to the podcast (his first appearance was RRP #353 in March of 2018) for a formidable and moving conversation that will leave you rethinking not only how you eat and live, but what it means to be a conscious consumer and engaged citizen of this precious planet we all share. A pioneer in the science of well-being, Dr. Bush is the founder and director of M Clinic, an integrative medicine center in Charlottesville, Virginia, and one of the only ‘triple board-certified’ physicians in the country, expert in Internal Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, and Hospice/Palliative care. How we treat the planet impacts human biology. Intuitively, we understand this to be fact. But what distinguishes Dr. Bush from his medical peers is his rigorous application of science, strength of humanity, and the intelligence of nature to his commitment to transforming our world. A man with a deep understanding of the interdependence of macrocosm and microcosm, Dr. Bush's brilliance truly shines on subjects like soil degeneration and regeneration. The relationship between intensive farming practices and the rise of environmental degradation and chronic disease. And his vision for a more integrated and holistic approach to physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being. My initial conversation with Dr. Bush remains one of the most mind-blowing, impactful and popular discourses in the history of this show. Picking up where we left off, today's episode exceeds all expectations — another conversation for the ages that will permanently alter how you think about everything from health, nutrition, disease, medicine, agriculture and environmentalism to what it means to be a spiritual being in this human experience we collectively share. It’s 2019 people. It's time to stop screwing around. It's time to get educated. And it's time to once-and-for-all take control of our personal health and that of the planet we inhabit. I ask only that you listen keenly. Take notes. And no matter what, stick around to the very end. Zach concludes the podcast with what I can only describe as the most poignant and moving closing monologue in the history of this program – a bold statement I don't make lightly. If you thought last week's podcast with David Goggins was peak RRP, think again, Because today, the doctor is in. Final note: the podcast is now available on Spotify and viewable on YouTube at: bit.ly/zachbush414 Peace + Plants, Rich

We're growing the worst food on the planet, the least nutrient delivery of any food system in the world, perhaps. The only other place where we see worse health outcomes nutritionally are people that just can't get access to food, period. Every single structure that we have to support big ag in this country is forcing the farmer's hand into poor agriculture and biologic decisions. The simple reality is the brokenness in the system has to do with the isolation of human relationship. And if we don't reconnect to nature, we'll just destroy it again. But my generation doesn't have enough time now

to turn the boat around, reinvent everything. And so our mission is not to inspire the farmers that are currently fighting the good fight. It's to inspire their children to do the right thing and do it differently. That's Dr. Zach Bush, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host.

Welcome to the show, to the podcast, to now, the only thing that is. Hope you guys are settling into 2019. Hope you're getting off to a ripper new year. I hope you enjoyed last week's banger episode with David Goggins. I hope you enjoyed last week's banger episode with David Goggins. Kind of a punch in the face that I think we could all use to kick our new year into high gear. But if you think that that episode was peak RRP, that that episode just can't be topped, well, think again, friends. Prepare thyself. And prepare thyself because today, my friend Zach, Dr. Bush, MD, returns to the podcast for what I think is a powerhouse episode that is going to blow your hair right off your head.

And that's coming up in a couple few, but first. 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 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,

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This guy is one of the most fascinating guests to grace this platform, this feed. I say that with a lot of self-assurance. He really is amazing. He's impacted me profoundly. And today he returns to the podcast for what I think is an absolute barn burner of a conversation.

This guy is a rare bird. He is not only the founder and director of Revolution Health Center in Virginia, he is one of the only triple board certified physicians in the country. He is expert in internal medicine, in endocrinology and metabolism, and in hospice or palliative care. But where Zach really shines is on the subject of soil degeneration and regeneration, on the microbiome, on the impact of big farming and big pharma on human and environmental health. He talks extensively about the future of farming. And science focused not necessarily just on the science of disease, but on the promotion of health and well-being. And I think of this guy as so much more than a

doctor. I really believe that he is a master healer. And I think a master consciousness. He's just on a different plane altogether. He first came on the show in March of 2018. That was episode 353. And it is one of my most listened to episodes to date. So if you missed it, check it out. Like I said, it impacted me profoundly. And today we pick it back up. And what I think you will agree is a wide ranging andanging and utterly mind-blowing exchange.

I'm not going to spoil it with specifics other than to say that it centers on the problematic nature of chemical farming on biological and planetary well-being and what can be done about it. Final note, you're going to want to stick around to the end. I promise you, because Zach concludes this conversation with what I can only describe as the most powerful, the most moving closing monologue in the history of this show. And that's a bold statement, I know, but I stand behind it.

It's 2019. It's time to stop screwing around, DK. It's time to get educated. It's time to take control of our planet and our health. And the doctor is in. So let's do this thing. Here's Zach. All right, let's get into it, man.

So glad to have you back. And I just wanted to, before we even begin, thank you for all the wisdom that you shared last time you were on the show. To date, it is definitely one of the most impactful, if not the most impactful podcast that I've done. It's been listened to by hundreds of thousands of people. Not a day goes by where I don't get a message about it or a tweet, even today, I don't get a message about it or a tweet, even today, somebody tweeted about it. So, it's exciting to have you back to go a little bit deeper.

Well, it's a thrill. I think it takes two to tango, and it's your wisdom that kind of pulls this out of your audience and your visitors. So, I appreciate all that you bring to this mission of public education, really, that you bring to this podcast. Well, it's the least that I can do. But you're in the trenches doing the real work. So I'm just the cipher here. I couldn't do it without you. For those that are new, we're going to dive deep. But I don't want to entirely recap what we talked about last time.

Everyone should definitely go back and listen to our first episode, which I'll link up in the show notes. But essentially, your work kind of boils down to making the case for this profound link between environmental degradation and degenerative illness, essentially, and the distinction between the science of disease and the science of health and looking at all of this from a 10,000 foot view in a very holistic sense from the soil all the way to cellular biology. Is that fair enough? It is. Yeah. And it's really a story of simplification in some ways. And so the education that we love to give our children as well as our doctors is everything's complicated. And the more complicated you make it, then the more opportunity there is for subspecialization and knowledge. And over the last decade, my whole team, scientists,

clinicians, now farmers, everybody else who's in on the mission, we're finding out that biology in the end is the same thing over and over again at fractal levels. But you can't have human health on a planet that floats in the middle of a vacuum space that's so vast and not have to come to terms with the fact that that human biology is just a small niche within this massive ecosystem of life? Yeah, it's a conundrum because as human culture and society progresses and evolves, it's almost natural law that we become more and more specialized. And specialization has its advantages. It allows a single individual or a small team to go very deep on a particular issue, and we learn a lot about things that way. That is the scientific method.

But what we sacrifice is that grander perspective, the interrelation between all of these systems and the interplay and how that all kind of works together in this symphony that either is moving us towards health or away from health. Perfectly said. And I think that lays out, I mean, in some ways that is the mission statement of the next three, four decades. In the last podcast together, we outlined the science and data that we have, mathematical models that we have around human survival. And at our current pace, we've got one in three males in the United States now sterile, one in four women infertile. And so we're losing the ability to procreate as a species. And on our current trajectory, we've got about 70 years left

of human life on earth. And if you try to make the argument, well, only the unhealthy people are dying. So maybe it's the poorly educated, maybe it's those with poor access to food. And we can look across the sectors right now and say, well, it's just the deep south that's really tipping off. Or maybe it's the Native Americans or the Native Hawaiians or the Eskimos. It's these Native populations that are really suffering the worst. Well, that was the case kind of in the initial decade, but now we see double PhD families with very high socioeconomic income with a kid with autism and two other kids with debilitating asthma and allergies and anaphylaxis and learning delays and everything else. And so it's now crossed all sectors of socioeconomics. And it comes down to the fact that you might think that you can outsmart this thing.

Maybe you've kind of found this niche, socioeconomic niche or an educational niche, that you feel like, wow, I'm going to be isolated. I understand human health is collapsing. I understand social structure is going to collapse. But there's going to be an enclave of humans that'm going to be isolated. I understand human health is collapsing. I understand social structure is going to collapse, but there's going to be an enclave of humans that are going to survive. The Air One crowd? Yes, exactly. And so there's that. I think there's a huge contingent that are in that hope. And we can see what our billionaires are doing, right? And so our billionaires are making that bet. You've got Elon Musk and you've got Bezos. They're buying a plan for space travel.

They're building space stations to leave Earth and go repeat somewhere else. And so if that's the game plan, if that's the exit strategy. And Peter Thiel is injecting himself with young people's blood and all kinds of stuff, crazy stuff that's going on. Right. And the hubris of this or the short-sightedness of this, crazy stuff is going on. And the hubris of this, or the short-sightedness of this perhaps, is that it's not about, if human health was an isolated event, then it would make sense to put young human blood inside of an older person. That should make you very youthful.

But of course, we've seen very little evidence that that actually sustains life. The fact is, our biology keeps proving in the labs is it's the microbiome. It's these invisible parts of the biology on earth that actually are the inherent physiologic building blocks of human health. The chronological age of a human being is not its biologic age. And so you might say, I just got stem cells from a 15-year-old. Well, unfortunately, a 15-year-old today has the biology of a 60-year-old in the 1950s. Is that really true? You can see this degradation in all kinds of elements within the biology,

most of all in the rate of healing. And so we walk around with a very simple ratio, a simple ratio of rate of injury and rate of repair. And that's everything. That's aging process. That's chronic disease. That's any process, an acute injury. If your healing rate is at the same pace as that acute injury, you might be sore for a couple hours, and then you're going to be better. sore for a couple hours and then you're going to be better. If you start to see that rate of injury outstrip the rate of repair, then you see degradation, you see rapid aging. In the 1960s,

the entire US population of all ages carried chronic disease diagnosis in 4% of the population. Today, 2015 numbers, we don't have anything more recent to rely on yet. But 2015, we see 46% of our children with chronic disease. Yeah, I saw that statistic. It's shocking. I mean, you paint a very dystopian, almost sci-fi movie view on the prognosis of the human race. And just to kind of go back to what we glossed over very casually a couple moments ago, these infertility rates are insane. Like, that's really true? That, what is it, one out of every four?

One in three males and one in four women are having fertility issues. That's something that you don't hear a lot about. You would think that might be front and center of something like the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health. That might come out. These are vetted statistics? For sure, yeah. I mean, these are large studies that are screening problems. And these are not even new statistics, like polycystic ovarian syndrome,

which is the leading cause of infertility in women right now in the U.S. and other parts of the world. It's actually chemical toxicity and other things coming into play. And I think chemical toxicity is kind of at the root of PCOS as well. But polycystic ovarian syndrome, even back around 2008, 2010, we were seeing one in four girls in America. And so these are not even new numbers. They're not even numbers that would be a statistic to throw up on a headline anymore because the data is old. The numbers may be more dismal than we see for the large part because even our numbers that we see, one in four girls with PCOS, well, those are studies

looking at girls that are captured through some sort of public health program, which of course we have a horrible track record in this country of doing universal screening. I think if you universally screened all the girls in an inner city environment right now, you would find even higher rates of infertility in that. Wow. And so we have a really stark reality today. But on the flip side of that dystopian possibility is the opposite view that if we change our relationship to nature, such that we go into

a co-creative process with mother nature and we can do this through regenerative agriculture at the foundation so if we go into a regenerative agriculture concept not just in our soil science but in our human biology i think we could very rapidly in the next 200 years see the entire earth you know be a verdant garden of eden where humans have figured out how to co-create within nature, that our technological advances and continued specialization perhaps and all these things lead to co-creative processes that augment nature or work within nature's processes. So dystopia meets extreme optimism.

Yeah. And I think that's the struggle, right? And in some ways, we're in a battle right now for morale. And we have a lot of people with brilliant solutions at hand, but they're fighting against a common paradigm that is keeping the rate of progress at a crawl. Yeah, I call it an arms race. It really is. And there's a ticking clock here.

It's an interesting, it's another conundrum. It's like this mashup of brilliant minds who are making giant leaps forward in terms of longevity science, extraterrestrial exploration, like you name it. We're in the midst of this extraordinary period in history where we're seeing breakthroughs at a breakneck pace. At the same time, there are such strong, powerful, well-funded forces working day and night to enforce a status quo that is rapidly leading to the denigration of our environment, our planet, human health, all for the sake of short-term monetary goals, for lack of a better word, or quarterly earnings reports. Yeah. And who's going to win, right? And I think if we have a chance at prevailing, it's going to require a grassroots movement of people really waking up and taking an active role

in not only educating themselves about what actually is going on, but getting involved and making that change possible. I 100% agree. And one thing that I continue to be encouraged and uplifted by is watching, as you and many others help my message in science get out there wider. It's putting me in contact with circles of people that are more and more not only accepting, but really intentioning the discovery of what are the solutions that we need at hand. And so I'm increasingly encouraged that at all elements, like last two weeks ago I was in Telluride

and speaking to five classes of high school students. And these kids not only got the message, they left feeling like there was a new sense of purpose at the high school level of what they need to do in the next 30 years to contribute to the survival of humanity. Yeah, you were at the, what was the Ideas Fest or something like that? Original Thinkers.

Yeah, I had a couple friends and podcast guests that were participating in that. And my friend Colin, who's like a tea master and a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, came back and he's like, man, I heard this guy, Zach Bush, he was going to blow your mind. I go, yeah, I know that guy. He's coming back to the podcast. So yeah, it's getting out there, which is cool. And I want to work our way towards the solution that you kind of introduced there. But let's immerse ourselves a little bit more deeply in the weeds of what's actually going on. I mean, you mentioned the declining fertility rates.

I looked at a couple other alarming statistics. One out of every two men and one out of every three women will suffer some form of cancer diagnosis during their lifetimes, not including skin cancer. The autism rates have doubled in the last six years. Now it's one out of every 36 kids, is that correct? That's correct. Of course, depression, anxiety, these things are ubiquitous. 46%, as you mentioned, of kids have a chronic health issue.

And there's projections that by 2030, one out of every three children will be diagnosed somewhere on the autism spectrum. It's insane. And that's not even getting into heart disease, diabetes, obesity. The common ones, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not even getting into those. And so, you know, we can debate the biology and the chronic diseases all day long.

But even if we were off by 100% on those numbers, what if we were a logarithm off on those numbers? The fact is, even today, if we froze progress where we are today with the rates of chronic disease we have and the financial burden that's putting on our country, we're in an insoluble state already. I think our national military and defense budget, which includes things like homeland security

and a bunch of other stuff in there, is somewhere around $700 billion a year. And that's a lot of money to spend on being isolationist and maybe being a bully around the world. But it pales in comparison to the $3.5 trillion that we're spending on chronic disease management. So we are somewhere in the ballpark of four to five times more on chronic disease than we are on defense. And I've spoken to one of the authors of Carter's 2000 report. reports. So Jimmy Carter in the late 70s commissioned a whole team of brilliant economists,

agricultural experts, education experts, technological experts, everything else. And they were supposed to write this 2000 report that would tell us in 1978 what's going to be happening in the year 2000, what do we need to be ready for to be competitive as a nation on the national stage. So brilliant, forward-looking thing. I think he's really one of the few presidents that had the foresight to look far beyond where his presidency could have ever been relevant to that story. And in that commissioning, when I talked to the author of it, he's now in his mid to late 70s, and he said the biggest shock to everybody who wrote that paper was how they nailed everything. They really didn't miss in 1978.

They predicted the technological boom. They even had iterations of the Internet predicted. They had all kinds of profound foresight into what was happening. And he said the only thing they completely missed was the chronic disease explosion. they completely missed was the chronic disease explosion. Nobody could have possibly predicted that at that time, that humans could have gone from 4% to 46% of our children with chronic disease, or 4% of the entire population to 46% of our children.

And so that is why we're economically failing, is the great minds that have been looking forward 30 to 50 years foresaw a lot of what we would need financially to stay soluble, but nobody saw this doubling and doubling and doubling of the healthcare budget. And all of the reshuffling of the deck chairs that we've seen with Obama's administration, well, of course, going back to the Clinton administration, their effort at healthcare reform, Obama finally pulling that together after Bush kind of disassembled the Clinton effort. And now we see Trump disassembling Obama's effort. The fact is not a single, at no moment in there did we create a soluble plan for the healthcare industry. And so all we're doing is reshuffling deck chairs on how are we going to continue to sustain this rate of growth of expense.

It costs us 6% to 8% more every year to take care of the chronic disease in this country. And so you fast forward a decade and you can see that rate of doubling coming quick. And so at this rate, we'll be spending somewhere around $5 trillion a year on healthcare by 2025. So with our next president is going to face that kind of crisis at the financial level.

And now you start to picture what would it look like if one in three children were autistic in 2035? Just if that was the only disease that existed, it would cripple us financially. It takes two to three people to provide for one disabled individual over the course of their life. And so you're taking out this huge, two of those children will have to take care of their peer for the lifetime of that peer. Meanwhile, being coupled with the largest geriatric population in history, that has a cancer rate of 70%. That is a grim picture. It's beyond fathoming of what we would have to do financially, right?

And laying on top of that, just our basic systemic structure for dealing with this isn't healthcare, it's sick care. It's basically managing disease and diagnosing and prescribing without much thought or intention being placed into what's causing these illnesses and preventing them before they arise. Yeah. Yeah. And if we tackle it from the Western medical standpoint, which is we need to figure out the biology of cancer, we need to figure out the biology of cancer. We need to figure out the biology of autism. We need to figure out the biology of all these different seemingly disparate disease processes because they affect different parts of our body. That's been the billion-dollar pursuit of all the pharmaceutical industries and all of our universities for 50 years now.

If we had to wait for that to all untangle we'll all be dead long dead before that all happens there's no way that our our species will survive that slow pace of of processing because what we're looking at as scientists are human cells that are highly damaged in a petri dish that is sterile completely isolated away from an ecosystem by that very definition of how we do science, we don't understand what human life looks like in the context of an ecosystem. And so we're so flawed at the basic level of exploration that we will never find the solutions. And so we've known since 2005 with the first genetic kind of untangling of the genome of the microbiome. So looking at all the genes of all the different species of bacteria, fungi, parasites, everything else that lives in your gut, we got snapshots of that very clearly by 2005.

By 2010, it was very clear that every cancer that happens in the human body can be correlated with missing some portion of that microbiome. Here we are almost pushing on 15 years later, and nobody in the cancer realm is talking about replacing your microbiome to get rid of your cancer. They are taking chemo, surgery, radiation, exact same story that exists in 1968. And so we have not progressed the clinical science because we don't have a way to take this basic information of ecosystem data. There's an ecosystem of microflora. There's this isolated human being.

Because our mechanisms of study are in this isolated space of the petri dish, we can't put those two pieces of data together in anything coherent story. And so that's where our lab has tried to jump out of that petri dish space and start working instead with the farmers to start looking at the lineage of health. And watching soil regenerate is very encouraging. And I think it tells us something about the human journey that we have, we can lay out ahead, which is where we built a nonprofit called Farmer's Footprint now. And all of our money from our biotech companies and everything else is pouring into supporting this bigger mission of

the farmers. And so we're now on the ground with farmers all up and down the Midwest from Minnesota down to the Mississippi Delta, where we've dumped the vast majority of the Roundup and glyphosate and done the most decimation on earth to any soil on the planet. And working with them on the ground, we've seen that every year that they've done chemical farming, their crop yields drop. And I think we covered that a little bit in the last podcast. But that dropping yield was something I had read about. And by the time this past February we were shooting this documentary up there, we got to see it in real time. In June, July, middle of the verdant growing season,

you try to throw a shovel in chemical farming soil and it's like concrete. It's a solid brick that you're trying to push the shovel into. You have no aeration. You have no earthworms in there. A single application, this is an amazing statistic that came from one of our farmers who's doing farm training for farmers to stop spraying Roundup. A single application of Roundup in a field will kill 50% of the earthworm population. 50% done with one spray. They spray multiple times a year, over and over, over and over. And you fast forward 20 years, you've got no earthworms left, which means you have no air down under the soil, which means you've lost the architecture and the aerobic environment you need

for the mycorrhizae, which looks almost like coral reef. Mycorrhizae are these beautiful hair-like fibrils that grow up through the soil, and they provide, just like the coral reef, the home for the bacteria, the fungal elements, yeast, all the things to be in there. It's like the scaffolding or the architecture upon which they adhere. It's the ultra structure of life right down there in the soil. And that's gone in a chemical farm. So we went into this mission to say, everybody needs to eat organic.

Well, it was devastating. By the end of our trip in February, we find out that the organic farms throughout the vast majority of the U.S. are using tilling, which is what all the chemical farms do too. They till their ground. So you drive by these, if you've ever flown or driven over the Midwest in wintertime, it's just fields and fields of fields of black soil. There's nothing growing in it. It's not covered. It's totally exposed. That's a tilled field. When we till, we use a mechanical process rather than a chemical process to disrupt all the earthworms, kill all the earthworms, kill the mycorrhizae, all that through tilling. It turns out that when you switch from chemical farming over to an organic process,

one of the things that tends to happen is you start to over-till. You start to till more because you don't want to spray the weeds. You try to till the weed into the ground. So what is the intention behind tilling? What is that trying to accomplish? It's interesting. When you ask the farmers, because my mindset was it must be to get rid of the weeds, but it's actually an aesthetic. The farmers actually just think it looks better. And so the landowners that the farmers are often leasing from want to see a well taken care of farm. And in their mind, a massive landowner, and it's interesting that our farmers no longer own their land, right? And so we've taken that land away from the family farms.

They're now owned by 100,000 acre, million acre plots by some massive conglomerate or maybe some wealthy person who doesn't have a clue really about farming perhaps. And often leads to some form of legal indentured servitude, right? It's indentured servitude. And we can go into detail on that. The amount of debt that they have to incur. The relationship between the banks, the landowners, and the farmers is extraordinarily insidious. It's got everything frozen and petrified in ancient processes because they can't move forward financially. But if we just take a look at

that simple belief that a plowed field or a tilled field looks clean, that's what the farmers say is, I can't not till my land in the fall because then my landowner is going to think I'm a bad farmer. And so it's this just simple, and you're like, seriously? You know you're doing damage to the soil, but you do it anyways? And then some of them say it's also a great form of relaxation and meditation for me to be out in the field because it looks kind of messy, and I can just drive along for hours a day, and I can look back, and I say, I just did all that. I just cleaned that whole

thousand acre swath over the last week and it looks spotless now. And so they literally do it for entertainment. They do it for a sense of accomplishment. They don't do it because it's good for the soil. They don't do it because they think they should to grow more crops. They know it doesn't increase their crop yield. And so when we go in to educate, these farmers need support on every level. They need support to say, a farm shouldn't look like what our modern farms look like. You have freedom to go make a farm look like whatever it needs to look like to grow healthy soil. But to do that, like we said, you got to get the banks involved. And these farmers are, you know, the farmers that we're featuring in our first docu-series with Farmer's Footprint still own their family farm. And so these are 350 to 400, 350 to 1,000 acre farms that have been in their family for at least four or five generations.

But are these on the sort of Joel Salatan model or just traditional? No, these are big-time GMO farmers now. I got you. And so they drank the Kool-Aid in the 1990s that they were going to be able to grow more soybean and corn. So these were already big-time commodity-growing farms by the 1980s. And interestingly, it's been generations sometimes since these guys grew gardens. They've been growing large monoculture commodities for one or two or three generations. The first farm we are featuring, we're one of the first adopters of the Roundup Ready

GMO crop in 1996. Farmers measure their entire, not only success as a farm, but their self-worth by how many bushels of soybean they get out of their soybean plants that year. And they'll all tell you they all lie. It's just this funny culture, just like fishermen. They all get together and somehow the fish got four inches longer. It's this story of like, well, it was really 29 bushels an acre, but 35 sounds reasonable, so I'll throw that in at the bar. was really 29 bushels an acre but 35 sounds reasonable so i'll throw that in at the bar i got 35 bushels an acre and so they all kind of josh each other behind the scenes like yeah we always fudge each other because nobody wants to tell the real story which is

their dads were growing 40 to 45 bushels an acre and at 40 and 45 bushels an acre they they were making ends meet in 1992 1993 1996 rolls around monsanto rolls in and says we're going to be able to increase your crop yield by six seven eight percent great that sounds amazing because dad's not making much money and it's hard for me to think about staying on the farm as the next generation so we'll do that so they jump in and even within the first year soybean yields went down not up and so they went back to monsanto comes to sell them seed the next year and say it didn't work like in monsanto every year it turns out and i didn't know this as a consumer but every year or every two years they would continue to come back and say we've re-genetically

modified this this has got a new you know twist on it That's going to increase yield In the seed And so it was this Constant reiteration of the same story That never came to fruition Their corn yields never went up And that's not what we're told As consumers

We're told that we need GMO because it increases yield This is how we're going to feed the planet This is how we are feeding the planet This is increasing yields across the world. And we are responsible for the ability for farmers to produce on a level that they would not be able to without us. Corn yields never went up. Soybean went down consistently. And so this farm, after 15 years of GMO farming, had dropped to below 30 bushels an acre. They're at 26 bushels an acre. So pushing half of their yield that dad used to get with normal conventional seed that had no genetic modification process in it.

Meanwhile, in that 15-year period, the banks had drank the same Kool-Aid that conventional seed was dangerous because it didn't yield as much. And the banks know that the farmer can't pay back their loans that they have to take out every year to buy the commodities on the front end. And so they think that the farmer is going to go out of business if they use a low-yield seed, which they've been told, just like the farmer, is going to be a conventional seed. So the loans become contingent upon using... Chemical farming. Yeah. And so now the banks think you have to chemically farm if you're going to survive.

But you have farmers telling the banker, look, my yields are dropping every year. Apparently there's a few community banks that are starting to realize, just watching the data come in, that this isn't working. But they're having a hard time getting out from under it because actually most of those small banks are actually within the arm of some large bank that needs to be convinced otherwise as well. And so the bureaucracy is cranking along, again, super slow to see any need for change. Meanwhile, the farmers are losing

their farms. And you really, you and I not being, not carrying on our father's tradition of income can't really, I think, psychologically understand the pressure these guys are feeling. No. I mean, I am part of that Erewhon generation. I'm somebody who's so disconnected from what that life must be like. I can attempt to sympathize, but I can hardly empathize with how difficult that must be to even just survive under what is essentially the stranglehold of this gigantic, almost monopolistic corporate entity known formerly as Monsanto and now as Bayer that is pulling the strings and controlling every aspect of food from seed all the way to the pharmaceuticals to treat the diseases that it produces. I think it would be good to, we explored this at length last time, but if somebody's tuning in for the first time, they will be inspired to go back and listen to our first conversation. But I think it would be good to just briefly contextualize this whole debate and argument around Monsanto and glyphosate by briefly tracking the history of how this came to be to produce the situation that we now find ourselves in.

Yeah. So Monsanto was a chemical company that was developing chemical warfare throughout the 1950s and 60s. And so they were very involved in the development of chemicals like Agent Orange and these things that we were using to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam so that we could see the Viet Cong better and expose the Ho Chi Minh Trail and do our bombings more accurately. And so they were part of this mission to kill life. the Viet Cong better and expose the Ho Chi Minh Trail and do our bombings more accurately. And so they were part of this mission to kill life before they got into the farming industry. And so there was a long track record there for that company wanting to kill biology. And Vietnam was wrapping up in the early 70s. They were losing market share there quickly. And so they were looking for more mundane ways to make money.

And they found this patent for what would become glyphosate and Roundup. This old patent is from 1959, created by a Japanese scientist who kept it on a shelf wisely and didn't think there was a safe human application for it, I think. And so that patent got purchased and they were trying to use it actually to declog sewer lines initially. It's a potent chelator. It pulls mineral out of whatever it touches, which is probably not what you want to do to soil, right? But nonetheless, they were putting this in pipes to chelate and try to clear clogged pipes from mineral deposit um turnout worked quite well for unclogging the pipes but when it came out the other end of the pipe it was killing all the life in the pond and around the the ponds and

everything else and so then that gave them the idea of it looks like a pretty potent herbicide and so they put it back into play as a weed killer. And so that then quickly marched. In the 1980s, we see that get approved for direct-to-consumer sales. And so you remember the big Super Bowl commercials with guys with backpacks of Roundup with the pistol-grip sprayers. And they walk out and they spray five dandelions in their driveway. And then they walk back in with a dramatic soundtrack. And so that direct-to-consumer message put a gallon of Roundup in every single garage in suburban America. What wasn't mentioned in those commercials is it's a water-soluble toxin,

and it just got sprayed onto your driveway, which is washing right down into your gutter, which goes right to your municipal water system. And so by the end of the 80s, we're drinking Roundup from, I think, the majority from homeowners, not even farmers. And so we start drinking this chemical, not having any clue that it's there or any clue that it would be dangerous because the tagline for Monsanto was safer than water. Well, at this point, Monsanto actually published in the late 80s the cancer-causing effects of this compound, glyphosate, Roundup. And they were studying it in mice, and they were showing major birth defects and cancers and sarcomas, weird things.

And so this is their own data, and they published that. And that's still in the public domain. You can go find Monsanto's original things. If you can't find it, then Stephanie Seneff from MIT has done a great job of kind of putting a library together of those original Monsanto documents. And so they knew it was toxic. But I think the reason they were comfortable putting that out is the threshold at which they thought that was going to be harmful, they didn't think they'd ever reach. Because in 1988 and 87, when they were publishing that stuff, I don't think they could have believed that they would be able to genetically modify a crop by 1996 that would handle that.

And so it was just being used as a spot sprayer. The amount in water, everything else was quite trace. Because at that time, before they'd manipulated the seed population, if they used too much, it would just kill the plant altogether, right? Kills corn, soybean, kills any plant you spray it on, right? And so it's a non-selective herbicide, really. And so I think that they couldn't have even foreseen their own success in some ways in the late 80s. And so they were publishing that data saying that it might be toxic at these higher levels,

but when will we ever be able to use that much glyphosate in the world? By 1992 was when we started spraying it directly on crops. And so it started to be sold as a desiccant or a drying agent to the wheat. Wheat is the only staple crop that you want dead before you can harvest it. And so they were spraying wheat in northern climates initially, and now it's kind of gone worldwide. And every single year since 1992, we've sprayed more acres of wheat with glyphosate. And it dries it quick, and it allows you, if you've got bad weather coming, you can kill it quickly and harvest it three days later so that you can get your wheat harvested before it rains or before the water comes.

So there's a lot of economic incentive to the farmer to desiccate the wheat at times. Not all wheat farmers use it, but enough American acreage got covered in this that we started to eat glyphosate and gluten in the same bite. And so that's really the development of gluten sensitivity. It started right around 92. And with each acre extra that we sprayed with Roundup, we saw the increase in not only in gluten sensitivity, but the autoimmune disease, celiac disease. So what is the interplay between glyphosate and gluten sensitivity? Yeah. So my PhD that works in my lab and at the University of Virginia is a brilliant, brilliant geneticist, Dr. John Gilday. He has done extensive work in areas of hypertension and

cancer and all kinds of things. But he really has been the smartest mind that we have behind understanding the role of glyphosate in the human biology. And his science has been incredibly landmark in that he's recognizing that the glyphosate injury of the gut lining, which induces a hypoxic injury. As soon as you expose the gut lining to the glyphosate chemical, you get this lack of oxygen injury to the gut lining. And one of the results of that seems to be the overexpression of CXCR3, which is a receptor to the gluten compound gliadin. And so now you grab that gluten breakdown product and it induces the production of something called zonulin. Zonulin opens up the tight junction.

You get this unzippering of the whole gut lining and now you have leaky gut. It's this sensitization of the gut lining to glyphosate that creates the receptor that would even grab the gluten compound to cause a problem. This is really why we've been able to have gluten in our diet for thousands of years without any measurable immune impact. And then suddenly in the 1990s, we have a huge swath, maybe 15%, 20%. By then, now we're looking at maybe 60%, 70% of the American population with some form of gluten sensitivity. And so just an amazing... That's amazing. And is that also why you hear anecdotally, like, oh, I go to Italy and I have pizza or I have pasta and I feel fine.

Yeah. I come home, I feel terrible. Croissant on the streets of France, you feel fine, no problem. Come back to the States, you have one piece of bread and you've got brain fog for three days. That is the reality, is that Europe's done a good job of reducing the amount of Roundup sprayed in their countries. Unfortunately, they did get infiltrated by the GMO world. But France has vowed that they're going to be GMO-free within the next couple of years. Russia has made actually the strongest stance on that,

that they're going to be GMO-free and a fully organic nation by, I think they said, 2025 or something like that. That's bananas. That's Russia having that mindset. This is the most important thing we could do for national security as Russia would be to create an organic thing. And I feel the same way for the United States. As an American, I feel like my highest duty that I have is to help this nation get to health security again. If we don't, it doesn't matter what we do with the military, what we do with our stance on our international political relationships or anything else. It just doesn't matter. We can't

contend on an international level in 10 or 15 years because we're going to be broke. We're already the deepest in debt nation that exists. And yet, we continue to leverage, leverage, leverage, largely because we have so much debt on the healthcare side. Yeah, it's devastating. But there's been some interesting developments since we last spoke, kind of fast-forwarding through this Monsanto timeline to current. Of course, we have the big landmark Monsanto trial that resulted in a $289 million verdict for that groundskeeper who had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma who prevailed at trial. And that spurred, I think at the time,

there were maybe 800 or 1,000 lawsuits pending. Now there's something like 8,000, right? So what is, there's a couple of things I want to talk about, but like what is the import of that decision? How is this going to play out? What's it going to look like when the rest of these cases go before juries? First of all, I mean, huge, huge interesting landmark case, as you say, is the first case out of the many thousands that have been brought before that one that was allowed to go to jury.

And the thing that was really allowed to go to jury was not just the science of why this guy got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is the most common cancer associated with glyphosate. The lymphomas and leukemias are the easiest ones to track back to the glyphosate injury. But the judge was the first to allow data to go forward that Monsanto had known that this was a cancer-causing agent since the 80s and that that data could be put into the court place for the first time. And the burden of proof wasn't that he had to prove beyond, you know, he didn't have to definitively prove that his non-Hodgkin's resulted directly from glyphosate. It had to be a contributing factor, I think, was how they adjudicated it.

Yeah. And it's very difficult, even if that is a clearer pathway than other cancers, how do you specifically, I mean, that's a very heavy burden to shoulder to say, well, this is, you know, I mean, if you're smoking to say I got lung cancer from cigarettes, even you can't definitively prove that, right? So the fact that they prevail. Yeah, we still haven't had a class action lawsuit on cigarettes and lung cancer, right? And so you're exactly right. And as optimistic as I tend to try to be, I'm not sure that that verdict is going to be allowed to stand. I mean, they're going to keep appealing until the cows come home, I think, in reality.

But the realist in my brain has to step back for a second and say, why now? Why suddenly, after thousands of efforts, did this case be allowed to go to trial? Why suddenly did Monsanto let this thing get to the point where they're paying out $200 million to an individual? What could possibly be the rationale for that and if we back up from maybe a less optimistic standpoint we we can say the major event that happened within weeks or months ahead of that trial going forward was the sale of monsanto to a foreign entity and so bayer the largest pharmaceutical company in in the world arguably arguably, but certainly in Germany, purchased Monsanto for $67 million or something, billion dollars, right?

And so that $67 billion moves the court environment, I think, to a different district, right? And so I think whatever impending stuff we have right now is I don't know if anybody outside of the deal makers for the Monsanto bears, they have seen it, but I have a feeling if we took a look at all that paperwork, we could see that there's going to be a time period in which case these court cases will be allowed to move forward. And then suddenly Bayer is going to be completely untouchable. And within days of the completion of the merger or the purchase of Monsanto, they dissolved the legal entity of Monsanto.

Right. They've retired that name altogether. They retired the name. They dissolved the entity. They just made it disappear. And so now we have all these cases against Monsanto that is now no longer an entity. It's a standing issue now. Yeah. Right. And so I think it answered one of my biggest questions right before all of that unfolded. My biggest question was, why is Monsanto selling itself for $67 billion?

They provide seed to 85% to 90% of our commodities in the United States. Their worth has to be far greater than $60 billion. And so how could they be selling themselves for pennies on the dollar to a foreign entity? What would be the impetus behind that? Number one, maybe they saw the writing on the wall, said, this is not looking good. There's too much data. Public sentiment is stacking up against us higher and higher every year. We need to just cut and run, get out from underneath this situation.

But it's also possible that there's a bigger situation at play, which is, again, the international commodities market. And the Monsanto, by 2002, we had hit 85% of our corn and 95% of our soybean grown by GMO. If it wasn't that hit those numbers in 2002, certainly in 2006, we had hit those. And so we've seen this huge domination of this single seed source for U.S. commodities. But now, if you look in the developing world, it's India, you've got China, you've got Australia buried in New Zealand. Brazil is one of the largest importers of it. And so you've got swaths of the entire 7 billion people in the world that are consuming some sort of GMO crop from this single source. So $66 billion, it sounds like a lot of money to you and I, but it's a pittance compared to that global commodities environment. In the

years right before the move for Bayer to go purchase Monsanto, they got approval from EU regulators as well as the US EPA and USDA to go in with a new genetically modified crop. And nobody's talked about this crop in the US. Our farmers know it's there because we're growing it in the Midwest already. It's called Liberty Link. And so it used to be Roundup Ready Crops from Monsanto, but now it's Liberty Link from Bayer. Liberty Link is a so it used to be Roundup Ready Crops from Monsanto, but now it's Liberty Link from Bayer. Liberty Link is a creepy enough name to it anyways. But Liberty Link, it turns out, is a different genetic modification to allow for a different herbicide to be applied to the crop. And the mechanism of action is the same concept where it's blocking the production of amino acids,

which are the building blocks for life, but it's blocking a very specific one in this case. It blocks the enzyme that makes glutamine. And this happens to be an extremely important piece of innumerable endocrine functions, innumerable functions of cellular biology, but most profoundly, perhaps, is fertility, human fertility, depending on this amino acid. So this is the next evolution of Roundup.

This is the next evolution of GMO crops. And it's growing in your Midwest United States right now, and it's owned by Bayer. And it's wheat. Corn, soybean, wheat. They can put it in anything they want at this point, I think. But it's the big staple crops that they're growing, corn and soybean particularly. But sugar beets and all those are well on the way.

But corn and soybean are already being grown in the U.S. under this new crop treatment, which is blocking the ability of that food to carry these essential amino acids into the food chain. So we have simultaneous fronts on our soil systems, and then we have the human health impact of ingesting all of these crops on a mass scale, which is disrupting our endocrine systems. It's destroying our microbiome. Explain a little bit about how this is leading to all of these degenerative chronic illnesses that we're seeing. that we're seeing. Yeah, so I think to finish off that political thought,

I guess before my brain can move on, is it makes sense that if you've got a new commodity that could take over the majority of the world, but you're in direct competition with Monsanto, who's already mastered 85% to 90% of the farm environment, to make the move to purchase that company is a no-brainer because it gives you the opportunity to become a monopoly across both approved GMOs. It's amazing that it passed antitrust muster. I don't think it got even evaluated.

I don't understand how somebody could have honestly said they did an antitrust evaluation of this. I think when you were here before, the merger was pending, but it hadn't fully gone through. I thought it was going to fail because of the antitrust issues. I didn't think there was a way that we, not only that, I just assumed, especially because of our current administration having such a nationalistic agenda, apparently, I couldn't believe the last time we talked that it was going to be allowed to go through because what American president would want to have that on their track record that they allowed 85, 90% of our commodity crops to be owned by a foreign entity?

And it's patently anti-competitive because there is no competitor. No competitor. No competitor. And so how it could not have been considered a monopoly is beyond me. I think they must have found some loophole around that issue of, well, we have to feed the world. I have a feeling that's how they snuck it through. Well, what is the lobbying budget of Monsanto? Or Bayer for that matter. It has to be the GDP of a small European nation. Sure. Yeah. And they're at multiple levels, right? Because it's not just food commodities,

they're also in energy, right? Because we've used up and raped our most fertile soils in the United States for the production of ethanol for our cars. And so Monsanto has been playing on multiple sectors politically. So they're not just food and ag. They're energy and spread across into even military budgets, I'm sure, because of the provision of ethanol to the military. And now it's pharma. And now it's pharma. And pharma is not new to Monsanto,

by the way. Pharmaco owned Monsanto all the way back in the 1990s. And so when we went to genetic modification of crops, our food chain was already owned by the pharmaceutical industry by that time. And so Monsanto has been owned repetitively by the pharmaceutical companies. And so I think Bayer is making the play now as a big pharmaceutical company to own the global food chain and make this weird play for Liberty Link. It's just going to block this amino acid. Why have I never heard of that? Have they purposely just not publicized it and given it this jingoistic patriotic name to make people feel good about it well i think now i'm predicting the future and i don't know it but you know my prediction is we're going to see a whole bunch of court cases now allowing to go to case to go to court because

i think bear wants everybody to now admit that that gmo ground up crops are terrible for your health so they can pull it off the market quicker and look like the white knights coming in with Liberty Link. You're absolutely right. Monsanto refused to tell you this, but we own them now, and we're telling you our science and our review of all of their data is saying it's definitely causing cancer. We're sorry. Mea culpa.

And that puts an end on all of the poor cases. Setting aside some crazy war chest to settle all these cases they had they i'm sure they did because if i mean look at how much they're making just off of gmo crops that are still selling monsanto seed and so even if the 66 billion bought the company they can they've got the income to offset the court cases with that they may have you know if you looked at the amount of income expected from Monsanto and multiply that by the typical 5x for the valuation of their company, we might find that the Warshast was built right into that as a fudge factor.

So they may have been worth $200 billion, and they sold for $66 billion and said, hey, we could pay $100 billion of lawsuits. And still, at the end of all that, we pull that Monsanto GMO crop off the market and we put Liberty Link in play. And so they already have, I think, there's no way a company as big as Bayer is not going to have an end game in play when Monsanto is already all tied up in these lawsuits.

Well, the lobbying arm is certainly healthy at this point. I just got an email today from EWG, Environmental Working Group. It was a letter penned by Aaron Brockovich about how the farm

bill that's up for renewal has a provision in it that would allow locality, that would strip away the purview of localities to ban glyphosate. Yeah. So this is still, you know, this is a war that's being fought constantly on multiple

battlefronts. Yeah. I mean, I've had people at the municipal level, at city levels begging for our science to be taken to their local school board to stop spraying the schoolyard with Roundup. And not just our group, there's hundreds of scientists around the world that are trying to help with this mission. But to see so much resistance down there, I got a call a couple weeks ago from this woman who was trying to make this fight, and they presented all this science to the school board,

and they brought in a Monsanto sales rep to to be there and the monsanto sales rep just got more pulled the trump maneuver it sounds like where he just got more and more angry the whole time red face this is foolish this this woman's uh you know has no educational background she's bringing all the science like she knows what she's talking about doing this and his final closing statement was roundup is so safe that i would be happy for my son to lick the grass right after it's sprayed and so as a scientist having looked at glyphosate that's child abuse yeah that's flat out ridiculous statement knowing what we know about this. But that emotional argument overcame everything, and Schoolyard's still being sprayed with Roundup. And so it's the emotionality of the human brain that's one of our biggest challenges.

We also don't want to really believe that this is going on on such a mass scale. We want to just say, there's no way it could be that unsafe. We would never have allowed it to get to this point. We're smarter than that. Certainly, the EPA does something. Yeah. The EPA has looked at this. There's been a million trials. Everybody says it's safe. You guys are crazy conspiracy theorists. I think that's been the paradigm for a long time. crazy conspiracy theorists. And I think that's been kind of the paradigm for a long time. And we are seeing that shift. People are taking your point of view and the point of view of so many scientists that are allied with your perspective in a way that we weren't seeing even a couple

of years ago. And I think that court case goes a long way towards lending credence to what's actually happening. I totally agree. And I think the snowball is rolling. That's why we've seen this transaction from Monsanto to Bayer. I think that the public sentiment, as the public continues to educate itself more and more through open channels, will realize that we've known this for a long time. And it's no different than the tobacco situation was in the 1960s to 2000. That 40 years, scientists were trying to sue the tobacco companies for lung cancer and for the damage to kids' immune systems and all kinds of horrible

things. For 40 years, we were at it with the tobacco companies. Yeah, doubt is our product. And it was that emotional thing of like, well, tobacco is how we built our nation, the deep south and everything else. It was part of the Americana. The Marlboro Man was the image of American strength. And so it was so entwined in our psyche and in our identity

that it took a long time to untangle that. In the same way, our identity is so tangled up around this belief that we are the best food growers in the world. And so to dismantle that belief, that humility that it takes to say, we're growing the worst food on the planet, the least nutrient delivery of any food system in the world perhaps, the only other place where we see worse outcomes nutritionally are people that just can't get in the world, perhaps. The only other place where we see worse health outcomes nutritionally are people that just can't get access to food, period.

And I want to bring it to that because, again, this argument that keeps coming up in the world of, well, we have to feed 7 billion people, so we have to do chemical farming. A, crop yields decline, not increase when you do long-term chemical farming. B, one of the great farmers that we're working with in the Midwest now, he says, today in the world, 70% of humans of the 7 billion people on the planet are fed by a peasant farmer. And that's humbling. If only 30% of humanity is actually eating from a large-scale farm, then what is the hubris that we need non-organic chemical farming to feed the world? So what is preventing these farmers from making this switch? It seems like they're aware that their yields are going down.

They have some sense that this is not working. Is it because they're locked in through debt structures that they can't escape this paradigm to do it another way? Debt structure, 100%, yes. But there's something more insidious at play that we didn't understand until we were on the ground with these farmers, is that in a culture and in a state where 85% to 90% of the ground is under chemical farming, there is a collective subconscious agreement or contract socially in that farm community that you don't talk about this. You certainly don't tell anybody that your crop yields have been decreasing for 15 years. You certainly don't tell anybody that

you think chemical farming is hurting your children and causing the birth defects that you're seeing in your kids. And certainly, we've seen the most horrendous of disease happening on these farms. These farmers' families are so sick. Major brain malformations in these children that are being born while their father had his tearful father come up to me when I was giving a talk, the science talk on Roundup in Minnesota, it was in July. And he and his wife came up right after my talk. And by this time, it was dark. We were out in a field and I was giving this talk in a field and the birds had settled us down and it was like crickets at night and it was just this bucolic stuff. But the tension in the dark with all these farmers,

there were about 100 farmers sitting around in the dark listening to this. They came up in the dark and said, you just answered the biggest question, but we have to ask this just straight to you, is that the week that we conceived our child, I was spraying Roundup and I was literally drenched in it. My clothes had come in in the evenings and I was covered in everything else. Our child was born with this defect where it has no connection

between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. And so he has all these developmental delays and has difficulty walking and all these things that he'll have to face the rest of his life. Do you think it's possible that me being covered with chemicals throughout those weeks previous to conception, did my sperm or her egg or did that damage happen due to the chemical exposure? And just being present and saying, just like the lung cancer, we don't need to put the responsibility on this second of your action with glyphosate. But what we can say is as

a population, this is exactly what's happening to all of us under the pressure of the chemicals. And so the farmers are not, it's not theoretical for them it's not a banking problem they have a collapse of their own family and infrastructure going on their children have attention deficit allergies asthma some many of the farmers that have children under the age of teenagers who we talk to won't let their kids out during the summer because the planes are flying over all day long spraying their neighbors' crops and their crops and everything else. And so if their kids go out, they've got asthma, they have breathing problems by the evening, their eyes are bloodshot because there's just so much chemical in the air. And so the kids are, we think of this bucolic farmland,

kids running around in the countryside. They're locked in these mildew-filled trailers, basically, all summer long, trying to survive the chemical warfare that's happening around them throughout the summer growing months. So you've got this financial lock-in with the banks. You've got health collapse happening in the family. You've got

the emotional tension of, I have to look at my dad every day and tell him that we're losing the farm that he's had since his great-grandfather farmed this land. So you've got all this emotional family tension. And then on top of that, you have the community pressure, the peer pressure. And so if you decide to make the jump and stop chemical spraying and go to a regenerative agriculture, you're immediately socially ostracized. Nobody will talk to you at church. Nobody's talking to you at the bar. Nobody's talking to you at the bank.

Really? Because just by making that jump, you just made a judgment call on everybody else. Wow. That's the perception. Yeah, I wouldn't have even thought of that. We didn't even think of it. Yeah. And to the last farmer we talked to to that's the biggest number one reason

they won't go regenerative ag as they have no community and even if they did or they could if they could break free of the debt structure if they could navigate the you know social landmines that are involved in that they're dealing with a plot of land that's been depleted. They would have to regenerate the soil before they could even conceivably grow anything in an organic manner, right? Like short of moving and finding a new parcel, it's a burden that I would imagine is just too unmanageable. They can't see the way out

because the chemical industry has told them that it takes more than 10 years to build half a centimeter of soil. So to regenerate half a centimeter to a centimeter of soil, they said 10 years. Well, they're losing inches of soil a year. We're in the biggest dust bowl in history right now. And how much of that can be, is attributable to chemicals versus just monocropping and not allowing, not rotating crops and all of these other practices. It's the overtilling, yeah. The overtilling is equally as damaging to the soil architecture as the spraying. That's quite clear. And so we can't just be organic certified.

That's not enough. We have to go to regen ag standards where we actually build soil, not till soil. And so we need to go to a no-till organic technique. And this is being taught all over the country by some very intrepid farmers who are out there. They've converted over a million acres quietly over the last decade, 15 years, to regenerative agricultural practices. No-till, no spray. That is the promised land for how we get ourselves out of this situation. So we went to shoot a documentary series and we came back knowing we had to start a nonprofit. We needed to get money into these farmers' environments. And more importantly than money, we needed that money to build an architecture for a new community. If these

farmers have community and they can talk to each other and say, okay, the six of us are going to make the jump. They can now talk to each other daily. They can now compare notes at the end of every week. That I think is the secret we have. So we've launched a nonprofit. We're in the process of our 501c3. We're partnering with another Virginia group to go ahead and start taking money in for the operation in the next couple weeks. It's called Farmers Footprint. The website's farmersfootprint.us. And the mission here is to tie consumers back to the agricultural land itself with the goal of converting 5 million acres of farmland that's currently under GMO chemical farming back to not just organic, but exceed that with this new no-till, no-spray mandate. We're going to do it through a number of different fashions. Certainly, the docu-series that we're creating, Farmer's Footprint, is there to educate us

as consumers as to what is the plight of the farmer. How do we come alongside that group to create a viable solution? We haven't even touched on the farm bill and how that's playing in for the last 40 years into farming practices and is yet another barrier to success. And so we've decided that if we can bring $100 per acre from the consumers into the farmer's environment, we can overcome the farm bill, we can overcome this banking juggernaut, and hopefully we build that community to allow the farmers to overcome this ostracized status that they get from making the jump. And so a farmer's footprint is seeing that opportunity to do that. So what do we see actually

happen? So does no-till, no-organic, or no-spray actually work? Like you said, these farmers are looking at dead, dead soil. One of the things that I have the highest conviction over now as a scientist is the concept of grace in biology. I grew up in kind of a Christian environment, a kind of hippie church in Boulder and great people around. And so I had kind of the lexicon of kind of a relatively open-minded church doctrine. And the word grace got thrown around in this faith community all the time. And now I'm exposed to a lot of people from all types of spiritual backgrounds and go into the Muslim or the Buddhist or the Jewish communities. And you hear this word grace with differing frequency, but it's out there in our lexicon. I think it can maybe best be defined now, in my mind at least, scientifically, which is

heal faster than you injure. And that's what we see in the soil. And that's what I get to see in my clinic. I see people who have abused their bodies for decades. And if they just give a pause, they do a couple of short-term fasts, they give their gut a break, they give their immune system a break, they get away from chemicals, they start growing some of their own food, make these simple little decisions. And suddenly decades of damage is reversed in hours, weeks, months. That's grace at the cellular level. And there may be a better spiritual definition of it. But from a biology standpoint, I see grace as you're going to make mistakes, and you're going to heal faster from them when you make the change. And that's what we see in the soil.

And so these farmers who are making the jump, again, we've seen a million acres make this transition. And so Soil Health Academy is our partners in this group. And they're four phenomenal farmers who really have been cutting the edge of this no-till, no-spray effort. And what we're seeing is that within a single growing season, you can go from this dead monoculture of corn or soybean to cover cropping with 16 different species and getting a no-till environment. You'll see the fungal elements, you'll see the mycorrhizae in there, the bacterial populations returning to the soil, and you see biodiversity returning in the form of earthworms

within a single growing season of rest. Yeah, it's the environmental planetary version of what you just explained in the human body. It's fasting. Fast for just a moment. Stop doing the damage for just a short period of time. The resiliency is amazing. It's amazing. And it would have to be. There's a book recently out, and I'm going to script the title. I think it's something like Earth Without Humans or something like this. And it describes how fast the ecosystem is going to recover when we disappear.

We're gone. ecosystem is going to recover when we disappear. It describes New York City two weeks without humans. And you see every element of the concrete infrastructure of Manhattan disappearing under biology. And within two months and two years, and you see how fast life leaps out of this planet. And it has to be that way because it's Mother Earth. That's how we got here. This planet's been exploding with life for millions and millions of years before Homo sapiens showed up. We got to combat this problem. I mean, one of the things that we talked about last time that was so shocking for me to hear was just the pervasiveness of chemical spraying. trying to live in a clean environment, that glyphosate and various other chemicals are so pervasive they found their way into our drinking water, it's in the rainwater, it's raining down onto these organic farms. So, despite trying to hermetically remove ourselves from this problem, it's still something that we have to contend with, even when we're doing everything in our power to avoid it.

I mean, I know that's one of the reasons that you moved to a remote location in Virginia, was to try to find a pristine place to live and have a family. Yeah. Yeah, it's getting hard, right? It's getting hard to find anything that would be considered pristine in the world, let alone the U.S. But I think it is. I mean, first of all, why is that? Why is glyphosate everywhere? It's the nature of the molecule itself.

It's an amino acid backbone with a phosphate group and a carbon group on the other end. And you get this thing called an organophosphate. And organophosphates in this form are extremely water-soluble. 70% of Earth is water. And it turns out that 70% of your body is water. And so we've put into play a chemical that is water-soluble that can now travel through all levels of the water ecosystem. And so in the evaporating water coming off the Mississippi River, as we collect some 80% of all the roundup sprayed in our country into a single water system, as we collect some 80% of all the roundup sprayed in our country into a single water system. Through the runoff that happens when we water or when the rain falls or whatever it is,

we consolidate that into the great muddy. It shouldn't be muddy, but it's carrying all of our topsoil in it now because all our topsoil is dead and is eroding away. An amazing estimate on that, actually. I just read that 11% of our GDP is being wasted every year in topsoil. The amount of monetary loss from our topsoil washing away is equal to 11% of GDP. Because it's so unhealthy that it doesn't adhere? Exactly. Yeah, there's no root structure to keep it there.

There's no mycorrhizae. There's no mycelium. There's no fungal structure in the soil to keep the topsoil where it needs to be. And so every time it rains, the rain can't even penetrate the soil, which is ridiculous. It's so hard that the water, when it finally rains on your crop, can't get into the soil. Instead, it takes the top centimeter of your soil away and washes it to the nearest gully and out into the water system, which of course ends up in the Mississippi River and then into the Delta. And at the end of the Mississippi River, we now have a dead zone that's larger than the state of Rhode Island

because there's so much herbicide, pesticide, and chemical fertilizer in that water. And so we've got this huge dead zone in the ocean right at the mouth of the Mississippi, and not a single politician is talking about that. It's dumbfounding that we can be this myopic. So soil is disappearing. All of this is broken. Yes, yes, yes, yes. But I still want to bring it back to the simple reality

is the brokenness in the system has to do with the isolation of human relationship. If we connect the farmer back to the consumer and we cut out the banks, we cut out the farm bill, we cut out the big chemical industry that's trying to educate them incorrectly, we cut out all those players, the amount of money we save is extraordinary, first of all.

But the amount of money we can bring into those lands is extraordinary. So there's such a huge economic incentive right now for farmers to make this jump. They just need support for about three years to make the transition. Because after three to five years, they can take crop yields. Right now, if they're under GMO crop, they can expect to yield maybe $40 an acre after they subtract out all of their inputs and everything else. So typical family farm, you're growing maybe 300 acres of corn, soybean, some mix thereof. 300 acres times your $40, you're at a dismal annual income.

And to achieve that, you've woken up every morning at 4 a.m., you go to sleep at 10 p.m., you cry yourself to sleep every night, your relationship with your wife is so stressed because she's yelling that change has to happen because the kids are sick she doesn't have money to pay the health bills can't fill the pharmacy prescriptions dad's chomping at you because you must be doing something wrong

so it's not working you need to change and for that you get your dismal return which goes to just service the debt service is the debt and so then you get your your dismal you know return which goes to just service the debt services the debt right and so then you have to borrow money to buy the seed to buy the fertilizers for your next crop and you're back in the cycle again and so this is the reality for so many of these farms and you know i just have to be amazed at the economic incentive on the other side of this. These farms, these over a million acres that have made the transition back to

regen ag over the last 15 years, these guys are seeing returns per acre of $500 to $900 an acre. From $40. We want to believe that there's some impossible way. It's too hard to get money for organic food. No, it's so much more lucrative for these farmers. They could be the most lucrative generation of farmers in their entire family if they can get to a regenerative ag practice. And what you said earlier is that to make that transition costs about $100 per acre in order to kind of help these people make that switch. Yeah. And that $100 doesn't even need to

go to being a safety net income entirely. So the third of it we see going to their education. A third of it we see going to consumer education. And then a third of it we see becoming a safety net income for them where they're not going to get paid, but we say, if you were to fail, because that's their fear. If I don't do what I've been doing the last 15 or 20 years of chemicals, my crop next year is going to fail and I'm going to go bankrupt. And so we don't even need to give them an income necessarily. But what we can say is, look, we've now raised enough private funds for you that we can give you a safety net that says, if you're actively in this transition of no spray, no till, and you happen to fail one of those years, we'll meet you at $40 an acre. Right.

We'll meet you there. You will not go down in income. That's what we need to do is create that safety net. Right, right, right, right. That safety net I don't think is even going to have to be tapped into because the farmers that are making the transition are already seeing improved yields year one of going back to a non-gmo seed on the same plot of land same plot of land no till no spray a non-gmo seed and suddenly they're back to 40 bushels an acre that's amazing so you're making this documentary or docu-series like how far into it are you and what is the plan for that because to me this is an education thing it it seems like right like the more people can understand what is actually going on we can

create a groundswell of support for these farmers my my goal is that by the end of 2019 we'll have three of the docu-series wrapped by then the first one's been all shot we're in post with that one should be out by january of 2019 as we debut that doc docuseries, I don't think it's going to take any imagination. It's a 30-minute docuseries, each element 30 minutes, so it's easy digestion. When you meet these farmers and see the passion and desire in their eyes and in their hearts to do the right thing here, we need to stop damning the farmer first. The farmers are the biggest heroes I've ever met. I've never met a more resilient, courageous group of human beings in my life. My brothers in the military, I think I would have said that about the military right up

until I met the farmers. I have huge respect for anybody in any military in any part of the world. Those are courageous human beings that do some of the worst of the worst. However, the farmers, I think, have been locked into chemical warfare that's nigh on to what we did in Vietnam as far as the amount of planetary damage times 10 or times 100 or times 1,000. And so these guys have been locked as the brute force to destroy nature, and they know it. On some level, they all know it. And that's why they have to ostracize each

other when somebody comes to the light is because it immediately convicts everybody else. And there's this huge guilt that's riding underneath the surface. These farmers already changed though. And to see the success where... You can see it on our trailer, on our website, on Farmer's Footprint. You can see it on our trailer, on our website, on Farmer's Footprint. Alan Williams is one of the PhDs with Soil Health Academy, and he tells the story that 10 years ago, they couldn't have put 10 farmers in a room in the entire country that could have cared about regenerative agriculture. Now they do health academies all year round, all over the country,

and they've got 60 to 100 farmers in every single room. And so there's an inevitable demand happening of grassroots swell, as you said, from the farmers. If we don't meet them, though, as consumers right there at that moment in the field, it's going to take too long. It could be 30, 50 years before we see enough people convert over to ag. take too long. It could be 30, 50 years before we see enough people convert over to ag. The amazing thing, though, is here we are laying out a recipe for success for regenerative agriculture and recovering soil health. If we convert 5 million acres, we solve greenhouse gas problems in North America. We will absorb more greenhouse gases than we produce. And so every acre of land, the largest CO2 consumer in it is the fungal community within the soil layer. We have global warming because we depleted the

vast majorities of soil on earth. I think we're down to 2% of irritable land is now viable still. We've killed 98% of the soil on earth. And that's China, to the US, to Africa, we've killed it. You can just Google this, actually. The big ag community will follow depleted soil records. And so you can see satellite map images of where the depleted soil patterns are throughout the world. And the Midwest of the United States is one of the most depleted areas worldwide. And so you then track that with global warming patterns, and the single biggest producer of greenhouse gases is methane, actually. They're the biggest contributor. Interestingly, by volume, by cubic meters of methane,

it's only about 15% of global greenhouse gas, but it's six times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. And so as its impact on biology or on global warming, methane's number one enemy. Interestingly, methane is primarily produced through the ag industry. And so it's through cattle farms, but primarily through poor management of the soil and the crops thereon. One of the biggest producers of methane is actually the decaying, slowly rotting piles of sugar beet cane that we have throughout the South. I did not know that.

So that's called bagasse, that byproduct. We have seen piles of bagasse that are in the billions of pounds size. They take up city, city, city blocks. You drive along these huge streets, long dusty roads down through Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi. And they're piled as high as you can imagine as the massive piles of sugar cane that don't compost well. And so they just sit there in these giant piles under the sun and off-gas methane. Sugar beets have zero role in human nutrition. There's no piece of the sugar beet that's good for a human being. The sugar industry has been

producing that since the 50s as a primary crop. It turns out the most subsidized crop in the farm bill is the sugar beet. It's gotten so dismal growing corn and soybean in Minnesota and the North where we have all these rich soils that they're actually now intentionally destroying the soil structure so that it can be poor enough to grow sugar beet in. Sugar beet likes poor soil. And so we have farmers that are killing their soil intentionally so that they can get subsidized $100 on the acre to grow sugar beets in Minnesota, where it should have never been grown. So the incentivization structure is wrong. It's backwards going both ways. Always. Every single structure that we have to support big ag

in this country is forcing the farmer's hand into poor agriculture and biologic decisions. is forcing the farmer's hand into poor agriculture and biologic decisions. Can we combat this problem without overhauling the farm bill? I mean, that seems to be front and center of a large percentage of what's gone awry here. Yeah, and if you'd asked me 10 years ago, that was my focus. When I was thinking about nutrition in the late 2000s, I thought, well, we just need to fix the farm bill, and this is going to be over in a day. I've given up on that. I've seen the most disparate political positions between Bush to Obama to now this amazing journey of Trump.

Not a single whisper of a change in the farm bill going on. And so I've given up on that transformation. That's why we're creating Farmer's Footprint, where the realization is, actually, even if we revised the farm bill, it's not a big enough single incentive to change the way things are done. We literally need to cut out all of the middlemen. If we cut out all the middlemen, i.e. the banks alone that are charging these incredible interest rates to farmers, if you just remove the interest rates that are costing our farmers to grow their food, we are going to see a very lucrative shift happen.

And so my belief is we need to cut out all the middlemen, get the farmer connected to the consumer directly, and we'll see an economic advantage so much larger than the current farm bill that we don't need to fix the farm bill. It's literally a private sector capitalistic solution to the problem. But if sugar beets are so lucrative and so incentivized and will literally grow anywhere in terrible soil, how are we going to overcome? I mean, the market desire for that product is astronomical. And if it's such a large contributant to greenhouse gas

emissions, we have to create disincentives for that. Do we not? I don't think so. Or better incentives for them to grow something else. Because if we can make $500, $900 an acre doing regenerative ag.

So what's the yield from sugar beets? You're down around $100 an acre or something like that, you know, typically. And it's going to vary depending on where you are. And there's, you know, the farm bill is the most complicated piece of legislation we have. So to say it's $100 an acre or something like that, typically. And it's going to vary depending on where you are. And the Farm Bill is the most complicated piece of legislation we have.

So to say it's $100 an acre is overly simplistic. But it's not at an economic level that we can't overcome it. It wasn't at such a high economic benefit that five years ago, everybody up north was growing sugar beet. They had to get to such a desperate level with the corn and soybean yields that they started this new practice of dead soil or killing the soil further to grow the sugar beet. So I think I'm encouraged at the end of the day that we can put into play a free market capitalistic solution. The concept of a nonprofit here is just to accelerate the farmer to it. Give them a safety net for those few years they need. I would love to see the situation where in a few years we have corporations coming along, farmers, to say, we would like to buy up a million acres, and we're going to pay you to do no-till regen ag on it.

That's the switch that I think is coming. re-agen ag on it. And that's the switch that I think is coming. Because right now we have all these Fortune 500 companies that are polluting the world and buying CO2 offsets. Well, the CO2 offset of an acre of re-agen ag could offset way more bang for the buck. And so I think that if our companies can start to recognize soil as their number one CO2 sink, then our airlines, for example, need to be the number one investor in soils in the Midwest and be working directly with these farmers to make lucrative situations for the farmer and massive CO2 dumps for the industry.

You made an interesting point before we started the podcast. I mean, clearly what we're talking about, this is in our economic interest, it is in the podcast. I mean, clearly what we're talking about, this is in our economic interest, it is in the interest of human health, global environmental health, but there's also this additional point about national security. So, explain that. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the national security threat, if you haven't started to see it in the course of this conversation, we can kind of point out those elements, too. But what's an extraordinary thing? everything from our fuel production for the energy sector to our big ag, which of course feeds the fish, the chickens, the pork, the beef, those huge industries all being fed the GMO commodities.

And so huge, huge control of this massive, massive industry of human food. And then to make the move where you allow a German company, regulated in a completely different environment than anything in the U.S., now outside the regulatory control, really, of the U.S., makes the move to purchase this country. I think it's, again, one of those most myopic things, if the world works like we think it does. Now that I've seen this thing actually come to fruition, which I really didn't think the government was going to allow to happen,

I have to wonder if maybe that international scene and the relationship between the US government and the EU and these other big factions must be a little different than we thought. There must be some backroom agreements happening across the world as to what the powers that be would like the world food chain to look like in 20 years. And they're making some sort of geopolitical decisions based on something much bigger than the United States of America. Yeah.

Well, Europe historically has been much more resistant to the use of glyphosate and GMO crops and has been more progressive in terms of being pro-organic, but we're seeing that start to slip away a little bit. Huge erosions. I mean, we have GMO crops in every European country. That's why France has to say, well, by 2020, we're going to be non-GMO. I'll say you're not going to be non-GMO. The future means you're GMO right now. And so, even these countries that we think of as being clean are not at all clean. And it's not just glyphosate. And that's my concern.

If we make this just an argument over glyphosate, then Bayer just simply presents Liberty Link and, see, we're glyphosate-free. So now France gets to say we're glyphosate-free or whatever it is. If they really hold the line and say we're going to be GMO-free, and they can hold that line, not just quote-unquote organic, but they're GMO-free, that will be an interesting shift, because now you've got contention within the EU of what the European regulatory body that's equal to what we would call the EPA here has already approved Liberty Lake. So we'll start to see some huge court battles, I think, between the nation states of the EU and the big EU regulatory bodies and Bayer over these next years to battle that out and see where that goes.

I still have hope because there's economic incentive that is massive. There's hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 30 to 50 years that could be made by an intelligent approach to this process. And so the right answers are lucrative. And that gives me hope. But there still has to be political will. And the strategy of trying to go top down, for example, tackling the farm bill, have proved non-fruitful.

So now the focus is more on a bottom up, incentivizing these farmers and creating a groundswell of popular support for this to then exert some pressure on the top levels, on the legislative level, on the regulatory level, and on the political level. Absolutely. onto the air here on a podcast around the loss of freedom and security for the United States as we sell off our staple crop production, we have just as much opportunity to give the beautiful picture of what if the United States became the most resilient and deeply rooted agricultural land in the world, that no matter what drought hits us, no matter what happens, we're going to have such resilience and such redundancy within our farmland that we become food independent. And so the catchphrase of Farmer's Footprint is a pathway to human health

and food independence. Because food independence needs to be the political mission. If we create food independence, greenhouse gas problems go away. We will absorb all that CO2 and methane. We will stop producing so much CO2 and methane. We will fix that problem. And so my message is one of real empowerment to the heartland of the United States. Are you a farmer right now? Do you know a farmer? If you don't know a farmer, meet one and become part of the most important American thing we'll ever do.

It's time for us to rebrand. And we've done this many times as a country. We were America, land of the free. We've been land of liberty. We've had all these clever catchphrases that change out every generation or two in the United States. Land of the fed, I don't know. Land of the healthy. Land of thrive. What are we going to rebrand as?

Russia's doing it, folks. You can have whatever geopolitical viewpoint you want, but if Russia succeeds in being organic agriculture by 2025, they've got us beat in spades. They now just have to wait 10 more years for us to financially completely collapse ourselves with our horrendous health problems. And they're going to win this economic battle on the big, big picture here. Keep in mind, China is not like Russia. I was just going to say, what's going on in China right now? It's the horrendous situation in China. China makes more glyphosate than Monsanto ever did. Glyphosate as a molecule went off patent in 2007, and the vast majority on the international market is now made out of China. China has the highest rates of prediabetes

and cancer in the world, and they aren't publishing that stuff. And so I really believe that the smoking gun in Western civilization right now, nobody understands, I think, and maybe I'm completely naive because I'm just a doctor, but I think that the biggest player in Western economics is China. It is not an Eastern force. It's a full-on Western force now. Perhaps in the 1980s and early 90s, you could call it an Eastern economic force, but they diversified all of their money into the West. And so they own the vast majority of gold and minerals and all that, their gold rights through South America, Africa, throughout the West. And so they are an economic power from the West, from my viewpoint. I would say Russia, the Eastern Bloc, maybe parts of Northern Africa

are kind of the Eastern economy now. And so you've got this situation where the Eastern economy that now becomes dominated in the next 15 years as China and the U.S. collapse in our health care and Russia rises, maybe that's going to happen if we don't change direction. It's so strange to contemplate that. It's so strange that I think nobody can take it seriously. I think people are listening to this right now,

blowing off everything I've said in either of these podcasts. It's like, that sounds completely crazy now. Because that's a jump where you can't imagine that, you know, in our mindset, Russia's got this, you know, backwards economy and everything else and corruption. Sure, but nowhere worse than I think what we've got in so many levels of our government here. But they made this call. They said the most important thing for national security of Russia is go GMO-free, organic food, make real food by 2025, and we'll win the game. And if we don't step up and meet that call, we're going to lose the economic game. we're going to lose the economic game. There was an article sometime in the last month,

a bunch of articles came out about this study that came out of the EU about the deleterious impact of glyphosate on the bee populations. Did you see this? Yes. And the reason I bring it up, I don't want this to be all about glyphosate, like you said, but it goes back to how we kind of originally opened this, which're seeing the beginnings or perhaps the adolescence of a cataclysmic house of cards falling in upon itself where it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to stop, to arrest. Once this starts to happen, how much of it then becomes self-perpetuating and difficult for us to put the brakes on? Because so many things are obviously dependent upon what the bees are doing. Where are we with that? You're absolutely right. And this does kind of bring us back full circle where I was kind of pointing out,

you may think you found yourself to a niche that's going to survive this onslaught of human health, chronic disease, all this stuff. But the fact is we now know that your health is not independent. You can't be independently healthy as a family. And we're in the sixth great extinction on the planet right now. There's been five other great extinctions in the fossil record on our planet. It's been 60 million years since our last great one with the dinosaur collapse and everything else, which happened to be a destruction of the topsoil, which is interesting.

Really? Oh, because of the ash? The ash that covered that dust layer that covered the planet killed the topsoil, and we had this huge collapse of the ecosystem. And so here we are back destroying the topsoil and seeing the sixth extinction happen. We're losing one species to the point of extinction every 20 minutes now. And so in the course of this—

Yeah, I think you said we've lost 50% of the Earth's biodiversity in the last, I don't know, couple decades. Yeah, 40% in 50 years. So 40% of the biodiversity on earth gone in 50 years is the current estimates. With one species disappearing every 20 minutes, in the course of our conversations, hey, we've lost three or four species that we don't even know how to name. We don't know who they were, but they disappeared. And the bees are a perfect example of that. We are seeing, we are pushing our bee population

to the point of extinction. They're really being kept alive in a lot of parts of the country by moving bees in on trucks. And so we have these huge trucks that are moving beehives around the country to go pollinate the almond trees in Southern California or the staple crops in the Midwest where we've killed all the bee population. And so we are driving these bees there. And I don't think Einstein may have been the one to coin the term or coin the quote, but he's been credited with it in the 1930s saying that humans will survive for about three years after the bees are gone.

I don't know who was the clairvoyant guy to come up with that. It was probably a woman who was nurturing enough to come up with that at the time, and it got given to Einstein there. But whoever said it really understood the role of these pollinating species in the human survival. And amazingly, this is being talked about a lot in academia and in the technology circles is that we can't survive the loss of the bees. And so one of the most astounding examples of our hubris, again, is a couple articles have come out in the last couple of years saying the solution for the future of humanity is these robotic bees. And so they're building these little drone bees that are supposed to replace bees as pollinators. And that's our solution. I mean, that's just a classic example of what we're seeing all over the place. I think there's a level of apathy and powerlessness that most people feel.

And it's convenient and comforting to think that Elon Musk is just going to innovate us out of whatever problem that we have. We're going to go colonize Mars when we can't even figure out how to properly terraform our own planet. Correct. Right? This idea that we're divesting ourselves of responsibility

and just looking past to the next opportunity or the next technological breakthrough and we can all go to sleep at night comforted by that. But the truth is, that is not the way forward. Yes, it's not the way forward. And if we don't reconnect to nature, we'll just destroy it again. I want to try to bring this to some sort of closure that doesn't feel like I'm the most depressing person you've ever listened to. And so, I'm kind of battling in my mind now to kind of get us back to this space where we can say. It is doomsday meets like unbridled optimism.

Like I don't really know where you're coming from. You don't know where to go with this one. So let me take you back to kind of how do you reconcile those two things. And I do it actually through my experience as a physician in the ICUs. And in the ICUs, when I was practicing intensive hospital medicine, I got the privilege of being around human beings at the end of life. And I was so compelled by this experience that I ended up getting another subspecialty in hospice and palliative care and dealing with end of life things for four years with a hospice group. And at the end of life, we've termed it death. And what I've laid out for you today is the possibility of the death of our species in 70 years, 100 years, who cares? If it's 200 years,

it's still pathetic. And so we're looking at the last chapter of life on earth with our current course of action. But let me tell you about what my experience has been in those last moments with patients who are dying. We have the belief, I think, in our subconscious because of the movies we watch, because of the TV shows we watch, because of our big divorce from the death process. It's become sterilized. You have probably not seen many people die. You've probably not seen your loved ones die. They've probably died in operating rooms or in ICUs

or they died before you could fly across the country and see them. And so very few human beings are now watching this process of death. And it's allowed death to be defined as an endpoint, process of death. And it's allowed death to be defined as an endpoint, as a contraction or disappearance rather than what I've actually seen it to be. And what I've seen it to be is a massive expansion of consciousness, of reality, of awareness, and ultimately of love. And the most poignant examples of this are people that actually die biologically. And we spend 15 or 30 minutes in ICU resuscitating them with drugs and shocking their chest like you see on TV shows and everything else. And we have a dismal track record of pulling those people out.

It's not like TV. We lose the vast majority. It's around 6% of cardiac arrests in the hospital will actually be resuscitated. 6% will survive, 94% will die. So you have somebody who's now biologically dead and you're artificially sustaining life. You've got them on a respirator and you're pounding on their chest and compressing, you're pumping drugs in their vein to try to get their heart restarted and doing all of this. And they've meanwhile been in the ICU for a week or a few days or weeks, months in some cases before they have this moment. And by this time, they've been isolated away from humans for quite some time. They're only touched by latex gloved hands.

Only people with gowns on will come and see them. They have masks on. They haven't seen a human face close up in months. You know, they're just so isolated and lonely. And they go into this moment on the other side. And then we start working on them and doing our code. And as the hero depicted on TV, you become that doctor that pulls somebody back from that other side of the veil. And it was startling as, you know, I moved past my internship and started to be kind of a senior

resident in these environments and really responsible for being around these patients for hours after these experiences, they all told such a similar story on the other side of biologic life. And it had to do with a little bit of a typical story that you might see in the movies or something where they saw white light and there was a sense of expansion and all this. But there was one sentence that came back again and again. And I had one ICU shift that was very weird. I had one ICU shift where I worked for 36 hours shift. And during that night and middle of my 36 hour shift, I see three people die and I bring them all back with my team. And to the last one of those three, every single one of them, their first sentence was always, why did you bring me back?

Which always kind of deflated my win. All of them said that? Yeah, they all said, why did you bring me back? And the variety was huge. One of these was an African-American pastor, had over 200 visitors in his ICU room in the days before he passed away. visitors in his ICU room in the days before he passed away. And the other one was this very isolated, kind of ostracized gentleman in his community who was dying of complications of AIDS. And then I had this kid who had genetic defects

and all this stuff, and he was dying of complications of pneumonia because he couldn't breathe anymore because his skeleton had collapsed. So you just couldn't pick three different medical cases or three different human beings. And every one of them, first sentence, why'd you bring me back? And then as they start to get oriented and in the hours that follow, they are telling their loved ones, I went into this space and it was bright white light everywhere. And I, in that moment, felt completely accepted for the first time in my life. And that was an unexpected sentence to hear out of multiple accounts. I felt completely accepted for the first time in my life. So what do you make of that?

I think we're all walking around lonely as hell. And our opportunity to rebirth, because death is not an end point. It's a transformation moment. It's an expansion beyond the limits of this frail biologic shell that we carry around. And the instant that we step out of that, we find out that the universe embraces us in every single second of our existence in complete acceptance of who we are. We are enough in and of our own identity of I am at every second of every point of our existence. And it's the disbelief of that that's keeping us locked in these stupid conversations we just had for the last hour and a half. That is myopic conversation in and of itself when you back up

for a moment and say, okay, we're killing ourselves. But what if we need a death moment to transform completely, to let go of all of the preconceived notions of what it is to be human, and to say, you know what, we are beings of light, and we are completely accepted at every moment, including this moment, when we would rape the earth of what we're raping it of, when we would kill each other at the rate we do, when we would destroy the entire ecosystem of a green planet in the middle of black space, when we would have that level of hubris, we're still completely accepted. And our journey is somehow understood by something more benevolent and more complete than we can see as human beings. And so let's not beat each other up

over this issue. Let's not see this as a failure. Let's see this as an obvious next step in our journey. And death is the inevitable thing marching at us that's going to say, are you going to wake up and see the transformation at that moment of death and transformation and you're going to say goodbye homo sapiens? Or are you going to do it a moment before that, in the body, before the doctor starts the resuscitation? Are you going to do it a moment before that, in the body, before the doctor starts the resuscitation? Are you going to say, you know what? What if we all looked at each other in wonder and awe and said, you're enough.

I accept you completely. I want to be with you. I want to live with you. I want to be alive, period. And if it's with you, then it must be on purpose because we're in the same room. And the odds of that is zero. And so, we are here. Seven billion of us showed up right now, which is really odd because I just laid out a horrific story of what's happening on the planet. And yet, seven billion of those white souls that seconds after death are going to realize

that they are who they've always been. they're fully accepted, and they are moving in true love, and that white light is the love, and they're in that space, what if we can transform before we die? Then there's no reason to go to Mars. There's no reason to go anywhere else, because we will do absolutely every single thing differently here on Earth. And we're going to do it differently by just that simple recognition of I am who I am. You are who you are. That's enough. And I accept you completely. And let's figure out how to do this within the design of nature. There's enough energy. There's enough food. There's enough soil. There's enough commodities. There's enough resources for everybody

on the planet to thrive at a level that's never been experienced in human history. We cannot continue any form of human economic systems that have ever existed before and expect us to escape the death moment. We literally have to reinvent everything. And so if you are under the age of 18 right now, you are the last generation that may live to the fullest extent of the human potential. It is you who are being called to transform because you showed up right when you did. If my generation is to do anything, it was to say, oh my gosh, we're going in the wrong direction. But my generation doesn't have enough time now

to turn the boat around, reinvent everything. And so our mission is not to inspire the farmers that are currently fighting the good fight. It's to inspire their children to do the right thing and do it differently, connected to new children who are in the cities, who are in the tech world, wherever they are, connect those kids back, give them a sense of that unity, give them a sense of the oneness, and give us all a sense that this is the inescapable optimism as we are going to transform, period. And it may be right after the point of our death or miraculously, it might just happen right before it. That was one of the best monologues I've ever heard in my life.

Preach it, brother. That was amazing. Oh, my God. You're this incredible contradiction in terms with the doomsday and the optimism and the deep-rooted experience and knowledge in science and yet somebody with a vast capacity for spiritual exploration. You're a wizard. You're a gift, my friend. We all are. And that's the excitement that I have is you can't actually come close to the science of atomic physics or astrophysics or human biology without an overwhelming sense of we are just so far beyond logic. We're so far beyond the material world. We are these

entities that are moving with such power, and we have been kept from that power. And we've been kept from it so that power can be taken from us and consolidated in the hands of a few. Right. So, the trick is, can we come to that realization, that dawning moment of consciousness expanding short of the death experience? Can we find the wherewithal, the facility to tap into that sense of what it means to be alive while we are in the present moment? Three words. Humility first, then gratitude and love. And if we can just practice that at the scientific level, at the technological level, at everything other levels, thank you for what we've been given. Thank you for the horrendous journey we've had.

Thank you for the atrocities that we've had to sustain as a people. And thank you for a mother nature that would continue to be graceful to us. Why does she let her soils recover in 18 months? Why? Why haven't you just wiped us off the face of the planet yet? Why haven't you smudged us out? We are out. There's 10 to the 31 viruses on earth, 10 to the 31. That's one with 31 zeros after it. Why didn't they just knock us out? The flu virus is nothing. There's 10 to the 31 other viruses on the planet. There's more biological life around us. We are one billionth of the life on the planet. Why hasn't it all just crumped us out, pushed us out, crushed us?

There's a crazy-ass paper that I wish I had already won the Nobel Prize, but it's called the Universal Scaling Law. It's by astrophysicist Nassim Haramein. The x-axis, the vertical axis on the graph, looks at the frequency of resonance of every structure, starting at the universe itself with its resonance frequency all the way to Planck's constant, which is the vibration of the electromagnetic field in vacuum space. Tiniest little thing we can measure. And on the y-axis, the horizontal axis, you've got the diameter or the radius, maybe it is, of every one of those structures.

And it turns out if you plot the radius versus frequency of resonance, you get a straight line from Planck's constant all the way to the universe. from Planck's constant all the way to the universe. Dead center between the smallest thing we've ever known and the largest thing, the universe itself, is human biology. We're the mathematical center point of the universe. The average size of the human being. Is that what you're saying? Our frequency of resonance plotted against our size. How do you measure frequency of resonance?

What is that? We all emanate electromagnetic frequency. So anything does. A rock does. A tree does. Any solid form will resonate an electromagnetic field off of it. And each of those, like light frequency, red light having a different frequency than blue light. So that's the visible spectrum, but then you've got spectrum of frequency going all the way

out in every direction to the almost infinity points on those two directions. And so, if we're the mathematical center point, it has something to do with the fact that everything wants us here. The universe wants us here. It's that beautiful thing of the more you know about science, the more room there is for wonder and awe, right? That is amazing. So, from the smallest measurable subatomic particle all the way to what we estimate to be the size of the universe. We're exactly in the middle. Plot that against the frequency and we are dead center.

Yeah. And so, it should be mind-blowing. It should recorrect our understanding of what our purpose is. Our purpose is not to be against nature. We are of nature and we're at its center point with great purpose. And it has to be that we would have the consciousness, that we would be able to participate on the level of consciousness to understand the concepts of gratitude and love. Beautiful. I can't think of a better way to end this. It's fantastic, man. I could talk to you for like eight hours.

So, please come back. Yes. I could talk to you for like eight hours. So please come back. Yes. I mean, we'll just agenda free, come back and we'll just like,

let it go wherever it wants to go. That was, that was really beautiful. Thank you for that. You are a gift to humanity and please keep doing what you're doing. It's super important work. Let me know, or let the listeners know how people can find you, connect with you. Where can they learn more about this docuseries and the nonprofit and all the good things that you're doing?

A long list of websites there. www.farmersfootprint.us is the docuseries and the nonprofit entry point for you. www.zachbushmd.com. You can find a lot of my educational material there and all these different areas of health, energy, ecology are my three main foci. But I also have a huge interest in changing the way business is done and politics and the rest. And so Zach Bush is kind of your biggest clearinghouse of bizarre ideas. The agricultural stuff and the soil science, you can find more at restore4life.com. Too many other websites to really

name, but that'll get you in the gate. That'll and I'll link up in the show notes a variety of other resources so you can go down the rabbit hole on Zach's world. Thanks so much for having me back. Thank you, my friend. Yeah, until next time, my friend. All right, peace. Peace. Regenerative soil.

Regenerate life. All right, you guys, how did that one land for you? Did I lie about that monologue? It's insane, right? So much knowledge, so much wisdom. Super grateful to have Zach Bush on this planet and share his message with you guys today. For more on Dr. Bush, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Let them know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly. You can find him on Twitter at DrZachBush and on Instagram at ZachBushMD. If you're looking for nutritional guidance, check out our meal planner at meals.richroll.com. Thousands of plant-based recipes, amazing customer service, unlimited grocery list, grocery delivery, all totally customized for you.

Super proud of this program and very affordable. So to learn more and sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would like to support the work we do here on the podcast, just tell your friends about your favorite episode, share it on social media, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts, wherever you enjoy on the podcast. Just tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share it on social media. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, on Google Podcasts, wherever you enjoy this content. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. That's very helpful. And you can support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music,

lots of behind the scenes stuff. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing today's conversation and for editing it and for graphics, which are also the work of Jessica Miranda. Thank you, Jessica. DK for advertiser relationships. Thank you, DK.

And theme music, as always, by Annalema. All right, thanks. I love you guys. See you back here in a couple few, I'm not sure what episode is going up next. So I'll let you guys know. In any event, appreciate all of you, love you, happy 2019 people, peace, plants. Thank you.