Zach Bush, MD on connecting with our infinite potential

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Welcome back to Optymyze. Coach coaching with the luminaries. So thrilled to be welcoming Zach Bush, MD, a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care. Zach, Zach, you apply the rigor of science, strength of humanity, intelligence of nature to transform our health and our world. Just reading that and saying it gets me so, so inspired. You have this beautiful combination of deep, deep intelligence and that scientist brain using the rigor of truth and data, along with just such a deep heart and a pure heart and an overflowing heart. Some would say spiritual. I know you frame that as philosophy or like, what is our deep truth and how does that come through us? But generally excited to connect and unpack some more of your wisdom on how we might optimize our own lives, our families, friends, communities, et cetera.

Beautiful. I'm thrilled to be here with you and your whole audience. This is always powerful to meet with people who are in the business of transforming humanity. And each of you are in your business as coaches and beyond. You are practicing the miraculous alchemy of human transformation, and I am just honored to support you in any way.

So when we were chatting just before, I said, is there anything you absolutely want to talk about? And you mentioned human potential, I'd love to go right there because we are all students and excited to lean into our own potential, our collective potential. What makes that exciting for you, and where do you think we can take it?

So many angles to take in on that passionate topic, but I think one that I could offer that's salient is the perspective of our definition of nature. If you look up nature in the Oxford dictionary, you will see that it is inclusive of all life, plants, animals on the planet, as opposed to human. And so we literally not only wrote ourselves out of the definition of nature, we put ourselves in opposition to nature in our definition of it. As the English language emerged. And that is much different than the indigenous language that we all come from. We all come from indigenous roots that saw ourselves as an outspringing of nature. But as the English language and the Western civilization mindset took hold, we wrote ourselves out of nature. And in so doing, we, through all of our innovation and science and the extraordinary power of, you know, the modern capacity to look into the fabric of nature through hadron colliders or, you know, electron microscopes or what, we have applied all of those technologies to the belief that we are separate from nature. And we are always looking for more and more Evidence to support the belief that we are separate from nature and we are in fact opposed to it. And therefore we come up with narratives like things like pandemics and the war on cancer and the war on mental health. And we are in this combat position against the very fabric of that which we spring from. And yet look what we've accomplished. When we start thinking about human potential, you have to first just stop and be in awe of what we have created. Despite the reductionist philosophy that we have applied to Western civilization and all of this, we have to just give tribute to the power of human ingenuity. Even when expressed in a myopic and male dominant, masculine minded, extractive, destructive process. I always, even in my joy over regenerative medicine, regenerative nature, regenerative farming, regenerative agriculture, I get invited to the most extraordinary pieces of land around the world that are doing these regenerative co creative processes with nature. I still get stopped in my tracks when I catch a view of the San Diego skyline across the bay or the incredible ingenuity of a race car. We create beauty even when we're screwed up, even when we are off track. We can't help but go after this highest iteration, spirituality and religious kind of construct, ultimately superseded by this aestheticism, this capacity for viewing and seeing and embracing beauty. I'm in awe. And so when we start to ask the question of what are we capable of? I simply don't have the imagination that would really be able to set loose that potential yet. I haven't seen enough of the other side of our current reality to even glimpse or understand what that potential might look like. But I can feel it, even though I can't see it. I get this goosebumpy electric sensation in my body when for a moment I get into that vertical space of understanding that I am an ancient soul imbued with wisdom of lifetimes and galaxies and multiverses. And I am imbued with this knowledge within me that's deep in the energetic field that I carry. And it informs the water in my body that would then dictate the behavior of the DNA that would then manifest a human body. I can feel it in that resonance that we are scratching the surface that we are just about to see a new iteration of life. And we might, if we change our mindset and, and emerge from our delusional, extractive, destructive mindset, we could participate, we could experience life on the other side of that. And we will be lit up because we are light beings. All of nature has engineered herself to Allow us to release sunshine, literally sunshine. Within our cellular systems, mitochondria are understood to be about 10,000 times more potent and energy production than the surface of the sun. The mitochondria are doing that through the release of electrical energy that was created by the mitochondria inside of plants that we call plastids. Sunlight hitting the surface of a chlorophyll plastid combines CO2 with CO2 to become a carbon chain. That carbon chain then carries and harnesses.

The power of the sun, and it.

Then migrates into the soil system, up into the root system of a plant, and than into the animal that would consume it. And when our mitochondria pull that out carbon chain out of our gut and bloodstream and the rest, and we release it and we break that carbon thing. Boom. Sunshine. 10,000 times more potent per cubic centimeter in its release than its generation. We are in touch with a infinite amount of energy because we're 10,000 times more efficient at releasing it than than the sun is at making it. And so we have within us the intelligence of a nature that is 10,000 times the potential of the sun to light up the universe. That is us, that is life on earth as a whole. And the word us has to start to go beyond the boundaries of our human identity, to embrace the organic garden of the microbiome, the virome, the intensity of life within us, outside of us. And in its symphony of coherence and cooperation that's always pushing for adaptation and biodiversity, we emerge after the last extinction. Mother Earth did not try to reinvent the dinosaurs. Instead, the dinosaurs passed on a genomic intelligence that would create the mammals. The fern of that paleolithic soil system did not just try to go recreate itself in its next iteration of plant life. Instead, we got flowering plants, trees, deciduous trees. There was an explosion of beauty intelligence on the planet. Under the extinction pressure of the last great extinction, 97% of life on earth as it was understood and manifest at the time, disappeared. And you could call that a failure, except nature knows no failure. Nature has only designed herself to maximize life on the other side of every friction moment. We are creating a friction moment, and there's an explosive opportunity. So human potential is harnessed in this fabric of nature that has designed herself not just to be resilient, but to be ecstatic.

I am ecstatic just hearing that, thinking about that, thinking about using our potential wisely to be beings of light, the 10,000. That's extraordinary. So the sun hits plants. Plants take that, turn it into carbon that we then ingest, and then our body breaks it down, and we're 10,000 times more powerful per cubic centimeter or something at using that than the sun is at producing it. To truly feel the power of that individually and then to recognize, okay, look, we've gotten a lot of conflicts putting ourselves in opposition with nature or in opposition with one another, or in opposition with fundamental parts of our beingness. And when we can start to work together instead of against and start to harness that light that's within us for something powerful and beautiful going forward, we can be alongside nature in whatever version is on the other side of this year. Obviously, pandemic is still doing its thing. And it's interesting to simultaneously want to speak about kind of transcendent periods, but also recognizing the power of the current age as being a transcendent period being really a pivotal point in our collective history. So how do we then put ourselves more in alignment with nature? I know you do a lot on biodiversity, the microbiome, farming, et cetera. How can we put ourselves most in alignment with this nature that's so beautiful and so powerful and that we come from and are part of?

For all of you, in your coaching practices and all the like, anytime you come in contact with a human perception or philosophy or belief system, the way in which to accelerate its participation in this regenerative capacity or this full potential of humanity, the most potent lever point, I believe, is to help release fear. If for a moment you stop fearing at the organism level, you align yourself immediately with life. And what we see again and again in hospice is the fear of death as a concept dissolving as you approach that moment of death. I have actually never been with somebody in those last few seconds that's afraid of death, because in the moments before death, there's a surrender. And they let go of their myopic biologic belief for a moment, and they release into this bigger thing. Sometimes it's after their mind has shut off, but you can watch the physiology suddenly jump from stress, stress, stress for months and months. Heart rates in the hundreds, 120s suddenly, boom, reset. Respiratory rate drops, heart rate drops. And then there's this peace. And oftentimes this happens after somebody is kind of giving up on life. And this is the moment you say, okay, well, it's too small breathing, there's uneven breath rates, probably going to die in the next few minutes. And then suddenly, from this parasympathetic state that has emerged at the moment of releasing the concept of fear at the tissue biologic level, all systems have had to release fear because they are no longer being fed not enough oxygen, not enough nutrients to feed that part of your brain that's capable of fear. Deeper than your capacity for fear is an innate knowing of being alive. Your state of being alive is more powerful and more innate to you than your hierarchical capacity to conjure up the experience of fear. When you, as a coach, reflect back at a person that they're actually fearing something that's not real to their current situation, you will release them for a moment to come in alignment with their deeper self, their deeper awareness that they are alive and there's actually nothing that can threaten them. Because life extends past the biologic experience of it. Life is energetic, and the energy cannot be killed. There's no electron in the universe that's ever been destroyed because the energy of it is immediately regenerated in the next moment. In the next millionth of a second, it takes on life in a different form. So as hydrogen releases its electron to oxygen in something like water, it's going to grab back a new electron a second later, and it's not the same electron. We have this belief that H2O is this rigid molecule of an oxygen with two hydrogens. That's not it. Water is actually, oh, it's one oxygen bound to a single hydrogen for a millionth of a second or less. And in that next millionth of a second, that hydrogen is released without an electron, and. And it grabs another electron. And so there's this constant dance of the protons within our elements and the electrical information stream among them. And so when you finally settle into the reality that you are not some Newtonian, biologic physical being, and you're actually a form of light energy that's expressing itself in tissue through becoming a particle moment. Einstein helped us understand that light is simultaneously a wavelength and a particle. The experience of being solid is being in the particle state for a split moment in the experience of a energetic waveform that we might call your soul.

And so you are in a particle.

Moment, which is an expression of you at the deep sense of you. Before there was an English language to name you, you were here. The I am inside of you is ancient. It is part of the web of energy before there was physical matter. And so this is this extraordinary thing. It's so abstract until you experience it, and you can experience that infinite nature of Michael, the moment you let go of fear. And, you know, you strike me as a very healthy, confident young man, I think, kicking ass in the world, you're Doing all kinds of good stuff. You're affecting human minds, all that. But intrinsic to you and me right now are these little elements of fear.

That we fear something.

We fear, you know, failing in our relationships. We feel fear not being good enough parent. We fear not being doing enough for the future of humanity. We have all these tiny little fears and sometimes mega fears that dominate our nighttime. You know, our dream life is full of anxiety and fear. And so each of us have the opportunity to become anthropologists who are in pursuit of the ancient fear that lies within us. And we need to unearth that, and we need to release that into the ethers, because that fear is what is separating us from the true coherent, vibrational message of I am, I am. I am alive, I am vibrant. I am part of a greater intelligence of life within the universe, within the matrix of the design that animates all things. I am part of that. What is there to fear when you can get it down into that zone? And so you're going to have clients that are ready for that big message, but you're going to have clients that are so engulfed in their narrative of trauma and victimhood and abuse and difficulties and economic stress and relational stress, they may not be able to even glimpse a possibility of a different reality free of fear. But if you can identify a fear in the sentence they just said, which will be easy. You guys all know how fast this comes out. And when somebody says, I don't even know why I don't want to coach, what am I going to do with the coach? And then that first sentence they say to their coach is like, you know, I'm terrified of being alive and everything's.

Hopeless and blah, blah, blah.

So in that first sentence, you're going to identify four or five real fears that you can bring them near to and then release them of that fear.

For a moment and say, what's the.

Worst case scenario if you go down that avenue? Well, the worst case is I die. Well, if you die, do you really think the energy is done, or do you think there's a legacy of energy beyond you? And actually, when most people kind of are faced with their worst fear of death and they really are asked, are you really afraid of losing contact with that thing yourself as soon as they back up?

Actually, no.

I'm just afraid that my kids won't be cared for.

I won't.

I won't have done this or that. But they're not actually afraid of the dying part. They're afraid of what might be left behind or what they may that fear of missing out, you know, but they're not afraid of the death moment. And I find that interesting. And when you really dissect it down to, you know, those few people that really are afraid at the moment of.

Death.

What you'll find is they're afraid of losing control, they're not afraid of death, they're afraid of losing control. And so that's the ones that will cling the longest. And so if you want to help somebody move towards this full human potential, give them an opportunity to surrender something, surrender control of something right now and feel what that feels like and find the freedom and the new harnessed power that recoup of power within you. When you surrender one thing, then let them start to extrapolate that in their mind. What if you surrender everything you are holding on to dearly right now and let life emerge from you instead of be constructed by you? What will that look like?

What do you personally do in those moments when you are conscious of being in a fear state or being controlled by one of these? Because you such a broad depth of wisdom and you touch on such great fearful topics for folks, whether that's death, right? The meta fear or something like this person gets elected or this person gets elected or that happens to my these deep philosophical underlying fears of the belief that the way I'm interacting with the world is fundamentally wrong. And you speak about these things with such a. A calm grace and demeanor that almost seems like offset I think a little bit of the fear and be able to speak about. So I'm curious about you as you go throughout your day in noticing a moment of oh shoot, there's that fear coming up that's me trying to control something. Do you have a go to process or something that you do to try and relax into that surrendering to life?

I hope it's a process that's well thought out. It's definitely a bumbling around and I'm starting to try to embrace the bumbling. And in the last few months I've gone through some catastrophic new uprooting of who I thought I was, what I thought I was here to do, how I was supposed to show up in relationship, all these things. And when you start to feel this new moment of deconstruction and I've gotten pretty used to these because the more willing you are to deconstruct and the more universe is in a hurry to help you do that.

And so it's one of the conundrums.

Or ironies of being willing to transform Is that your willingness will be met with exuberance from nature to destroy whatever was in your way of being your true self. And so I'm trying to relax into that. Whereas a few years ago I would have immediately been awash and guilt and fear for months, that's starting to become more like hours or minutes. And then I can find my way back to a more vertical state of awareness of I am still connected to the original source. My, my eons old soul remains untouched by current circumstances, manufactured by me or otherwise. It is untouched because it signed up for this journey. For the very purpose of helping my conscious mind, my human constructs, dissolve to the point of becoming my full self. I have designed a journey. I have orchestrated every relationship, every trauma. I have orchestrated the highs and lows for the very purpose of destroying the human constructs that are keeping me limited. They're keeping me away from my true identity, my full potential. And so it's going to be a process of recognizing friction when it occurs, acknowledging why the friction is there. It's not for your destruction. It is for your deconstruction, which are very different things. Your deconstruction is there to bring you to your elemental self. Destruction is, is only conceived of by the human construct. There's nothing in nature that destruction. There's only deconstruction in nature. And it always finds the elemental truth within. And then it reiterates life more complex and more beautiful with its next attempt. And so I'm constantly aware now that I am a compost pile. I am taking all of this input and I am percolating it down to something, to its essence. I'm releasing the energy from all of this stuff I put in my mouth, in my mind, into my eyes, into my emotional field. And I'm composting that down into its elemental structure so that I can create a soil system to allows life to leap forth from me in a more vibrant fashion. And I have to celebrate the human junk that I'm involved with in any given moment. My emotional junk, my spirit, spiritual junk, my economic junk. You name this junk, you have to just acknowledge, yes, of course, that's all there and it's okay. And in fact, if you didn't know it was there, and if it wasn't there, you would have nothing to compost. And so let's celebrate the scraps. Let's celebrate the pieces that are left over in a day that didn't get metabolized by somebody else that has enslaved us. The stuff we're left with at the end of the day is really the gift of the future soil that we will make for finding our own autonomy, for finding our own identity, for letting life grow within us.

If I'm interested in exploring that path and feeling as deeply as I can, being as present, as fully connected to what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, what I'm feeling, what my intuitive system is telling me, et cetera, and I want to almost like cultivate and hone my body as a capacity to feel and my connection with that ability to feel. Any tips, any suggestions for going about that?

I think it'll vary a little bit.

By your neurologic makeup. And so for myself, I'm very visual and so somebody can read me a text message and I'll forget it instantly. I can't even actually integrate the information, but if I glance at it and see it visually, I'm in it and I can remember that I can integrate that information quickly. I'm very visual and there are some people that are more auditory than they are visual. But what I would invite you to is find what is your strongest sense organ and then shut it down. For me, it's easy. I just have to close my eyes. When I close my eyes for a moment. I do this a lot when I'm traveling. You're about to take off on a six hour flight and you close your eyes. Instead of visually accounting for the fact that you're in a cramped seat with an inch of room in front of your knees and all that, if you close your eyes and just start to feel the environment you're in, feel the air on your skin, suddenly you're in an infinite space and you can sense things within this infinite space, but they're not limiting your experience. And so if you happen to be auditory and that's how you experience the world and everything that happens, there's a soundtrack running in your of your favorite 1980s song. Instead, create the experience of shutting down the auditory senses. Put on the ear canceling or sound canceling headphones and start to just explore the taste of a tomato and let your sensory experience increase through your sensory of taste or scent. Close your eyes and put on earmuffs and touch soil. Smell it and you're going to have a completely different appreciation for what you actually know. You actually know what nutrient dense soil smells like, even though you've probably never taken the time to do it. You will know there is an innate knowingness of what the richness of life is within that soil when you smell it. In the same way, if you're making love to your partner, close your eyes or change the sensory experience to realize there is an intimacy happening that is non physical. There's a spiritual intertwining that can be.

Sensed in the goosebumps or the breath across skin. There's these subtle reminders and sensory experiences that remind you that you are not just two biologic organisms swapping fluids. You are two biologic entities that are light beings that in their particle state can be distracted from the miracle that they exist in this energetic form of light. Try to sense the light in your grandmother's hand. When you hold that hand.

You have.

All of the ultraviolet sensors in your hand to be able to do it, you just haven't given it attention. This is qigong at its best. You know, qigong or reiki, these, you know, martial arts and these healing mechanisms and healing therapies have helped their practitioners perfect their capacity to feel energy. What they're feeling is that is the transit of electricity through space and time, the three dimensional, four dimensional, five dimensional experience of energy. And they can use that to change biology by pushing energy, light energy into a human body, by learning to collect that in their hands and direct it. And so let us become the qigong master of life. Let us start to feel the state of being alive by challenging our senses to go beyond the obvious. Let's go beyond the constructs of what we're seeing, hearing, smelling. And let's also suddenly realize in that all the junk we're fueling that sensory.

System and we'll start to look for.

A more pure version of input.

That's amazing. I'm also a visual guy, so even just in closing my eyes and instantly feel a different space, and I've often thought about someone who doesn't have the capacity to see at all, is experiencing the same connected world and yet in a completely new way that I am. And how could I increase my capacity to also feel? So I love that, that idea of removing our dominant sensory experience and starting to challenge ourselves to feel in a different, different kind of way and to go into a deep practice and honoring the qigong or the reiki, their capacity for feeling energy and moving energy in such a deep. I feel like one of my daughters. I've got a three year old and a seven, but I feel like we're going to have quite powerful positive experiences this afternoon when I next and my wife as well, reunite with them and just feel the joy of sharing this life together. Well, I don't even know. I'm just.

No, I think that's perfect picture of it, that's the application, is that it's one thing for you to suddenly experience yourself as a light being, but it's not useful being a light being until you're in relationship. And so until you're in community, all of the work that you might do, clinging on to this new self identity that you have, that might be an expanded version, you're still not going to see it all. Until you see it through the mirror of a spouse, or your kids or community or co worker or your spiritual brothers and sisters. Until we're in community, we will have an incomplete version of that sensory experience. The Germans have this wonderful word, umwelt. U M V E L T I think is the spelling. And umwelt is kind of what you were describing, which is each sensory organism is going to have a different version of reality depending on how they're sensing it. And so there's good TED talks on this and other things you can find on the umfelt.

But basically, you know, the good ones.

Will show you what it looks like to a butterfly when it looks at a rose, then it will show you what it looks like to a bat and then it will show you what it looks like to a grasshopper. And each of these forms of biology are going to interpret the physical expression of a rose completely differently. And it's awesome to realize that there's not a single rose on the planet that's red. That's a complete human construct that's due to the biology of our eyeballs, not due to the flower that makes it red. It's just a frequency rem, you know, eminence, that's complex in its waveforms and we can only pick out the red version of that. And so we see it as a red rose. And there's nothing red about the rose. Red rose has a beauty that goes beyond the human eyes capacity to, to experience. And so when you sit down with a family, when you remember that your children can see a different version of the reality because they have not been masked and layered with the same depth of beliefs and preconceived notions that your adult brain has. And so every interaction for a child should be your stepping into a previous knowing, a previous awareness, a previous vision of the reality we live in. A three year old sees the world so purely and we then work to break down that pure vision and give them all these artificial constructs and how to interpret their world.

You know, repeat after me.

The sky is blue. The rose is red. The sky is blue. The rose is Red sky is blue and pretty soon they just think the sky is blue and the rose is red. But their first experience of it is the rose has this scent and this touch in it. And you notice every three year old putting every damn thing in their mouth because they're getting a full sensory experience of it. They can smell what it tastes like to crush the rose petal in between their teeth and mix it with their saliva. And the enzymes with their saliva release these alkaloids and polyphenols and all these incredible chemicals that you will never sense when you just go put your face next to a flower child who has put everything in their mouth is engaging life. They are in the ecstatic state of being alive. And you're going to say, stop putting that in your mouth, stop touching that. Oh my God. Don't you just touch. Ah. Like just become isolated. Don't touch nature, don't touch other people. It's inappropriate to touch people. You know, don't hug strangers, don't touch.

Like you realize as a parent, my.

God, my whole job has been separate this kid from their entire sensory experience of being alive and then layer them with a bunch of responsibilities and beliefs about who they are and checklists and how to do executive function and how to get to school on time and how to do your homework. And pretty soon they are so divorced from the experience of being alive that they are very easy to manipulate and that should frighten all of us.

To learn more about the 300 day Optimize coach program, visit Optimize Me Coach.

Hi, this is Brian with some super exciting news. Optymyze is now absolutely free. All 600 philosopher's notes, the 50101 masterclasses, thousand optimized, plus ones free. So what do you want to optimize today? Your productivity?

Habits? Sleep?

Mental toughness? We've got 33 categories here, each of which comes with its own Optimal Living 101 masterclass and a collection of Philosopher's notes to help you go to your next level with more wisdom and in less time. We've had tens of thousands of people from nearly every country in the world sign up for our premium membership offering, which we have now made. Did I mention absolutely free. Come join us. Optimize me more wisdom in less time. Let's optimize every aspect of your life so we can go out and change the world 1% at a time together, starting with you and me today.