Why Getting Sick Might Be Your Body's Reset Button with Dr. Zach Bush

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I'm JJ Virgin PhD dropout. Sorry mom turned four time New York Times Best Selling author. I'm a Certified Nutrition Specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. That's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health and into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now@subscribetoj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. So before today's interview, I decided to really tune into Dr. Zach Bush. It's funny, we've been at so many events together and we never seem to connect. And I started to get into his work and then get more into his work. And it's one of those things that as you start to listen to Zach, you start to read his blogs and information and watch him. The more that you get into it, the more you want to know. And yet what you're going to hear, it's going to feel like you already knew it. It's going to feel like you're remembering. It's going to feel almost like you're coming home. And you'll get what I mean about that when you listen to this interview. Let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Zach Bush. He is a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, hospital care, and an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome and the mitochondria as they relate to human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future. And you may have heard about him Talking about the ecosystem and planetary health and on what the heck is that? And what you're going to learn is that you as a human being are actually a human ecosystem. And that's what we're going to be talking about today and how you can use that to get back to health. And again, as I've listened to him and dug into this, you're going to see how this wild background where he started out, you know, basically in the ICUs, then shifted over to endocrinology and metabolism, then ended up doing hospice care. How all of this has come together to create this beautiful synergy that allowed him to have a realization that, that we are our microbes and that restoring that microbial balance restores your health and how you can go about doing that. And that we are not doomed as a planet because of all the glyphosates and all the things that we've done. But yet we can actually start to turn this around fairly quickly because the body is built to heal. So this is a super interesting, inspiring interview and one that I knew as I was going into it because I literally had 80 questions like I went through and researched and I started just going question after question went, all right, I'm just going to put these all here and I know I'll get to maybe three. So this is part one of part many because this is someone who you will want to be studying for the duration. He is amazing. So without further ado, I'm going to bring you Dr. Zach Bush and I'm also going to let you know that I've put all of the information. He does so many cool things. He founded the Seraphic Group and the non profit farmers footprint. So this was all done to develop root cause solutions for human and ecological health. He's got his product line ion, he's got a course, he's got community, all sorts of cool stuff. So I'm putting all of that there. It's going to be@jjvirgin.com drzach and it's spelled Z A C H where you'll learn about that. You can learn about journey of intrinsic health, you can learn about intelligence of nature. So all that good stuff, I'm putting it in all one place because I know that when you listen to a little bit of Dr. Zach Bush, you're gonna want a whole lot more. So stay with me. I'll be right back. Hey jj, Virgin here. Okay, real talk. 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Dr. Zach Bush, I have been binging your content. I am so excited. I hope you have 10 hours because I got a lot of questions. But what I thought would be fun to frame this with is I had a nutrition mentor early on and it used to be because I worked in weight loss that every January, like by the end of January I would get like some horrible cold. I always thought, oh, it's because January is such a crazy month, I'm working too hard. The weather changed some ridiculous things, I told myself. And then this nutrition mentor said, no, you just shouldn't get sick. And it was such a paradigm shift for me because in my mind it was like, oh, colds were normal. And he's like, no, that's not normal. You should never get sick. And it just changed my operating system, my belief system. And then I heard you talking about that on a podcast. So I'd love to talk to to start there with this whole idea because we've so normalized disease and being sick right where it actually shouldn't be at all.

Yeah. And I think there's a potent differentiation between acute illness and chronic illness. The chronic illness is something that should be fully avoidable and repairable, and so you should be able to backtrack out of any chronic condition. The difference there for me is actually an increasing appreciation for the role of acute, you know, inflammation in longevity or health or all of this. And this is a reframing for all of us to start to understand. We'd been so programmed with the belief that microbes and viruses were out to attack us and that a healthy body was prone to attack from these things. So we needed to sterilize our environment. So we needed hand wipes and antibiotics and all these things to kind of combat this environment that was attacking the healthy human. What we have learned over the last 50 years of increasing amount of data around the role of the microbiome in physiology, forget it, just human physiology, but the physiology of a farm field or an earthworm. Any complex ecosystem, we're starting to realize, is fully dependent upon high numbers of connections between biodiverse inputs. This is the difference between the rainforest and what you could think of like a botanical garden. And, you know that I grew up, my kids around in Denver. So you go to a botanical garden and some. Some group of, you know, naturalists or botanists have come and pulled species out of all over the place, over the world. So you can go see species in the middle of Denver, in the middle of winter in a big greenhouse, and you're looking at palm trees and you're looking at things. So botanic garden is biodiversity without the purpose or without the capacity of connection. So it's biodiversity for the sake of biodiversity. That's not what nature does. Nature does diversity for the purpose of communication. Communication then increases biodiversity, biodiversity increases communication. So it's the stacking function and the pattern of life on a planet or within the cosmos at large, is a literal stacking of functions. And so nature, by the fabric by which we are created, whether we're talking about the atomic physics level of a single atom, all the way up to a single molecule, to a cell, to a large organism, relies on these stacking functions of complexity. And the more complex you get, the more diversity it takes to maintain that system, the more diversity, the more allowances is made for these stacking functions. And so there's a tendency to take for granted what it means to be human. We wake up one morning, we think we're this person, and then we get sick, and we think we're now a sick person. And then we get chronically ill, and we think, well, I'm just an aging person, therefore I have chronic illness, I have osteoarthritis, I have these diseases. And so we can write off a lot of things without thinking deeper into this. And so if we back up for a second, just ask that question, what does it mean to be alive? And we come up with a pretty extraordinary answer. It means that you have a logarithmic increase in the concentration of light. The difference between physics and biology is a concentration of light energy. To get a single stacking function of complexity, to get a bacteria to occur, you're now at a thousand times more light energy per cubic centimeter than the surface of the sun. So just to get a microbe to do the complexity of life at the level of a bacterium, you're at this thousand fold increase in light concentration. To then leap to a nematode or earthworm, some multicellular creature, you have to 10x that concentration of light again. And so at the level of a human, you're 10,000 times brighter than the sun per cubic centimeter. And interestingly, that light is coming from the sun. And so the way in which this works is the sun shines down on a planet. Microbes in the form of what we call plant plastids, living inside of plant cells, will collect that sunlight and store it between carbons. We call these things chlorophyll. And so chlorophyll is this amazing little bacterium that grabs CO2 out of the atmosphere and stores sunlight between the carbons. And that is the perfect battery for life to run on. So life is a concentration of light energy held in the battery of carbon. Carbon is passed from organism to organism in the form of carbohydrates or fats. And those are basically the mechanism by which sunlight travels. And so when you think of a sugar or carbohydrate or you think of fats, what you're really describing is a battery storage for sunlight. And when you absorb that into your body, the mitochondria break those apart and release the sunlight. And the mitochondria are the ones that are now, you know, with its, you know, cooperation with the chlorophyll, able to concentrate light to the point of being as bright as biology requires. And so then we get to, to think back, okay, wow. If, if brightness, you know, the amount of light energy per cubic centimeter determines your ability to be alive, then what is illness? Illness is basically two options. One, is an acute stressor on the organism. Might be for me, it's oftentimes lack of sleep. I've now recognized over and over again that I never get a virus. I get colds often from a lack of sleep. And so if I go five or seven nights without sleep, I'll get some congestion and I'll get this. But that's not because there's some new organism that's attacking me. It's because I lowered my light energy to the point where my body needed to reset its energetics. And it uses acute inflammation to do that. And so when we think of fever, cough, inflammation through vasculature, the body is literally saying, all right, we need a stressor to come in and change the direction of this organism's current dimming of the lights. And so fever is a really potent way to reduce wasted energy. And so it destroys cells that are not functioning well and kind of, it's basically reprioritizes life and reconcentrates your most potent cells ready to, to rebirth. And so for that I think we can start to really appreciate that stressors that start to dim our lights call in acute inflammation to reset the baseline. So acute inflammation, whether it be a cold or the micro fractures in your bone that occur when you run down the staircase, those are really life building, those are your rebirth process. And to build a strong vital body, you need constant rebirth. Atrophy is the main risk for death. Any, anything that stops flow, anything where you stop this cycle of generative action, Injury repair, injury repair, injury repair, you stop injuring, you stop repairing, and the body goes into atrophy very quickly.

It's like lifting weights, right?

Lifting weights, yeah, same concept, same concept. You're stressing the body to force it to adapt to a higher level of energy per cubic centimeter, basically. And so you can do that with fever, you can do it with a workout, you can do it with a cold plunge. You're stressing the body to get this reactive capacity for more energy per cubic centimeter. So acute inflammation via exercise or an acute viral syndrome, which really, it's just, it's, it's me basically utilizing the viruses in my body to reset my baseline. It's not the virus attacking me. And so you have to have some reason for your body to express a virus before it goes and takes the effort towards the fever and the reset and this effort towards a gain of function that any virus will offer you. Chronic inflammation is a different story. Chronic inflammation is now where you've superseded the level of stress, the level of Stress you're experiencing on a daily has superseded your body's ability to jump you back up to a higher level of function. So acute inflammation gets you to a new reset. Chronic inflammation is your body's attempt at that and it misses the mark. And so you dim again and it responds again and dims again and responds again, but it's never really quite making it over that mark. And so what's happened is your coping mechanisms or your injury response mechanisms are the reservoir they're in is drying out. And so once your coping mechanisms of anti inflammatories, antioxidants, you know, the cascade of CO repressors, co activators at the genetic level, all these things start to diminish in their reservoir when you become nutrient starved and when you over express the injury. And so we're basically all walking around as some ratio of rate of injury, rate of repair. As long as our rate of repair kicks up, even if not on a daily basis, is capable of kicking up higher than our rate of injury, then we're healthy. When we start to see a steady decline in health is when that rate of injury can't keep up or the rate of injury is outpacing our rate of recovery and there we get the steady decline in the chronic disease, which is where we find, you know, probably 80% of humanity currently.

Yeah, it's, it's been fascinating listening to all of this because you and I remember learning this early on that the last thing you want to do with a mild fever is suppress the fever because it's not going to be able to do its job, which is what I was hearing you say again. But you think about most people, they'll get an acute sickness and they'll do everything to try to stop all the body's processes that are jumping in to.

Heal so they can get back to work.

Right?

Yeah, I actually need an antibiotic because I've had this cough for three days and I need to get back to work or my kid's out of school for two days. They're not going to let the kid back in school until they get an antibiotic. So we have these weird social and economic pressures that which dictate our biologic response to illness rather than just letting our body. You know what, it's true, I have not been well slept for weeks. I need to take my foot off the pedal and I need to sleep for a few days and I need to rest and I need people to stop expecting me to put active in the measure and I'm going To reset my body, I'm going to put all my energy back into myself. And that's the constellation of symptoms that happen to the organism to make those priorities clear. And when we see those priorities that the body's setting as symptoms of failure, well, I must be failing to heal because I'm still tired, because I'm still fatigued, I still have a cough or whatever it is. We have to stop seeing our biologic response to our environment as a failure of the system and start to see it as an intelligent design for our regeneration.

And would that regeneration then start with the microbiome? Because, you know, because you had the most eloquent description, you know, the microbiome now has been thrown around a whole bunch. There's microbiome resets and all this stuff going on. Right. But you had such a beautiful way to describe it, which I would love you to do. And then what we need to do, because it makes complete sense that you get sick. Like just like every January I get sick. Why did I get sick? Because I was overworking. I was, you know, under sleeping, all the stuff, got stressed out, would get sick, then I would throw things at it so I could get back to work. I did all those things that set me up, if anything, for more challenges, instead of going back and going, what's happening here and what do I need to heal within myself? And you also said something that I love that's just, you know, we have everything inside us to do this, or we did till we trashed the soil and trashed our microbiome. So let's start with unpacking the microbiome, what it is, how it works, why this diversity is so mission critical.

So the microbiome is the soil system by which life occurs. And so you can't get a single bacteria to occur until you get this kind of hyper intelligence down at the soil level, where you get so much energy potential into the soil. And before the first cell, this happens through some really unique things. This interaction between water, carbon and mineral salts. That's how you start to hold electrical energy within a soil system that then can then grow something like an algae or a black mold or some of those very first forms of life. And so the energetics of the planet are actually necessary for life to occur. So it's not just you need water, you need microbiome. Before the microbiome, you need electrical energy. And so once nature is there in the form of soil, air, water and fire, basically. And the fire can be, you know, electrical energy from lightning or volcanic Sources. But you need those four elements to be present for there be enough energetics for the first bacteria to form. Once that bacteria sets up, shop is fermenting. And so it's breaking apart double carbon bonds that are existing there from plant matter and the rest. And so you've got this really cool kind of cyclical fashion of capturing energy from different sources and then creating more and more complex structures. And so when you start to fail in energy, you literally have to begin back at that. That point and trying to throw band aids on the end of it is what I used to do as a medical doctor, so medical doctor by training, internal medicine, which kept me in the hospitals, you know, all the time I was running ICUs, and, you know, in and out, seeing the revolving door. You know, we patch somebody up in the icu, we send them out, three weeks later they're back, and then they're in worse conditions than they were. And then we're spending another $2 million to get them back out the door. And you're just seeing the inefficiency of disease management at that far end of the curve. And in that process, I realized I'm never going to be able to contribute to public health sitting in ICUs. So then I retrained in endocrinology and metabolism with an idea of, well, if I could get upstream of this, really understand the communication of the human body, how the immune system communicates with the gut and the gut lining to the liver, liver, to the kidneys, kidneys. So that was really exciting for me in the endocrine standpoint. Endocrinology is the study of how hormones coordinate a complex system into a single coherent organism with a force of life. And in that, it was the second half of my specialty, which was metabolism, endocrinology, metabolism, where I started to study mitochondria. And that was the shattering of my belief that there's such a thing as a human. Human is not a species. Human is an ecosystem. And we now know this very well, that you can't actually get human biology to function without about 200 different mitochondrial variations per human cell. And those little mitochondria are complex bacterial species that live in and reproduce inside your cells. And those can't have function or fuel without a diverse soil system in the gut lining, the skin, the sinuses, your lungs. And now we find every organism or every organ in the body reliant on some subset of this organic soil. So even my brain, certainly when I went through medical school, and honestly, if you go to medical school today, you're going to learn the same thing. It's like the cerebrospinal fluid has to be sterile. If there's any bacteria or viruses there, you must have sepsis or meningitis and you're dying. We've known for 20 years that if you genetically sequence the cerebral spinal fluid, there's actually normal bacteria, fungi, viruses that are present within those environments. And so we're starting to have to move away from the belief that the microbiome is something that exists in the human colonial. And it's actually a description of a living organism and its diversity. And so this is an ecosystem that then manifests through a single biology that we call human life. But the life force isn't coming from the human cell. The life force is coming from the mitochondria inside the human cells. And the coordination of those life forces are being dictated by the macro kind of ecosystem around the cells or outside of the cells. And so in some ways, we are ultimately just the. The vessel that nature has designed to allow the maximum number of species to display information into. And it's like any computer system. The more inputs that a computer has, the more data an AI system has, the more intelligence it appears to have. And so we're basically the intelligence of the planet right now. And the planet achieves that through putting massive amounts of biodiverse data into our neurologic system, which is now quite literal. We've been able to map how bacteria talk directly to the neurons in your gut lining to give your brain data. And the more biodiversity you have in your gut, the more creativity and intelligence the human seems to have, the more resilience, the more problem solving. All of this. You start to take antibiotics in the form of herbicides and pesticides in your food, or antibiotics from your doctor, or alcohol as a mechanism of dulling your pain. All of these antimicrobial compounds that we've now surround ourselves in, we lose that biodiversity. And we see an immediate impact on neurologic function. Creativity, curiosity, all of these things dumbing down. So it is pretty amazing that to be human is to be an ecosystem. And to be an ecosystem is to have a connected intelligence that doesn't have to do with a single species.

I mean, when you look at it and you think back, I just was on a plane last week and the woman across the aisle was in it to win it with the. The wipes. You know, she had all the wipes and the mask. And you look at it and go, what has happened to us over the years? You talked about antibiotics But I. And. And of course, herbicides, fungicides. I definitely want to talk glyphosate. But then I kept watching during the last couple years, all of these hand sanitizers, I thought, oh, my gosh, what are we doing here with all of this? So I'd heard you talk about getting on antibiotics and then taking a probiotic and somehow thinking this was going to do this whole repopulation when you just scorch the earth in your intestinal tract. What happens with the use of all of these things especially, I think most people don't realize something like these. These little wipes that they're using on their hands that I will not go near. I remember I was just on a cruise ship and they made us do the antibacterial thing before we walked in. I was like, I'm, you know, I was pretending like there's zero chance I'm touching that, you know?

Yeah. So anything that. That kills bacteria, which is how we've lived our lives. Right. So the. And somewhat understandingly, we didn't really understand immune systems and germs and all this. Well, even as early as the mid 20th century, we're still. Well, frankly, you go to any medical school today, you're going to learn a very erroneous understanding that the human immune system is against nature and it's trying to sterilize the human body. And if it fails, then there's bacteria and viruses, and now you're dying. We've known that's not true for a long time, and we're just having a hard time teaching something else. But ultimately, an immune system is a description of a complex system of relationships. And so it's basically really good process of diplomacy between species. What we like to think of it is as a military construct, and it's out there warring against. And we even call it like killer T cells. Our white blood cells are killer T cells, and we're killing things. And, you know, it's the battlegrounds of human biology. Like, that's. That's old. Like 150 years of belief systems around germs and everything else. And so coming into that germ warfare kind of mentality comes along penicillin. Right. In World War II, where we're sitting here running around the country as, you know, superpower, you know, for the first time and getting all pleased with. We couldn't believe the power of penicillin to kill bacteria and suddenly gangrene. And some of these real threats on the battlefield were fundamentally changing course. And so we thought, well, this is amazing. We're sterilized the human experience. We're now the healthiest human beings ever. What we didn't realize is we were stepping into an era in which antibiotics would become a foundation of not just our medical system, but also our food system. The word antibiotic is really scary. The word biotic means the relationships and health of any ecosystem by its connectivity. So to be antibiotic is to be against the relationships of nature that create a living system. And so it's pretty extraordinary that we would go to a doctor for an antibiotic and think that's a rational thing for our health. And so every time you get exposed to antibiotic, you are literally doing the opposite of life. You are shortening lifespan by the simple reality of decreasing the biodiversity and the connectivity of life within you. And so it's really that simple. And it's, you know, so do back, do antibiotics save lives? Sure. In the acute setting, if you've got a pneumonia, things like that, because you haven't paid attention to the signs of what does my biology need? And now you've got an end stage condition called pneumonia. Sure, I can give you a temporizing measure, but I can tell you I never actually really saved a life with an antibiotic. I changed the course of disease, which is much different than saving a life. And we've seen this in chemotherapy in spades. So as I went into chemotherapy development, it became kind of amazing to me our methodology for getting drugs approved for chemotherapy. We don't look at all cause mortality because it never really changes. And so you can put people on radiation, surgery, chemo, or any variation thereof or nothing. And they all seem to die at about the same time. So what we measure instead is cause of mortality as an outcome. And so they don't die of breast cancer. If we do this drug, you know, 20% less women will die of breast cancer with this, this, you know, management, but they tend to die at the same point. So none of our chemotherapy trials in the history have really changed all cause mortality. So what this means is we're changing, you know, some of the nuances of what's the obvious threat to your body. But we're not changing the life course because we forgot that life isn't about being sterile and cancer free. Life is how much energy per cubic centimeter do you have? And so when you back up to the process of what is life and how do we sustain that, you have a completely different algorithm. And what we find out is that the lights have to dim to like 5% of normal before you get a typical cancer. So for a cancer, start threatening your life. You're already near death. And so by wiping out the cancer with chemo surgery and radiation and not correcting the amount of light per cubic centimeter, the person dies at time the same, same point. Because really, they're going to die of a lack of light per cubic centimeter, not of cancer, not of anything. So all these death certificates that say somebody died of, you know, from cancer to autoimmune disease to Covid or whatever it is, that death certificate is very misleading. What they died of was a lack of light per cubic centimeter. The symptoms are really irrelevant to the course in a million ways. But our doctoring has brainwashed us into thinking that it's all the symptoms that are attacking us. It's all these different diseases that are attacking the healthy body and causing death and disease. And the reality is they're just symptoms of diminishing light. And if we keep demonizing the viruses or the bacteria or the cancers, and we keep mounting a war, war on cancer, war on, war on Covid, war on xyz, war on obesity, like, we've heard it all. We keep this warlike mentality on the symptoms of a diminishing light. We're never in a chadens of the course of our. Our wellness or our outcomes. Whereas if we really start to concentrate, what are the elements of life that start to really brighten the daily experience, Then we would have a completely different public health course. And that's what I get most excited about, is we figured that out, and it's not very complicated.

I know. And that's the. It reminds me of hearing, you know, Brian Johnson spending $2 million to hack his health and not die. And when you come down to it, it's like, oh, you need to eat healthy and exercise and have good relationships. I'm like, you know, glad you spent the $2 million a year to check this. So I've heard you talk about the light and being able to check this, and I may have gotten this completely wrong, but being able to use a bioimpedance machine to check phase angle to be able to test that. Is that true?

Yeah. Yeah. So your phase angle is a relatively simple measure, and it gives you an idea of how much electrical energy is held within each cell of the body. And so. And that's determined by the amount of resistance that a healthy cell wall, you know, can maintain. And so the more electrical. It's kind of like a good insulator on a wire. Right. And so we insulate a wire because electricity dissipates. So all the electrical electromagnetic energy that's released by mitochondria from the sunlight will dissipate if not held by really well insulated systems. And the insulation around a single cell or across a gut membrane or vascular membrane or blood brain barrier depends on something called tight junctions. And so there's all these proteins that are much like Velcro that strengthen the scaffolding between single molecules or complex cellular relationships. So it's that Velcro that becomes really fundamental to the amount of electric light that you can hold. The amount of electrolyte you can produce is directly related to the microbiome and mitochondria. So rich, diverse soil from the microbiome, feeding a diverse and rich population of mitochondria, you produce a lot of energy. And so reconnecting to your macrobiology inputs clean air, soil, water, and that. So this is why everybody feels better after a week of vacation on the beach, is you're walking barefoot again. You're in the ocean water that is teeming with bacteria and viruses. There's 10 to the 30 viruses in Ocean water. So it's like cosmos is of new genetic information coming into your system. And you've got a massive amount of electrical reconnection to the earth because sand is silica, which is the ultimate conductor. That's why we create superconductors and computer chips out of silica. So you're literally tapping into the electrical energy of the earth and the biodiversity of life around you by, by breathing real air and not going inside for air conditioning and all this stuff. So re immerse yourself outdoors for just as simple as a week and you start to really transform. And we've seen that if you go and immerse yourself in an indigenous culture with indigenous food relationships, and so the kids are crawling all over you and everybody's stripped down and not wearing polyester yoga clothes and everything else, you're starting to really bury yourself back in nature. We can see that the microbiome of a westerner can become indigenous very quickly within a month or two. They have all of the qualities of a pre antibiotic being.

Wow.

So exciting how fast we can reintegrate into nature and how fast fast she is to like wrap us back up in her arms and repopulate the vessel that you are.

That's important because honestly, listening to some of your stuff, when I first started listening, I'm like, oh boy, we're doomed.

Well, we keep going the way we are.

I was like, yeah. Then I Was like, oh wait, no, you can turn around before we go to that. Could it be that someone using a simple bioimpedance scale at home, if it reported phase angle, could they use it as a way to monitor their progress?

Yeah, we did this over time in our clinic for many years. And the caveat is I find data to be just as debilitating as it is empowering because it becomes this external marker. And what we found in clinic over time, and I finally closed my clinic two years ago for this exact reason, is the more information that we gave somebody that was external to their own intuition, the more them to heal. And so we closed my clinic in favor of Journey of Intrinsic Health, which is an eight week program that we monitor or manifest online as a community. And so we have a community come together, we got community members that just connect just for the curiosity and the intellectual stimulus that happens every week in our community with our weekly meetings. But then a subset of those go through our eight week program, which is an intensive eight week program here with six to eight people to watch each other in the healing process. And it's, and it's empowered by a coach that's in that group. And so the Journey coach is really steeped in these eight mechanisms by which your lifestyle plugs you back into these fundamentals of biology. And so there's eight step process that we do through those things really empowers each level of your physiology to come in line with the biologic diversity and the biologic capacity to reconnect at every level. And so that process really zooms past this whole concept of biohacking very quickly. Biohacking, what I see more and more of, and you and I were just at a big conference in London and elsewhere, and then Florida, Eudaimonia, and there's this hope that we suddenly have had a technological breakthrough that helps people overcome the toxicity that we're experiencing. And there's a deeper and deeper understanding from the public at large that we're in a crisis. And so billions of dollars are flooding into the biohacking tech world and everything else in hopes of finding that thing that's going to help them overcome their chronic fatigue, chronic pain, low sex drive, you know, menopausal symptoms, whatever it is. And so it's an understandable pursuit. But as we continue as an industry to throw up these external solutions, here's red lights, here's, you know, here's cold plunges, here's this thing, here's, we tend to be distracting from this deeper reality that every individual knit Themselves together in the womb of their mother with no instructions, no technology know how to build a body that is known to its own self identity. And that's really critical. Nothing that's given to you, an oura ring or a red therapy or anything else actually can understand your identity versus another identity at the quantum physics level. And so it's not actually there as personalized medicine. The only place that you get personalized medicine is tying back into your core identity the same thing that resonated in frequency when you were in the womb. And so that, that resonance is, is really critical for us to, to key into. And this, this is something I learned by mistake, so, or by doing the wrong thing. I'll give you that very few times in my life. Do, do I feel like I just absolutely did the wrong thing. I made some really innocent growth and did a lot of things, but what I did wrong was as a medical doctor, I believed that I was trained to know what was good for another person. And then I was trained to break their relationship to their intuition and override that with my prescription. And this became very clear in my first clinical trial with the chemotherapy. I developed this very first patient into that trial. And it took me an hour of fear, guilt and shame to convince this woman to swallow those six capsules. And they were safe capsules. That's why I was so excited to get this thing out. It didn't do her any harm. But, but she asked a critical question in that hour long thing which was what do these six capsules have to do with the reason I have cancer? And that was what I could not answer. And so 17 years of my academic training and all of my success kind of went up in smoke at that moment. And yet I continued to push through with fear, guilt and shame until she swallowed those capsules. And so even though she had revealed the emperor with no clothes in the room, which is the fallacy of pharmacy, is that we're waiting for something to make biology better, when in fact disease only happens from a disconnect from biology. And so there is no technologic solution for a biologic creature. There's nothing more intelligent in the universe than biology. It's 10,000 times brighter than suns. Life is such a high intelligence, it's such a frequency of resonance. It's logarithms more complex and more intelligent than anything else that exists. And you look at the beauty of a supernova or Saturn through a microscope or a telescope or whatever it is. Mind blowing beauty, mind blowing complexity in the universe. And yet a single Organism, bacteria, let alone a human being. The word miracle doesn't even scale correctly here. It's cosmically impossible. The intelligence that is in the womb of a mother that allows you to knit yourself together as you and then know a self identity that's entangled at the quantum cellular level such that if I draw my red blood cells out of my arm and that's taken to some distant location and I pop an aspirin, that blood in a tube, you know, 100 kilometers away is going to respond to the aspirin, just like the blood in my arm. My identity is so potently described at the fabric of reality that I'm non local. I have a non local identity by which I know every cell that I birthed out of that one cell that was me at the beginning. And so this is something that is so beyond extraordinary that woe unto us who would go and disconnect a woman from her instinct and intuition of I know health and I know I'm not well right now. And a lot of women around the world are really frustrated at the medical system right now because they're going in. Sam. Fatigued, I can't sleep, I can't eat anything. Everything's reactive to my body. My immune system feels like it's shutting out. I have a deep intuition that I am dying. And the doc is like, well, your blood pressure is normal, your blood sugar looks fine, thyroid normal, you're fine. And maybe it's chronic Lyme disease. And then we create these radical philosophies and storytelling and hand waving around. Well, it's probably this or that. We need to put you on a few weeks of antibiotics and you know, see, and then come back a month later. No, I was temporarily felt changed. I thought maybe so, but now I'm actually worse than I was before. So I was in that spiraling toilet with my patients forever and I was not listening to them. And that was foolish because actually, on the first day of medical school, my dean came in and he said, I'm going to tell you two amazing truths that you're going to forget quickly. One, you're going to learn more in this next couple years than you will ever learn in the rest of your life. Unfortunately, 50% of what we're going to teach you is wrong. And the really bad news is we don't know which 50% that is. So that was his first truth. Second truth, if you sit with a patient long enough, they're eventually going to tell you what's wrong with him. And if you continue to be Shut up and listen longer. They're going to tell you what they need to do to get better. And so he told us those two things. And true to his word, we forgot all of that within one or two weeks of the heady experience of, oh my gosh, you know, gross anatomy. And you, here's the diseases and you can throw this drug on and look, their blood pressure gets better, their blood sugar gets better. And like, you really get put into this God complex very quickly in this pharmaceutical model, forgetting that 50% of everything was wrong. And you know, 30 years later, I can tell you I did figure out the 50% that was wrong. And I believe it's 50% of everything. It's all half truths. And there's no true truth in the pharmaceutical, you know, technologic model of biology. There's, there's nothing true about something outside of the body making it more intelligent or better. It's impossible. And so in this era where we're now looking at transhumanism, we need computer chips in our brains and we need, you know, fake limbs and robotics is going to make us, you know, survive this thing that is, that is a course of action. I believe there is going to be a future for humanity that does that. And there's nothing we can do about it. Like that's going to be a manifestation, but there is a different avenue. And there's going to be a small subset of us perhaps that stop going after the transhumanism or the biohacking belief that we're going to hack biology and have some technology that suddenly makes us live longer. And there's going to be this small step set of us that take a deep breath and say, you know what? I'm going to trust the mother on this one. I'm going to go with the mother and I'm going to go into the belief that we were birthed into a birthright of diversity and connectivity that creates an intelligence and a resilience and adaptive quality to us that can help us overcome any threat. And I really learned that spades on the microscope in our science of, of soil. And we've been extracting soil intelligence and putting that into dietary supplements for years now, actually, the beds above right there. But yeah, ION is, is an acronym. Where, where is there? ION's the acronym for it, which is intelligence of nature. And we came convinced of this under the microscope because the biggest threat to, to human biology right now is disconnected. And so when we disconnect biologic systems, we get disease. And the thing that's driving Disconnect faster than our doctors and their antibiotics is actually our herbicides and pesticides in our food that function as antibiotics in soil and at the food residue level to hit our gut and our gut lining and our vascular lining and the rest. And so our laboratory has been on the front lines for 15 years studying the direct impact of herbicides on human biology. And we are so excited to report that despite the decimating effect of herbicides in there, nature had a solution that predated that injury by 60 million years. And so we're using 60 million year old fossil soil to extract an intelligence of the microbiome that becomes a foundation that's so rock solid in communication that the herbicide doesn't do the damage to the current system. And so we've become very convinced over the last 15 years that nature has never allowed an injury that she didn't already have a solution to. And so I'm just putting out there an invitation to every one of you. They take a hard left turn towards the feminine archetype of life. The masculine archetype is being proved out, especially the wounded masculine. We got to fix everything, right? So that wounded masculine belief, like, well, we created the problem, we got to go fix it, versus the nurture angle of the feminine. Nature has never stopped nurturing life, ever. Four billion years strong on this planet. Who knows how many eons before this? But nature is shepherding life to more and more complex systems of intelligence. Ultimately, beauty at every single level. And she doesn't mind extinctions. Extinctions come and go. Five big ones before last one. 55 million years ago, it wiped out the top soils of the Earth. And without the microbiome in soils, life died. 90% of life on Earth disappeared with the failure of the microbiome. We're repeating that pattern now. And this time it's not a volcanic event or an asteroid hitting the earth to kill out the topsoils. It's herbicides, pesticides, and chemical farming. And so we are the existential threat to the microbiome now. And we're repeating the pattern of some 90% loss of life on earth. At Sierra, discover top workout gear at incredible prices. Which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time.

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Sierra, let's get moving. Is there a way around what we've done with this, farming this? And I'll tell you what just happened, Zach. I was at an event and someone said, yeah, but the farmers use the tiniest little bit of glyphosate for their entire crop, so it's fine. And I went, what? What are you talking about? But that is the. The argument out there in the world is that if we didn't do. If we didn't have these things like Roundup, we wouldn't be alive because we need it to be able to produce enough food. And so it's necessary. And they use such a minuscule amount that it doesn't have an issue.

Yeah, I've heard it a million times that I've probably toured more farms than any doctor on the planet, I think, at this point. But it's a very common argument from the chemical technologic world is like, oh, we're just barely touching things. Right. And it's necessary because we'll die without it. And so we certainly have that perspective as doctors. Well, everybody would be dying if we didn't have ICUs. Well, we actually only had ICUs for about 50 years, and we'd survived for 300,000 years without that mechanism. And we have a lot of evidence that we had elders well into their centurion years for millennia before an ICU showed up on the scene. So longevity doesn't seem to track with a lack of ICUs or an abundance of ICUs in the environment. And yet we have this belief, because we accept disease as normal, that, well, without disease management, we would die. And so it's this fundamental paradigm that allows for these arguments to play out. Our team is about to publish the definitive paper on Roundup specifically, or glyphosate, which is the active ingredient there. And because we're so exhaustive of these arguments, but we are now taking this down to 2 parts per billion of glyphosate. This is the amount residues that's everywhere. And rainwater, you know, you name it. Yeah, 85% of our rain that is measured is actually in. Typically in the 5 to 20 billion parts per mil per volume there, your. Your root vegetables, your potatoes, your turnips, your beets can be quite high up in the parts per million. And then your kale and brussels sprouts and a lot of the crucifix vegetables, as well as a lot of the grazing material that we put into cattle feed. And everything can be up in 10, 20, even 100 parts per million. So logarithms higher than is necessary to cause damage. So we're showing damage to the microbiome and mitochondrial membrane potential at these 2 parts per billion in our laboratory science around human cells and animal cells. So we're really, you know, eager to Publish this data because we need to get away from the idea that just a little bit is not a problem. A little bit in every ounce of water in the planet is a big problem.

Well, at this point, is there a way? I mean, if it's, if it's in the water, it's in the food, it's in the soil, how do we turn that around?

It's very simple, actually. And it's re embracing biodiversity. And so the cool thing about nature is she always has a solution to every problem that nature can present. And right now, we are a natural system presenting a problem for nature, but that's just another opportunity for her. And so while it looks like humans are the enemy on the planet, the cancer on the planet, biologically, that's, that plays out very nicely. We, we do behave as a cancer on the planet. We are metabolically more demanding than we offer up. And so we suck the energy out of the planet and biologic systems. But at the larger level of natural law and the way that nature works, every existential threat is her next opportunity for rebirth. And so every extinction has led to an explosion of biodiversity and more beauty and more intelligence on the planet. We went from dinosaurs to blue whales and mammals and ultimately humans after a single extinction event. We went from palms and ferns as the only macro flora on the planet, to deciduous trees, wildflowers, and the rest. And so the explosion of intelligence and diversity on the planet was created by the stress of an extinction event. And so while we are an existential threat in our current behavior towards the planet, we're preparing her throughout the friction and heat that we're causing. This is her fever for her next recovery. So when you stand back at the millions of years of nature's scale, we're just kind of like an acute little fever that's driving her to a more resilient and more intelligent system to come after this. And so ultimately, we're not outside of nature, even though we like to think of ourselves that and as existential threat, we're there. Things are going to get better on this planet. Might be a few thousand years, might be a few million years, but it's going to get really cool. And the fun thing for me is it takes such a short amount of time to do the right thing for nature before she reabsorbs that glyphosate and metabolizes that and becomes resilient against that through the microbiome. And that's what we keep showing with the ion supplement, is if you give back communication, you can overcome the injury. And so While glyphosate at 2 parts per billion and every drop of water on the planet is currently diminishing things as soon as we stop plowing, and as soon as we stop over disking our soils, which destroys the mycelial network and all that, so stop plowing and stop spraying for a single year, even just a single season. So don't spray and plow in the fall and let spring come on without disruption and let the soil micro microbial system and the nutrients there and start to be able to rebuild itself. In that single year, you see an increase in metabolism of the planet. And so we could reset the planetary metabolism with one year of rest. And we can actually continue to plant during that too. But we plant differently. We use seed drills and all the techniques used in regenerative agriculture. We find out we can actually get harvest without being enemy to the soil, without being an enemy to biodiversity. And over time, we actually get more resilient and more abundance from that natural system than we did when we were trying to monocrop a bunch of corn or soybean out of that land. And so allowing the land to recover its right to life, which is biodiversity, it immediately creates solutions to all of the problems that we've created. And so we are pretty much 12 months away from a Garden of Eden re blossoming on this planet. We just need to give nature her right to reconnect. And when human behavior stops driving disconnection through all of our industries and our own personal behavior, the nature is going to rush in. We're going to be a resilient, beautiful creature, maybe with a different biology altogether, because we're an upgrade when we reconnect to a planet that's already responded with new creativity, to the extinction level stress that we've already presented to the planet. So we can stay and play. I believe. And I think if we take that hard left, turn away from technology into biology, we're going to design different cities, different houses, different daily lives, different interfaces with technology altogether. And we're going to be focused on how much air did we breathe today, how much water did we bathe in in natural rivers, waterfalls, oceans? How much soil did we actually touch today with bare feet, with bare hands? How much soil is underneath our fingernails? Today we start just metricing life that direction. Autism goes away, Alzheimer's goes away. Autoimmune disease goes away. Cancer epidemics go away. It will be so fast that we reset this chronic disease story. It's a very recent story. It's only been around 30 years. And so we can bust out of that and really get into a whole new world of possibility. It's not going to be linear. We're going to have a lot of loss because we've pent up a lot of damage and the collective trauma to the generations stemming from 1975 forward. So there's going to be some premature death in a couple more generations as we detox this system. But it's going to be a fraction of a second in planetary history that nature is ready to reabsorb humanity into her next expression.

So those of us listening right now who, you know, I could start a little garden at my house. I can't start a big whole thing. But like someone listening who doesn't want to wait for big pharma and big food and big healthcare to turn around because God knows if they ever will. What are the things that we can do for ourselves for our families to start turning this around?

Yeah. The first week of our eight week program is focused on rediscovering self identity. And for this we really have a series of techniques where we help people start to detox from all of the external roles you've taken on in life. And I think that anybody who's been in a family unit for any amount of times knows how hard it is to be in that family unit. You know, there's a lot of, you know, yogis that say everybody thinks they're enlightened until they go back for their family, you know, and so why is that? Why is the family unit so intense to stay in? And I think it's because the roles are so densely dividing each other from our self identity. And the closer you are to somebody, the more you think you know who they are, and the more you think you know who they are, the less curiosity and attention you have to who they are come. And so if you really want to begin the journey back into nature in your family, it's going to start at listening to each other at the dinner table in a much different way. Instead of running through the list of stressors or events that happened over the course of the day. If the dinner began at who did you become today? What changed your sense of self? What, what challenged your previous worldview today? What made you feel joy today? Like, what was that one moment where you can point to just like really turned you on and made you feel human for that moment? If we start asking questions like that and we start letting go of the concept that I'm a son, I'm a dad, I'm a boss, I'm an employee, I'm a doctor, I'm, you know, a taxpayer, I'm, I'm a voter. We have all of these layers of identities that we bring onto ourselves that, that change our sense of values, the metrics of success and failure. Pretty soon we don't even know what it feels like to have been intuitive individual with a core identity that's knit together through some quantum field that we can't even understand because it's non local. So it's just a soul that holds me in place on an earth, or maybe me. The biology holds a soul here on earth. The beauty of all that, the complexity of all that is so easily to forget when it's your partner that snores all night and annoys you or, you know, whatever little thing it is. And so the closer we are together in proximity, the more likely we are to forget the miracle in the other. And so to begin the journey back into nature, I believe it's the journey back in the self. And sometimes it's impossible to start that self journey, but much easier to start the journey into somebody next to you in curiosity. And as you start to witness somebody else going through transformation, because you're witnessing them, suddenly they get to witness you and you feel seen in a new way as well. And so that's why we've found these groups of six or eight strangers that get together and journey can heal each other at rates never imagined in a medical clinic. Because you have humans that are starting to be curious about one another and not about their diseases. They don't care or know about the diseases. They're not doctors, they're curious. Other humans that want to know what your journey is and the more you tell them, the more they realize, well, that's my journey. I have such a pattern like that. Oh my gosh, that's so different than my journey. But in that I can see that my journey is so precious in this way. Let me share that. The amount of healing that can happen in just two or three episodes of a group getting together and being curious towards each other is mapping the potency of self identity. And self identity is reinforced immediately when seen. This is the two slit experiment in physics unseen. The photon of light energy actually stays in waveform and when it shoots through the two slits, it like spreads out through the universe in all of its possible directions. But if you put a sensor next to that or you put a human in the room to watch the experiment, it moves out of waveform into particle and it creates two Perfect slits on the X ray screen behind it. And so it's exciting that the witnessing of something actually makes it real. If it's unwitnessed, it kind of meanders into the cosmos with all of its possible outcomes, but doesn't have a definitive identity. And so to really tune back in, we're gonna need to witness each other and to be witnessed one another, we're gonna have to let go of all the beliefs about who this person is sitting in front of you and start to be curious. And then it gets really exciting when you start to look in the mirror in the morning and be like, oh my gosh, I am so sorry that I have discounted you so severely. I'm so sorry that I haven't even asked the question in 50 years. Who are you? Who have you become? And then just sit there with that in silence for a minute. It. And maybe just start crying because you don't know and you haven't asked and you haven't given permission and you haven't been curious to know the beauty that has, is you today. And it's, there's no, there's no better medicine. I can offer you as a doctor, a moment of silence in front of yourself with curiosity of who you've become. Not because of the perfect path, but because of the traumas, because of the stressors, because of the frictions, because of the illnesses, because of the chronic collapse. Whatever has got. That's exactly the fire that was needed to become the being. You are right now at the tipping point of all things when we're going to decide do we want to do a transhuman separation from nature and go into some pattern of demise that way? Or do we want to trust the biologic future where we iterate with an ecosystem that includes the blue whales and the dolphins and the dogs and the wolves of Yellowstone. Are we going to tie back in as a keystone species on this planet and become part of the solution and part of the creative network that nature is expressing here? And that's going to happen too. And it's already happening. There's a great divide happening in our population and I want everybody to stop judging each other on which course you're on. And you want to go a technological route. Absolutely understand it. I get it. It's a really intriguing three dimensional journey into these robots and spaceships and everything else. I get the allure of that and I get the beauty of it. On some level it's amazing what humans can create when endowed with perhaps extra human technologies. And so that's a path that will be taken and no judgment on those of us that you choose that path. But more importantly, where do you feel good? Just try the other left hand course towards, towards nature for a couple days and see what your intuition tells you. Do you really want to go put that aura ring back on? You really want to go stand in front of a red light for half an hour of a day when you could be on the beach instead, when you could, you're walking out in nature with your children instead. What makes you feel more real and where do you feel witnessed? And I would offer that as, as the beginning back into self identity as if, if you're too worn out, which I have been many times I've been too worn out energetically, socially, emotionally to sit with a group of people and be seen. I didn't have the bandwidth, I just wanted isolation. That's all I had the bandwidth for. And to begin the journey out of that space. Nature's been my solution. And so when I go, when I really hit the wall, I know I need to go lay under a tree. I lay down underneath an oak tree and I look up through the patterns of the fractal branches, up through the leaves at a blue sky above white clouds passing over and it starts to re pattern my neurology and I start to remember what it feels like to be a connected specimen within a diverse nature and that helps. But the transformation happens when I ask the oak tree to see me and I make myself vulnerable energetically to be seen by nature. And then I usually just start crying underneath that tree and only in the dirt and cry for a while until I remember what it feels like to be seen. And I can do that for weeks before I'm ready to deal with humans and. And then when I'm ready I can go show up for my family or my kids or other people in group. And sometimes it's the strangers that I have a better tolerance for because they have curiosity who I am. Whereas my own family thinks they know who I am and they can take time to dig through those layers. And so it's an invitation back into nature. Take that left hand, turn into the mother and let her wrap some arms around you and just see where you get to.

That's just this idea that as you were speaking it, I'm thinking I have not asked my kids who are 27 and 28. You know, last night we had a family dinner which is my ex husband and my husband and my two kids. And I just realized like I have completely Made assumptions like I've got. We all have each other in the boxes. And, you know, I would love to. I don't actually know. I remember asking one of my sons what he wanted for presents for Christmas, and he's like, oh, surprise me. I'm like, I don't even know what it would be that would. You would love at this point. Right? Which is really the question. What would bring you joy? What brought you joy today? And that's an even bigger question, because did anything bring you joy today? Are you even thinking that way?

How about you do the what brought you joy today?

What brought me joy today is I led a team meeting and I had a CEO resign. And, you know, these things are always silver linings. It was the right thing for both of us. And to lead a team meeting and watch people who hadn't spoken up because they didn't feel like they had the power or that anyone cared what they were saying, speak up, share ideas. It was like, it was just fabulous. You know, it was just fantastic to see people stepping up and. And being excited about what they could share and the direction they could help take. The company. That brought me joy last night brought me joy. Just looking at what I've been able to create with what used to be a very hostile ex husband and my two sons and my new husband, and everyone gets along fantastic, and they love, you know, they all love each other. And that. That really is a great model because it was interesting. I did a lot of. Of journey work with my kids and son, with my sons and ex husband, and we had this shaman come and do a human design and sphinx code with us. And he said, you know, you two, I'm surprised you even made it past three months. Like, if you look at your whole human design, you were never. You're two diamonds. You never would have. This never would have worked. And my kids, everyone just had this deep breath and forgave. It was the most beautiful, fantastic thing. And what you don't know about me, my older son was hit by a car when he was 16 and nearly died. Left for dead in the street in the ICU for four months. You know what's also been amazing to witness is all along this time of being run down by a car, he's never been a victim. And we'll sit at Thanksgiving each year, and we always go around the table and talk about what we're most grateful for. And he's like, I am just grateful that, like, it's year 10, I'm here. I've had all These years. So, you know, it's lots of amazing things to be joyful. But this whole idea of curiosity, Curiosity and creativity are these two lost arts that can change everything. That's one of the things we were talking about today during our team meeting was like, we need to bring the creativity back. And, like, we need to bring curiosity back, too. We need to be looking at all of these things. Think if people. Think if. Think if in the medical field, people were like, huh, all right, well, we keep doing this thing. We're doing the definition of insanity every single day. You know, maybe we should look at something else. But I think for a lot of what we do in training throughout life is to become less curious, not more like it's threatening.

Yeah. And I think that we have a value system that we've built around humanity that values the effort towards stopping change rather than embracing change. And so that when I ask you what joy is and you say it's the departure of my CEO, that's. That's you embracing change, and that's you sensing into, is this a good thing or is this a bad. Oh, my gosh, it's a good thing. I can feel all this new energy and percolation of curiosity about what are we going to do next? What's going to happen? We need to start to design with the purpose of change and transformation. And nowhere is this more true than in our own relationships. And this has been my most difficult learning in my life. I came seemingly out of the womb with a desire to be the best husband, the best dad, monogamous, to beat the band, and, you know, great, great, you know, servant through my church and missions work and everything else. That's how I came into the world. Like I was going to beat the band. And I loved it. And I was a great husband and a great dad and monogamous for 20 years of incredible relationship. And to find out that I had built a system around the desire for that to never change led to the phenomenon of it coming to the end of 20 years and my wife deciding on a different path for herself. That at the time felt like an utter complete collapse. And failure of my system could have been seen as the greatest indication of a great success and a journey of unconditional love and transformation, because that's what it was for 20 years. We were kids growing up. For 20 years, we held space for each other to become the humans that we became. And we could not have done it at the rate at which we did it, in the way in which we did it, without each other. And so just the deep gratitude and the deep success we had in transformation. Had that been metric by society, people would have literally, like, mobbed us for a celebration. Instead, she got damned by her extended family. And I got, you know, thrown on the bus in a million ways by my whole community. And everybody assumed it was because I must have cheated on her or whatever it is. Like, there's all this projection on us of failure and darkness and blah, blah. This thing we produced, the incredible kids. We were together for 20 years. We never beat each other. We never. Where was the failure here? And yet the projection on us was so intense.

It's interesting you hear about men with divorce, too, because this is. Once I understood this, it shifted the relationship. My ex husband's one of the nicest human beings you will ever meet. He is so kind, so sweet. He's been instrumental in bringing my son back into the world and. But he was so. He felt like such a failure because divorce for men's failure. And I didn't understand that. I was like, what? You know, let's just move on into this next phase of our relationship. And he was, like, so angry. And I kept trying to figure out what the heck it was. And then I worked with a woman who teaches a course on understanding men. And I went, oh. And I shifted my languaging and my gratitude and everything, like, overnight and everything shifted. And, you know, now we can have this. We moved from California to Florida, and we all moved. Husband, ex husband. You know, everybody goes together and it just works out. It's this absolutely beautiful situation where my ex husband and husband absolutely love each other. They're like brothers. It can all be. And I just refuse to go along with a culture or community who won't go along with that. So, like, if you are in my life, you understand that this is the way that we operate. And actually, it's become a role model for other people going through divorce, because it doesn't have to be that way. It might just be like, the odds that you could, in your, you know, when you're young, choose someone who would be your partner for life. I mean, really.

You know, it's kind of impossible, you know, in a lot of ways, but it was more possible when change was slow. So for thousands of years of human history, very little changed. In 100 years. You had the same farm field in your family for, you know, five generations at least. You grew the same crops. You did the same thing around little changed. So it was very. It was much easier to be on a parallel path for 30 years because there weren't very many paths. Now when we're in a situation where change happens, a doubling of the intelligence of our cell phones happens every two years, let alone human systems. And all the complexity around like the number of options, the chances now of finding two parallel paths and stay parallel and allow for constant mirroring of each other and transformation, all that for 40 years is suddenly microscopic. And yet we keep placing on it the importance and value system of divorce is a failure. And so we learn to compromise and compromise and compromise and compromise. And that's where the course miracles changed my life. From the construct of believing that marriage was the penultimate example of what relationship be to realizing that anything that's trying to keep biology from transforming in any fashion is antithetical to nature. Nature only wants growth and complexity. And when nature gets into these logarithmic states of complexity and growth, as it has in these last iterations of life on planet Earth, the speed of transformation is designed by nature and it cannot be resisted by humans and our value systems. So we are going to keep transforming faster and faster and faster. So can we start to understand a feminine approach to, to relationship? Instead of a masculine archetype, a masc archetype is goal oriented. So you check the box. I'm married. I can totally relate when, when my wife realized that her path was departing and she left glitter on the countertop of, you know, found this other path. I have to go do this around me. Miserable. I felt like a Mac truck. It literally hit me. Physiologic, spiritually, energetically, like I was a disaster because all of my check boxes just disappeared. I must not be a good dad. I must not be a good husband. I must not be a good Christian. I must not be. I was suddenly like the ultimate failure on the planet. In 30 seconds, like I went from like thinking I was winning the game to the utter failure. That's the masculine archetype of relationship. Feminine archetype is not goal oriented, it's process oriented. And so it's, it's, and it's, you know, plays out in, in our, you know, multi gender relationships. So divorce rates between two women who are married is around 72%. Divorce rates between two males that are married about 21%. Divorce rates between a male and a female about 46% dead centered between the two. And so you've got this interesting thing where if there's a woman involved, she's likely thinking process oriented and she's going to see that things do change and transform and her whole, whole worldview is one of adaptation, nurture, flow, change of direction. It's a process of life. It's a process of self expression. Then she gets owned by a man, which is our current marriage contract is an ownership model of women. And now you're putting her under the demands of no change and goal oriented. And if you dare flow, you're failing the relationship and you're not working in whatever it is. And so if we all start to take the feminine tack and we realize that we need to change the word divorce, by the way, anyways, like, graduation would be a better term. Well, congratulations. You graduated out of that.

Or a completion of that. Yeah, it's a completion, a transformation, a transition. But yeah, it's my. And I don't like, I need a name for my ex husband that's not ex husband either. And he was like, could we call me something else? I'm like, what shall we call you? You know, because you are, I think.

My first journey partner. You know, he's your first journey partner. You guys journeyed together a long time. And maybe it was three years, maybe it was 30 years ago.

And we were meant to, like, you look at these things. And as you were talking about that, I realized when, you know, my husband, I met his friends and his friends were all from high school and college. No one was growing, no one was shifting. I mean, literally he has a friend that does the same thing like every Friday, you know, where he's going at night. Every, like everything's the same every week. And, and I don't have like, I have friends from high school. I rarely ever talk to him. My friends are really friends from the last 10 to 20 years. And I thought, that is so interesting. And I didn't realize till you just started talking about it what that was. Now it shifted a lot for him as he's been finding this new identity, but as he's been making the shift, they all tried to grab him like the crabs in the crab pot. This was eel. Wow. It's been interesting, but I love this whole concept of really stepping in to this nurturing, process oriented, how can we heal place. Because that is absolutely where we are at this moment in time.

My world flipped on its head a couple years ago. I've been long intrigued by the feminine archetype and it's, it's erasure from our modern psyche, especially around religion. It doesn't matter which religion you pick. It's all male dominant for the most part. And so it's, it's the erasure of the feminine from our spiritual worldviews that leads to manifestations of society that are in this masculine paradigm. And so I had long curiosity about it and, you know, for me personally, grew up in a Judeo Christian church. And so I thought my church was kind of outside the box because I'd learned about the Gnostic gospels that got written but didn't get included in what we consider the modern Bible. So I got to read the Gospel of Thomas and a lot of amazing things that didn't really fit the common narrative that you quickly see when you read the Gnostic Gospels. Oh, they wanted a very cohesive narrative. And if they had included all these books, it raises a lot of questions about the fabric of reality and what is God and what is Christ and all these things. And so you understand why they kind of needed a simpler story for. For a period of time. But even in that open mind, I had never been shown the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. And when that fell into my lap some years, you know, ago, that suddenly blew up my whole world because it. It suddenly showed me what the masculine would look like within a feminine archetype. And I realized for the first time what an unwounded masculine would look like. And that starts to be what we call a Christ consciousness or Christ energy or this kind of Christos. This energetic rebirthing process coming out of the masculine can do that within the context of the womb of the feminine. And so without that feminine container, the masculine never becomes its full expression. And we just stay there in the wounded masculine. We run around trying to fix stuff and define everything as failures if it didn't check the box and all that. And so it was very curious, but it really shattered or really flipped on its head thoroughly. And finally, when I was in the south of France and I was doing this Mary Magdalene journey and, you know, kind of just really deep interest in, and meditation in these spaces in which Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene were our story to have lived after the. The death of Christ. And I was in that space and a woman told me she was just like deep in meditation, didn't know me at all really. And she suddenly said to me that it is not. Not the right, it is the role of the feminine to protect. And that shook me so profoundly because up until that moment I had been told that the masking is the space holder and it holds space and then feminine flows through it. And all this stuff around the balance of masculine, feminine within anything a leaf has masculine, feminine. Every single human, male or female, has masc and feminine they have to be balanced. If not, the whole thing glows apart. But my understanding that was the masculine was holding the space. And somehow I had been sub programmed that by holding space it meant I was the protector. And so I behaved that way towards my family. I was protector, I was the provider. I did this thing, I ran around, I got enough money for there to be food on the table and I built a house from scratch. And like, I was the ultimate like machine manifestor of all the protection, locking doors. And you know, all this stuff it said in this woman says instead is the role of the feminine to protect. And it's only the feminine that knows how to protect because she leads from nurture. And it's obvious that the masculine isn't the one that was called in to like create a womb that would hold a portal of space so that a soul could connect to biology and manifest this have a trillion cell body. So it started remapping my understanding of like, of course it has to be the feminine that protects. It's how it's always been since the first cell of the beginning. It was the feminine that was going to hold that vessel and create the nurture that it actually creates safety. If you then go ascribe safety as a responsibility to the masculine, especially the masculine who's been kind of kicked out of the garden. Here we run around doing war. And so the only way we can figure out how to protect is be that immune system in battle form. And we're not realizing that the role of protection is not battling one another, but is actually diplomacy and feminine, when put in charge of large democratic systems and the like, create that, that relational reality of that democracy in the form of diplomacy. And this was proved out in natural law for 40,000 years before Europeans showed up the United States, it was arbitrated. Natural law as a system of governance and sociopolitics was governed by the Council of Women. Council women were a selection from many of the 615 nations that were here in North America. 100 million people within those 600 nations. So it was a huge population with complex agricultural systems, complex systems of water and soil. And it was a miraculous system that Europeans showed up here and saw way more complex, you know, food systems than were represented in Europe. So it was a really powerful demonstration of what would happen if the feminine archetype of protection was one of diplomacy and democracy via that diplomacy playing out in natural systems such that we were not just in balance with one another as 600 nations, we were in balance with nature itself. Because the feminine Was was creating the safety and the nurture. And so then I begs the question, well, what's the role of the masculine? And this woman, you know, tells me that the role of the mask is just open the heart. And I realized that I just had had the whole darn thing ass backwards and upside down. When I give up the responsibility of protecting everybody around me and I start to be able to receive the nurture and protection of, of Earth itself and I start to be nurtured and the microbiome proliferates and I get biodiversity back in because I'm now in the oceans and I'm on the rivers and I'm spending time in nature instead of believing that I need to run around and protect people from nature. And when I start to trust that nature meant for us to be here and I can step back into my capacity to receive as a masculine, now I'm in my right relationship with nature. I'm here to hold space, not to force out nature. I'm not the walls and barriers, I'm the walls of receiving. And so the masculine is there to receive from the feminine that can only pour more in. And so nature is so abundant by its natural relationship with the masculine feminine in its balance, it creates space for abundance to be poured in and to regenerate and generate and generate new iterate and into new life. And so when men stop running around and trying to protect us from nature and we stop the abandonment disorder that somehow we got kicked out, we start to receive back from nature. Our microbiome goes nuts, our curiosity re engages, our creativity follows that and we become a feminine expression of humanity again. And that femininity we become fertile and nurture. And the masculine and its capacity to hold still and hold space gets to witness the feminine. And that's what I have come to say is the role of the mask and is to hold the space so the feminine can flow through in a witness state. And the energy flowing through me when witnessed is beautiful. And so I have to practice this on a daily basis because I've found that if I try to go into relationship to complete myself, I drain the other person. And that's, that's predicted by the course of miracles and everything else. Not until I complete myself will I be anything but a drain on the other people that I try to grab onto to try to justify my half completion, you know, that I tend to believe in. And so if I'm going to become complete, I have to start to witness the beauty within myself. I need to see the feminine nurture and flow within myself. And the way that I do this is different for every one of us. But I need to be at a piano or on a guitar. I need to be creating music because it's the immediate obvious thing that there's something flowing through me that didn't exist a moment ago. And now I can pluck some strings and suddenly there's something that exists now that didn't exist a few minutes ago. And it's beautiful. And then I get to see that and witness that. And the masculine within me, witnessing the beauty coming through my own creativity. And now I'm becoming complete. And so if I play the piano for an hour, I reach a resonance of frequency, of capacity to manifest from my creativity and curiosity that I didn't have before. And so if my companies are under stress and vice presidents are leaving, like I've gone through a similar clearing of the field in recent weeks because it's the astrology of the moment. The planet is saying, we're going to wipe this thing free. We're so grateful for all of the journey partners that have got us here. And now it's time for a new community to gather. And so we need that clearing and we need to get curious and creative. We need to realize that the masculine, every one of us is ready to hold space for each of us to complete now. And we need to receive so much from nature right now. And so more breath, more time under the trees, more fresh air, more reconnection with the glory of the cosmos above us with the stars or right above or the northern lights are the clouds at sunset. Whatever you need to dive in and get reconnected and start resonating the frequency of completion. Witness the creativity coming through you and have the sensation of the masculine within you that holds enough stillness that it can witness the beauty pouring through you and being received. And then we will manifest a different future.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much. Can I have you back for part two? Because literally, you know, I have like 80 questions in a document.

No problem for two of 10. It sounds great.

We got three of three. And that was just. I had no idea we're going in that direction and that direction is just couldn't be more perfect. So thank you for that. Where are all the places we should send people? I know you have your eight week course, you have your membership, you have Ion. Let's put it all in the show notes. I'll put it at jjbirgen.com DrZak Z A C Tell us about, tell us about what you're up to what you've got and where everyone should go.

Yeah. ZachPushMD.com is the website that kind of is a portal to everything I do. There is a, a new membership or a free library there that it's. It's called the Knowledge Library. And that library contains 300 of my most popular podcasts that cover just about every question you could possibly have in your mind. It's a searchable database. And so you have a particular question of what I think about anything, including linoleum. You'll find probably find it in there. And so the Zach Bush MBU coral take you into it.

I guess someone's asked about linoleum because I was like, well, that was really random, Zach.

So any random thing you can come up with, you can probably find in that database. The Global Health Education Summit is a data deep dive on a lot of different scientific frameworks of the backing that I'm doing here. So you can dive into some of that library there, also free and available to you through that portal. The participation on how the globe goes back into a regenerative rebirth. As we start to embrace the thumb and nurture of nature back into humanity, we get to be part of the solution for the planet to go back into really rapid regenerative state and rebirth. New biodiversity, new energetics, and this whole story of climate change can disappear in a moment. And so Project Biome is my large nonprofit that is visioning how we bring humanity as a whole, industry, nonprofits, governments, into a cohesive vision, simple vision of rewilding rivers and coastlines, regenerative agricultural corridors around that and reconnected economies where we start to care for bioregional economic stimulus. Through those three mechanisms, we can suddenly all become in line with what the planet's trying to do right now. The planet's not in crisis. She's in a moment of rebirth. So she's going through a contraction right now and getting ready for her next deep breath in. In which case all the CO2 disappears from the atmosphere and everything goes back into this generative cycle and that relies on Africa. So I'm really excited for you to tap into Project Biome as an understanding of where we are with nature and the fact that we can be part of her generative rebirth rather than her existential threat as we start to receive from her again. So projectbiome.org is that site for food systems for your family. I strongly encourage you to tap into FarmersFootprint US. The garden club can show you how to turn your backyard of monoculture grass into a food forest and really start to not only nourish your family right now, but provide for your entire neighborhood for generations to come through that. So the garden club is a potent activation there and lots of opportunities for you to engage in that nonprofit space as well. For those of you that are dismayed by the recent election and kind of the spectacle that we have going on around the world and the breakdown of sociopolitics and relational behavior towards one another in the crisis of war, whether it be Israel and Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, you name it. If that's starting to really weigh on your psyche and your feelings within you. A desire to be part of a different solution. Institute of Natural Laws from a nonprofit that's really focused on expanding our understanding awareness of natural law as a very coherent system for sociopolitical change where we can all have a unifying understanding of the way in which nature expresses itself in complex human systems like societies, et cetera. And so an exciting way for us all to make sure that we never have another election that looks like the last one we had is to tap in there so we can use your Support at both projectbiome.org and Institute of Natural Law. We'll get your support behind all that. We would love for you to join those communities. We have big community platforms on both of those, so get engaged and be part of this change that we all want and feel is possible in our hearts.

And you forgot Ion Ion's on your website on Amazon. I tried to get some yesterday, by the way, and sold out.

Yeah, we've got quite the demand going on on Intelligence of Nature right now, but it's going back to and to availability across the country over the next couple weeks. So you can go to intelligence of nature.com, tap in there. It'll be a couple months before it's back on Amazon, things like that. But for intelligence of nature.com for tapping into the intelligence of ancient soil as a new foundation for your biology and to start to hold more electrical energy and more vibrancy in your own self expression. It's a cool foundation. So tell us to nature.com and get to them.

Perfect. So all of that's going to be@jjvirgin.com DrZach because that was a lot. And I went to your website. There's a lot of great information. Plus put a link to a couple of my favorite podcasts that I just was deep diving into because you've got a lot of different podcasts out there as well. So lots of great information. I know we just scratched the Surface and I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

Honor to be with you.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast at. Subscribe to jjerg so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Foreign.

Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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