Zach Bush MD | Sacred Commerce & Community: How To Thrive In 2022

We have this opportunity to witness the financial opportunities that lie in doing the right thing. We need to stop believing that doing the right thing is expensive or it's going to cut into your profits. Doing the right thing on the global scale is always going to make you more wealthy. I think that that's true in any part of your life. And I'd say relationship is the one area that we most make a mistake in about this is we don't value relationship for what it's really capable of doing. And so we have very surfacey relationship. And, you know, we're not trained into sacred, holy relationship at any level. Friendship, marriage. We. We take these very surfacey versions of it. And so I think it's time for us, when we start thinking about sacred commerce, to put in maybe the word sacred value again. Let's put sacred value back into everything.

Welcome to my home. Welcome to Austin.

I'm glad to be here with you. It's just a joy to see your family settling in here.

Yeah, you got to meet my son Nova today.

What an enormous smile that kid has. Love it.

I flashback to a moment we had in Cardiff and you were like, hey, the next time we hang out, I'll hang out with your family, hang out with your son. And like, here we are. It's wild, man. What's been going on with. With our community, our global community, and also commerce. And this is from my heart today. You know, I, as you know, I did a vision quest this year. It was 100 hours fasting in nature, Zach. No food, no fire, just water. And I had so many profound revelations, one of them being some learnings that, that I actually learned from you. And it was about commerce and how human beings, we consume so much. We are literally just eating the earth and we're not giving as much back as we're taking. And I'm curious, as a jumping off point, how do you see commerce, you know, what is. What does commerce mean to Zach Bush to be in sacred commerce? I think of Charles Eisenstein's work and the gifting economy, and I don't know if I fully agree with the gifting economy. Maybe in a perfect world, but as you sit here today with us, you know, what does sacred commerce, sacred economy mean to you? What is that?

I think for me, I would go straight to what is value? You know, what. What is our value system that we could share in a sacred community? And that value system for has to be reintegrated into natural systems. And if we don't do that, we will Continue to extract, destruct, and ultimately, you know, accelerate this sixth existential crisis that we have on the planet called extinction. And so the process of re evaluating value in our lives is really asking for a realignment of philosophy in which we kind of get rid of the schism between the concept of scarcity and need in our lives and a recognition of the abundance and the creativity of nature itself. And a good example of this is anytime you go into an indigenous group that's been living in its natural system for any tens of thousands of years recently was down in Ecuador with The Achuar tribe, 40,000 years in the sacred headwaters of the Amazon on the border of Peru and Ecuador. And they don't have any storage in their kitchens, that's just a fire pit. And every morning they walk out into the jungle and they collect what they're going to prepare that day. And they share this incredibly beautiful social experience throughout the day of food preparation. And you know, the men are carrying back armloads of hearts of palm that are shredded into these tea leaves and baked over the fire for breakfast. And these grubs that they boil or steam in the tea leaves with the. It's just like unbelievable that it hasn't dawned on them in 40,000 years to need to store anything because they know the forest is going to continue to provide. And so that is a reminder of where we come from. And then we can take a look at modern society where in our typical household, we don't have more than a few days of safe food supply. And cities are now in that entire situation. Cities all over the world are now islands unto themselves. Hawaii is famous for only having a seven day food supply. If the ships stop coming in, they import 95% of their food, which is bizarre because the million inhabitants that were there when Captain Cook showed up there, they were completely autonomous in their food industry. They had fish ponds and incredible agriculture developed. And they were totally autonomous with a million inhabitants. There's still about a million people on Oahu today, and yet importing 90, 98% of their food. So we've done that to an area or an island that just 100 years ago was thriving in autonomy. And we've taken that away through this sense of scarcity that happens when you believe in dominion and ownership. And so when we start to think about value systems, we need to go back to are we in a state of scarcity and abundance? And then what are we really valuing here? Are we valuing life behind something that we're consuming, that the food we're eating, are we going to start to eat more conscientiously or are we going to keep eating things that are wrapped in cellophane multi seven layer weird materials of plastics and metals and tearing open bars and. Or are we going to start to really have reverence for fruit and vegetables and the animals that we kill? Are we going to start to have reverence again for this consumerism in our food system? We're going to start to have reverence for the humans that are involved and the human capital that is really slave labor for thousands of years, producing food all over the world. And we remain in this slave labor type mentality around farmers. Farmers of all ilks are just barely making it right now, and they're highly dependent on labor that's being paid, migrant farm workers, all this at below legal wages. And so we've managed to perpetuate in something as simple as our food consumerism, a extreme version of dominion and colonialism and abuse of human capital as well as natural capital. And so it's a good example of how we have corrupted any sense of value within a system. And then if you go on beyond that and start to look at any other area of consumerism, it's easy to see, wow, we really took nature out of these things. And what we're valuing in there is some sort of oxytocin dopamine surge that we're getting from the joy of buying something.

I feel like when capitalism started, it had a different energy than it has now. Like everything. I feel like water can get polluted so easy and soaking capitalism. So I'm not anti capitalism, I'm pro conscious capitalism. Do you, do you consider yourself to be a conscious capitalist?

Yeah, I've participated in that group's events and stuff like that. So, you know, if you mean aligning myself with conscious capitalism as an organization.

I don't mean just John Mackie or his book, but I mean just the essence of capitalism through a conscious lens.

Yeah, I think I am that. I think, you know, I align very well with objectivism, working on kind of a new branch of philosophical thought around sociopolitics right now with a bunch of colleagues. And it certainly aligns strongly with some of that original work of Ayn Rand and then Nathaniel Brandon, who really, I think, advanced it in important directions. And then coming out of that kind of Atlas Shrugged world, we can see where it went wrong probably was that it saw technology as the solution, really, and ingenuity was the critical, you know, element of capitalism in her mind. And I think that that Remains accurate. But where we went wrong, if we did as we took nature's template out of this and we were willing to just let technology itself go unchecked as to its value system. And so as we think about a natural version of this, you have sociopolitical philosophy integrating natural law back into it really creates a different tune, different tone to it. And I'm excited by it because it helps, you know, reevaluate some of the founding documents of our country. You know, our founding documents are unfortunately very patriarchal, very colonialist, you know, very subject to separation between nature and God. Is the preamble to our own Declaration of Independence that separates God from nature, which is almost insane to think that they were able to write that into a document. Yeah. But even more insane that we've spent 250 years not rewriting that. You know, it's like, why are we accepting this document as truth at this point? Like, it was a work in progress. Those guys, you know, scrambled us together. And I grew up looking at those documents by some fortune of my lineage. But my grandmother was the head of public relations for the Library of Congress. And so when I was a kid growing up in hippie Boulder, Colorado, she would fly me out at 13, she flew me out alone. But before that, my family would drive out every summer in our station wagon and drive out to D.C. and I remember at a very early age, but then definitely at that 13, she would take me to the original copy of the Declaration of Independence and the original copy of the Constitution. And the thing that's most obvious is there's scribbles and scratches and crossed out words all over the place.

They were updating it in real time.

In real time, yeah.

And we haven't updated it once.

They had to get that thing done because we were about to go to war with Britain. And so to think that they've had time to finish that thing is ludicrous. Like, it's a complete misperception that somehow that was a finished symphony. No, it was the beginning of a symphony that we forgot to continue. And so the results of the consumerism that we see today, the collapse of the equality of capitalism, the corruption of capitalism that's led to the instability of our country, the continued abuses of African Americans in this country, the stealing of lands from first nations, the stealing of lands and raping and pillaging of the Mexicans, that we took half their country away from them. It's just we have been one atrocity after another in this country because we are working by documents that justified it through a God that was separated from nature. And I think that that's. If we start to think about sacred capitalism, if there is such a thing, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that we got to finish these documents, we got to clean this thing up, and we got to start moving towards a more holistic approach where nature's back in. We need natural law to be back into this country and move that direction.

When you say natural, what exactly does that mean? Are you talking about just mimicking the behaviors of nature and putting those into us because we are nature? What do you mean by natural law?

Yeah, in some ways, it's as simple as that. But the first nations people of the United States area, North America in general, had developed a massively effective form of governance that was managing huge population throughout the this. And so over 500 different tribes that were organized and, you know, certainly constantly skirmishing in wars, often throughout those small regions. But there was a, you know, thousands of years of. Of stability in those tribes with their nature, you know. And so we saw this great system of governance that may have been recent document I read was guessing that there may have been as many as 100 million First nations peoples throughout North America at that when looking at the late 1700s, something like that. So if those numbers are even close to accurate, that's spectacular accomplishment. And the Iroquois were the ones that really trained Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, all these people that we now probably erroneously referred to the Founding Fathers and things like this. But it was really the Iroquois that helped write, you know, all of the salient points of the Declaration of Independence because of their concept of natural law. We the people, you know, see these inalienable rights. That's all natural law. And what you can see is that that natural law was immediately usurped by the preamble to that sentence, which is a paragraph saying that while we recognize natural law, basically, there's also a God that's separate from that and is an equally important force. And we. We can. We can supersede natural law with God if needed. And so we did that saying our God is more important than, or we're more enlightened than yours. And so we can kill you, you know, we can take all of your land, whatever, because, yeah, yeah, natural law, but God supersedes that, you know. And so by this manifest destiny kind of belief system of the time, we allowed this document and our nation to become one of the most gruesome, you know, empires to ever unfold. And anybody who's Enjoying wealth today is enjoying the consequences of all of that abuse. Stolen land.

Yeah.

Slave labor. The abuses of millions of Africans stolen from their land, shipped here, abused for generations. We are. If you drive around in a car on a paved road and live in an air conditioned house in the United States of America, you're benefiting from that. And that includes anybody from any walk of life. You're benefiting from the abuse. And so, you know, if you're African American or you're Hispanic or whatever it is, there's this bizarre reality that the, the wealth that we move in in this country is blood money, you know, and we have to reconcile that or the empire collapses as it is today, because we're not coming to terms with these deep, you know, schisms in our philosophy and lack of value systems.

I'm coming to terms with them. When I was in the forest in Idaho, Tim Cookorin, who. Aubrey introduced me to him. And it was the most powerful thing. No drugs needed. I mean, just being in nature. No fire, just water. Water and a tarp and a pad. And I thought about you, I thought about all the people that I've interviewed. And it was this burning question that's taken me six months to ask you. And it was, how do we manage the dichotomy between people that are suffering financially but need help with their health versus how do we make a profit as a health company or an organization and actually take that money, bring it back to the company so we can serve more? Right. Because it's an organic cycle. But it takes a lot of responsibility and it takes a lot of heart in order to do that. So how do you do that? That was what I was thinking in the forest. We're consuming so much, we're fucking killing ourselves. We're killing the planet. How do we find the middle? Where's Lao Tzu's middle road here? How do you operate your companies like that?

Yeah, I come from an angle of endocrinology just because I was trained in it. But endocrinology is a study of basically the hormone systems and the cycles of communication in the human body that coordinate 70 trillion human cells with 1.4 quadrillion bacteria with 14 quadrillion mitochondria inside of us. And so there's somebody's googling quadrillion right now. Yeah, a thousand trillion. And so when you start to think about a thousand trillion, that's. You would spend eons counting to a quadrillion. Like it's such a vast number and yet there's 14 quadrillion microbes that are called mitochondria within you that are swapping genetic information across your, your genetics that you receive from mom and dad every day. There's this incredible plasticity between the genetics of the mitochondria and you. And so who you are today is being coordinated by this extraordinary cycle of communication and all of these endocrine of cycles to make sure that everything is coordinated. And so in a company like ours, we've done this by creating a parent company that is a flow through corporation. So we have all these LLCs that are built below the C corp and the LLCs function as R and D spaces. And so we can we file a single, you know, tax form for all of our subsidiaries because they're all 100% owned by the parent, they flow back up into it. And so we're able to take any money that are creating profit anywhere in the system and pump it back down into the creative process for root cause solutions for other things. So a good example of this is the issue of the farming stuff. So our first really successful product was Ion. And we were using 60 million year old soil because we don't have soil on the planet right now that can produce this kind of intelligence between the bacteria and microbes that existed previously. And so we knew we needed to begin the process of reinventing soil on the planet so that we're not relying on supplements for getting these critical nutrients back into humans. Humans have never seen these nutrients. We're only been here 200,000 years as Homo sapiens sapiens, as Homo erectus, maybe 12 million years. And so we don't know 60 million year old soil. And so when somebody starts taking these supplements, they're literally experiencing an intelligence of nature that has not occurred in human history. And what we see happening with that supplement in mind is people doing biologic and psychosocial psycho spiritual transformations that we could have never predicted because we were thinking biologically about the compounds. But it's not surprising that our psychospiritual sense of self is keyed into the entire ecosystem within us. If we're the, if we're 0.1% ultimately of the life within us, you know, then it must be the life within us that would actually define who we actually are and what our level of enlightened consciousness might be. So we needed to recreate soil. So we took our profits and started building the big non profit which is called Project Biome. It's got focuses in soil, water and air systems. Our first project was Farmer's Footprint. We Launched that with a film in February of 2018. We immediately kind of hit gold on that. We were recognized all over the world by not only consumers and farmers, but also by organizations that have been working in soil systems forever. We just happened to be able to very directly connect human health with soil health for the first time with our science. And so now we're really focused on can we create a world where we don't have 97% of our arable soils depleted or severely depleted? Instead, can they become the Garden of Eden? That would produce a level of intelligence over the next couple hundred years that would bring humanity to its next potential density of light energy. And so that's a regenerative organization. As we worked through that, we realized we needed really large for profit capital. We moved through those systems and so we started Biome Capital Partners, which is a big impact investment vehicle. And that big vehicle is now taking 18 months to get off the ground. But we have one of the most talented, you know, financial expert teams in the world that have taken early retirement from long careers and extraordinary spaces to come and join a group that has zero dollars in the bank.

They resonate deeply with your mission.

So they are the mission. Like they've known their whole life that they were going to do this, not having seen what it was going to be. And as soon as we showed them the opportunity, they jumped. And so they are now putting together what I think will be one of the most exciting mechanisms for accelerating regenerative agriculture. And then we're working on many other layers behind this to start accelerating the ways in which we realign soil values and real assets within soil systems to monetary systems. And so that's one example. Another example though is the plastics. And so every product on the planet now is so plastic heavy in its consumerism. And we knew that we were participating in that because we had plastic bottles and all of this and we couldn't use glass well, for a number of different reasons. And so we started channeling any additional profits into a new subsidiary called Resource Dynamics. And we've been working for six years to build a full scale plant which finishes in February. But we've been building a 40 foot mitochondria that digests any long chain carbon into biodiesel and biofuels.

How do you deploy a 40 foot mitochondria? How do you do that?

Well, it took basically re engineering some existing concepts around carbon metabolism and so use thermal processing techniques to break down long carbon change, which is exactly what a mitochondria does. So mitochondrial take long Carbon chain of carbohydrate like glucose or a fatty acid. And this whole low carb, low fat stuff is not biologically relevant. Like the, the mitochondria take both of those and in a single enzymat step to turn it to acetyl coa. And so fat sugar all becomes acetyl COA the instant it enters the mitochondria to then go into the fuel production process. Those long carbon chains of the fatty acid or sugar that's now acetyl CoA, those carbons are split off and CO2 is ultimately released through the respiratory process in the mitochondria. But the light energy that was made by the sun contacting chlorophyll that turned CO2 into long chain carbohydrates and fatty acids in plants is now reversed in our bodies when we eat. And so we release this huge abundance of light energy in the mitochondria. It's thought that a cubic centimeter of mitochondria, which is pretty much a cubic centimeter of tissue because each cell has over 200 mitochondria. A neuron has 2000 mitochondria in the axonal body. And so you have this massive amount of energy production, sunshine release, in any cubic centimeter of tissue. And it's thought those mitochondria are about 10,000 times more efficient than a cubic centimeter of the sun. And so there's so much efficiency in carbon release. And we're sitting here with all these waste streams with spare tires and plastics all over the world and a massive amount of agricultural wastes, bagasse being the biggest one around the world, which is sugarcane. And it just off gases methane for 30 years and, and pollutes the atmosphere. Hemp cane is now second biggest problem behind sugar cane. And it is producing a massive amount of methane out of California and Oregon and Colorado. And so there's an opportunity for us to put these units alongside all of these stockpiles globally to start cleaning up the mess. And it's a great example of how sacred commerce can happen. Because basically what you've said is, look, we're going to recognize the sovereignty of carbon itself. We're going to stop calling it waste. We're going to stop trying to bury it under the ocean. Ocean or in landfills or whatever it is. We're going to start to put a value on that because there's so much potential energy in it. And so a single unit can process 50 tons a day of material. So it's an extraordinary speed at which you're digesting massive Amounts of energy and the efficiency of the system is all done under a vacuum and all this. So it's a very exciting process to watch it unfold. So as we start scaling in 2022, with very large private equity and everything else coming in to help us accelerate globally, we have this opportunity to witness the financial opportunities that lie in doing the right thing. And so we need to stop believing that doing the right thing is expensive or it's going to cut into your profits, or doing the right thing on the global scale is always going to make you more wealthy. And so I think that that's true in any part of your life. And I'd say relationship is the one area that we most make a mistake in about this is we don't value relationship for what it's really capable of doing. And so we have very surfacey relationships. And, you know, we're not trained into sacred, holy relationship at any level. Friendship, marriage. We. We take these very surfacey versions of it. And so I think it's time for us, when we start thinking about sacred commerce, to put in maybe the word sacred value again. You know, just like, let's put sacred value back into everything.

Everything sacred, we just forget. And I. I feel like we do it on purpose. You know, our souls come into this world. You incarnated as Zach Bush. They'll never be another Zach Bush. It's beautiful.

Yet the load. Damn good thing.

The load that you're carrying, like, you're human. You're fallible. Like, yes. You have an incredible work ethic. You're doing so much good for the world. Like, you're helping to heal this circle of making commerce sacred again. But, like, how do you handle it, man? How do you carry that load? What are some ways that you integrate the strength in order to carry the load of all these things that you're doing? Because it's incredible.

I mean, I don't carry anything.

So you just hire people to carry it with you?

No, I don't think any of us carry it. When you're in sacred, sacred commerce, as you've called it there. When you're in a sacred mission, there's. There's literally higher energy carrying the mission, providing for the mission, making the mission work. You know, if you believe in God, we can simply just call it God. If you believe in extraterrestrials, you can call it aliens, whatever you want, but there's a higher intelligence than humans in the universe. And if you haven't found that out in your life, you've got a lot to look forward to because it's freaking beautiful. But so none of us, I make sure that nobody in our organizations have any sense of ownership over anything. We have to have our hands wide open and allow the universe to play through us. We, you know, there was a long period of time where I thought, you know, I had been given this vision for all of this in 2010, and it was. I had never started a company. I was still working at the University of Virginia in my cancer lab. And I was very depressed and lonely and isolated in academia. I had been, you know, started in my academic journey 17 years before that. So I'd been a long time through, through the whole pre med and medical training and all my subspecialties. And then being on faculty was the most depressing thing ever because you're suddenly, you know, no longer in a group of residents who are working 100 hours a week together in this intense camaraderie. Instead, you're just like at the very bottom of a rung of a 40 year journey through a politically unpleasant and uncaring system of academia. And so I was very depressed and just calling out to the universe for a different path, you know, and asked to be at the time a living. Sacrifice was the word that came. And this huge vision of what would become Seraphic group and all of that that I work through today came through and I didn't know what to make of it. I was overwhelmed. It was beautiful. I've never had an experience where I was just receiving information.

Were you in meditation or prayer? Was it cumulative or did it come to you all at once?

I didn't have a clue about any of that. I was literally just like a freaking cancer researcher. And I was in probably the lowest energy spot you could be in the world. So I was in this building built in the 1960s on the campus of the University of Virginia. It was a beautiful campus. It was built by Thomas Jefferson, has all that kind of founding fathers BS kind of going around all over the place. So you have this elite feeling to the whole experience. And yet there's this loneliness and emptiness within it all. And so I was in a much lower space than even that because in this old beat up building in my little tiny office, had enough room to walk to my desk chair and pull it out two feet and then sit down. And I was surrounded by six huge freezers that held thousands of tumor specimens. And so I literally was surrounded by death of cancer. And so I don't think I can imagine a much less spiritually enlightened Space.

And energetically, it just seems like a depressive.

Oh my gosh. Fluorescent lighting from the 1960s. Just like Cinder block walls painted by. No talks of biohacking, healing, paint, chipping, lead paint. I have no idea. It was just so toxic of an environment. And you know, when I look at how many years I spent in those labs, oftentimes not seeing the light of day because I'd be there before dawn. And by the time I was going home to my kids, it was dark and I was in a pretty dark space. And so sometimes I want to encourage everybody that spiritual enlightenment doesn't take some freaking process. It takes a willing heart. And if you just become willing for a second universe is going to freaking show up like you can't even believe. Doesn't take effort. It takes surrender. It's the opposite of effort. And so let go, let, let the go of all your beliefs about what it's going to take to become conscious or all these words we throw around in the, this metaphysical environment that are kind of, I think, in and of themselves almost low energy or diffuse. The real truth of the beauty, which is that we can't create any event. We, we aren't the creators of this thing. We are players in this beautiful symphonic dance of life within the universe. And we have this opportunity to surrender into that right now as humanity. And one thing that comes to mind that is one of my pet peeves is when I hear people saying that human consciousness is rising. First of all, there is no such thing as human consciousness. Consciousness is an access point to the knowledge field of all knowledge in the universe, which is. Works in the quantum field. The quantum field holds all of this in the black holes of the universe and all of this and the black holes within our own bodies. But there is not like a rise in consciousness. It's, it's a, it's a portal through which you're looking into the knowledge field and so either the, you're using that effectively as an access point to the knowledge field or not, but to, to put dominion over consciousness and call it human consciousness, this is just ludicrous.

I think we use these terms as human beings here in the 3D reality that we call home. And we try to make sense of things that are esoteric, but it's really hard sometimes to even understand what those mean. It's just human beings trying to fabricate words so we can understand the point of consciousness you're talking about, which is very intense at times. And I see spirituality being commodified where, you know, on My podcast, I've had many spiritual, quote, leaders and I just interviewed Danielle laporte and she asked this powerful question to you. Actually, I was messaging her this morning and I said, what would you ask Zach? And she said, ask him about hope. Ask him where he pulls hope from. Because I think that can bring us closer to the portal instead of it being called, quote, quote, human consciousness rising. Maybe hope is it.

Hope is definitely an interesting one in that it's, it's often mis portrayed as an emotion. Right. Or something like that, but it's a state of being. I would say the same about joy. I would say the same thing about real, real love. You know, the, the sensation of being in love or something like that lasts about seven seconds and then you have to rekindle it. So that's it.

Seven?

Yeah, yeah. The amygdala only works for like seven seconds on these intense emotions and it fizzles itself out because it's a huge neurologic effort to create all those sensations that we would have, you know, akin to one of these intense emotions of whether it be lust, anger, you know, you know, quote unquote, you know, fluttering love, whatever it is. And so when we start, step away from the amygdala, when we step away from our emotional brain and start stepping into a state of existence, that's where the state of joy, a state of peace, a state of, you know, hope, these are, these are vibrational states. And so it's not something that needs to be manufactured. It's not something that needs to be, you know, conjured up. It's simply a tuning in. And so you tune into a frequency and it happens to be hope.

What's your process for tuning? Because we're not cultivating it is what I'm hearing from you. We're not cultivating.

We don't create hope.

We're attuning ourselves to it.

How do we do that?

That we attune ourselves?

Yeah, I mean, I think everybody's going to have a different process for me. For me. I'm a huge fan of silence. I'm not a huge fan of the word meditation because it has a lot of, I think, preconceived notions around it. And I'm not the best meditator in the strict practice of it. Instead, I find it much easier to use the word silence because it reminds me of the process. And so when I go into silence, I fly all the time. And so airplanes are like my best friend these days because I can put on my noise canceling headphones And I now fall asleep, typically before the plane even rolls. And I'm just in a space. And I'll usually wake up, you know, 20, 30 minutes later from this micro nap in this, like, relaxed alpha state. And I've got a number of Sanskrit soundtracks that I like listening to that help me access a vibrational energy of silence, because I'm not understanding the Sanskrit, so I'm not thinking about the words. Instead, I'm feeling the experience of this deep wisdom. And so find a space somehow, whether it be through any of these tools or your own path, but find that space and then just stop trying to create anything and completely go into this state of willingness from the heart. Yes, I am. Yes, I am willing to. I'm willing, I'm willing, I'm willing. And it's intense what the universe will call you into if you are. If you are willing. It's going to take you on a beautiful freaking journey. But humanity's not doing that journey, so it's going to be challenging on the people around you. It's been challenging for my own family, I think, over the years, because I'm just not the same person that I used to be they spent 40 years with back then. The last 10 years has been so different. And I'm very blessed with a loving family that still very much loves me. But I think it's been hard for them to watch me go through all of these chapters. And my life has. I've had to let go of so many things, so many things, and, you know, I now just have, like, so little to call my own, which I love. I've got this log cabin in the woods that me and my son built together, you know, 13 years ago. And that. That log home in the woods is just all I need, you know, and it's more than I need. And I. It's now my sacred space. And that it's got all my blood, sweat and tears in there for sure, but it's. It's got a. It's a breathing entity itself. It's made out of living, living walls. And, you know, it's. It's a process of watching nature dance through my life and reclaim this home. The carpenter bees and the woodpeckers are steadily taking it apart and returning it to nature. And I love watching it happen. I love just, you know, not spraying it all dead and trying to sterilize the house. I have such a hard time killing any bug in. In any place, but especially in my home. You know, cockroaches seem sacred. The, you know, the whole thing just. Just breathes life because it's real and it's, you know, not trying to claim or sterilize itself, you know, into loneliness. I feel when I'm in that home alone. I feel very surrounded by love.

Yeah, we all need a sacred space like that.

Feel entities. I feel. Feel nature around me. I feel like I can hear the trees talking to me. It's. It's just a stunning experience to start to give up dominion in all parts of your life and be willing to lose everything that you've been told you wanted or needed. And if you just keep asking yourself, am I willing? Am I willing to go, Go different, be bigger, whatever. Be different is enough. You know, just show me a path that's my highest vibration, or whatever you want to ask for, but. And be willing. And that means you're gonna have to let go of a lot.

It's one of the biggest things that you've had to let go of since the pandemic, since March. I remember we talked both in person and virtual last year, and you do seem different. I get an energy from you that you have let go of quite a bit. So what's something big that you've let go? That's. Honestly, Zach, a mirror for all of us. Everybody had their shit come up, up during COVID Yeah. And epigenetically, physiologically, societally, politically, like, there's not one space where we haven't had to deal with our own by looking in the mirror. So with all. I mean, you're incredibly mature, you handle a lot of things in this world, and you do it with an element of grace. How do you do that? And. And what have you had to let go of to be in that grace, to be in that vibration?

Well, certainly during the pandemic, I had to give up any value of my public perception, you know, my. The public's opinion of me, you know, and so by just staying true to what I know and speaking my. My honesty as much as possible, it put me through a lot of, you know, just the interesting phenomenons of a cancellation society and cancel culture and just, you know, watching people read into you what they want to hate, you know, and all of that. And so I've had to give up any care for what people think of me, and that's been empowering for sure. And I've never been more childlike in my life. I have just. I sleep like a freaking baby these days, you know, I'm just. I don't even know how to feel stress at the moment. In My life. I hope I never learn to do it again because. Because I can't find any scenario that could be defined as failure anymore. It's just like, no, that doesn't actually even exist. There's only journey, and we need to completely let go. I guess the biggest thing I've let go of is judgment on myself. And I stopped judging my own path. I stopped judging myself for failed relationships or failed beliefs about was I good enough dad here or there, or was I, you know, good enough employer or, you know, yeah, it's hard not to, you know, hold on to everybody who's let go from your company over time. Not to take that personally, all these things. So there's a lot of levels of just letting go of that judgment that has been transformative in my life. And I have finally been able to see my own beauty, which, if you'd asked me a year ago, I'd be like, oh, yeah, I know how to do self love and all this stuff. Like, yeah, no, I didn't have a freaking clue. Yeah, because I was trying to engender the. The emotion of self love and the fabric of everything. If you've probably heard this in other podcasts I've done. But, you know, one of my colleagues, you know, came back from this message from a journey that he was on and got a clear message for Zach. And Christ told him that the fabric tells Zach, the fabric of everything is not love, which I had been railing against. I was so frustrated with this. How is it the fabric of everything? Because if it is, then we are nowhere near an enlightened species because we seem to do this thing so poorly and we don't even understand what it is. And came back with this incredible message that the fabric of everything is not love. Love. The fabric of everything is beauty. And when you see beauty, you can have the experience of love. And so that transformed my life. And hearing that a couple years ago, and I didn't realize I hadn't seen my own beauty yet, you know, and I hadn't put those pieces together. And just in the last six months or so, overwhelming experiences of seeing the beauty of the sacred thing within me, soul or whatever you want to call it, that's beautiful. It's beautiful to. To behold. There's. There's literally a. Like a star being inside of me, you know, and you all have that. You all have that in you. And nobody has empowered any of us to go and find that thing, connect to that thing. And when you do, you know, suddenly the idea of fearing anything seems Ludicrous. Fearing death is the most ludicrous thing. Because all you know now is you're going to step back into that full potential of that star being when you step past this veil of this physical meat suit. And so you lose the fear of death, you lose the fear of failure if you're still holding on to that concept of this and you start to play a different game. And that game has shifted from a finite game. So if you look at the way in which commerce, governments, sociopolitical belief systems, social systems, educational systems, they all play a finite game, which is always a finite game, is always designed so there's a winner and loser. The infinite game is designed so that we can keep playing. There is no win or loser. There is no right or wrong. There is no light in dark. There is no. There's only a balanced energy within the system, right? And for its balance we get to continue to play. And so when you find your own beauty at that soul level, you let go of fear and guilt at that moment. You're playing an infant game for the first time. And suddenly every single conversation you have is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen. And I was falling asleep last night talking to a friend. I'm blessed with some of the most heart open men in the world. Like just amazing group of men around me, amazing group of women around me who are just pushing the envelope for themselves and for all of us on coming into alignment with our own beauty. And by talking to a friend last night and he's holding space for, you know, just our conversation unfold. And he dropped a few lines in there that just were. Just spoke to me at the soul level. I was kind of half into sleep and can't even repeat them right now because I don't remember them so clearly. But I remember them feeling like they reset my cellular structure. Like just, yeah, I didn't hear them in my brain. I felt it in my body when he said these truths and fell asleep in this state of just awe. If I had just had the most beautiful conversation I'd ever had and then woke up this morning and had freaking mind boggling great conversation with Aubrey Marcus and wife staying at their place and.

Just.

Most beautiful conversation I've ever had. And here we are having the most beautiful conversation I've ever had. And so it can get to this point where you're in such awareness of the beauty around you and the souls that you are touching and you can start to see through the divine eye, the beauty and other people around you. And when you see their beauty, they immediately go to the next level. Immediately. There is no need for psychotherapy. There's no need for trauma counseling. We simply can heal immediately if we can see each other's beauty. And that's hopeful for a world so full of trauma, so full of angst, and very justified victimhood, we can heal that so fast when we see each other beauty. And there's an access point there for that vibration that we would call hope.

There's so many questions I want to ask you from what you just said. Good Lord. But the one that I really want to ask you is the one that hit your soul when you said your friend was speaking to you. I feel like whenever I really hear the truth. No, bullshit. Whenever I really hear the truth, it imprints my water, it imprints my body. And. And what I heard from you when you were talking about going right to the beauty in conversation, going right to the beauty in someone. There's a natural, almost like a snake shedding its skin that we have to do spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally. How do we begin that process? I mean, I understand what you're saying. I can truly connect with the beauty of you right now. And I'm feeling all the people with us that maybe are having a hard time doing that for themselves.

So let's just do it together now. Let's put our feet on the ground in front of us. Uncross your legs. If they're crossed, put your feet down. Push your chest out gently. Open up that heart center. Let your shoulders fall away from your ears. Let your breath relax. With your eyes closed. Relax your eyeballs. You carry a lot of tense energy behind those eyes. Let gravity take over. Turn them into jello. Relax the forehead. Now let it melt space between your eyes. Relax the top of your scalp. Now feel root systems shooting down from your feet down into the earth. Mycelial networks coming in contact with those roots. To talk, to, nourish. Bring your attention to the space between the floor of the pelvis and your belly button. It's called the Dan Chien and many of the Chinese practices. In that quiet space, you have an animated. Hologram or image of your entire soul there, right in that space of your pelvis. And it's untouched. The vibration of the soul is immune to, separate from any human trauma, human emotions, human belief systems. These souls predate the existence of life on earth. And so when you're in this space between the pelvis and the belly button there, you're in a sacred space. You're in the holy of holies. Of your own body in many ways. So if we call this your core, this is a space you can come into, listen into, Feel the silence there, there. Feel the lack of chaos. There is no chaos. There. In that space is something so beautiful, so complete. There's an opportunity here to wind divine, feminine, divine, masculine. Together we stop looking to one another as humans looking to complete each other in relationship. Instead complete ourselves through this holy relationship, through this holy opportunity to combine, intertwine like a double stranded DNA. Bring together the divine masculine and feminine within your body. Channel it down into that tan tien, into that core. Feel the pelvis fill with warmth. Feel it expand. Feel the tailbone, the sacrum relax like your tail unfurling. Relax the floor of the pelvis. Feel the fullness of the space, the warmth and the energy. This is your access point for the entire knowledge field of the universe. Everything's remembered, everything is integrated. This space is always there for you. You are exquisitely beautiful. You are enough. We can lose judgment on the journey. There is no failure. There's no victories. The journey is exactly what it's needed to be to bring us together now, to take a step forward as a humanity that is ready to engage nature, A universal intelligence without any sense of dominion, ownership, division, scarcity. Step into the silence to recognize the abundance. We can start to realign commerce, sociopolitical things, our jobs, our relationships to the tune of this completed symphony within us, the masculine and feminine divine within each of us. We are balanced. We are no longer in need of one another. We instead have the opportunity to be in reverence to one another. As you come back, you can pull the roots up back into your body so that you can walk again, bringing the nutrients from Mother Earth back up in your body. Now, don't forget you have feet. You spend so much time in your head, you forget you have these legs and these feet. These are your transportation systems to take you on the path of your life. Give gratitude to your feet right now. Give gratitude to your ankles, your calves. And thighs, hamstrings, glutes, Core, Belly, chest, shoulders, neck. Beautiful face. This is your body. You've been given it for great purpose. Take care of it. Be grateful for it. It's exactly the vessel you needed to achieve your highest path. Give deep gratitude for it, for its imperfections, for the age that you might carry. This is the track record of your path. The body remembers that, and that's okay. And be grateful for this body. These are the arms that will hug the people that you will come to see as Beautiful. This is the heart that will explode when you find your own beauty. Be well. Look for the vibration of hope in your life. Draw near to those that heighten that vibration.

I feel this beautiful lump of sadness. Not fear that we die. It's not. It's not a fear that we die. It's a sadness. And that sadness reminds me how special it is for me to have my son. For me to be with my partner. Carrie is profound. Thank you. I was hearing my son cry in the background. Connecting to what you said and.

It.

Was pretty overwhelming for a second in the most beautiful way. Grateful for you, Zach. Grateful for this life and our ability to be here. Thank you.

Grateful for the opportunity and fellowship. Grateful to be with all of you listening right now. There's a collapse of space time when we get into these spaces together. There's a camaraderie here that we should come to practice often. Sacred community will certainly birth sacred commerce in the future. But it will begin with your own relationship to self. And I want to remind you, will not find that beauty of self without some incredible mirror around you. And so find the people that are willing to be witness to your journey as you surrender freaking everything. You don't. You can't build consciousness. You can't work hard enough to become conscious. You literally have to do the other way. You have to go into complete release. Tell the universe you cannot do it yourself and that you're going to let go of it and instead receive it. It instead of create it. Receive everything. Tap into that. It is infinite. Energy is infinite. All energy is information. All information is for connection. There is a galactic ecosystem of life within you that is all interconnected and talking all the time. There's a galactic community throughout this universe of life on who knows how many planets that is resonating back towards us. Intelligence of millions of varieties. We are not alone. We are here to be in fellowship with the planet, with the ecosystems within us, with the ecosystems of the universe. We're here to be reconnected to the greatest nature at the greatest scale. We can step into that. We can become co creators once we learn to receive. As a gift to be with each of you. There's a huge opportunity that we're sitting here right now with is that when we get up and walk away from this, we could allow everything to be different or we could walk away from this and try to get ourselves back into the stressed out mindset that we had been in. There's an opportunity for you to let go of it. Just let go of all of it. Let go of any sense of failure, of financial failure, relational failure. None of that's true. The money system is not at all tied to any real value. If you can't make money that's worthless, then who cares? Start creating value in your life and you will be heavily rewarded. Create value in everything you do, starting with yourself and the relationships you put around yourself. Be inclusive with your love. Love everything. Love everyone. Sit across from anyone you meet with the awareness that this is the most important conversation you've ever had because it is the one you are having right now. And for that we're going to have a different result. Different society, different political system, macroeconomic system. All of that can switch over in an instant. When we start to allow this natural law to emanate through everything, when we put a value system back into everything.

Somebody's experiencing that for the third or the fourth time. And they're doing their best in there, in communion with you and I. And they're met with censorship or they're met with exclusion. They're met with a different terrain than what you just created for us. How have you. How can they, how can we all deal with and learn to transcend from this insanity of censorship? I'm wrong, you're right.

Yeah. It's such a low energy environment that is just like once you keep dropping into that space where we just were, it's going to become irrelevant to you. It's not a value system at all. It's. It's just a. It's a form of self abuse, the way that people do this. So remember, if you're being attacked, it's simply people hating themselves if they project that hate on you. It's. It's just a instance of human behavior there. It's not personal to you. It's other people failing to love themselves or see their own beauty. I have huge compassion for the people that have lashed out at me at different times. This scar on my face is kind of interesting. I got hit by a beer bottle in a bar on my last day of residency. Split my face up. And it was not what you're expecting Zach Bush to be doing with his life at the time. But I'd been coming out of three years of intense internal medicine residency. We'd been working 80 hours a week at least with this group of 35 doctors. And it was the last day of residency. And so we all went out that night. I had been chosen as one of the chief residents. So I was continuing on another year of faculty appointment and teaching and So I was actually on call that night as chief resident for the hospital system and managing kind of hospital admissions from the emergency room and other hospitals around our network and everything else. And so I was the only one needing to be sober that night. Everybody else was a bit liquored up there for three years of working their tails off and celebrating kind of the last time they'd see each other largely and kind of all going to the wind to their different careers at that point. And so we went to this dance club and Charlottesville, Virginia is called Rappers. And it was happened to be hip hop night on a Thursday night there. Not exactly known as hip hop dancer here, but I bet you have a good one. Love dancing and I definitely did a lot of break dancing as a kid and sucked at it really bad, but loved it. And so I was just having a freaking ball. So dancing hard in the night. At about midnight 1am it got really crowded and so this little dance club got packed and it was kind of shoulder to shoulder and. And this gentleman in the corner started freaking out on acid or something and picked up this cocktail table and threw it at our group and didn't seem to be like necessarily targeting our group just through this table. And he was screaming at the universe, you know, just angry and whatever. And so I watched two of his friends go grab him and push him back through the crowd. So I pick up this table and I put it back and turn around and walk back my group and got. Got smashed in the face by something that I just. I figured something fell off the roof or something. Like I didn't see anything coming. It was just smashed in the face. I spun around a couple times and landed on a table and kind of a little bit blurry and kind of figured out where I was and stood up. And I was wearing red shirts. I didn't. When I looked down, I didn't notice anything. And then I turned around and this little resident who's friend of mine looked up in my face and she just like went white as a ghost. And I suddenly realized there's something going on and reached up on my face and I could feel my skull on my right side of my face. And the zygomatic arch, which is the thing that creates your cheekbone, is this arch of bone. And I reached up and accidentally reached all the way around my zygomatic arch, realizing like all the tissue was gone. And so, you know, immediately went downstairs into the restroom area there and looked in the mirror and bone is beautiful. Living bone is like one of the Most beautiful things you've ever seen. It looks like the inside of a clamshell or an oyster shell where you have, like, this pearlescent quality to it. It's like pink living tissue. It doesn't look white. It doesn't look like, you know, bone that when it's dead, it's just, you know, a skeleton, if you will. Living bone is this vibrant quantum tissue. And so I was watching my own skull in such fascination, having never seen it, obviously, and struck by just the beauty of that, and then kind of coming back around, like, I better stop this bleeding. I was bleeding profusely. The face bleeds pretty. Pretty hard when it split apart like that. And so my. My shirt and pants were just covered in blood. Grabbed a huge wad of paper towels and just shoved it on my face as hard as I could, try to stop the bleeding. And we were only a couple blocks from the hospital. And I came out of the bathroom. There's 30 doctors freaked out and all just, like, in shock and all drunk. And I just burst out laughing. I was like, three years of training. You guys are all useless. Just, like, useless, cumulative hundred years of training out the window. Like, nobody's helping me here. So I drove myself to the ER with two of my friends who had drank too much in the back seat, making sure that I didn't pass out on the way to the ER because it was going to take too long for naming ambivalence to get there. So within, like, four minutes, I'm over at the hospital. I'm walking in the glass doors of the emergency room that I'd been so well aware of, worked so hard in over the years and walked in. One of my best friends in the emergency room was in there as the chief ER resident that night, and he just burst out laughing when he saw me. He's like, what, Zach? Like, of all the freaking people, this would be you walking and looking like this. He's like, what the hell happened? I was like, I was just in a bar fight, and that. That I was the most unlikely human being in the world to ever be in a bar fight.

Yeah.

But you know, the interesting thing that I learned from that is that that man who walked up behind me and smashed a. A full beer bottle on my face was so afraid of me that he couldn't even do it to my face. Come up behind me and smash that. And he was like. Like, I'm just a skinny white kid. He's a huge, muscled up, you know, dude. And, like, could have crushed me, you know. Like, whatever. Like, I could have. I would have never fought this guy. Right. You know, but the fact that it went down like that, I never saw him because as soon as he'd smashed me, a couple of his friends grabbed him, ran him out of the place. And. And so it gave me this deep sense of, there is no perpetrator here. There is no. There's. There's a broken humanity here. I'm part of it. His anger is totally justified. You know, I represent the colonialism that has enslaved his people and his ancestors, and whatever abuses they've suffered, I've profited from, you know, and so I. I could never have any anger towards him or, you know, and I was just in awe of the resources that were immediately at my disposal. Like, you know, I was surrounded by friends who cared about me, and they called in the chief plastic surgeon for me and spent five hours getting my. They cleaned up this huge blunt trauma into these clean edges and brought my face together in 60 stitches or something like this. And I was back in the hospital at 6 o' clock in the morning for the first day of residency, for this new class coming in. And I looked like freaking hell and welcomed my team of new residents and said that this is going to be the best 3 years of your life, and it's going to change who you.

Are in your face.

Yeah. I mean, I've got, like, just. I'm so swollen at that point. Like, I look like they were just like, wow.

Being a doctor is kind of intense. Yeah.

And I was like, you know, I was just in a bar fight last night, and it's like. So I was like, you know, you think you're coming to sleepy Charlottesville, but it's really the knife and gun club around here. Anyway. It's just so funny. The whole thing is so ridiculous, but it stuck with me. And I get this little tingle across that part of my face. There's a little bit of neuropathy from the damage there, but I get this little tingle from time to time whenever I start to feel sorry for myself or feel abused by the system or someone cancels me or whatever it is. You know, it's like this little tingle comes through just to remind me of, like, you know, there's no. There's no victimhood here. There's no perpetrator here. There's. There's humanity struggling to come in line with a nature that loves it and to express our own beauty. And so I'm grateful for the moment. It gave me a different sense of self. Walking out of that, I became a lot more confident after that. I had never been through, you know, minor little fights and punching people, getting punched in the face by little sixth graders on the playground or something silly, but I had never been really nearly unconscious from a blow like that. And realizing how well my body took it and realizing how resilient the healing process is, it just gave me some lots of new beautiful concepts and deep insights into my own physiology, my own spirituality, my own sense of connection with the man that smashed that bottle on my face. I. I feel for him. I know that he was just under a huge amount of suffering that night. He's so lonely, so terrified of the universe and feeling completely hopeless and out of tune with himself. And the same thing happened about one week later on the same Thursday night seen. And this time it was one of the staff that got hit by the same guy. And so the third week, they were ready for that and he showed back up and SWAT team raided the place and made a few different arrests and all this. And to this day, I'm kind of bummed it all went that direction because I just kind of wish that he had hit me and walked away and learned something from it instead. Said, you know, our system vilified him and put him in prison and perpetuated a cycle of new slavery that we call, you know, prison. African Americans in our prison system are so abused. And you see this, you know, they're arrested for something like that. They'll never vote again. We take that right away and they're no longer a citizen. That's horrible. This shouldn't be allowed. We should never take away voting rights, I believe, from anybody.

And yeah, it actually kind of reminds me of what you talked about with cancer, because you've mentioned many times that cancer is when cells stop communicating. So what happens to us as people when I stop listening to you or when we stop listening to people because they've done something atrocious? Yeah, it's the cancer of the spirit, cancer of the society. It's cancer of the body. Is cancer all the same. Does it really operate on the same fundamental principle?

Yeah, the meta disease beyond cancer, even all disease, the meta disease is isolation. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Works every time. Any system left in isolation increases its chaos, period. Second law says entropy, which is one of my favorite words, but it's second to the word syntropy, which is the opposite of entropy. And we have the opportunity to step into syntropy with a nature that we've been entropic with. Because we isolated ourselves from nature, we've isolated ourselves one another. So we get school shootings, we get 65 year old men climbing towers in Las Vegas and shooting hundreds of strangers down below. That's just a isolated cell that's become so out of tune with the original organism, forgetting it is part of that organism altogether. That's the saddest soul in the system. And we have have a way of feeling righteous about anger at that person. And we try to met out justice, to try to even the playing field, bring light to the dark, even it out. It's not working. That's not how we're going to bring balance to the system. We're going to have to start to realize that each of these instances, cancer or school shootings or whatever it is, are going to all be our path forward. One of the most beautiful things I've found out in medicine at this point in my life, especially through energetics energy medicine, is that the antidote for every injury lies within the wound. And we have a tendency to run away from the wound. We have tendency to suppress the pain instead of walking into the pain. And so in the pain that we have in this society over the chronic abuse, the raping and killing of women, the raping and killing of indigenous peoples, the stealing of lands that we continue to do around the globe in the, in the, this time, you know, masquerading as corporations that are out to feed the world. We go and steal lands from indigenous people all over the world through these land grabs. And our big corporations are acting as their own form of militias at this point. And they hire local militias in these developing world and do land grabs and literally push indigenous people out of their land that they've been on for hundreds of thousands of years without any care of where they end up. And we fence those properties and call them ours and make a bunch of sugar cane too.

It's not just us though, it's China as well. China's owning multiple like huge acreage in Africa. And it's not just America. It's like this, it's a global consciousness.

Yeah.

That we're experiencing. And I. Zach, like this interview is so interesting. Like I, I feel a different part of you than I've ever felt. It's really beautiful.

Appreciate that.

It's really beautiful because I just put my questions away because obviously we're talking about community. But I mean the things that you've already expressed, those are all the ingredients we need, we don't actually need anymore.

Yeah, I mean than what You've expressed. I want to just tell everybody right now that it's already been one, the whole journey's already won. It's the infinite game already got played out. Space time is a perception of our own third density, third dimensional reality that we think we're living within here, but it's already done. There is at the end of time, an extraordinarily beautiful journey of human history where a great enlightenment continued over time. And we've seen through our history of the last few thousand years, moments of those enlightenments, moments of great change and understanding of who we are. And I think we're right now in the biggest scientific shift revolution that we've ever been in right now. And those scientific revolutions of the past have led to enlightenment moments. The Greeks discovered, with the work of Pythagoras and other early geometry forefathers, mothers of the time, they started to make breakthroughs in understanding geometry of the heavens and realized that the Earth was not flat, that it was actually a sphere. And it was so disruptive to not just scientific thought at the time, but religious beliefs. And it led to a really huge explosion of new perception and new new questions being asked. And 1600 years later, we would see the invention of the telescope, or 1400 years in 1400, the telescope, and we would suddenly discover that the planet was not in the center of the universe, which was shocking. We certainly feel like we're still. And we thought that the heavens were swirling around us to find out that we were swirling around the sun with a bunch of other planets. And this sun is a tiny speck in a massive galaxy of a billion suns.

Have you seen the Carl Sagan video? The pale blue dot?

Yes.

Oh my God. We're gonna link that. I mean, yeah, we're so. We're like a speck of sand.

Speck of sand.

We truly are.

Yeah.

There's so much we don't understand at all.

Yeah. And so that was super disruptive to religious control at the time, you know, and suddenly, if there's billions of other, other planets, is there life out there? So we started asking new questions and we started making ourselves available to new possibilities. And now in the last 15 years, with the advent of genetic sequencing, we have a very, very big revolution of paradigm shifting science happening, which is talking.

About CRISPR or something different genetic sequence.

Genetic sequencing is meaning we can decode the genetic fabric of any tissue in the body to figure out what's in there, what genes are active in any tissue of the body or whatever. So genetic sequencing has shown us that the human cell is not at the center of human health or human life. And at the center of human life is this vast ecosystem of almost invisible creatures. Bacteria, fungi, protozoa, archaea, parasites. And that's at the center of human health. What does that mean about who we are? Well, we are walking ecosystems of intelligence that go far beyond a nervous system that we would call human. And so we are a sensory processing system for all life on the planet. That's what I've come to see us as. And as a sensory processing unit for life that has been developing for 4 billion years, there's an intelligence that we can access that's insane, massive, and we have no need to remember it because it's already remembered, it's already integrated. It's in our fabric. And so as I sit here, I'm. I'm about three and a half weeks into five weeks of continuous travel. I haven't been in the same bed for more than two nights for that time. And there's a state of peace in me moving from spot to spot because I just still am me. And it's because I'm not Zach. I'm. I'm a collection of intelligent vibration, an ecosystem within. And the human construct of the belief of Zach is such a small part of what I actually am. And so if somebody wants to go attack the Zach piece, it's kind of like getting a hangnail. It's just, like, so inconsequential at this point here. You can hate Zach, but, man, my 14, quadrillion mitochondria kind of kick ass. You might want to love that, you know, and so it's. It's just very pleasant to come into a reality where there is no longer any belief of needing to be a personality or maintain some sort of character or be performative in your work or performative in your relationships. You know, just let all that fricking stuff go. So surrender, surrender, surrender. Open your hands up, keep them face up so that you can receive whatever the universe wants to pour in and expect everything to transform easier than you could have ever expected. Because if you think through, oh, my gosh, I'm in this relationship, I'm stuck, no finances, job's terrible, and I never have the access to do my company I always wanted to start and blah, blah, you have all this, stop the chatter in your head, stop that, and come down into that core that we just practiced getting into earlier. Come to that space and just laugh. Just freaking laugh.

I love the ground I was feeling. I was actually visualizing all the mycelium wrapping around me almost like vines.

That's it.

And, and I loved it because, man, I've definitely like growing a business and, and what I'm doing is like very micro considered to your macro. Right. And I'm not comparing myself. I'm sorry, just speaking to two different missions, two different things. And I have experienced so much stress, hot air, weight gain, self judgment, all these things. And I've had to go through them. I mean, actually, it's beautiful. I've had the gift of going through them because they really are a gift, but they don't feel like it in the moment. In the moment I feel like I'm bleeding or I feel like I feel like I'm dying at times.

Feel like you're failing.

I feel like I'm failing self judgment. So this paradigm, I think of it, it's almost like a silver ball on a string. And we all play that game. The most of us, not all of us, actually most of us. And it just goes back and forth. It's like, you didn't do enough. You have shame. Go back to working hard. You didn't do enough. Go back to working hard. How do we like take that game apart? Just drop that game. This paradigm of self shame, judgment. I'm not doing enough. I think I look at all the buildings in downtown Austin, man. How many of those buildings were built from men who had father wounds and they had to prove themselves because they weren't enough? Like, we've got to change the paradigm here. So I feel like you should run for office, man. I really do. Like, we need a breath of fresh air in politics. So how do we change that paradigm? It's a massive question, but I like, big question.

Yeah. I mean, my grandmother told me that that would happen when I was a kid.

She said you'd be in politics.

Yeah, yeah. And my, my, my family, of course, always has been.

But you're not Bush family. Oh, so you are related to George W. Yeah. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah. The Bush family arrived in 1617 at the beginning of the country. And just 10 years after Jamestown was found founded. John Bush arrived there in 1617. And okay. And then the family kind of went two different directions. My side of the family went with Daniel Boone through the Kentucky Gap and settled Boonsboro. The other part of the Bush family ended up heading north to Connecticut.

That's so wild.

So H and W are both from the Connecticut side of the family. And then my side of the family was Southern Democrats and my grandfather worked directly With Eleanor Roosevelt as kind of her right hand man during the, the New Deal and the rebuilding of the economy coming out of the Dust bowl and all that. A lot of beautiful parks were built from that years. Yeah, yeah, a lot of big infrastructure, the national park systems, all this. But Eleanor drove herself around in her own Model T. He dried in the passenger seat and they'd go from D.C. down into Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, through the coal mine regions that were just starving, literally starving, soup lines miles long. And they would, Eleanor Roosevelt and my grandfather Monroe Bush would be in service there. And you know, she ended up being one of the most important political voices I think in that century. She, she really helped envision what a world after World War II would look like so that that would never happen again. And she wrote, she was put in charge of the new UN Commission for Human Rights and wrote the 50 point designation of the Declaration of Human Rights for the Whole world. And that 50 point document has never been utilized effectively, but is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing. And what you realize when you read that is the founding fathers forgot the founding mothers. We would have never written the Declaration of Independence like we did or the Constitution had there been women in the room. If we had included the wisdom of the matriarchy of the feminine archetype within that they would have created an infinite game rather than a finite colonial, you know, abuse system. We would not have killed so much, we would not have stolen so much, you know, and so we need a balance of the infinite game, the natural law, the feminine archetype back in. And so if I'm ever going to run for office, it's going to be with a huge group of women around me. And we're not going to let a system tell, tell us what kind of input we can give. We're going to come with a huge platform of women who can see the mechanisms of real social change and create spaces for real deep reconciliation with our history, with the abuses and all of that. Because leading a country under its current formation, under its current documents, under its current form of colonialism is not an option anymore for any us.

Is the colonialism also the, the game, the paradigm, the shame, the fear? Is it the same thing?

Yeah. Colonialism is, seems like it is the direct result of scarcity. And so if you believe in scarcity, then you have to go steal resources from anyone you can find.

And even when we're experiencing a perceived from the egoic space of scarcity is simply not true.

No doesn't exist. Energy is literally infinite in the universe, energy on the planet, planet is infinitely accessible. And so all we have to do is start closing all these loops of waste and brokenness and we're going to have free electricity by 20, 40, 50. There's no cost to electricity because we're bringing energy production in line with nature's design of H2O. Mostly we're going to start releasing the energy from hydrogen and oxygen at the moment that it combines to make water. And that energy source is insane. Like it's literally will make energy free.

And Zach, I feel high, I feel high from our conversation. Man, I really love your wisdom and I know that there is so much going on in your community. Like you've been, you travel, you teach, you educate. We all need community. I mean, it makes me emotional just to say it. Like I, I have fallen into that trap where I, I stay at home and work. That's all that I do. I, I get stuck in these work loops. But it's so beautiful to like, you know, we hug today. So beautiful. Or when I go and sit with men and we hug each other and, and we need that on such a profound scale. How do we do that virtually? Or is that not even possible? Like, what are you doing to lead your community right now in that way? I've seen you put out a lot of content and education.

Yeah, obviously I do a ton virtually. But you know, I think that I'm getting better and better at transcending the virtual space into making a really spiritual connection with anybody, you know, and obviously depends on how the other person shows up, I suppose. But you know, I think I've, I've lost any sense of, you know, inefficacy in that space. But I also would be not the person I am today if I didn't every single day seek out community every single day. And I have surrounded myself with the most hard, open, generous human beings that I could ever meet. And they have continued to push the envelope in their own life of becoming more generous and more heart open. And so that giving economy is definitely happening around me. I have people leaving 25, 30 year careers at the biggest companies in the world, the biggest finance companies in the world, to help start my own capital partners, which has no money at the moment. So to see people rallying to a concept and being willing to leave behind huge wealth potential that they're giving up to step into the space to say, this must be done, we must begin a reconciliation with nature through our food systems. We have to do this. So this is really what it's about at this point is building community and being with them on a daily basis. And so I spend a lot of time in my, my evenings on the phone with friends because I'm in a space being able to listen in my quiet time to other people's wisdom that just re. Just resets my cells before I go to sleep, you know, because when I started to sleep, now it's just a process of making sure I've let go of whatever happened in the day so that I don't create any beliefs or perceptions from that day that I would then imprint on tomorrow because I could only limit what's going to happen tomorrow. So to go into that completely free potential for a completely revolutionary and transformative day tomorrow, you have to let go of stuff. And it's easiest for me to do that sometimes when I'm listening into the hearts and minds of my friends. And so, yeah, you're running a small business. And the toughest time of my life was in those first five years of starting my clinic out in rural Virginia. And I was so isolated and so freaking exhausted. I was seven days a week, you know, in that stupid little clinic making no money. I was working, you know, part time jobs in hospice and things like that so I could pay my mortgage and keep my kids fed. And I was always out of money every month. I was in the whole, you know, getting the bank notices and all that for years and took a toll on my family for sure. Took a toll on me because I was taking it so personally.

Yeah, what are you taking it personally? Like, why is this happening to me more?

I'm failing that constant belief that I was failing, you know, and this isn't working. And I was angry at God in the universe for quite a while in there because I was like, you gave me this vision.

Me too.

And I'm just doing the freaking vision. Like I didn't have any preparation for the stupid vision because. Because it's not my vision. Like this thing was given to me, so why the hell aren't the resources showing up to do it? So I was very angry, especially on Sunday nights when I'd go in to try to finish payroll and all this computer shit that I was so bad at. And slowly I started surrendering because I started being surrounded by community that was way ahead of me and surrender experiments and they helped me get into that core space where we went today for the first time. And so that was about three years into the journey. And it took me a couple years to be able to really start to embrace the Potential within that space in me. But, boy, it sure did shift things. And, you know, between three years and seven years, the whole world changed.

The world inside of you and my companies?

Yeah. Yeah. First me. But my gosh, did success come quickly when I stopped the judgment of failure.

When you truly learn how to embody surrender, not just say it, because it's easy to be like, I surrender intellectually, I surrender. When you embody surrender. Holy shit.

Yeah. For me, I'm about as stubborn as human being as probably comes, and I'm about as resilient of a physiology and a psyche that's out there. So I tolerated 17 years of relative abuse and academia, and then I tolerated, you know, five years of isolation, loneliness as a small business startup. And so, amazingly, I was still alive and my body was still functioning at a level that I didn't have some sort of crippling disease at that point. But I had finally reached a bottom state that surrender was the only option. And so that's why it took so long, is because I was pretty determined to prove that I could do it. I was going to perform, I was going to win the game, I was going to start a company, I was going to do this or that, that. When I finally surrender completely, like, I cannot do it another second. I cannot breathe, I cannot move. I'm dragging out of bed in the mornings, at 5 o' clock in the morning, try to start the day over again. And at that moment where surrender starts in real, it's. It was less a decision for me and much more a necessity. It was just like, that's all I had left was to let go and say, you know what? I'll. I'll let this whole system fail. Let all the companies fail. I don't even understand the vision at this point. So screw it, I'm done.

Alison Armstrong calls that the tunnel where a man is becoming a king. And he's like, what the hell is going on? And she's like, that's when people either make it or universe takes them another way.

Yeah. And I think it is just by the grace of nature and the universe and the trees that I try to speak for today, that it's just nature's graceful, freaking peaceful place to reside within. And so I hope for each of you that you can step outside in the next day or two and find a piece of nature that's maybe new to you and lay underneath a tree, perhaps maybe the middle of winter, wherever you are, or whatever. But even if there's no leaves on that tree, I want you to look up laying on the ground, look at the sky through the quantum patterns that are in all those tree branches, and watch clouds float over that for as long as it takes to start to unwind and let your body unwind, let that higher intelligence of nature integrate into your body. Feel the roots of the tree below you and the intertwined mycelium as you described it, vining up around those. And you're literally vibrating at your path, looking up through that tree with so much life potential in Earth that's going to express itself through you when you align to it. And so surrender your concept of failure, surrender your path, and ask willingly to step into your highest potential through community. And if you don't include the through community part, it will not work. And so offer yourself to community. Offer yourself to grow something beyond small business, maybe the. That small business plus community, whatever it is. But you need to stop the fight. Stop the fight. You can't fight it. You can't win it. It's an infinite game that you're striving for, and you've been only handed finite versions of that game. So that's why it looks like failure all the time. So let go of the finite games. Finite games are made for a winner and a loser. Infinite game again, it's made so that we continue to play. And so let's. Let's continue to play. Let's not do this extinction thing. Let's go ahead and get in line and let's stay in play.

So many things came up for me. I'm actually. It's rare for me to go through my own podcast, but I'm going to go through this one, man, some beautiful lessons. Experiencing you for the third time and knowing you for a few years now, the way that you describe wellness, we have a highlight reel and you described it about a reverence and this beauty. Has that changed for you in the year? It seems like you've gone through very personal moments this year, you know? So how does. How does Zach Bush see Wellness Today, 2022? The road ahead, the direction we're moving in, and the direction that you feel that you are moving in and Seraphic is moving in. How do you define the wellness inside of you? The wellness outside of us? The. How do we honor the. The intelligence in us all?

Yeah, it's a vibration, too. So it's just like hope. It's another vibration. It's one of vitality. It's one that. It's a vibration that induces regenerative process within our bodies and minds. And Spirits turns on stem cells, turns on neurologic dendritic sprouting, turns on telomerase. It turns on all these myriad of 480,000 proteins that are there to repair our bodies constantly. And so wellness is a vibration to tune into. The future of medicine is definitely energetics and vibration. We will stop having supplements in the next 20, 30 years, and we'll stop having MRIs and CT scans and all of this. And we'll simply scan the electromagnetic field of the body. And we'll be able to do it with our hands better than we will with technologies. And we'll start to move to a point of real, beautiful integration of healing. We'll be able to heal each other so quick, which is something I'm really enjoying these days, watching people heal under quiet hands instead of all these nutrition things and all the other things that we do. Coming in into silence next to somebody is a powerful healing tool. And so as somebody who still works in clinic and, you know, sees patients and all this, I do my highest work now when I learn to bring my cellular vibration almost silent. And I start to feel like stone after a few minutes of just super relaxed breathing and just focusing on bringing all my stillness into its full potential. And then I spiral that masculine, feminine, divine within me and let that new DNA inform the original math, original vibration within my body, and then make that available to the person in front of me and with no expectation or understanding of how it needs to interact with that person. And the amount of emotional release, the amount of physical release, the amount of realignment within that human being has nothing to do with me. Obviously. It's the divine coming through all of us. And so we will heal each other beautifully. And these decades to come, as we start to learn how to tune into the vibration of wellness, the vibration of hope, the vibration of community, you know, these things are going to be. They'll supersede all the tens of thousands of years of abuses and traumas, and those can heal in an instance, the genetic memory of all that can disappear.

I feel the teachings of Eckhart Tolle when he talks about the pain body that's still rippling healing. And you've spoken about it a lot today and there's just so much wisdom you shared. So I'm super grateful for this conversation and you and coming to my home and meeting my son. It's very surreal actually, because he said it would happen and then it happened. So where do people go for your community, you know?

Yeah, we are building new community with the journey of intrinsic Health starting in January journey of intrinsic health.com there and and you can also find it on zachbushmd.com, intelligenceofnature.com you can do the deep dive on soil physiology and physics and all that that we work around. So intelligenceandnature.com and then with all of our work in restoring soil systems and the like, you can go to farmersfootprint us. We also just launched our Australia arm too. So there's if you're in Australia, you can tune into Project Biome Australia there there@projectbiome.org here in the US gets you to see the bigger picture that will be coming out as we continue to mature things Beyond Farmers footprint. BiomeCapitalPartners.com can get you into a glimpse of, you know, the potential of bringing large capital into this regenerative movement and all of that. So I'll keep you busy for a while.

That's enough. And more enough. So thanks for reminding us about that and thank you for being a friend and someone that so many of us learn from, who is consistently doing his own work that the universe always brings lessons and challenges to. And the way that you have navigated them and the way you've shared about your navigation is beautiful. So it's the beauty that you're talking about. So thank you Zach for coming on the show.

Appreciate you, Josh.

Appreciate you too. You guys were talking more about Zach Zach@wellnessforce.com community. It used to be group. I'm changing it to community.

I like it.

So it's wellnessforce.com community until Zach and I see you again, we're both honoring the intelligence in us all. Thank you for that kind of verbiage and messaging that I've received from your websites and your business. But until Zach and I see you again, we're both wishing you love and wellness.

Sam.