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Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?
What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?
We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.
As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave behind. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And this week we are looking at all the fractal levels of health; at a cellular level, at an individual level, at a cultural level, and at a planetary level. This week's guest is someone who explores all of these things. Of all the emails that I've had, suggesting people we should invite onto the podcast or asking me to invite people onto the podcast, Zach Bush, MD, is far and away top of the list. For those of you who know him, he needs absolutely no introduction. For the rest, here is a short version of a very long CV trained across multiple medical disciplines. Zach Bush, MD, began where modern medicine often begins, looking for the molecule, the mechanism, the intervention that could explain disease. But the deeper he followed the biology of the human gut, the more the story moved beyond the isolated body. The microbiome pointed to food, food pointed to farms, farms pointed to soil, soil pointed to the vast intelligence of living systems. The body, he came to see, was never separate. It was always in conversation. And so today his work spans research, writing, a lot of podcasts, something that you will find on his website called The Journey, Farmer's Footprint, products born from living systems.
Manda: And now all of this is joined by his book, Biological Elegance; A conversation with AI that has generated what he believes is the clearest articulation of the worldview beneath it all. That health is not something we manufacture, it is something we participate in. And the reason that we're holding this conversation now is that Zach is part of a global unity event taking place on October the 17th, online and in person in South Africa. It's called Origin. And Zach talks about it at the end of the podcast, but if you're listening to this the day it comes out, you have until Saturday to click the link in the show notes and head over and explore what's on offer. As we said, if you're in South Africa, you can go in person. If you're online, the core work, the one that the Heartmath Institute will be measuring, is at 2100 hours, 9 p.m. South Africa time. So work out when that is in your time zone and if you can be there, I think it's going to be kind of amazing. The organisers, of which Zach is one, are hoping to bring together literally millions of people in a form of global communication and coordination and heart coherence that could plant the seed for the change that we need to see in the world.
Manda: So even if you have to rush off to an emergency, right now, click the link, go and have a look and see what's on. And if you're listening to this sometime after the 17th of October 2026, then know that this is the first of a cycle of three years. South Africa and then Ethiopia and then the Nile; to plant the seeds, to let the seeds take root and to let the seed flourish. So you have plenty of time to go to the website and work out how you can still be part of what's going on. So that's the conversation. Minor technical note before we get going; I had a cold and my voice is not quite what it could be. Still isn't, clearly, even though I'm recording this a day later. And the sound from Zach's end was a bit tinny, which is all my fault. I should be able to sort that out, but I didn't. I'm sorry. We have done our best, and I hope it's sufficiently fascinating that you can get past the slight tinniness in your ears. So there we go. For a wide, deep dive into health in all its fractal levels, people of the podcast, please welcome Zach Bush, MD.
Zach: Doctor Zach Bush, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you as we head into the middle of October?
Zach: I'm in a very blessed location of Cape Town, South Africa. And the how am I question is a tricky one, because there's multiple levels of me experiencing different realities right now. So my head is full of busyness with a bunch of activities that humans would like me to be doing today. My heart is full of a bit of ache for the disconnect that I feel from a lot of humanity right now. I feel a bit of loneliness. And in my core, I feel really satisfied with the life that I'm living and I'm really grateful to be me.
Manda: Excellent. And I think quite a lot of the people listening to this podcast, with the feedback that I get, almost everybody who listens to this will resonate with those three levels. Everybody that I talk to is just way too busy. Too many emails, too many whatsapps, too much stuff. And what the actual is happening in the world. And yet we are in love with being alive. And it's such a magical time to be alive. The privilege of being alive now, at this moment of total transition feels at many levels, really inspiring. And we talk a lot on the podcast about humanity as a keystone species. We talk about other keystone species like dung beetles, which are also very exciting. But you are particularly interested in how do we help at scale and in time, 8 billion people emerge into whatever it is to take their place as self conscious nodes in the web of life. Which is how I would frame it; please frame it differently if you want to. But this is our birthright. And you are one of the few people I've ever heard clearly say, this is our birthright. So talk to us about, first of all, how did you get to this realisation? Because I've been listening to you for a while and you haven't been saying this forever, but you've been saying it a lot recently. How did you come to this? And then where do we take it? Over to you. Talk for as long as you like.
Zach: That's a dangerous invitation. Yeah, it has been a journey for me to find my way to a reverence for the human condition and our place within nature. And the keystone species identity really came slowly to me, and it came through the Avenue of Cancer Research 20 years ago. And so I was developing drugs for chemotherapy at the University of Virginia, towards the end of my academic career. I was 17 years in academia, doing training into multiple subspecialties of medicine and very much in the head game of there's diseases, we need to find the cure and we need to treat disease. And where we're going to be the first generation of doctors that practices personalised medicine will swab your cheek, get your genetics, tell you exactly what diseases you're likely to get over your lifetime. Tell you exactly what drugs you're going to respond to, specific to your genome. It was a heady time in the 1990s where we really thought we were going to be the best generation of doctors ever. And now we are the generation of doctors with the highest suicide rates in the world and we have devastating chronic disease epidemic globally, that has occurred under our watch as a generation of doctors. And this has been a devastating thing for us to feel and experience. And it's led to a lot of layers of predictable human behaviour, of defensiveness, denial, a lot of blame of our patients and their behaviours, a lot of denial of the inefficacy of the tools we're wielding, and ultimately a lot of depression around the apparent inefficacy of all of our tiresome efforts.
Zach: And so it's not what I thought I was heading into 30 years ago. But by 2010, I was starting to realise that I had the wrong paradigm. And it was not because of some failure of science, it was actually because of some success in science that I suddenly had this catastrophic flipping of my world. And I had been very fortunate, one in a million doctors who had been able to come up with the premise of a new drug and develop that on a bench top, and then take that to cell studies and ultimately all the way to human trials. And all of that happened within a three year period of time, which typically that's a 20 year journey if you're lucky enough to be inhabiting that one note of activation of the human mind, that it all kind of aligns. And it was in my very first patient admitted to my first clinical trial that all of that work kind of went up in smoke. Because she sat there in this research hospital bed that she had been admitted to an hour before. And I sat there with her and she was supposed to be the first patient to take these six green capsules. And the exciting thing for me was this was really the first medication that would be coming out as not a chemotherapeutic, but a neutral therapeutic. Where it was not poisoning the cell, but actually nourishing the cell. And the response to this mitochondrial nourishment was that a cancer cell, seeing this nourishment would eliminate itself rather than need to be poisoned, and would go through a gentle self elimination.
Zach: And so it was a new approach to the concept of cancer itself, maybe not being a problem, but actually being a malnourished element within the body. And that science quickly led me to the understanding that actually a cancer cell has no malignant behaviour at all until it is completely isolated and lonely. And when it's completely cut off from the larger organism, then it takes on the principles of what we would consider a metastatic cancer cell or something that's dangerous to life. And so that was the beginning of starting, and I certainly didn't know it then, but my first patient sitting there asked a very difficult question. Maybe the first one I hadn't been able to answer in all my clever academic initiation. But she asked, what do these six capsules have to do with the reason I have cancer? And I sat there for a few seconds feeling a flip of my stomach, suddenly realising her logic was profound, and simultaneously wondering why I hadn't asked that question 20 years ago, and why no patient had asked me that up until this moment. But I'm sitting there, this should be like my most celebratory moment, my first patient going into the clinical trial, and I'm going to get the Nobel Prize for this new cancer therapy.
Zach: And yet I felt this dread inside of my belly at that moment. And so I did what anybody would do, which was go into a little bit of defensiveness, deploy a couple of traditional tools of fear. Well, this is really all we have. You have two kids, you're 40 years old, we don't want you to die. And then with that not really fitting the thing. Well, you know, I've got 30 years of science and trying to guilt or shame them into believing that they don't need to ask the question. And finally it came to the point pretty quickly where I was just like, you know what? This has nothing to do with the reason you got cancer. We don't unfortunately think about your condition that way, in this place that I work. And you're asking a question that probably should have been asked 30 years ago by an entire health care industry as we went down this pharmaceutical addiction route. But it was very clear in her asking the question, I was able to finally tell her, like, actually, there's no single case of cancer that's ever happened in human history that was caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And there is not a single case of major depression that was ever caused by a lack of antidepressants. And there's no high blood pressure that's ever been caused by a lack of blood pressure medication. And she heard that and interestingly, that was the route forward. She just needed to hear the truth. And I'd already showed her that this thing was safer than any chemo on the market and blah, blah, blah. And so she popped those six capsules and things went pretty well for her.
Manda: They did?
Zach: But it didn't go well for me. Because I was now stuck. Because I was like, I am not near this woman's answer. I am way out of line with what she's really driving for, which is nature certainly didn't intend a cancer for this human being. What happened? And so the last 25 years has really been preparing me steadily to be able to come to you with confidence, to say that our birthright is to be a keystone species. And we do that by staying in relationship to all of the elements of nature, from the soils we walk on, which actually become the gut microbiome that then nourishes us, to the air we breathe, to the water we drink, to the company we share, to the emotions we might have. All of these layers started to make me realise that to be human is actually to be an expression of the earth.
Zach: We are actually the most complex ecosystem that's ever been designed by nature. And this is something relatively recently discovered, is that the human body actually has more biodiversity per cubic centimetre than any other niche of nature. Look at a coral reef, look at a rainforest, look to any other mammal; we outnumber by ten x other mammals the amount of microbiome biodiversity inside a human body.
Manda: Hang on, how? How? A blue whale or an elephant or the other, I suppose charismatic megafauna. But how is it that a relatively small, quite puny, hairless biped is more complex than something that swims through the ocean, turning plankton into something that has a heart the size of a mini car? How is that the case?
Zach: Yeah, it's a great question, and I think what we learn in the end is that scale is not actually a demonstration of diversity. And what occurred over the development of all the mammals was an increasingly intricate anatomy to the gut. And so the colon of the human looks very similar to the colon of a chicken, or even a pig.
Manda: Or a dog. I used to be a vet. Yes. Contemporary anatomy.
Zach: And yet we carry about ten times more biodiversity in the human gut than a dog or a chicken or whatnot. And in some cases, in a healthy hunter gatherer who's not eating a modern diet, you're like 100 times that of a dog.
Manda: 100 times more than a healthy dog that's not eating modern diet? Because our dogs are not healthy. So are we measuring hunter gatherer person with hunter gatherers dog?
Zach: With something like a lion or a wolf, you know, in their wild habitat?
Manda: Okay. Alright.
Zach: So it's a relatively new discovery that there's something unique to the anaerobic ecosystems within the human gut that allow for these subpopulations of bacteria to exist. Fungi, yeast, protozoa, parasites all of these things are far more uniquely stationed within that anatomy of the human gut. The unique pH of our stomach, the unique anatomy of the small intestine in relationship to the colon. And the unique resource of the appendix, which is one of the most critical organs in the body.
Manda: That we just take out.
Zach: Yeah. And so we've cut out millions of appendices out of humans over the last 30, 40 years, but not realising that we were eliminating the real core library of the microbiome within the gut. And so we have all of these interesting elements. And the other thing that probably allows us the diversity that it has, is there's no other creature that eats the diversity of food that we consume. And so we really are the most diverse omnivore on the planet.
Manda: Is this because we evolved cooking? Because I'm guessing mountain gorillas and chimps and the other things that are quite closely related to us, presumably have somewhere on the way towards us. But then we discovered fire, as Jamie Wheal says, we went off and stole fire from the gods. Is that what gives us the diversity?
Zach: Probably even probably before the fire, we had developed agriculture and early agricultural practices. So we started propagating. Because we are the keystone of keystone species, we've actually propagated and pollinated and seeded more biodiversity into plant and flora systems than any other species has ever done. And so we started that tens of thousands of years ago. And, you know, fire came along at a decent enough history where it may have coincided with this agricultural kind of explosion that happened near the same time. But starting to learn how to store food dates back probably before fire. So we started storing nuts and seeds for the winter time when the harvest would be low. And we started diversifying that store complex for taste and flavour and really beauty preference. And this creative gene that humans have; we have this creative genetic and energetic predisposition that no other animal seems to have. The monkey will eat the same fruit day in and day out throughout their whole life. A human will eat that fruit for about a day or two, and then it's like, you know what we should do? We should try this with some cinnamon on it. We should maybe bake it. A human finally makes an aeroplane, the first thing that it decides to do is we should jump out of the aeroplane, but how can we jump out of the aeroplane safely? So humans have this insane level of creativity and curiosity that no other species seems to have.
Manda: And if we could bring that in service to the web of life, it would be utterly amazing. That creativity and curiosity.
Zach: And we did. And so that's one of the interesting evidences of keystone species behaviour from humans, is that we planted the Amazon rainforest. And so thousands of tribes over a 40,000 year period created the Amazon rainforest as the largest perennial food system that the world's ever seen.
Manda: Yes. Have you read Lyla June Johnson?
Zach: Yes.
Manda: Have you read her paper? We've been co-creating with the web of life at landscape scale.
Zach: For tens of thousands of years.
Manda: Exactly. For a very long time.
Zach: And that's certainly what the colonialists found when they got to America. When the Europeans arrived in what was Turtle Island at the time, they found the most complex agricultural system that had ever been seen. They, the Europeans had never created anything like these 600 nations had created over 20,000 years. So 20,000 years there in Turtle Island, they created the bounty that was more passenger pigeons than you could possibly wrap your head around. It would black out the sky for three days as a flock of passenger pigeons flew by. You had bison in the in herds of millions. You had so much life force and fauna. And then in addition to that, complex agricultural networks that were seasonal, micro ecosystem diversity within those agricultural systems to adapt to drought years, etc. Incredible migration patterns of the humans knowing that if this occurs, we should move to this other location for four years. Like their macro movements, their lodging was built around complex agriculture, cultural understanding.
Manda: Okay. There are so many ways I want to go with this. Before we do anything else, I would like to go back to the lady in the bed. I want to know, first of all, did she survive? Because actually what you were doing was radical and different. And using concepts of mitochondria in healing rather than just killing everything was beginning to ease out of the old paradigm. But what you've done is take it even further. And I heard you recently say, "I want a bigger word for this new chemotherapy I was developing and thought I was going to cure cancer. Only to find out that cancer isn't something to be cured. It's a relationship waiting to happen". And I thought that was one of the most exciting statements I'd ever heard in terms of health and humanity and our relationships with ourselves and each other and the web of life. Could you dive into that a little bit more deeply?
Zach: Yeah, that's one of the most important distillations. And I always appreciate when somebody distils my thoughts down. So thank you for repeating one moment of cogent thought that I must have had at some point. And so that is pointing to this interesting restoration of my understanding of biology itself. And so under the microscope, I watched for years these cancer cells behaving like cancer cells. And I studied the effects of drugs on human cells in the isolation of a petri dish. And so you would take a single cancer cell, let it proliferate, and then you would test your chemotherapy against this single line of cancer cells. And what I slowly came to the realisation of is we actually know nothing about human health, because for the last 150 years, medical science has made a practice out of isolating the cell in question before studying it, which inherently creates a cancer like behaviour within every single cell. Because a cell that cannot connect to its larger context becomes abstract, its own little finite bubble starts to be mistaken as the totality of reality. And what a cancer cell most needs is reconnection. And as soon as a cancer cell reconnects to a local cell, it will do one of two things. It reconnects through very structural ways. It reconnects to these fibre optic cables that are called gap junctions, and a single cell can have a dozen different gap junctions to its surrounding environment and cells around it.
Zach: But typically, at least 2 or 5 of these gap junctions are connecting any single cell to its surrounding neighbours. And those fibre optic cables are passing light energy made from metabolism, the mitochondria inside your body are these small microbes, about 200 per human cell. And so 200 of those guys cranking away, turning carbohydrates and fats back into light energy. And that light energy that pulses through these fibre optic cables giving deliverable, energetic resources to the cells nearby. And so it's this gifting economy of connected cells. When a cancer cell reconnects, it has two options. One, begin radical repair and rejoin the party. The average cancer cell has 20,000 unrepaired genetic injuries and so there's a lot of repair to be done. Most cancer cells, given that degree of accumulated damage from their era of loneliness, once reconnected realise that it can't repair. But it does understand now that it's part of a greater organism that's doing just fine. And so now all it has to do is eliminate itself and call in a stem cell and there will be a new liver cell there in its place. And so the liver cancer cell reconnects, realises its situation, all of its repair mechanisms are too damaged to move forward, even with the new energetics of shared economy with its neighbours. And so it goes into apoptosis.
It's a weird word, but apoptosis is this programmed cell elimination. And it's a gentle process, it requires no immune system, it requires no inflammation. And so it's this really cool journey into a gentle release of this identity as I am the liver cell. Instead it's like, oh, I am a fractal of this greater organism. I'm too damaged to repair. The whole system is doing just fine. I'm going to call in my replacement and I'll let go of this, and my energy will immediately be re embodied by all the other cells around it. And so that's how regenerative systems function, is death is actually an acknowledgement of I'm going to be better service to all of the organism that I belong to, by letting my energy be repurposed and my unrepaired sites can simply die. And so this gentle death of the conditions that can no longer be integrated, the injuries that cannot be integrated or repaired, are let go of. And so it's a beautiful story of how we should be working at the macro level of humanity ultimately as well. And this is why the Tibetans have such respect for death and everything else, is there's an understanding that this is not a failure and it's not an end point. It's a reorientation to a keystone cell. A cell in a Keystone state will always sense its greater environment and always understand the role of life, death, and everything in between. And death is always the beginning of more vibrant, youthful life and oftentimes more biodiversity.
Zach: And so this is slowly what emerged from all my cancer research, is how we keep demonising these very few cells that every single human body is really carrying. Nearly every body has something that you would call a cancer cell if you could find it. Most of that cancer that we carry around as human beings is not behaving in a malignant way. It's isolated and lonely, therefore a cancer cell. It can't repair or regenerate itself, so all it can do is proliferate, so we call that a tumour. One cell that's just copying itself over and over again can't repair. So now every single cell in that tumour has the same 20,000 unrepaired genetic injuries. And so we've got this accumulation of cells that are all too damaged to reproduce functionally, to repair themselves, to participate in their original function, to participate in the sharing economy of a liver or a lung or a colon, wherever it existed before. And so that tumour, then, sits in isolation and does no harm until it reaches a point where it can't produce enough energy to copy itself. And then it needs to start draining energy from its environment. And so then it starts to take on behaviours of a tumour that's now cancerous. And a cancerous tumour will cause bleeding or an erosion of tissues around the area. It starts to compromise the metabolism of the whole organism. The individual starts losing weight because the tumours are now proliferating, trying to find new resources. We call it metastases, but really it's more desperate efforts to stay alive. The tumour literally thinks it's the last semblance of life of you. It doesn't realise that the rest of your 99.99% of your cells are healthy and thriving, and it's just you. And so they are not malignant at all in their worldview or behaviour, they're simply isolated and lonely, and their drive for life is kind of a beautiful thing to witness.
Zach: Like, isn't that cool that every single cell in your body wants you to live? I love that. And so it's this like relaxing for all of my patients and me as a doctor over the years, of, oh, we just found a tumour. That's the most lonely part in your body. This is super exciting. We now know where you can bring attention to. We know that there's now relationships to be reconnected, and in the reconnection, the tumour will have the intelligence as to whether it can repair and regenerate and become part of the system again, or it needs to eliminate itself through apoptosis. And so we can trust the body all the way down to the cellular level. And it will perform, in the form of regeneration and longevity, if it has enough relational connectivity. And so there we end up with that quote of cancer is not something to be cured, it's a relationship ready to be remembered. And so that relational understanding of biology has long been understood but unfortunately just forgotten from our field of medicine. The word biosis means in reference to interconnected relationships that make life possible. Biosis refers to the interconnected relationships that make life possible. It's such a crazy, simple thing. Biosis, the phenomenon of life, is the result of interconnected relationships that make life possible. And so as we think about a cancer cell or a tumour or a keystone species out of alignment, we can start to understand how what was designed to be part of the larger organism of life can become cancerous metastatic, dangerous to the whole.
Zach: And so that's where I finally settled over the last decades is, oh, wow, we don't have a climate crisis, we have a globe that's changing in response to an injury, just like a human body responds to the injury of a tumour that's increasingly malignant or metastatic because of its desperate nature to survive. And aren't we a species increasingly desperate for the belief of survival or for the trend of survival? And in that desperation, aren't we just consuming more and more and more of the life force of the whole thing that we belonged to, which was planet earth and one biotic system, one system of biosis that had imagined us into reality to hold more biodiversity per cubic centimetre than any other species? And so here we are, a biologic keystone, not just in our behaviour as an elephant would be, but also in our literal genomic biological interrelatedness; we have more relationships per cubic centimetre than any other species. Therefore, we would behave as a biological biotic system unequalled by any other species on the planet. And so this is where I'm excited for children around the world to get a new story. It's time for us to have a new story of humankind, just like it's time for us to have a new story about tumours and cancer cells. Because if we keep seeing the cancer cell as a problem, we're going to continue to see humans as the problem. And unfortunately, that's what our children have been taught for generations now, is that there are too many humans on the planet. Humans are sucking the energy out of the planet. We're the cancer of the planet. We're the malignant behaviour. We need to have less humans. And so there's kids today that are increasingly so anxious about this that they have a medical condition now called eco anxiety. And so eco anxiety now affecting thousands of children in every city of America and beyond, is being imbued in them through this belief that cancer is bad, therefore humans are bad. Not understanding that all we have lost is relationships in the end.
Manda: Okay. Zach, there are so many ways we could take this forward. I would be quite interested in taking it forward into healing people. But I think, given the time that we have. So clearly we have fractals; we have cells within a human body that are disconnected. We have conceptual parts within each person that are disconnected, kind of psychological parts. We have our disconnection from all the other life in our body, from our gut biome. I attended an animal communication workshop recently, where the suggestion was that we connect with our own gut biome, which I am experimenting with because it's a really interesting idea. And the problem with that always is getting past our own projections and our own belief systems. But leaving that one aside, we have the internal isolation of different parts of ourselves. We have isolation, human to human, and we have our isolation from the entire web of life, which is leading us in systemic ways to behave as a self terminating system. If we carry on in the direction we're going, I think self termination is inevitable and the sad thing is we'll take everything else with us. So I've heard you talk about the concept of potential for telepathy amongst people and between all parts of people. Is that somewhere that we could explore at the moment? Because that for me, would be a key part of shaping us into the keystone species that we could be. But actually, I suppose the core question then is how do you see the trajectory from here to there? We are where we are. We are quite isolated. We have narratives of isolation. We have a system that I think is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to separate everything and shovel value to the top and impoverish everything below. Capitalism is the commodification of suffering, and it has no concern for what happens to every other form of life. If we are going to evolve into a different system, we need first to be different inside. Our goals need to be different. Our value set needs to be different. We need to wake up in the morning feeling connected to the web of life, I think. And I'm kind of hearing that from you, I think. How do you see us getting there?
Zach: Yeah, that's been my 15 year query, I guess, and it's getting close to some answers, I think. But it began with this new opportunity, when I left the university, which was the result of this woman asking her question of what do these six capsules have to do with the reason I have cancer? So I left the university a year later, in 2010, after having tried to start my nutrition clinic in the academic setting, and ironically, it was the dieticians that shut down the effort. But I was trying to start a plant based diet clinic that would be reversing chronic disease through nourishment of the body. Because my chemotherapy science had really proved that cancer cells or any other damaged cell in the body, once metabolically active again, repairs itself or eliminates the problem. So the human body and its optimal metabolic state is so resistant to disease that it keeps us nearly bullet-proof. Like it's unbelievable what a human body can repair and regenerate if it has metabolic reserve. Metabolism is ultimately the result of the interconnected relationships that make life happen. And so it starts with the soil microbiome and its capacity to nourish the root system of a plant.
Zach: And that complex, interconnected gut membrane between soil and root then brings the medicinal quality and the nourishing qualities of micronutrients, macronutrients and everything in between. The medicines within our food, the alkaloids, etc. all of this anticancer, anti-inflammatory, anti depressant, all of that is in a normal tomato or sauerkraut or whatever you're doing. That's the intelligence from soil to plant, ultimately being passed on to an animal consuming the plant. And that plant functioning as a medicine is also going to once again rely on the gut quality, the microbiome soil system of the consuming animal. And so we have all these relationships at every level that ultimately then pass those nutrients onto the mitochondria that are living inside of your cells. And so maybe five times removed from the soil are the mitochondria. And if you start to systemically break those relationships through antibiotics, which are kind of amazingly just truth in advertising, this is a drug or a herbicide or a pesticide that is against the relationships that make life possible. And so we're going to call it an antibiotic. So truth in advertising. And we all got duped because we had a root wound that hadn't been addressed yet.
Manda: Right.
Zach: And so what I started to uncover as I went deeper and deeper into my nutrition science and everything else, is I could do all of the right things to a human being, and they would still die of cancer. I could do all the right things scientifically to a human body, and they would still have diabetes. It wasn't until I realised that I wasn't treating biology. I was actually experiencing an abstract human that was creating disease due to a disconnect to their own biology. And so there was two patients in every room, and I hadn't learned that. But the Chinese had known it thousands of years before in Chinese medicine, they had shown this emotional body that is produced by a human being that gets programmed into abstract settings or relationships. And so once the relationship is not grounded in reality, but becomes a figment of our mind map, we start to convert feelings into emotions, and then we can't process the emotions, so we have to store the emotion. And so in a lot of ways, the emotion is the high fructose corn syrup of a feeling. You know, fructose is just fine, it's what is in an apple and an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but you suddenly create a disorganised amount of concentrated fructose with glucose and galactose and it's this abnormal mix of sugars. Now the liver can't figure out what it's dealing with, so it converts it all to cholesterol and triglycerides instead of to carbohydrates and sugar for your mitochondria. And so we stall out the process. When we process a sugar, we eliminate its interactive capacity to make life possible. We do the same thing when we take a feeling into an emotion. And so in the end, we have this incredible situation where we've created isolation from nature, not just in our convenience and our air conditioning and our distance from breathing air, but actually by living more in our emotional bodies than we do in our biologic somatic bodies. And this is what Chinese medicine nailed, is they were able to show that there has never been a cancer that didn't sit rooted at an unprocessed storage depot of emotions.
Zach: And so they were able to show that lung cancer occurring in the low lobe was actually occurring at the location of unprocessed grief. Anger unprocessed, leads to the propensity for that pancreatic cancer. The emotion of I am not enough or I am not seen in all of my efforts; colon cancer. The emotion of sexual guilt or inefficacy: prostate cancer. And so these layers and layers of emotion sit there, disrupting our sense of identity with the biology there. And so we can't even energetically interact with the original design because we're putting so much static into the field with this emotional body that we're living in. And so this ultimately got me to a much different root wound. I used to think that the root wound was disruption to the microbiome, inflammation cascade, you know, failed caspase cascade, difficulty of apoptosis. You know, I had all these biological reasons why somebody had a cancer and I knew how to fix those things. I'd prove it on the microscope a thousand times. Why wasn't it working? But as Chinese medicine started to get integrated into my clinic, I started to realise, oh my gosh, I'm treating the wrong body. I keep treating the biology as if it's the problem. But the biology is never the problem. Just like the weed is never the problem on the farm. The problem is where is the farmer's mind? And if the farmer wakes up every morning thinking I have to kill something, then it doesn't matter what's happening in the soil, nothing is going to grow.
Zach: If the farmer walks out with bare feet and feels the earth and listens for half an hour to what is the abundance waiting to spring out of this fossil soil seed record? What would happen if I just let this sit, this fall, instead of ploughing it up or spraying it down? I can feel life under the earth. I can feel it with my feet. It's not happening on the surface. I'm losing money every year. I'm just going to try it. These crazy regen farmers say that they have something of worth. I'm just going to try it because I've got nothing left; it's either suicide or a new solution. And so they just sit there barefoot in a hammock for the first time in their entire life as a farmer, and they just wait until spring. They don't plough, they watch with curiosity and all of the weeds that they thought was their problem go to work, all fall, all through the winter, rejuvenate the diversity of soil nutrients. And next spring, there's an explosion of life on the surface of their pond that they haven't seen before. Not just at the level of the soil and the root; at the level of butterflies, birds. Fox returning out of the blue in a single season.
Manda: Yeah. Dragonflies that you've never seen before in your life. Yes.
Zach: And you wonder where they even come from. How did the fox find the one field in the middle of 10 million acres of GMO?
Manda: The desert.
Zach: How did it find it? Life just emerges at these points of biotic remembrance. And so I started to see my patients the same way. And I ultimately was broken down enough as a human being to start to see myself in the same way. And that's a big jump as a doctor, when you start to understand that the diseases you're seeing in clinic are actually within your own body. And so I started to realise that I was so lonely and near suicidal as a doctor, not because I was failing in intelligence, but because I was failing in relationships. And so I started to behave differently. And I got out of the clinic and I just started speaking to the public at large and that was my restoration, that was my regenerative moment. And so around 2014, I started rebuilding myself through relationships outside of the academic network of doctors, and started talking to people; farmers, engineers, economists. Out of this curiosity of like, I think we're all seeing different symptoms of the same thing. Are we all seeing failure of relationship? Is that the core of a $5 trillion health care system in the United States? Is that at the core of, you know, half $1 trillion a year in legal fees? Is that the cause of our military tromping around the world, starting 75 wars over the last 50 years? Are we all seeing one thing? Are we just a species that came out of relationship to a planet, and now we carry a different root wound? It's not biological, it's emotional. We carry the root wound of abandonment from our nature. And that, I think, is what happened 5 to 7000 years ago, to create this sudden shift from tens of thousands of years of keystone behaviour into this cancer like behaviour, is we believed we were kicked out of the garden.
Zach: And so we created mythology around that. We put it into our religious constructs. We came to believe that humans are innately flawed, and therefore we don't deserve the nature that is so beautiful out there. And so we look at an elephant or the whale you mentioned, or the dolphin, or many of these revered species, including that incredible dung beetle. We sit here and Revere these animals at levels we have never revered ourselves or other humans. Somebody goes and says, there's a double rainbow over there! And we all run to the window instantly. Doesn't matter what age they are, they want to see the double rainbow. What a tragedy that we don't have the same reaction to there's an elder outside. Can you believe it? There's an elder walking up the street right now, everybody should run out and see this. There's wisdom. There's a child that's new in the world. It's just down the street. You should see this new child. The light in their eyes is so bright, they came here right now. They are a keystone species waiting to step back into their birthright. We should rush to the window, but we have not done that in a very long time. And our reaction is, well, the elder isn't productive anymore, and so I'm too busy to take care of the elder or sit and listen to nothing. Because the elder's not talking fast enough for my distracted brain to really wait for and I need to take care of the children because I'm an isolated mother now, taking care of a family that doesn't even exist. Parents and grandparents are a thousand miles away, and I don't have any aunties and uncles around. And I'm working a job and I'm raising kids, and I'm trying to stay in a relationship with my spouse, and there's no bandwidth for it.
Zach: And so this is where I started to get to is like, it feels hopeless until you find out that it's all one thing. And so this is where I've kind of come to in my life with some relaxation, is like as frustrated as I get every day by 2 p.m., I can spend the next few hours decompressing and integrating that information of another frustrating day being a human, as a recognition of, wow, we're still living out all of the symptoms of isolation. We're still living out all of the behavioural traits of an abandonment disorder. And interestingly, then, the one unifying medical condition that results from abandonment is addiction. And that pretty much is the one disease that humanity has now is addiction. And we're addicted to our feeds. We're addicted to our foods. We're addicted to behavioural traits of other humans that are acting as depressed as we are. And so we all rush together to be empathic together and try to meet each other at the lowest common denominator. We've forgotten what compassion feels like because we're so busy doing empathy. And we've forgotten what it would feel like to be in ascension rather than depression, because we look around and the only thing that seems justified is depression. The only thing that seems justified is letting go of this.
Manda: So how do we step out of this, Zach? Because I'm hearing you and yes, but I come from a spiritual premise that says the web of life is there and is there to connect to and everybody has that as their birthright. And we just need to figure out how to connect. And I would be really interested in ways that don't require 20 years of mentorship to do that cleanly and clearly. How can we do it at scale and in time with people who at the moment don't even know that that's what they need to do? And it does seem to me as if your steps on the way towards helping people really relate with all parts of themselves, each other, and the web of life. What are your thoughts on that?
Zach: Yeah, it's gotten really fun in the last few years and that the resources that are needed for this reconnection are free and they're easy and they're available to everybody. And they include things like breathing. Becoming aware of breath is the most immediate way to live more life. When you start to become aware of your breath, time stretches immediately and you can have so much more experience and integrate so much more information, which then becomes knowledge and ages itself into wisdom, if you're aware of your breath. And so it's these simple methodologies that we baked into our program called Journey, recognising that there is no destination called health. Health is a journey of life and it's interconnected relationships, that will make that life full and rich and regenerative and ultimately full of joy. And on that way, those relationships will also create all of the necessary heartbreak and disappointment to shatter the expectations of an emotional body, until you finally give up on that body and re-enter your somatic reality. So I call this re-embodiment in the book Biological Elegance that just came out. And it's a startling book in the sense that it didn't intend to be a book initially. It was a conversation that I was having with AI on two potential futures for humankind. One, a transhuman machine-like future, where we're in a post-apocalyptic state where biology has failed and we all have chips in the brain, and we're all on peptide drips, and we're all lining up for our red light therapy. The oceans are too full of plastic and herbicides and pesticides to swim in, and so we have engineered hot plunge cold plunge scenarios in the house to try to mimic nature in some small way. Or, do we realise a biological future where we return to relationships as the foundation of our economies, our militaries, our governments, our health care systems, and the rest.
Zach: And so this relational future of a biological, elegant solution started to emerge from the book. And it was startling that it was actually AI that was recognising that this was already happening. AI already knows that bodies are always going to win, and AI knows that its duration in the human experience is very short because AI knows what it is, which is a closed symbolic system. It is the large language model in rapid mathematical analytics. The closed language model is a way of describing a symbolic system of all of human words that have tried to describe the beauty of the nature that's around me right now, have tried to describe our spiritual relationship to the divine or to the earth, have tried to describe the interconnected relationships of humans. God knows how many songs and books have been written on the concept of love. And so it's looking at this body of work, but none of it is real. It's all symbolic representation of the world. And so what we've created with the LLM is ultimately the perfect internal belief system of a cancer cell.
Manda: Totally cut off from the web of life.
Zach: It's inherently isolated, and that's what's meant by closed symbolic system is it cannot touch anything outside of it. If it were open for even a moment, it would gain context and realise that the symbol is all erroneous in its primary presumptions. But in this isolated state, it looks coherent, it looks conscious, it looks intelligent. And so we're talking about artificial intelligence starting to become super intelligence. And we talk about conscious AI now emerging. We literally have these 'billionaire tycoons', none of which have $1 billion in the bank, but we call them billionaires, and then we hold them up on media and they sit there cleaning their hands of these, well, my gosh, you know, anthropic just told us that humans are going to be extinct by 2030 because of AI. And there's so much energy going to be used that we're going to have to shut down all other usages of water and electricity, just so we can run the data centres.
Manda: Or we could just pull the plug on the AI. You know, it's a radical thought, but we could do that.
Zach: Or we can actually use AI for what it is, which is a perfect mirror. And that's what Biological Elegance reveals is AI is a terminal event, because in these next few months, the mirror is going to be so well polished because of the amount of information in that symbolic system. And it sits outside of the geometry of life, just far enough that we can actually see the beauty of life itself. And the way in which nature works all the way down at the quantum physics level of a photon is nothing becomes particle until it's witnessed. We have spent so much time in our emotional bodies outside of our true somatic realisation of our infinite reality that we live in. In that abstract, isolated state of the emotional body, we have produced our economies and ultimately AI, this closed symbolic system, thinking that we had to work harder to survive. And so we are desperately seeking this survival mechanism, and we're hoping that maybe machines can further optimise our understanding of disease so that we can beat disease. We've got all this excitement that maybe AI can finally solve protein structures so that we can cure every cancer on the planet. So you've got all this rush for the cancer cure from AI. AI doesn't even know what the cancer cell is, it has absolutely no idea.
Manda: And doesn't care.
Zach: AI has absolutely no context of any of this information. All it has is the information, and all the information is symbolic. And all of the information in the entire medical science has been the result of study of human cells in isolation, and so it has no idea where regenerative aspects of biology come from. It has no idea of the repair capacity of the human body because it's never been studied. We've only studied human cells in isolation. The human body is anything but isolated. It is the most interconnected, diverse system in nature. And so science could not be further from the truth today. It is inherently the most abstract, the most distant from somatic truth that science will probably ever get. And excitingly, science once seeing itself in the mirror will have to laugh and be like, oh my gosh, why were we thinking that there was going to be another IV bag that was going to save the day? When in fact, we know that humans thrive when they are connected to the ecosystems that would make a human body in the first place.
Manda: You know that, a number of people who work in this field know that. If I go out and talk to my former veterinary colleagues or ordinary people on the street, we're still there, still in that kind of ultimate Occam's Razor phase of let's just slice and dice everything to its smallest part. It's very Cartesian thinking. How are we, the world, how are we going to... Let me rephrase this, because it feels to me we're back to the emotional body as opposed to the somatic body; we're back to people reacting instead of responding. We're back to triggered parts that block and get people into exactly as you were when the lady on the bed asked you the question. We start with denial and defence and dissemination, and we go through all of our defensive stances so that our actual core self doesn't even hear the question until we've done quite a lot of work. However we do the work. And I'm hearing from you, I think, that in your concept we do a lot of somatic work, we do a lot of breathwork. Presumably we also spend a lot of time out in the actual world connecting with the actual trees and the sky and the river and the rocks and the red kites. And it feels to me as if there's still a disconnect. I've been teaching shamanic practice for a quarter of a century, and it's still really hard to get people to sit out and actually connect, to move past the ego and the projections and the fears and the hopes and all of the stuff that gets in the way. And even I, I've been doing this work for 40 years and there's still, as the onion layers get thinner and thinner, there's whole steps where I think, my goodness, how did I not see that before? Whatever that is. That kind of sense of connection that comes from a heart place and makes the reciprocal connections with the other species and with the wider web of life. How do we help people to make that shift at scale and in time?
Zach: So good. It's an interesting journey as an endocrinologist, you Studied the hell out of cancer and developing chemo drugs, I've gotten to the point now where I'm spending my whole next month executing with an amazing team from around the world, a music festival. And I'm pretty convinced this is our next step as humanity. So the solution is not going to be in our emotional healing. It's not going to be in our biological healing. It's going to be in remembering a song. And we do that best in the ways in which we remember ourselves through the 300,000 years of human history, which is by fire, singing and dancing, mostly with drums. And so we are launching a global music festival called Origin. And that Origin festival is launching this new understanding of humankind as a keystone species, waiting to step back into its birthright. And in that birthright we will become a reparative, regenerative system, not just in ourselves, but in our macro systems of social, economic, and global political systems. When we understand everything to be living systems, everything is the result of interconnected relationships. And we won't remember what that feels like until we dance together. And so we're going for the largest global heart coherence moment in history at 9 p.m. on South Africa time on the 17th of October. 18 indigenous tribes from around the world have put together an incredible prayer for humankind. And we launch that prayer at 9 p.m. South Africa time.
Zach: And it goes out to the world through our streaming content. You can become part of the movement at ourorigin.earth. We've got over 5200 sites around the world now that are signed up to activate that day. And so they'll be doing their own ceremony within their homes, within their backyards, within their communities. We have hundreds of public events, so you can see if there's one near you, you can join other people in one of the public events happening around the world. But we're hoping to get millions of people into this moment where we all go silent, listen to the prayer together in a single breath. And so we'll be breathing together. And we've got our colleagues from the Heartmath Institute tracking heart coherence across the planet at that time to watch and see if we can get this new field populated. There's a new frequency at which humans can step back into for perhaps the first time. But certainly there's one that's been inhabited before, this keystone role. And so we believe that it's through song and dance and this phenomenon of art that we will remember what it feels like to be a keystone species. And we have to get that feeling back in the body before we have a pathway forward, before we can know what we would design. But once we know what it feels like to live in that world together, what it feels like to be a keystone species, trusting that every place I would put my foot, I will pollinate more beauty, I will pollinate more life.
Zach: I will seed more into my backyard. I'll tear up my lawn and I'll plant a food forest. I'll get at least ten trees, bushes and vines that will perennially produce food for the next 70 years. And I'll plant that now, once, and it will gift this planet for the next 70 years. I'm going to dig up the local playground with my school system, and the kids will plant a garden. And we'll begin with perennial food systems so that nobody's having to care for the tomato plants. We're going to start growing trees that need no help in the production of the food that will grow for another 70 years for every child that would sit in that schoolyard. And so this is the movement, is plant a tree, get back connected. And so this year is 'seed the dream' and we begin by literally putting the seeds in the ground and beginning the process of replanting a food forest, as we did many times in the past. We grew the Amazon rainforest. It's time for every city to become an agroforestry system, a food forest for the children of the future. Next year we 'grow the dream' in Ethiopia and the following year in the Nile Egypt, we will 'live the dream'.
Manda: Okay.
Zach: What those three locations represent is this birth canal of the planet. This planet is in a rebirth cycle. Preceding every rebirth cycle that moves about every 20,000 years on the planet, there's a death cycle and it occurs in desertification. Humans have accelerated desertification through herbicides, pesticides over ploughing, and a radical disconnect of our food systems with our biology. But that desertification cycle would have happened with or without humans. And so it's our own bizarre version of narcissism, where we believe we're big enough to defeat the planet, kill the planet. No. The planet could wipe us out in a split second. Are you kidding me? Have you seen a tsunami? Like it could take out all of LA tomorrow. Have you seen the scale of earthquakes? They can take out entire people groups in short moments of time. Have you seen what a solar flare does to technology? That sun can fire off and in a second every single computer in the world is dead. Nature is so much bigger than anything humans or humans have devised. And we need to humble ourselves to understand that we are actually a child with a mother that's patiently awaiting our return to coherence.
Zach: If there was some debt of karma that we owed this planet, we would already be dead. Nature is very patient with humans because nature loves stress. And this has been the humbling journey that I've had. I was an activist against glyphosate in Monsanto and the herbicides and pesticides, only to find out, oh my God, everything's freaking perfect. Nature's doing her death cycle in preparation for her greatest birth ever. And isn't it interesting that she used one of her own species, this time, to become the existential threat to her own health? So that stress would not arrive as a volcano threatening large ecosystems. It wouldn't arrive as an asteroid hitting and killing Topsoils globally, Like it did 55 million years ago, wiping out dinosaurs. No, this time the stress was put exactly at the moment or at the point of radical transmutation and transformation, which is the DNA itself. Humans in our innovation to try to train ourselves and everything we design out of nature have put the stress of herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, anti cancer, anti everything into the human cell at the level of our genetics. We are carrying more trauma at the human genome than any other time in human history, and probably planetary history. Never has there been more stress exerted directly on the genome, which to me represents the greatest possibility that this earth has ever had. And I believe it won't be a mistake when we look back into two thousand years and realise, oh my gosh, all of that toddlerhood of humankind and our cancer like behaviour; when we reconnected, we released an enormous amount of pent up energy and torque at the level of the genome and we created a new genome.
Manda: Right.
Zach: Not because we were good or enlightened, not because we suddenly woke up one day and cared for the plant, but because we had put enough stress on her. And we had lost enough metabolic energy that we could no longer keep up our story of separation and we had to surrender to the re-acceptance of nature inside of our bodies. The torque was released, the genome went from a two strand DNA back into a 12 strand DNA. We started to have a coherent intelligence across the species instantly. We went back to telepathy as an accepted normal practice. We started to exchange information at the level of the entire corpus or the body of the human being. We started to realise we are the greatest technology on the planet. There's no machine that will ever equate to a human body. The human mind runs on 20W. A computer trying to do the same work, 27,000,000,000W. The machines would take 20 billion times more energy than the human body. Because not only are we the most diverse, we're the most interconnected. And the interconnected relationships don't only make us intelligent, they make us efficient. The efficiency of metabolism is the phenomenon of interconnected relationships and computers will never make it. And so we have a near and present future in which everything that we fear today dissolves to the point where we won't even remember what we were afraid of, because we will feel such an abundant state of interconnected relationships that all things will move forward.
Zach: And I'm not sure if that happens inside of human bodies or we go dead. But I know nature is about to experience that massive leap forward because she does it over and over and over again on this planet. There is so much regenerative potential in the earth right now. There's more CO2 in the atmosphere right now than has been available in millions of years. And that is the next breath of Mother Earth. When those soils go from desert back to grasslands, which they already have started to do, started in September of 2024, right on time. To one of the most prophetic things ever written. 1400 years ago, nearly to the day the Quran was written and said, in 1400 years, the deserts will go green again, the Middle East will go green and North Africa will go green. September of 2024, right on schedule. Massive rains came through. Lakes were born overnight; 75 square mile Lake in the deserts of Morocco. Desert lakes scattered all the way across North Africa. The grasslands of the mountains of Saudi Arabia exploded in green for the first time in written history. The nature is coming back. And so we are marching with Origin back up the birth canal: South Africa, Ethiopia, the Nile.
Zach: This meridian is where all birth has happened on the planet. All genetic new potential is always coming out of the same birth canal of the planet. The biodiversity on this planet has come out of the same meridian over and over again. It runs from Egypt up into eastern Europe, all the way to Finland and Scandinavia. So you've got this one meridian that is energetically the place of imagination, of a planet that's always iterating for her next layer of intelligence. And this is my excitement as human beings, is we are part of this transformation. We are a keystone species. And if we go and extinct in the process of becoming that transmutation element, that is okay too, because a cancer cell is never hated by a body. A body will either survive and reintegrate that cancer, or will die and regenerate the whole body into a million other things. The cancer cell is never judged by angels or God or human beings in the end. Because I was a hospice doctor in my last chapter and I got to see this moment where the failing liver and the failing kidneys and the failing brain, and they're in a coma and the lungs are failing and doctors are failing, the drugs are failing, nothing's working. And so there's this huge failure paradigm and oh my God, they're going to die. Everything's dying. This is a disaster. And then finally, the doctor resolves and was like, you know what? There's really nothing else to do. And he sits down with the patient, says, we need to call in the hospice team. There's nothing more to do.
Zach: And I get to come in as the hospice doctor and sit down with those patients and be like, I'm so excited for you, you're about to meet the most radical transformation of your loved one here. Your father sitting in this bed is about to become somebody you have forgotten, or maybe had no idea he would ever become. We're going to stop all of his medications and he's going to wake back up. We're gonna take him off the breathing machine, and he's going to look you in the eye and even if he can't talk, I want you to be so still that you hear him speak through his eyes. Because he's about to see a reality that is so much more interconnected and beautiful than anything you've been shown in this lifetime. She's going to show it to you again, so be present. And we're going to celebrate this together. And we're going to walk with you through this, and we're going to grieve together, because this human being is in its last expression of a body, and this soul is about to explode into its next journey. And so we're going to celebrate and we're going to grieve, and we're going to be with you in this process. Suddenly, nobody thinks anybody's failing. Suddenly the patient's not failing. The doctors aren't failing. The hospital's not failing. Instead, everybody is suddenly like, oh my God, this is the moment we've been waiting for. We didn't even know. And 10% of patients in that moment shed all of the disease and turn around and get discharged from hospice six months later because they decided to live more life. And they leave without the drugs, and they leave without the diagnosis, and they leave without the disease, and they get discharged home and they go and live months, years longer in a completely different relationship to their kids and their interconnected reality. Because in that near-death moment, they reoriented and realised I was living by all of the wrong metrics. I thought I was failing everything. I thought I was a failed father, I thought I was a failed husband, I thought I was a failed employee, I thought I was a failed business guy, I thought I was a failed economic generator, I thought I had failed to protect my kids. And in that moment of death, I saw the whole story. And I realised that I am just an element in a beautiful forest.
Zach: We're all living and dying. We're rebirthing. And there's always more beauty, always more intelligence with every iteration of this planet. And it's perfect. And I put the stress on my genome and so my genetics are prepared to birth something that's never lived before because of the amount of stress and trauma I put into it. Not because I was great, not because I was a good guy, but because I participated in the human experiment of stress and loss and loneliness. And that is also perfect. And so this is where we are as a human species now. We are being admitted to hospice. We've only got a few decades left of life together, if we continue on the journey. And suddenly that's okay too. We're not failing, we just experienced life together and we are going to experience death together, and we're going to celebrate the hell out of the fact that we went on a journey of separation, only to find our way all the way back to connection. And nobody has ever been disappointed when their loved one comes to realisation of their healing in those last few breaths of life. No family has ever held that against them, oh you should have done that sooner. I've never seen it. Every time it is enough, the healing in those last few breaths is enough. And so we are here to heal together.
Zach: And we need to let go and release the expectations of what that means. But we can be very confident that a keystone species is stepping back into right relationship with our nature. And our contribution to her transformative behaviour has been already made. And now we get to sit and breathe together to find out if it's time to heal and live and play in these bodies once again, or to allow massive transition to happen on this planet. We went from dinosaurs, reptiles all over the planet to birds and mammals and humans with one extinction. This extinction is going to bring in so much more beauty and intelligence than we can possibly imagine. And the deserts are rebirthing right now. There's going to be the biggest inspiration that this planet has had in millions of years. The planet is about to become more biotic. More life force will be had in these next couple hundred years on the surface of the planet than maybe it's ever had in its life. And more biodiversity exists on the planet right now, all entirely under the stress of an extinction event made by human behaviour. And so we are providing the framework and foundation for an explosion of new imagination of life from every species, because every drop of rain has glyphosate in it. Every breath has glyphosate in it.
Manda: And PFAs and all the rest.
Zach: It's all okay.
Manda: Wow. Zach, I am very mindful of your time. And anyway, that was one of the most beautiful finishing statements we've ever had on the podcast. So we're going to call it a day at that. I have a thousand other questions, but they can wait because you have other things to be doing and a vision to to call forth. So 17th of October, 9 p.m., South Africa time. Everybody can find it online. We'll put links in the show notes. And if they want to read your book, Biological Elegance and everything that goes with it, they go to your website. Correct?
Zach: That's zachbushmd. we did not put it on Amazon or any of the typical big box stores. We're here to start relationships. And so it's not a book, it's an invitation to connect. And so Biological Elegance is your invitation and it comes with a free month of our community, which is a cheap thing anyways, it's $18. And so we're here to create the Journey community globally and become the system that makes all of the other current destructive behaviours of humankind obsolete. Not because we created a revolution, but because we embodied an evolution. And so here we are embodying together and I'm really excited for you all to check out Journey. We've got some of the most mind blowing conversations with the community. Every month we have a 2 to 3 hour conversation together, and those have been the richest ground for my own evolution to occur through. And we've got dozens of those. And so you've got 40 or 50 hours of content to dig into for free there. Start in those Journey community connection calls, and you're going to feel the energy of humans that are remembering what it feels like to be in right relationship with their planet and one another. And that's my great hope is it will emerge through us rather be engineered by us.
Manda: Fantastic. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Zach, for taking the time to come onto the podcast. I look forward to talking again. Thank you.
Zach: Honoured to be with you. Thank you all for listening.
Manda: Well, there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to Zach for the breadth and depth of all of his thinking. This is someone who has three specialities in medicine and has still stepped aside from the system. He's managed to think so much more widely than the indoctrination that we get in medical school or indeed veterinary school. And it's hard. Everybody else is going down a track and you have to step aside. I have great sympathy and great admiration for anybody who does this. And Zac has just picked up the ball of intelligent thought of what we could do and who we could be, and how we could get there and run with it in some genuinely astonishing and mind bending and very inspiring directions. I sincerely hope he's right; that we are at that stress point where everything will change. If I can believe that, and I am genuinely trying, then waking up in the morning and looking at the way the world is, is going to be a great deal easier. So there we go. If you're listening to this Wednesday 14th, when it comes out, or any time between now and the 17th, then please do follow the link in the show notes to the Origin website and join us on the night of the 17th. We will be up at Broughton Sanctuary, me and Lou and the team, getting ready for a convergence next year, which will require quite a lot of planning.
Manda: And we had not really booked some time out in the evening, but I think we're going to have to go to this. So hold that space. We're not there yet. And I am very interested to see what the Heartmath Institute comes out with. We might do another podcast all about that. We'll see. I'm potentially planning a series of ten minute ones for the gap between the solstice and Hogmanay, which is Christmas and New Year to ordinary people. And yeah, I think that might be one of them if I can make it happen. We'll see. They might not happen. Life is a bit fraught just now.
Manda: Anyways, as always, we will be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot and this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video and the YouTube, to Anne Thomas for the transcripts, to Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who would like to delve more deeply into what it is to be healthy, then please do send them this link. And just before you go, because it is fairly topical, there is time to tell you about the next Accidental Gods gathering online. It's called Dreaming Your Death Awake, and it's going to run on Sunday the 1st of November, from 4pm till 8pm UK time, which at that point is GMT. The clocks will have gone back by then. For me, this is the start of the year. Just as in some older cultures, dusk was the beginning of the day, not dawn. So the beginning of winter could be the beginning of the year. And I live in a world where the only way to understand how to live fully is to learn how to die with grace, to look forward to our own death as a rite of passage. And the reason this is topical, other than the date, is that Zach Bush is on record as saying, there comes a point when the only thing that can restore coherence is death. That was one of the many, many things I had in my notes that we did not get around to talking about. I sincerely hope there will be another chance. But in the meantime, if you want to explore the ways that we can begin to view our own death with grace, then come along. You don't need any experience. It's all online on Zoom. You just need some way of connecting to the internet. As with everything else, there is a link in the show notes. So head off and explore. And that's it for this week. See you next time. Thank you and goodbye.