196. Zach Bush MD: Back to the Garden

Zach Bush MD has become an internationally recognised educator on the microbiome, as it relates to human health, soil health, food systems, water systems, and regenerative living as a whole. The touchstone insight of Zach’s initial transformation was that we don’t need to solve each of our many increasingly prevalent diseases – we need to regenerate the source of our health and vitality. And he’s been startled by our regenerative capacity since embarking on a film project called Farmer’s Footprint back in 2018. It became a global phenomenon, prompting the creation of Farmer’s Footprint USA, Australia, UK, South Africa and New Zealand, so far, alongside a broader project called Project Biome.

Amongst all this, the transformations have continued for Zach. So this time, ahead of the Farmer’s Footprint Festival in NSW, I hoped to get to know more of the person behind the star. The feeling behind the public accolades and judgements. Along with what this doctor does when he tends intrinsic health, why farmers continue to be at the heart of his life calling, Zach’s intentions to run for President, his vision of a regenerative economy, his response to a charge of talking psychobabble, new films and courses, all culminating in the spiritual roots of it all, and a world first - Zach’s first live musical performance on a podcast.

Head here for automatic cues to chapter markers and transcript, also available on Apple and some other apps. (Note the transcript is AI generated and imperfect, but hopefully serves to provide greater access to these conversations for those who need or like to read.)

Recorded in the northern rivers of NSW on 10 November 2023.

In case you're noting the bird sounds in my intro and outro, they were recorded on the Mornington Peninsula back in Victoria (visiting my brother's family).

Title slide: AJ and Zach on stage at the Farmer’s Footprint Australia Festival (pic: Olivia Katz).

To see more from behind the scenes, become a member via the Patreon page.

Music:
Green Shoots, by The Nomadics.

Regeneration, by Amelia Barden, from the film Regenerating Australia.

The RegenNarration playlist, featuring music chosen by guests (with thanks to podcast member Josie Symons).

Find more:
Nutrisoil’s WormFest on this week, 21-22 March.

Transcript

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Music, Preview, Introduction & Supporter Thanks

Zach 0:00

But I did just meet him right where he was at . I was like of course you feel that way , because if I had heard myself speak right now , 15 years ago , I would have walked right out of the room .

Zach 0:08

I wouldn't have given myself three minutes of airtime in my brain 15 years ago . Because I am seeing the world so radically different than I did then . And that doesn't mean I'm 15 years ahead of him or something like that . It just means that we are capable of transformational understanding of the systems we live in when we start to open up the doors . And I believe he could be innovating on a farm in five years because he was there at an event called Groundswell .

AJ 0:57

AGood day . My name's Anthony James and this is the Regeneration , exploring just how we are regenerating life on this planet . Thanks , kala , and the team at Nutrsoil for having us at Wormfest later this week A seed of the famed Groundswell in Australia just what's needed . We look forward to seeing some of you there near Wodonga on the 21st and 22nd of March . And , of course , if you're also finding value in all this , I'd love you to join Nkala and the team in supporting the podcast . Just head to the website o the by other show notes Regenerationcom . Forward slash support and thanks again .

AJ 1:39

Zach Bush MD probably needs no introduction these days , but for those who aren't familiar , this doctor has become an internationally recognised educator on the microbiome as it relates to human health , soil health , food systems , water systems and regenerative living as a whole . The touchstone insight of Zach's initial transformation was that we don't need to solve each of our many increasingly prevalent diseases . We need to regenerate the source of our health and vitality . And he's been startled by our regenerative capacity since embarking on a film project called Farmers' Footprint back in 2018 . It became a global phenomenon , prompting the creation of Farmers' Footprint USA , australia , uk , south Africa and New Zealand so far , alongside a broader project called Project Biome .

AJ 2:33

Amongst all this , the transformations have continued for Zach and , having shared in his sold out East Coast tour of Australia a year ago , we resolved to have a long yarn on this podcast at our next opportunity , and that came along late last year , ahead of the Farmers' Footprint Festival in the northern rivers of New South Wales . This time with just the two of us over a cup of tea,

AJ 2:57

I hoped to get to know more of the person behind the star , the feeling behind the public accolades and judgments , along with what this doctor does when he tends intrinsic health, and why farmers continue to be at the heart of his life calling . We explore these and myriad other connections here in an extended conversation , channeling my inner Joe Rogan . We explore the microbiome, community , food , those who grow it for us , those who are regenerating country for us at the same time , those regenerating broader systems and stories , and Zach's intentions to run for president , his vision of a regenerative economy , his response to a charge of talking psychobabble , all along with new film projects and courses , the spiritual roots of the whole shebang and , in a world first , zach's first live musical performance on a podcast . So let's get to know Zach a bit more here and , ultimately , like we've never heard before

The Great Toilet Frog

AJ 4:00

. Well , zach , it's great to be back with you . Mate , welcome back to Australia .

Zach 4:06

It's such a pleasure to be with you . It's just a joy to see a year gone by and more life experienced and more to be felt and celebrated .

AJ 4:14

I'm looking forward to where the conversation might go on that very front . But first where we left off last night . I have to come back to this - the frogs in the toilet .

Zach 4:26

Yeah , that was one of my startling experiences here in Australia this week , because I still have this little question in the back of my mind is if it was a frog or not , because it was the weirdest looking creature I've ever seen . But when you're stumbling in to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and hear something and flip on the light and it startles the heck out of you and there's something large moving in your toilet , so I thought it was a creature from the deep because it just looked like nothing had seen in a frog world before .

AJ 4:52

So maybe it was a small dragon , maybe it was an extraterrestrial , I don't know I like the thought , but , yes , a common sight from here up in the subtropics . For those who don't know where we are in the northern rivers and certainly north of here in Australia , but that's the first time you've seen one then . Eh , yeah , yeah there you go ? I've not seen a toilet frog before Great species . That'll be our emblem of regenerating life . That's right . That's right when frogs are back in toilets .

Zach 5:17

It's a mythical creature , really . It is now .

AJ 5:19

Very rarely spotted . But in all seriousness , I feel like launching off from there , in a sense of what are the great surprises have you had of late ?

Zach 5:30

Wow , yeah , gosh , my life over the last 10 years is kind of just accelerating in its rate of surprise . In some ways , this past year has been an opportunity for a lot of longstanding projects that I've been working on for five to 10 years starting to kind of come to fruition or hit the pavement in different ways . But the surprises on that side of project development are always kind of wonderful to see . It's kind of like planning to have a child and then suddenly it comes through the womb and you're like , oh my god , what just arrived ?

Zach 6:03

here , Way more brilliant intelligence right straight from source than you can possibly imagine when you have that first child . And so I feel like a lot of these projects have become that Just kind of these shockingly beautiful recalibrations of my sense of reality , priorities , my sense of purpose in the world , all those things I love , being as flexible as possible with having as loose a hand as possible on the things that define me .

Letting Go of Identities and Shame

Zach 6:32

And that's been a long journey and it's been one of the most emotional things that happened . I guess it's just a tad over a year ago now I closed my clinic and that was a big shift in my identity . I've been a doctor for so long and it was such a central part of my purpose was sitting across from a patient who was in crisis or in a healing journey or whatever it was , and being in that deep , intimate experience of patient care was so much of my life , and I had spent ungodly amounts of time training to do that , and so it held this place in my subconscious value system . That was really deep , and so when it came time to and the writing had been on the wall for years and my companies had been trying to help me to the emotional experience of shutting that for some time . So it was in some ways shouldn't have been a shock .

Zach 7:25

But what surprised me in the journey was I had a lot of baked up narratives in my head that , oh my gosh , my patients are gonna be so desperately sad that I'm closing the clinic , because they've been with me for 15 years , 10 years , whatever , and they've been on these huge healing journeys and I'm kind of their foundation for their new identity or health . And blah , blah , blah . When I made that announcement , there was maybe two patients out of the many thousands that were like oh gosh , I can't believe we're doing . 99.9% were like oh my God , we're so relieved you finally did this . We know that you need to keep moving on . Like , what are you doing ? Doing this anyways , like . And so it was so overwhelming that I realized that I was the one with the codependent relationship to my patients and not vice versa .

AJ 8:11

And self-limiting , but for all the best reasons , so it is interesting , it seems like it . Yeah , yeah and it's not , and you've probably seen this a lot too . I hear this often from terrific people , like what you were doing , who could argue that that would be worth continuing . But then , similarly , when the move is made because it becomes irresistible , a similar sense of retrospect and almost it can often come with a feel of who was I to think of as this hero that they desperately needed to get him .

AJ 8:39

It's an ultimately almost disempowerment frame to them .

Zach 8:43

Yeah , I think that's the daunting reality and I closed . The thing that inspired me to close it was that we had started about six years ago . There was something called Journey of Intrinsic Health and it was an eight week program taught online . So I was giving all the content that I would give you over a two year process of coming to my clinic . We had to consolidate that into an eight week experience and it was one on one coaching or group coaching that was available and the coaches were phenomenal listeners . Ultimately their job wasn't to tell the patients health advice or anything else . Their job was to be a mirror to those clients going through the experience to see their own possibility of health and healing from within and was watching that be so successful . So I'd seen myself extracted from that patient care model for some time and to great effect and ultimately much greater effect than I could create in the clinic . So one would think that I could have just easily been like yep , that's the better thing , let's go do that , do that .

Zach 9:45

But ultimately it's surprising to your point , it's good people doing good things that tend to find ourselves in these unconscious states of disempowerment of ourselves and those that we serve . And I think , the more altruistic your identity is , the more likely you are unaware of how disempowering it is in your life because , ultimately , there is no identity of you outside of a deep source self . And so I am actually not doctor , I am not a dad , I'm not the you know all these . I'm not a boss , I'm not a CEO of companies , I'm not , you know , nonprofit founder All the things titles the world wants to give you , or perhaps we seek from the world . None of those things define who I am at my essence and in my most empowered state .

Zach 10:31

In my most empowered state , I'm an ancient energy source that is animating a finite existence in a human body for a moment , and I have deep connection and capacity to understand the universe and all things in it because I have some sort of memory bank that I can access outside of my body that can give me , you know , connection , ancestral wisdom , connection to you know , cosmic truths , natural law . All these things are inherent in the environment in which I live , which is some far flung little planet in a far flung galaxy , among 2.5 trillion other galaxies , each with five billion stars . You know , I'm just a speck of sand and the grain of the expression of the universe and yet I've been given access to the whole thing and so I have this incredibly powerful thing because I'm a being , I'm a living being , I'm human and I'm . Perhaps the lion and the whale have even more clear access to that , that knowledge field , than I do , because they don't have the egoic mind to separate them from it . But that's the interesting thing that we do in the first step of journey of intrinsic health .

Zach 11:38

After being a doc for 25 years , I can say that your healing only begins when you eliminate all of your external identities . And that is challenging and it takes time and you have to have a lot of grace on yourself and actually begin the process , because you're going to uncover all kinds of insecurities , codependencies that then palliate those insecurities and ultimately , at the base of it , some deep-seated fear , guilt or shame complex that was programmed into you probably , as probably in your ancestral line , but certainly consolidated somewhere between the ages of three and 10 years old . We are programmed socially very young , with little events , and , as I've gone through many different versions of what we call modern therapy I guess motion , code therapy and NET , neat , barbara Brennan , energy work , all the esoteric stuff I've done to myself before offering to my patients have revealed all kinds of tiny memories from my childhood that I realize , seemingly so benign and so innocent , in so many ways shaped my shame and guilt . In particular , we are ashamed in these subtle ways by our parents , typically by very benign , seeming disciplinary actions or statements of their own guilt , shame , fear , paradigms around religion or spiritual beliefs or social norms , even just the interesting thing of nakedness . When do we get programmed that nakedness is bad , that somehow we need to be ashamed of these bodies and cover these up ? And it's super young , it's I think it's somewhere around age two that we're often faced with this kind of new shame paradigm . But certainly by age five we're facing it deeply , from peers and parents and the rest , that it's just socially unacceptable to run around naked at some point .

Zach 13:36

And I have a picture record of my own life when I grew up in low income housing , government projects kind of thing in Colorado , and so in these government projects my neighbors were from all over the world . We had Hmong refugees was a big chunk of this community , because the Vietnam War was just wrapping up and we had bombed the crap out of all of Cambodia and so the Hmong people indigenous to Cambodia were in this severe , tragic refugee status and so a bunch of them got shipped to Colorado and so there's living among this indigenous people and I was naked all the time by the photographic records there and I was one of the few white kids in some ways , but I was . You're so unaware of skin color , of nakedness itself , and then this shame thing comes about and it's subtle and it happened to me around age five . I remember the incident that happened . My mom suddenly startled by nakedness and she was like I'm sure something like this was happening and it wasn't her fault , she was socially programmed and playing this thing out generation on generation .

Zach 14:49

But I think it's that wound is deep because it's kind of the story of us getting kicked out of the garden . When you see that story in scripture , the first thing they became aware of when fear , guilt and shame entered the equation was their nakedness and they covered up . And so there's some deep , deep wound of believing that somehow it's embarrassing to have this body and we all have to walk around with that as adults and spend most of our life decompressing that stress or that deep insecurity in us and it's ultimately , I think , our pathway ironically back into the garden or back into nature is accepting that we are a beautiful representation . There was a creative result of an imaginative nature that would see these bodies as unique and precious to this march of life .

Zach 15:40

And yet here we are sitting in , fully clothed , a little bit overly hot , because it's been reasonable for me to strip down naked in this thing . Yeah , so it's like we have normalized discomfort to cover up at deep , deep levels , and we're blessed to be in Byron Bay , one of the epicenters of nude beaches in the world . Still so there's pockets of humanity that remember that it's not shameful to have a human body . And I think , if we all start accepting not just nakedness at that physical level , but really nakedness at the emotional , social level , that we will start to find our way back into a healthy relationship with self

In the context of Zach's more esoteric direction currently, how does he continue to dedicate his life to farmers?

Zach 16:25

first , and then into community .

AJ 16:27

Oh yeah , there's so much in that . I think of all the conversations and in unlikely places in some ways , where that work is being done , and I'm talking investor communities , for example , where that internal work is being done , where that is being understood now . But I also think of I live on the coast in Perth right , and I've watched , even in my lifetime , bathing suits get briefer and briefer and briefer , and I wonder if we're sort of inadvertently grab .

AJ 16:54

I mean , it might be an Instagram phenomenon too , but I wonder how much we're gravitating back at the pool , I don't know , but what stands out to me most interestingly in what you were just saying is , when you're on that sort of a journey and I relate to it in many ways to including the path that really took me from what I was doing into this domain , if you like to be meeting you at a farmer's footprint gathering that there was another shift and another because there's sort of multiple another shift in identity and having and having that fall away what you thought was your path , and starting anew , but then finding that to be wondrous , beyond your expectations and what you could have ever planned . So I look at you on this journey and then what really stands out is there's this esoteric is is that word is esoteric aspect and Almost said yet , but of course it's , and You're dedicating your life , really it seems , to Farmers and farmers footprint , founding farmers footprint , usa as a manifestation of that , and now it's becoming global with obviously Australia .

Zach 18:02

New , zealand , yeah , uk , south Africa to .

AJ 18:07

This enormous body of work that's dedicated to farmers and I put the accent on that as much because they still are , aren't they almost them ? Wow one of the most neglected parts of our society , these struggles that they've experienced in incumbent systems , in the way the world is set up at the moment To not only produce the food we eat and the water we would and the clothes we would wear . You know , it's set everything in the world effectively food and fiber and etc . But of course these ones that are getting on to the regenerative path are doing that for us as well . Yet their experience of personal isolation and debt burden pressure , I mean even the I don't know if you've heard this the mainstream National Farmers Federation here did a survey across the country with their cohort . But it's , yeah , it's a big cohort .

AJ 19:04

It's the national representative body that found a third of farmers Contemplate suicide or self-harm . We know plenty do it too . I bet a third contemplate . Almost a half consider leaving it because of the debt burden pressure . And that's not their male practice . That's the way the system set up to bleed them ever lower . Well , with their prices and so forth , and of course , inputs , the chemicals and everything that we talk about and Two-thirds feel a lack of recognition and and not being understood . That's the mainstream survey , let alone the people who are trying to add to that , bringing back Ecology and and so forth and a future of food and water . So , in that context that you you know as a doctor originally , and then going on this journey that gets to these domains that you were just describing , you find your dedicated path Couldn't be more grounded and with a cohort that Almost couldn't be more taken for granted . Tell us a bit more about how that squares for you .

Zach 20:07

So my journey into that space of soil and farmers and farming began in the cancer experimentation space . I was developing chemotherapy at the University of Virginia and in that journey of developing toxins to kill cancer , started to discover the power of nutrients and so innovated a new drug pathway for killing tumors in the endocrine pathways that Really didn't have , you know , existing therapies available . A lot of these endocrine tumors don't have effective chemotherapy and surgeries notoriously ineffective and radiation doesn't work . So it was like these kind of orphan cancers that just didn't hadn't gotten attention or treatment . So it certainly applied more broadly to the common ones of breast cancer and things like that . But we were developing in a space that didn't have much friction and there was a deep need for for new innovation , because if you go challenge you know , a common chemical pharmaceutical in the space of breast cancer , you're gonna get a lot of , you know , pushbacks . I thought , okay , here's a friction-free place to develop this concept that we can feed cancer into its own Resolution rather than try to poison it to its death . And so we were using vitamin a compounds to to basically induce a Program cell suicide or elimination of the cell that's now become so damaged that it can't participate in the hole . It recognizes that with enough communication , enough energy , and then eliminates itself . So you don't have to poison a body that has cancer , you have to neutrify that body to the point where the cancer cells receive enough information and and nutrition to to eliminate themselves and call in a stem cell for complete regeneration . So that was my journey to nutrition , nutrients , slippery slope , eventually down into the soil systems and realizing the reason we had so much cancers because we had completely demolished our soil systems and therefore the nutrient density within our food and therefore the medicine with within our food was missing . So that was kind of that slippery slope . But what it found me into is a completely new understanding of at least our last 10,000 years of family , of Kind of family constellations , community constructs and ultimately human society , which were forever based on food , and so food systems have Defined kind of the scales of societies , the scales of economies from our origin and when we developed the plow . That that is often the plow and the printing press kind of are often the two inventions that created the industrial revolution and Western civilization Is often credited to those two inventions .

Zach 22:48

Turns out that the plow was the beginning of the end of soil health on the planet . We demolished soil systems globally through over plowing long before we even developed the first you know chemical inputs in this last century . So the first massive dust bowl in the United States had we killed all of our top soil by the early 1910s 20s and we were in this raging dust bowl by the 1930s . And we are . Our country was starving . We had soup lines all over the country . People were actively starving . It looked like you know scenes from Africa in the 1980s or something . So we were deeply deprived of nutrition because we had killed Our soils through plowing .

Zach 23:25

Then we figured out chemical fertilizers to kind of band-aid up this damaged soil system . And of course , when you give Process food to an organism it can feel better because it's got calories but it's not actually healthy . And so suddenly it's a a kind of vital but now sick Organism . It's a growing organism but it's sick , has a poor immune system all down . So then you're seeing invasive weeds , invasive viruses , fungal and things , all this on the plants and so now your herbicides , pesticides come in and all that . The same thing was happening in human health along that journey and by the 1950s Process food became un-warm at the same time that we create processed chemical inputs to the soil , by the 1970s , we're starting to see , you know , trends towards chronic disease . That wouldn't really be understood until about 15 years later and around 1990s , when everything was really rearing its head . And so we , both humans and our soils , have been treated the same way over the last you know century .

Zach 24:27

But digging deeper back in history , you realize , wow , the food system is interesting from a social economic standpoint , which leads to a sociopolitical standpoint , in that it's always been built on slave flavor . Hmm , so , as far back as you can find written histories , or even you know Egyptian pictographs , we fought wars to get slaves to grow food , and so we were an imperial species so that we could have consistent food production . That's basically modern civilization , you know . So we went from hunter-gatherers , subsistence living , to scaled Empires and economies through slave labor to produce food . Once we had cheap food based on slave labor , then we could scale economies , we could specialize into different areas of study and innovation , and and we created the modern world . And so I'm interested in this moment of regeneration where it's calling us back to a pre-exploitation phase , to ask can we have a realignment of value systems and an understanding of Biologic energy such that farming for the first time can be raised out of this slave labor . You know kind of subsistence living economy , and if we do that then suddenly we reverse the entire model of of empire building and Necessary wars and everything else that we fight for oil and other inputs that end up in our soil . So that that's the very intriguing thing .

Zach 25:48

As we look at farmers footprint and our global project is called project biome and all my for-profit companies are trying to find these . You know acupuncture points for change and changing our energy Technologies , our information technologies . You know how do we use bio mimicry to start . You know really Changing the narrative and changing the innovative mindset in these industries that have been so damaging to the ecosystems . So Food , energy , transportation and information technology are kind of the big spaces that we need to align with nature quickly and to do that we need to , to innovate .

Zach 26:24

You know learning systems and get out of education , which is a is a programming of historic beliefs , to engage learning , which is an experiential process that you release that student into their full creative capacity , to see where they are right now , see what's relevant to them right now , seek those root cause problems to create root cause solutions . The root cause solutions that we need today are not taught from a British education you know system that now dominates the world and and so we need to release the old metrics of you know business building and exploitation and resource , you know , congregation or whatever we do , into these dynamic abundance models of Innovation . And so that's kind of how my life has Dodd me , into these big macro environments to realizing , wow , if we , if we let the farmers lead this revolution , we're gonna have a new human society that nobody can imagine because it's never been built on an equitable Relation ship to source source energy . Food is source energy and when we develop enough value system to that source energy , we won't . We'll have to change the whole you know relationship of economic development and innovation To metric off of that relationship that we have to the energy of the planet and and it will be really beautiful and it's not hard , it's it's we have all the science available to us to Remetric those value systems . You've seen an abstract , kind of ineffective version of it in these carbon credits and everything . So we're shuffling the deck chairs at an economic level . That proves that our Abstract economies have a lot of pent up energy ready to be refocused and if we can pivot it away from Carbon credits , believing that carbon is some sort of demon on the planet when in fact it's the fuel for all of life , and start to really metric all that economy back towards farmers . To say , if you produce food in a Way and that enriches your soil system and we end up with more zinc , manganese and mineral content in your soils a year later , we're gonna start metricking your value that you've contributed to not just the food system but the entire planetary system by that , that innovation of that . And so there's an exciting way in which we can Reshape this .

Zach 28:39

And I guess I conclude that whole you know narrative there with a beautiful statement that came from Dolores Huerta . She's a she was the right-hand woman to say sir Chavez and the in the farm revolution that happened in the 1950s in the United States , which was a basically big protest movement to the deep abuses of the slave labor that was being titled migrant farm working workers and stuff and deep abuses and Inequities and all that that were happening at the time , real deep humanitarian crisis in our country , and that farmers revolution Was super successful at really kind of bringing in rights of the labor , rights of . You know human rights and all that . But what it missed , I think was , was probably rights of nature . You know we didn't consider the soil and other things to also have a living sovereignty to them .

Zach's Coming to the Impact of Agricultural Chemicals on Health, and 'MND Alley' emerging in Australia

Zach 29:28

But she and I spoke on stage .

Zach 29:30

She's now in her 90s and she's the most decorated Activist we've had in our country's history . She's been to every White House since Eisenhower in the 1950s to receive awards for her activism in so many different areas and it goes so far beyond farming now . But she and I were speaking on stage and I got , came up afterwards to tell her about farmers footprint , what we're doing , and she's so brilliant , her mind , so quick . Still she's . She's one of the few speakers that I'm on stage with where I feel like I can't keep up with it because she's firing so much information so quickly and Deep wisdom roots in that . And so she listened to farmers footprint thing and she put her hand on my shoulder . I was sitting on the ground at her feet and she said well , I don't entirely understand Everything you're doing , but I can tell you something for sure is in my long life I've never seen in a successful revolution that didn't start with the farmers and that really sat pretty hard with me because that's you've heard the thing you are what you eat .

AJ 30:28

Hmm .

Zach 30:31

We are as a society , what we eat . Ultimately and that gets pretty interesting like wow , if we If we begin to quote-unquote eat valued food , we are gonna have a different value on self , we're gonna have a different value on Social-political relationships . All of this land and country , land and country ah , there's so much in that .

AJ 30:53

What comes to mind is there's a noongar elder when I'm from who said something a couple of years ago that's actually sort of reverberated around the world a little bit and certainly continues to around the West . His name is Orem Agua and he said biodiversity is a manifestation of spirit . It tends to have the effect of the same effect that you experienced there with that woman of stopping you in your tracks , that it's such a process that goes beyond Just , just the land , if I can say that I've heard you say . Certainly he had a nice way of putting it to you when you realized that the , the soil Regenerates itself and other natural systems regenerate , that they're inherently regenerative . It's us who've lost our regenerative nature . That's already in us and tending that in each other .

AJ 31:45

I Want to come back to a number of the threads that were raised there , but to keep going on where you started , with what Awoke this in you , what made you so passionate about this ? Because it's in this state of New South Wales , in the Southwest , in the River Rena , that I mean you had cancer alley . Take you by surprise . And then around the Mississippi , here there looks to be a modern neuron disease alley emerging in the River Rena agricultural district in the Southwest of New South Wales and this is ALS for for listeners who might not by different name at Lou Gehrig's disease or something .

Zach 32:26

I don't know what I call it as well .

AJ 32:27

Hey , modern neuron disease , mnd , we're calling it here . It's spreading , it's becoming epidemic so fast and again this last 30 years period , where we know we ramped up the toxin so Dramatically , is mirrored here . Deaths from it have doubled in this area in the last 30 years and the incidence of it is looks to be Five to seven times the national average in this spot . It could be elsewhere too , but it's not a notifiable disease . So it's just taken this amazing professor , dominic Rowe , who's tabled his research in this period of time , but there are no official figures and so there's no . There's no figures at all for anywhere else . So it might be elsewhere too .

AJ 33:12

But you see enough of the pattern here and I thought instantly of the journey you were on that really opened your eyes . Bless this professor and actually another one or two who are starting to cotton on at the same time . Well , even just starting to look for the causes , it's amazing how much prominence MND has in this country . Now even one of my favorite old footballers , neil Danaher , from my club back when I was a kid Amazing football , amazing coach and then gets MND such an amazing bloke , he turns it into this huge fundraising vehicle and somehow maybe because of this , his last of 10 years , when he usually last too , and there's a major annual event around , a round of a football every year that raises millions for research . It doesn't look from the website . I mean , the language even is around fighting MND and it doesn't look like they're getting to the causes .

Zach 34:03

They're looking for pharmaceutical solutions .

AJ 34:05

Unfortunately , trials and stuff .

Zach 34:06

Exactly , yeah , and the farms you know it's , it's just , you know , I was in that space for so long , but the , the pattern just looks so ironic now from a distance , you know . Yeah , is that you know we break our relationship to nature and then we look for Paliation from the chemical industry . That brings no nature , you know . And so the what is the possibility that we're gonna find in a manmade chemical the solution to reconnect to many to its nature ? And it's just impossible . And so We've definitely done deep , you know , work in correlating all that . In the United States , parkinson's , alzheimer's , ms al s , all that correlates perfectly with number of acres sprayed with glyphosate , glyphosate being the active ingredient and most weed killers globally know how . We spray about four billion pounds , or two point five billion kilograms of that into the soil systems globally every single year now , and a billion , you know , kilograms of of a potent antibiotic that destroys microbes and fungi and earthworms and everything else in the soil systems Once it gets to your gut , lining through your water , the . What about ? You know Nearly all of our runoff from farms is heavily contaminated with roundup . Now , 85% of our rainfall , 85% of the air we breathe is contaminated with roundup and glyphosate . So these chemicals are just imbued in biology at this point , and with that advent of putting these chemicals into our water and food systems , we've added up with these , you know , deep correlations with demise .

Zach 35:44

Cancers that run with this include bladder cancer , liver cancer , thyroid cancer and , of course , the the all of the myeloid leukemia is in lymphomas , and so those are the ones that are most easily mapped to this . But I believe it's really at the root of all cancers on the planet is this breaking of relationship between cells , and that's what these chemicals do , is they disrupt the communication and structural relationship of one cell to another and it basically creates cellular isolation as a wound and a cell isolated inevitably becomes cancer . It has to be so . So we've created a food and water system that that isolates and creates loneliness at the cellular level , and for this we see macro disease and certainly the loneliness epidemic that we have expressed in major depression , agoraphobia , anxiety disorders . You know , all these things that have become rampant in our societies are kind of macro version of what's happening at the cellular levels . We disrupt this , but Certainly Alzheimer's , parkinson's , to our autism and our children , and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders , all the way to gender dissolution , all of that is related directly to this .

Zach 36:56

You know cellular injury from these chemicals , and so the I herald and celebrate , you know , any awareness these two doctors in Australia are starting to bring to this because it's it's glaringly obvious data . And you know , for three consecutive open hearings with the EPA , my team and others have shown up there to . You know , the last time we were there we present a hundred ninety six peer reviewed science journal articles proving these chemicals were at the foundation of all these diseases we're talking about . The EPA , would you know , two weeks later , again rubber stamp the , the approval for Broad . You know broad spectrum antibiotic usage in the forms of glyphosate , another herbicide . So it's falling on deaf ears at the regulatory level . But the amount of science we have now has just run so deep to prove that it really is our food system that's annihilating our relationship to nature .

AJ 37:47

Yeah , ways or deep ways ? Hey , because it I Think how many ways it comes back full circle to where we started in terms of you know Again , really good people doing good things , but if it just stays in the reaction to symptoms , it's it's , it's an ultimately disempowering frame , which which is tragic . In a way . It's also interesting how you said food and water systems , because a lot of this appears to be I mean you said it to in the runoff and so forth but a lot of the MND Causality . It's hard , almost hard , to pick it , because there's such a saturation of chemicals , but the blue , green algal blooms Look like they might be at the heart of it , and that's in a Murray Darling River system which is almost like our Mississippi , the bigger system , and so much of the country and so much of the country's food Seems to stem from water management as much as food and land management . And then this dovetails with another podcast I had recently with that bloke .

AJ 38:43

I hope you meet this weekend actually , chris Hengler , a station manager in Kachana station , who who says look , places like mine . I mean he uses cattle and holistic grazing and so forth to regenerate country in extraordinary ways , but he doesn't export because he can't . He doesn't even have road access to his 200,000 acres , so it doesn't export cattle . This is a regenerative project and they are for regeneration , so I mean they eat them . And you could do more on the other parts .

AJ 39:08

I mean you've had some engagement , I think , with this station , haven't you ? Yeah , he says , look places like ours and so much country in Australia certainly Isn't producing food , and not that it couldn't , but it's not at the moment .

What about regenerating country in all the places where food isn't grown? (Zach's founding of Project Biome)

AJ 39:21

Yet it needs to manage soil as much for water , mm-hmm and just broader health as anything else . So to see the streams coming off his property now crystal clear , into the next river when otherwise this , all this sediment and runoff it's like with the food story we might , we might miss something very important if we don't put water Right , lockstep with it , and as much . Then , coming back to this particular issue , I thought the prospect that we're in an MND alley not far from here , right now , actually in Australia , from a situation where we're mismanaging water as much as we might be mismanaging land and that's the cocktail Mm-hmm that's producing , while that's compounding , I guess , all these sorts of trends you're talking about .

Zach 40:07

Yeah , right , when we launched project by our back in 2018 . As a concept , it was recognizing , there was basically three , three broad ecosystems that we were mismanaging soil , water and air and those three are intrinsically linked . They really are the same system in a lot of ways . Yes , healthy soil leads to healthy water relationships to land and rivers and oceans .

Zach 40:28

When you break the soil system on a farm , it cannot absorb the water that falls , and so Instead , you know , you get what's called silting , where you've lost the soil structure , and so , instead of nice big clumps of black earth held together by mycelial networks that can absorb , you know , 180,000 liters per acre and it's healthy state , you now have no mycelial network , you have no soil structure , that , so you've lost the sponge and now you have just tiny little particulate that silt or washes down into the . What should be a root system is now replaced with this tiny fine Sand , basically . That then plugs up the ability of water to move through the system , and so I just drove by you know farm last weekend here . That was massive in scale , probably a couple thousand acres , but it they had clearly just plowed Probably their spring crop and we're getting ready for summer planting , and it was you know earth , you know , clean earth without a single growing thing in it , for hundreds and hundreds of acres .

AJ 41:30

Interesting the word clean , I bet that's , that's them , that's the model .

Zach 41:35

That's the model . Here's a good managed farm . It's perfectly clean , there's no weeds , there's no things . So the amount of herbicide , the amount of plowing and disking and everything else they had to do to get a sterile field to be thousands of you know how it is . You dig up your little backyard garden . You're so frustrated because five days later it's full of life . It's teeming with all the things that you thought you dug out of there . So it gets sterile . You know fields that large . You know some really deep damage to nature has occurred and it was a literally a lake . You got a bunch of storms .

Zach 42:06

Finally after five months of dry , suddenly the water flowed out of the sky and it could not soak down into those soils , and so it was a lake , rushing off into the river system around it and carrying with it all that silt . And so in the farmland in the US and Australia we were losing somewhere around two to four tons of topsoil per acre for the entire nation . You know , it's just unbelievable . In the US that equates to a loss of natural resource Equitable almost two trillion dollars a year . So here's a GDP of 17 trillion dollars . We're bleeding out two trillion dollars a year of future assets that could , you know , grow the future food fiber fuel for our country , and we're not gonna be able to grow that in ten years .

Zach 42:50

Current estimates are that the United States might be down to 25 to 60 harvest left . The whole world might be closer to that 40 to 60 years left . And so we are losing topsoil at such an alarming rate and unfortunately , in tropical zones it's even faster . Costa Rica is losing an estimate at 13 tons per acre of topsoil per year now , and it's one of the most heavily sprayed chemical environments . Hawaii the same thing . So massive devastation to land happening and we're just losing these natural assets so rapidly now that that will take us a long time to recover unfortunately soon . So we are bleeding out that relationship of soil to water . Water , once silted and carrying all those antibiotics , don't have the normal microbial , therefore not the normal fish populations and not normal algae .

Zach 43:39

Yeah , exactly , and so that's the algae blooms you're talking about , and so the one at the end of the Mississippi River is the largest one in the planet . It starts there in the every summer as all of our runoff from our initial spring springs to beat down all the weeds , to create all that sterile land , sweeps down into the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi River and the bloom begins kind of Mouth in Mississippi . There's a dead zone there where no fish can live , no thing . It's complete moonscape underwater there because the algae Bloom is is so dense in that region . And so that's the dead zone . That's larger than the state of Rhode Island now , and then the threat threatened zone is larger than the state of Texas out in the Gulf of Mexico .

AJ 44:22

Well , this is what's happened here too . We've had we had not one fish kill , which you think is so hellish that it couldn't possibly happen again and we wouldn't let it surely happen again . And that was five , six years ago . And then we had another one just earlier this year . This is in the Darling River , where it sort of comes down into the Murray that we're talking 20 million plus fish , so we're getting the same thing here .

Zach 44:44

Yeah , yeah , I recently did an Instagram post . If you want to scan through my Instagram , it must have been a few months back , but I I captured a clip from the BBC that was covering the fish that die off . That just happened on the beaches of Mexico and the Gulf of Mexico , from Texas and everything else . You can't believe the number of fish on those beaches like it is . Yeah , it looks like a carpet of silver for , as far as you can see , just blanketed with fish that are big . Yeah , you're looking at sudden dead fish that are , you know , 12 to 18 inches long . So massive , massive souls of fish dying out there . That that algae bloom that's now trying to metabolize all of our farm runoff Runs all the way across the Atlantic Ocean via the , the water Gulf Stream currents there , all the way over the Ivory Coast , the West Coast of Africa , and is killing fisheries in Africa now . So US Midwest farmers don't realize they're killing fisheries in Africa with their farm runoff . So the scale of devastation that we're doing with modern agriculture Can't be calculated . And the frightening thing to me is I presented a whole PowerPoint presentation on exactly what we just said there and that algae bloom and everything else to scripts oceanography . This was about five years good , and in that , you know , I was actually at Dr Monk's office or home when I presented that to a group of their you know Things .

Zach 46:10

Dr Monk was really founded oceanography . He , he founded scripts oceanography at the University of California , down there in La Jolla . He was the oceanographer who trained Jacco Stowe and you know everybody else We've ever known . So he was 102 when he was listening to my lectures . So he's sitting there , you know , john the ground , because he had never heard of farm runoff as an issue for oceans . Wow .

Zach 46:36

And so here's your penultimate expert in ocean health . And the soil story hadn't gotten to him . And so it's this deep schism in the academic world of well , that's soil , that's water . So you've got ocean experts , you've got soil experts , but they're not cross-pollinating because the funding schemes that are in academia keep you so pigeon-holed or in your isolated column of thought that we are missing the big picture .

Zach 47:04

And so I came away from that terrified of like , oh my God , scientists all over the world don't know , they don't know , they aren't seeing the big picture because they're not being given the information , because they haven't walked up the hall to talk to a soil person . It's like , wow , this is a deep wound within our academic structures and I certainly had seen that even in the medical world . You've got your diabetes expert , you've got your kidney expert , you've got your lung expert , you've got your cardiovascular expert and nobody is realizing , oh my God , this is processed food toxicity . That's fueling all of these different industries and they're all throwing drugs at downstream consequences of a food system that broke Nature . Relationship to humans gone , disease occurs and nobody's asking those deeper questions like you're forcing . Your scientists are starting to ask like why is all this ALS exploding in this thing ?

AJ 47:58

Well then .

Zach 47:58

Some of our most famous regent farmers are suffering under these conditions right now . These are the farmers that recognized 30 years ago that we needed to change . And so you've got Gabe Brown and many others out there who are kind of our godfathers of the storytelling , and they have not escaped the pressure of

Are regenerative farmers being brought down by the unstable systems they're trying to move beyond?

Zach 48:15

these MDS conditions and everything else .

AJ 48:17

No , that's right . And nor have they escaped the financial fallout as well . It occurs to me , as those incumbent systems inevitably collapse , that we seem to be at a point where they're bringing down those pioneers as well , because they're still all in it to some degree . And I wonder what you're seeing ? Are you seeing that ? That as things get harder , there is that breakdown of those systems that aren't anchored to nature well , that it's bringing those efforts down with it ? It's almost like we're hitting the wall of the paradigm change . Now this is what it means to prospectively shift paradigm . It is actually a well , a not easy . It doesn't happen easily . It might be that we this is what it might look like that actually gets hardest , almost like the birthing canal . Isn't it when you're in a renaissance scenario that we sort of gun for that ? We might be in that spot right now ?

AJ 49:13

What are you seeing ?

Zach 49:16

Yeah , I think farmers who print projects are kind of my microcosm of this kind of maturation of understanding of where we're at . Just in the last few months , you've had my own personal revelation around farmers who are kind of like why has it been so successful ? We set out in 2018 to make a film about the Mississippi and everything we're talking about . I didn't set out to start a non-profit , set out to start a film , just to create awareness of the relationship between soil , water disease . As we were filming that project , we were on farms from Minnesota all the way down the 2000 mile corridor of the Mississippi tributaries to get to New Orleans , where it opens into the Gulf of Mexico . On that journey , we met so many family farms and farmers that are just absolutely suffering economic desolation in their entire cities . Ghost towns for a thousand miles . I mean literally boarded up . No retail , no restaurants . Bars are closed , post offices were actively closing as we were shooting . These are literally towns that have disappeared and yet you have all these farmers now living in isolation . They have to drive two hours to get groceries . We have created a desolated ghost town system through the entire Midwest of the United States , covering 16 states . Basically , we have decimated our economies . But in each household you see the burden of all of these conditions all the kids with attention deficit or autism , all the kids with some sort of developmental delays or challenges there , it seems , and nutritional problems with eczema and allergies and asthma and just whole host stuff . The farmer and his spouse are suffering with breast cancer , prostate cancer and two other weird bone marrow conditions . Just the disease that we would see in four people on a farm was just astounding amount of human stress being expressed .

Zach 51:16

That was when we realized there was a deeper , deeper wound than we had even anticipated . And unfortunately we also were witness to the soil testing that was happening at our first farm , showing that organic soil management could often be worse quality than the chemical farming technique . And that was scary and startling to me . And that was when the aha moment of we didn't need to do soil management , not organic produce . We really needed to turn our attention back to biodynamics , permaculture , regenerative agroecology at a large scale . We needed to start to understand biological living systems within the soil rather than soil management practices being the emphasis . We are always reductionists in our certifications and therefore in our education systems and all this , and so we got to stop the reductionist viewpoints and metrics and start to really value living systems of soil . And to get there you have to find the living systems within the human and its relationship to self , its relationship to soil .

Rewriting Humanity's Connection With Nature

Zach 52:15

So that's been the long arc , thinking that , oh , we've got just a soil water problem to wow , we have the human crisis is deeper wow .

Zach 52:25

It's because humans are disconnected from self and source , we don't value ourselves and therefore we don't know how to value our land and our relationship to nature as a whole , and then we get all the way back to nakedness . Basically , we have to go all the way back now , as we start to face our great extinction event . We need to choose a different path forward , and so we need to go back to the garden myth and say how are we going to rewrite ourselves into that garden of Eden ? How are we going to recreate the garden of Eden ? How are we going to recognize that nature is inherently abundant in life giving and is always pursuing the biodiversity that you mentioned earlier in that quote , rit , into the language of nature itself as biodiversity , not as biodiversity occur through adaptation of genetics and everything else that is , you know , arbitrated through viruses and exosomes , and so nature is producing its next opportunity or its next expression of self every time it gets stressed , and so this is a beautiful journey , as the nature does its thing is it loves death and dying , because that's when the organism starts to make a whole bunch of new opportunities or potentials for what it could become next , and we express those out into the atmosphere around us through our breath , through our sweat , through our urine , through our feces , like we are exuding new genetic possibilities that we call viruses , and in my bloodstream right now is about 10 to the 8 viruses . So 100 billion viruses are coursing through my bloodstream , and that's not one virus repeated that many times . That's 10 to the 8 different viruses that are coursing through my bloodstream . This second and every one of my 70 trillion cells is looking for the next gain of function of . Oh wow , that looks like something that I could use to help Zach past his current iteration of stress . I could become this and then resolve that stress . And so my body is constantly updating itself , constantly finding new metabolic pathways to escape the toxicity that I'm exposed to through this cup of TM drinking or whatever it is , and so that this is the excitement I have . As nature is inherently regenerative period , it is seeking adaptation and biodiversity at every single angle , and with each new iteration of biodiversity it gets more beautiful , more intelligent and more spiritually connected , honestly . So that's where humans come in , is we're basically the iteration of the planet after the last extinction , which was dinosaurs as the dominant species of the planet . So we went from reptiles to birds , to mammals , to humans , and that was the result of massive genetic stress and new genetic potential on the planet . And so we are in a rebirth phase that we call death , and that was much of my personal and spiritual , and therefore professional , journey was through death .

Zach 55:07

I went from , you know , running a hospital ICU as an internal medicine doc to feeling like I needed to get out of the hospital system to find more of a root cause thing in primary care and all this .

Zach 55:19

So I became an endocrinologist and focused on endocrinology metabolism .

Zach 55:23

That got me into my cancer research around food and nutrition .

Zach 55:27

When all that wrapped up and I left the university in 2010 , I subspecialized a third time in hospice and palliative care , and it was in that constant exposure of death in the ICU that had seeded this interest in me is that it was the one space that I never felt bad walking home from , was it was being witness to a death , which was so weird to me ten years into my journey as a doctor is like why is that the one thing that feels good ?

Zach 55:52

Cause I've been told that I'm supposed to stave off death , I'm the solution for the patient to avoid death , and why do I feel like I'm part of a really corrupt machine every time I'm trying to fight death . When we finally , as a system , accept death and then come along side the patient as a human , say I'm here to hear you , see you , love you in these last few days , weeks , months of life , and then suddenly your relationship to your own life , to this patient , their life turns around . We have to discharge 10% of people from hospice because they stopped dying and suddenly get healthy , because we became human with them for a moment , and so it's just unbelievable

The Global Greening Cycle (with more water and carbon available to us now)

Zach 56:30

.

AJ 56:30

The stories that come out of those contexts where people have , I guess all distraction is stripped away . Hey , the stories that come out of those context . In some there's best selling books about it . You know you mentioned the dinosaurs .

AJ 56:44

I heard someone else say something recently that was akin to what you said last year actually , where you said the dinosaur period was the last time we had this sort of intensity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere . And how green was it ? Like we instantly the dinosaur era , that's the image that comes to mind . And yet this huge opportunity in that , if we draw that carbon back where it belongs , into the soil , to regreen the planet . And more recently I heard someone say the same thing with water , with I mean , we're in the epicenter of a flood , flood catastrophe in recent times here in the Kimberley , where we've been again this year , the same like the scale just keeps ramping up . But we've sort of touched on the reasons for that , and they were . They were certainly born out , to be true , in the Kimberley . I looked into it and researched it deeply and spoke to people there . I'm assuming here too , it was all these sorts of dynamics that we're talking about soil death .

Zach 57:39

Yeah , soil death on the farms . You no longer can absorb that 180,000 liters of per acre , all of the river at once . And suddenly you know a storm system that's covering thousands of kilometers all ends up in the river at once . Yeah , you end up with the massive record floods .

AJ 57:52

It wipes towns off the map and infrastructure out . And not only that . The stuff that in the Kimberley wasn't Fitzroy crossing , the stuff that wasn't washed away , was buried . There was that much like Pompeii there was that much land movement it's exposed bedrock that this speculation hasn't been seen .

AJ 58:08

You know I hadn't seen a lot of day for millions of years at least thousands sort of they don't really know , but it's that biblical scale type thing . But then I can't remember who it was . But he said similar sort of opportunity . Okay , so if we're moving into an era where this amount of water because it was more water that had ever fallen as well , so it was all these things combined if we're faced with that and we know how to get back to a position where we're able to absorb it and harness it , then same thing with carbon we got this opportunity to regreen .

Zach 58:39

So out of the death .

AJ 58:42

It's already come to that , tell us some of what's really striking you when you get around these days .

Zach 58:47

The the global greening happens every 7000 years or so , and so we go through these cycles on the planet and the main band that regreens is the temperate belt of the northern hemisphere , which , you know , basically is epicenter on North Africa , and so North Africa sits above the equator and is , so it's a northern hemisphere phenomenon and it's a temperate climate that doesn't have a winter that would cause a die-off in the in the northern half of the United States , north America , for example , we do a great job greening every spring and we pull an enormous amount of carbon and other nutrients back into the soil systems , but then we go into the fall and die off and we can't absorb anything . So northern hemisphere goes into a very CO2 positive discharge during the winter time and then is reabsorbed in the spring almost to neutrality . We leave a little bit of extra percent of , you know , co2 , every atom . But with with a temperate zone that does not winter in the northern hemisphere , we would reverse all of that and we would have no excess CO2 at all . In fact we would be putting all that CO2 right back into the soil system . So that naturally happens in cycles without human intervention . So we certainly weren't plowing in , spraying chemicals , you know , at the time of the Roman Empire , and so what we did , though , was create the Sahara Desert through screwing up our relationship , through agriculture and river systems , with Alexandria and the like , but it was also just going back into one of its natural desertification cycles .

Zach 1:00:21

The last time the Sahara Desert was as large as it is right now is about 14,000 years ago . 7,000 years ago , it was the largest grassland in the world , the largest savanna , and when it goes green , when North Africa goes green , the water that gets back into the atmosphere and starts to cycle healthily with the carbon cycle , regreens Saudi Arabia and the entire Middle Middle East , and then , and then northern India , and then Siberia and Russia , and then all the way into northern China , so it's one third of the planet goes green again , and 7,000 years ago it went green . And then the Romans show up , you know , a thousand years ago , and they find the most verdant soil systems in the world , and so they build Alexandria . So we've got Alexandria booming in , biggest city in Europe , biggest city in , you know , the entire system , and it's sitting there on the southern border of the Mediterranean , in North Africa , and that city you go now is just dust and sand as far as the eye can see , without a single living green thing . So how do we get go from the most verdant ? You know systems of soil and water and all that ?

Zach 1:01:28

It's largest river in Africa was the river Chad . It was being flowing out of the lake Chad , which is now just recently been discovered . It's imaged by satellite imaging . It's all under sand , sand dunes throughout Northern Africa , but right in the middle of the Sierra Desert was Lake Chad , largest lake in the world , feeding the largest river in the world , and so dwarfed . You know the Great Lakes in the United States that are kind of the predecessor to the whole catchment area of the Mississippi . So what we have in North America was dwarfed by what happens naturally in North Africa . So that looks like it's a pretty natural cycle and going back 28,000 years and further back and further back . This has been a long , long cycle and therefore all of those deep soil grasslands of North Africa end up under sand and pushed down , and pushed down and over 200 million year process turns into oil .

Zach 1:02:26

And so for for billion years , I think , we've been in a greening desertification cycle of Africa that's allowed us to create the largest oil reserves in the world in North Africa , saudi Arabia , siberia and North China . That's where all the oil of the world is focused , is in that strip , not because it's a desert , because it becomes desert , and so it's the death rebirth cycle of North Africa that really is the birth canal of this planet , and so that's Project Biomes . Effort now is to bring global attention to the fact that this desert is ready to go green again , and the factors that are necessary for that is CO2 in the atmosphere , lots of available water , transfer in the atmosphere for these huge storms to come through and ignite that , and then the big piece of it is the animals themselves , and so the architects of the river systems are the hippos and the elephants , and over the last 10 years elephants started overpopulating Botswana and northern South Africa , which is really the birthplace of all things . So the cradle of humanity , as it's been termed by UNESCO , and the cradle of life , which is about 300 kilometers from that site , it's the first bacteria on the planet , the first humans on the planet , all that is in this zone of northern South Africa on its kind of east coast . That birth canal is on the 31st longitude and goes all the way up to Scandinavia , and along that line is all of our historic epicenters of high technology and wisdom that predates humans . So pre-human cultures were in these zones . We have Stonehenge and things like that as human expressions then , and we go all the way down to Zeptepe .

Zach 1:04:07

That 31 parallel original time is what Zeptepe means . The original time beginning of zero degrees lad to you , or longitude is what it should be named . But then the British moved the longitudinal system so that they were more superior on the longitudinal map . But this is now the 31st longitude , but at the bottom of that is Adam's calendar , which is one of the most ancient monolith stone formations that was built to seemingly focus energy on the planet . And you go up from there to Giza , egypt , to the three pyramids there , and all of that is along the same energetic birth zone of the planet . And so the Nile , there in Egypt , there in Giza , is the northern tip of this pumping agency .

Zach 1:04:55

And so now you have elephants that are amassing on the southern end of this , ready to move , ready to re-engineer the river systems of Africa , and they can't move because of all the fences that we put up in the name of conservation , and so conservation and food production are the two reasons we have killed the planet , and we need to re-wild our understanding of how nature works and really return to this understanding that biodiversity is a function of motion and movement of water systems , soil systems and its dynamics , animals and keystone species moving on the land as they sense the need to .

Zach 1:05:29

The elephants want to participate and find purpose in overpopulating now to go and do this .

Zach 1:05:35

I am convinced that is the deep spiritual reason for this movement of elephants , and so Project Biomes sees the opportunity to bring attention to the soil , water and kind of human systems that line the five major river deltas and systems all the way from South Africa to Giza .

Zach 1:05:54

And when we get that pumping again , we will see the more rapid re-graining of Africa , which will occur over the next couple thousand years , no matter what . But if we participate I think we can make that a couple of decades Like we know how to move carbon and water so effectively now , and we know how to work with nature . A single farmer can build a meter of soil in two years , and so I just watched a 1.2 meters of soil be created in an 18 month period on a farm down in South Africa just by very well established grazing methods , and so it's unbelievably possible to create deep , deep reservoirs of water and nutrients in these soil systems , and then take the fences down and let those animals move , and it's just going to be astonishing how fast this planet goes into its next rebirth .

Zach 1:06:41

And we get to be the co-creators of that .

AJ 1:06:43

Well , to contemplate again full circle where we started , in a sense , to contemplate our value , could be no less than keystone species in that way . Not you know thing that you would GDP , yeah Well , exactly Well , speaking of which perfect segue . Speaking of what else we need to enable this , I think of the financial domain and the economy . And I think of it as much because a lot of what I see around now , a lot of the amazing stuff , has again seemingly hit the wall of the paradigm change where it seems the best of investor capital still comes with growth paradigm , essentially like it'll get down to 4% returns and that's sort of that's a compassionate , sort of regenerative minded investor , and that might be well and good in some contexts , but in other contexts I've seen it just continue to play the same game Again . I come back to the start of our conversation . Hey , the unwitting ways we disempower when we're really trying to empower . So it plays the same game in the growth paradigm , still expecting growth of investment and what it does to farmers , where this is applied .

Reimagining Economics and Ownership (humans as keystone species or GDP?)

AJ 1:07:52

And I'm talking even the people who've led the way for 30 years , who've worn the debt . They've just put in the R&D and the hard yards and done it and they're still being finding themselves to step it up and help others join them , being settled with debt burdens that crush them . That we heard at the top too . So I said , well , that's untenable , and you know , you know that , like the you know mainstream , that means that survey , that a lot of them even think can I keep doing this ? Others find finding ways through , but I'm finding the pincer is on , and a bit more extensively , because of the you know situation we'll often call cost of living crisis and inputs prices going through the roof and so forth , those acute contexts , so those things being untenable . Ultimately , at least on a massive scale , I think going into that paradigm change , these are the things we won't be doing , that farmers will be not crushed by debt burdens , and all the more or all the less when they're doing this regeneration , when they're stewiting this regeneration on our behalf , it'll be a completely different scenario .

AJ 1:09:04

But then I wonder and I know a lot of people are wondering how we get from here to there , and I wonder I'd love to get your thoughts on this If I feel like , again , it's okay if I just say what I feel like is an ultimate truth . We have to face down at some stage , and this could be true of even of just the housing crisis . We've got everywhere , but people just can't get homes . So how's that tenable too , is that we have to face down . What we all sort of broadly talk about , that it's stewardship of countries , the thing that it's a furfie . Do you know that word ? It's a furfie . It's like a fallacy , but with sauce on top . It's a furfie to think that we can own country , that we can own nature . Okay , given that that's almost another original wound , in a way it is we bought so far into that mythology .

Zach 1:09:53

It's a scarcity model , totally . Since rejected from the garden . We need to own something to make sure that we're safe .

AJ 1:09:59

It's interesting .

AJ 1:10:00

Mapping that back , I can't help but think , for all these reasons , we do need to face this .

AJ 1:10:07

And then I wonder maybe there's ways those of us seeking investment , to further these , the greening and the food of the nature we're talking about , et cetera need to broach that so that the structures we present to investors , the very structures , communicate the transcendence of that ownership fallacy . So , whether it's common governance structures or trusts or whatever it is , I mean which sounds big , right , if I'm talking multi-generational farmers who then say I'm going to take my name off that title that my great-great-granddad or whatever picked up , but then , on the other hand , as I say that , I think of the First Nations folk who never needed a title , which , of course , is the reason they're stripped of the land at the moment . But that's got to be part of what we're doing in the next paradigm too is like being together in this land . So it feels like that relinquishment or that facing down or that death maybe of the fallacy of ownership is a critical piece , a critical enabler to get us past this wall or through if I stick with this metaphor through the birth canal . What do you think ?

Zach 1:11:18

Yeah , that revaluation of societies and economics is critical . Currently , investment models are being based on old economic models of success , right ? So we got really deluded with the tech boom to think that we should expect 10 to 100% returns on our investments , and we have seen so many collapses or bubble bursts of that tech industry since the 1970s . So every 10 years or so there's a huge bust in the marketplace at the NASDAQ level or whatever your metrics might be , and those deep recessions are caused by an excess in returns over short periods of time . Because it's not biologically feasible . The proof that we have in the pudding of human history is you cannot escape natural law . It dictates the very quantum physics of the tissue you exist in , and so you cannot exceed natural systems or their growth rates and expect there to be a stable system . It will collapse . The stable growth rate of nature is about 4% a year , and healing can be faster than that for a period of time . So one farmer builds a meter of soil over an 18-month period , but now he's not going to keep doing that . He's not going to have 30 meters of soil in 30 years , right ? So once he's recovered the normal biology of the land there , it will continue to grow at about 4% and the nutrients there , the biodiversity , will grow , all of that . So we need to , I think , re-metric our growth rates to 4% . Gdps and global economies should all grow at about a 4% rate , and anytime we have a GDP grow at a 3.8 to 4% rate , it's always our biggest period of prosperity because there's not collapses in little microeconomic sections and the wealth disparity decreases , and it's always a very good period for a country that finds itself in a 4% growth rate . So we've been working on a currency that maps to natural systems , to kind of make sure that our currency systems grow at the same rate as nature can , and so that's a way of re-metricing economic values and growth towards biologic systems . So I hope that currency becomes available in the next two years or so , and it's been a long journey , many ups and downs , many failures in the path , but we've basically been using biomemetry , that's , socioeconomic modeling , to figure out how do social systems start to utilize economic systems that grow within those biologic frameworks , and then how does investment strategy and all the other things play off of that , how does innovation happen within that space , et cetera . So it's been a very interesting journey for me because I love kind of nerding out on economics , even though I'm not an economist at all and I'm actually relatively bad at math .

Zach 1:14:18

But what I am pretty good at is seeing the patterns of cells and biology under a microscope . And every time you see a complex biologic system under a microscope you are struck by the complexity of the system . How does a single cell coordinate the energetic expression of billions of atoms to self-organize every millionth of a second ? Because it disappears and reappears every millionth of a second because of the nature of physics and so the quantum relativity of being solid . How does the cell continue to remember how to be itself every millionth of a second ? And to be itself it has to be like 200 different things . There's different organelles , different proteins , different things . There's somewhere around 400,000 different proteins in a human body and so all those different cells with all those different protein structures there's . How is all of that self-manifesting and self-organizing constantly over the course of a lifetime to keep building my body ? How can I wake up every morning having a self-identity ? That's Zack . Having a body that looks a hell of a lot like it did yesterday , that's freaking miracle . It's absolutely astronomical

The Power of Biological Energy

Zach 1:15:31

and unbelievable . So nature is really good at energy maintenance and maintenance and energy usage .

Zach 1:15:38

The difference between physics and biology is about a 1,000-fold increase in light energy per cubic centimeter . So a bacteria has about 1,000-fold the energy of a cubic centimeter of the sun . So the sun's are the brightest things and most energy-dense things that nature does at the physics level . But single bacteria have enough fermentation , energy release of that sunshine within them when they're metabolizing nutrients that it actually shines per cubic centimeter brighter than the sun . In the same way , when you jump to a multicellular organism , there's about a 10x increase in the amount of energy per cell because we go from fermentation to a respiratory cycle within the mitochondria rather than fermentation in the mitochondria becoming your fuel source . So the mitochondria , with this 10x now , are 10,000 times the brightness of a solar event or nuclear energy . So life is at the multicellular level of a dolphin or a human is 10,000 times the concentration of light energy per cubic centimeter than the sun . And so that gives you a sense of the economies , of the fabrics of reality that we live in . And if a cell can be 10x or 100x or 10,000x the source of energy that it's absorbing , you've found something that is an extreme abundance model . There is going to be always more life because it's so good at making energy and utilizing energy , and so life is the ultimate expression of energetic refinement and efficiencies .

Zach 1:17:16

When we start to map our own economies to the cellular metabolism or the rate of energy production light energy of our children , we would have a really unique economy . What if our economy grows at the same rate that the light energy within our children grows and suddenly we don't have children that are dying of immune dysfunction and cancers by the time they're four . We have children that are living routinely over 100 years of age because they're so nutrient dense and they live without the diseases of today for the vitality that they hold within them . And our GDP grows as our children grow their capacity for vitality . So these are things that we can literally metric . We can measure these things . It's just an opportunity for us to redesign currency so that it doesn't reflect the scarcity model of gold or military intervention . It actually maps to biologic vitality . Soil metabolomics and

Intentions to Run for President

Zach 1:18:14

human metabolomics would be a really exciting basis for future economies and currencies .

AJ 1:18:20

Very interesting . I wonder if then we'd be calling it gross domestic vitality instead . That's a quippy way of saying . If we've got that far , so much is going to be so different . It's almost the unforecastable . But not that there's not value in projecting the vision . All right to skip to a different domain , politics . I wonder . Well , firstly , I wonder , are you still considering running for president ?

Zach 1:18:49

Yeah , I mean , I think politics is long on my horizon so I'll definitely come to that in this time and my family's been long in American politics for 400 years . So yeah , I think it's in my matrix , I think it's upcoming . I'll be excited to roll out that broader intention for the public scene . But as a precursor to any personal ambitions or efforts towards politics , I've started a new nonprofit called the Institute of Natural Law and that project is really exciting . It's kind of doing what we did with Farmers' footprint to the industry of food systems . We're trying to bring that same kind of root cause solutioning towards social , economics and socio-political systems by understanding natural law . If you Google natural law and you're coming to Wikipedia page probably , and it's going to give you a long history of political philosophy . So dating back to indigenous cultures in North America is a good example of it , but it could also be found in Africa , australia . Every continent was practicing natural law as socio-political understanding and systems of management .

AJ 1:20:00

Indeed . Yeah , you know , some First Nations here have started to call it ancestral law as a framing that might speak to our Western system too and get some traction there . But it's interesting little twist on it .

Zach 1:20:12

Yeah , and so the Iroquois nation , within the North American kind of continent , had developed a pretty deep understanding , philosophy and practice of natural law that was adopted at the macro level , with unique languages , cultures and governance . We're working coherently together under the system of natural law . Conflicts and other you know frictions that would occur were largely arbitrated by a council of women that were elected and they participated together to bring resolution to conflict and use natural law again as the philosophical foundation for finding win-win scenarios and resolving conflict to help understand people's , understand their relationship to a greater whole than their own culture or government might do . So along those lines , we're trying to relaunch that model

Expanding Understanding of Natural Law

Zach 1:21:01

. Oh , to follow up on the Wikipedia thing , you might mention Confucius and the United States itself built on natural law and all the stuff , but what you never see mentioned there is nature . So it's the irony of natural law that we found when we started looking at this is like wow , we haven't updated this body of wisdom or knowledge or philosophy with our now understanding that humans don't actually exist without a diverse biodiversity of , you know , soil systems and microbes within our guts and immune function , all this stuff . So we needed to extrapolate , you know , the current definitions to really include all of life and when we start to see the whole planet as a single life system that is thriving and regenerating and dying and regenerating and rebirthing all the time , then our natural law starts to go far beyond understanding human systems and starts to understand our expression within this complex ecosystem that makes us possible .

Zach 1:21:56

So , institute of Natural Law , working on expanding our definition , awareness , understand and practice of natural law into our biological relationships outside of the human experience . And it comes at an interesting time because certainly a couple years ago , when we set out to build this institute , we didn't realize it was going to coincide with , you know , the US government and everybody else acknowledging that there's non-human species that we've been working with for 100 years and all of this . And so , at the same time that we're realizing the microbiomes role in human intelligence and vitality , we're realizing that intelligence is expressed in the entire cosmos and there's intelligent beings here around us in different dimensions and different expressions and different colonial missions maybe in all this , but we have , we are a part of life sandwiched between the microbiome and , you know , extra human intelligence throughout the cosmos . So if we don't quickly ground ourselves in natural law to find our , our cohesive identity as a species and we continue instead to infight and kill each other and pillage , rape and destroy this , this

Transcending adversarial politics that brings the worst out of people

Zach 1:23:00

planet we live on . We're going to be swallowed up by nature itself . We can't subsist , we can't persist as a species against natural law . And so this is , you know , going to be a fun sister project to the Project Biome Pharmacy Footprint Mission , because it's going to give us some framework on how we start to develop those social political systems , and all of our politicians need to be deeply educated in natural systems and living systems , thinking and natural law so that they can start to have a cohesive philosophy of change that isn't based on anti the other guy running , you know . And so this whole polarized , anti everything platform that all politicians are currently running on globally is just taking us to the lowest common denominator of expression of society , and this is good in the sense that this is this is the penultimate expression of centralized governments . We need decentralized systems of governance and that's the only way nature does everything is redundant and and biodiverse , and distributed networks , all decentralized systems . And so how is this going to look for you ? Listening to this thing , is you're going to need to start to develop a system of maybe 100 to 150 households around you as a core sense of community identity . And those might be in your immediate adjacent , you know community but in a lot of cases I think it's going to be 150 other families that think like you and they might be kind of far flung and distributed across wide , wide areas . But you need to find that that group of 100 or so households and start to theorize like how do we create a cohesive , autonomous pod here ? Because that number , that 100 to 120 , 150 somewhere in there , is the number of households that have again and again been been successful in indigenous cultures globally for tens of thousands of years .

Zach 1:24:55

Cities of 25 million are collapsing all over the world under the weight of waste and all these inefficient systems of failed human productivity . San Francisco , maybe the golden example of this right now . This is a city in absolute , utter collapse . Right now . Their economic you know wellness is , you know , doomed at this point , as far as I can tell . So one of our most vibrant , long-lived cities in the United States has been a , you know , beacon of innovation and and brilliance , for the world is now dying under its own weight of disparity between wealth and and poverty at the human level and between the kind of disconnected version of wealth that it's been practicing as a tech epicenter . Building software systems and computer programs have absolutely nothing to do and are often exploitive of nature , and so this is the place that's dying fastest in the country . So we have , you know , we have to go back to these nodes of health and vitality at the community civilization level

Elinor Ostrum and systems that bring the best out of people

Zach 1:26:00

if we're going to live past those 60 harvests that are estimated .

AJ 1:26:05

And the work , I think , of Alonora Ostrom , who I've just come across this year it's been a revelation , the first female winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics who wasn't an economist either , but yeah , her research on common's governance , you know this sort of thing that was very often based on water , like don't forget where the water is . That that is the connection point , the ultimate connection point . That did work , have worked for millennia in all sorts of cultures , in all sorts of contexts . So , yeah , it's been a revelation .

AJ 1:26:31

I think , then , about how does the power shift , if I can just use that word , straight up and such that the model , the adversarial model itself may shift , which we saw a glimpse of in Australia last year with the independence coming into federal parliament that did politics fundamentally differently to that adversarial system , didn't buy into the anti this just stood for something and were elected in numbers , and we'll see what happens next time too , but it's certainly true to say the major party's popularity continues to wane . So , best case , I think that that adversarial culture , let alone system , might be on the out here too . But when I think about power and all the ways it it does find ways to double down and hold on to itself . I took note when you said in your conversation with Rich Role earlier this year and you mentioned a bit of it here too .

AJ 1:27:25

When you talked about how you presented to the EPA , you said to Rich that power and civic process period just the way to go about this , is also to be relationship based , and I feel a partiality to that . I mean everything more brilliant to this question it's exhibited in that . I'm aware that a lot of people will and probably fairly , in their context too their thought pattern might be when it comes to power . Soft approaches like that have their limitations . They might say that was tried with Hitler . You know the Hulk Chamberlain mythology that's come up around that .

AJ 1:28:04

But you found interesting things repeatedly , like with the EPA and you said it with something else before . Oh , the 102 year old professor . They weren't even aware of the stuff you assumed they would be .

Future of Global Leadership Models

AJ 1:28:19

So we do make a lot of assumptions about people in power of things they must know and given they know that they're being assholes or power hungry , et cetera . And you know that might be true to some extent . But the assumptions we make are so often , as you found and I found it too so often proven to be unfounded .

Zach 1:28:40

We vest too much power in them in a way , and we isolate them for that and therefore they can't get the information that would allow them to make an informed decision , you know . So it's this leadership model that's really broken , and the leadership model mirrors our academic models of leadership . So it's basically , you know , this hierarchical , slow , climb up long ladders to become more and more powerful in academia or in political systems , and so you end up with a bunch of , you know , 70 year olds that are basically running the world , that half of whom , you know , are starting to decline in their mental function and their memory and capacity for communication . And when we become isolated we become more and more malignant , we become more and more violent in our rhetoric and more polarizing in our belief systems as isolation occurs . So the isolationism of our current leadership models , our current nationalistic , centralized , monopoly kind of power systems , is all collapsing . It's self-destructive , fortunately . So what's gonna emerge is a decentralized stewardship model of leadership where we start to realize that real , sustainable forms of leadership are not there to gain power but are to coordinate life force . And so the country that first adopts natural law in its purest state will be one of the most successful epicenters of commercial and , you know , economic , generative wealth and everything else in the near future . So we'll see which society is ready to make that jump the fastest . And I'm very curious about it because I think it's right on the bubble it could be . You know , I think Africa is the most prepared to do it , india is right there ready to do it , and so I think we're gonna find some large population shift towards this . You know , natural law , distributed systems , biologic economic metrics , all these things coming to be .

Zach 1:30:41

I don't think it's gonna be the United States , but I'm kind of determined to see if I can defy that likelihood . You know , like , can we accelerate the United States back to its creative potential that created San Francisco and created the tech boom ? Can we redirect all that ingenuity that comes from valuing the individual , you know , and that's where the United States really did so well is recognizing the individual has rights , and so the natural law elements that were working early in our society still have ripple effects of positive , you know , capacity that many other nations emulate . And so , for all of the limitations of the American ingenuity at this point in regards to our socio-politics , I think it still bubbles away at our entrepreneurial spirit and is expressed at the individual level quite potently in the United States , and so I don't think the US is out of the running for influence in this new space of leadership globally . But I don't think it's the hegemony of the US military and all that needs to die back and we need to become present within a , you know , federation of nations that has cooperative respect for one another and no longer uses war as the mechanism for generating economy , and that's gonna be a big shift for us , because all empires have used war to build their control and power and consolidate wealth and all that . So we're not new in that mechanism , but we need to stop ceding wars all over the place and we need to start ceding exciting ideas all over the place again .

Zach 1:32:14

Because that's how the US became a nation is it gave fertile soil to cooperative relationships and it's wound that is unhealed is the fact that it , you know , at the same time that it became a nation under natural law , it also added the line and divine law . So the God of nature and that divine law , divine rights model came out of our European , you know , british heritage and that's where if our God is better than your God , then natural law doesn't no longer apply so we can kill , rape and pillage your villages and resources and own you , and we'll put up fences and own everything and all that . So it was that wound of believing that not only we are separate from nature but our God is separate from nature and natural law that set up our country for great failure . If we had kind of followed George Washington's mode I think George Washington's , and even Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin they had learned agricultural systems from the First Nations peoples of North America the .

Zach 1:33:15

Eroquoibing . You know , maybe the forefront of that ? There was a more complex agroecology occurring on North America when we arrived as European settlers or colonialists . There was more complex food systems producing more food than we had in Europe , and so we were stepping into a learning curve , not like , oh , we need to go feed starving people . No , there was no starvation in North America 600 nations without any consistent shortage of food .

Zach 1:33:42

It was always a genitive economy of food systems that were understood within natural systems . It wasn't like all rosy . Certainly the Denay Navajo people were power colonialists and they extracted food systems and stole food and crops and all kinds of stuff . So it wasn't like rosy perfection of some sort of a garden of Eden thing . The human wound was still present there as well , but certainly far more connected resilient systems of economy and food systems present on our arrival and I think there was a desire for Europeans arriving to fit themselves into that economy rather than try to destroy it . But inevitably the colonial hunger of Europe kind of took over and the French and the Spanish wars and everything else kind of demolished the infrastructure of everything was there . We created deep starvation . My ancestors , arriving in the United States in 1617 , suffered great , great starvation moments because they had such a fragile food system and trying to import European practices into that environment and all that . So we brought the fragility of the European , failing monarchs and failing systems of food over here and then created perpetual problems that continue today .

AJ 1:35:04

So Yet the roots are still there , right In both our continents . In that sense , here too , I hope .

Zach 1:35:10

I really

Rediscovering Indigenous Culture and Wisdom

Zach 1:35:11

hope so . Unfortunately , our indigenous cultures that predated colonialism have forgotten their relationship to land . Unfortunately , broadly in North America and , I think , australia , you guys are down to the last few years of indigenous culture that remember their relationship to land at that level . But even here it's a pretty broken relationship to memory of what the food systems look like before the arrival of the Europeans . Yeah , fragmented .

AJ 1:35:40

One indigenous bloke said to me that it's fragmented and that , yeah , there's generational loss , but there's also rebirth .

Zach 1:35:47

I see it in the community . There's rebirth and it's in all of us .

Zach 1:35:50

So we are all indigenous to planet Earth and we all have indigenous culture and wisdom within us , even if it's poorly remembered , and so the regenerative movement is largely a remembrance of what we already know , of all the systems that already have existed at scale and have supported global communities . There's 100 million people in North America when the colonialists arrived , so it was like a big ass population that was doing quite well for 40,000 years there , so it wasn't like it was a sparsely populated hunter-gatherer system . It was very well-organized agroecology with big regional epicenters of economies and everything else .

AJ 1:36:32

That's what we've learned about Australia too . The colonial mythology didn't have that . That wasn't the story . Yeah , but it wasn't some primitive system .

Zach 1:36:40

There was advanced natural law that had spawned advanced systems of

The Story Front - New film project

Zach 1:36:45

economies and productivity .

AJ 1:36:47

Well , speaking of the stories we live by , this is a big part of I was reprint , obviously , and certainly a big part of everything we've talked about in a sense does come back to that , and you're working on something at the moment with the team here with the big film project Might as well . Talk to that a bit here as we go into this big weekend of the festival tomorrow . And then you skip to New Zealand for the launch of Farmers for Print , new Zealand . Nicole Masters will be on stage up with you , trey Cates beaming in from the States . I believe Big weekend coming but also big projects brewing on the story front . Give us a little insight .

Zach 1:37:25

Yeah , one of our favorite quotes that we have built in Farmers for Print 9 is that humans are not made of cells , but we're made of stories , and it's this remembrance of a different history than we've been handed by our colonial governments and everything else that we're talking about here .

Zach 1:37:40

It was like wait , history was much richer and there was a lot more wisdom to be had than we remember in our histories that are taught in schools today , and so I'm excited that stories really do build our capacity for manifesting the future that we all feel as possible , as Charles Eisenstein says .

Zach 1:38:01

So that future that is forthcoming is understanding where we come from and how we got to where we are and where we could potentially go next , and so it's that remembrance , and to do that we need a new story of our human relationship to one another and planet , and so this is being done in Australia through the film project you mentioned that is currently called On the Fence , and it kind of is looking at this decision point that we're at .

Zach 1:38:26

We're at a tipping point that either we go into some sort of post-apocalyptic , technologically founded , robot-driven agricultural system with chemical inputs , maybe under domes , because the climate collapse is so thoroughly and the poisoning of the earth is so thorough that we have to isolate growing systems away from natural systems further , and so you can see that kind of apocalyptic story unfolding globally very quickly now , and so that's one avenue .

Women Leading Agricultural and Environmental Revolution

Zach 1:38:54

And then the other avenue is young people , who are suddenly reinvigorated and starting to remember their joy and pleasure and be a part of an abundant planet that gives forth life every time you turn your attention to it , and so that group of young people are really our motivating force , and we have multi-generational farms and farmers , largely women in their 30s and 40s , that are coming out of this deep agricultural history , realizing that they need to pivot their families ethos and then family farms productivity . In the United States , it's estimated that 55% of the original farms now owned by women , and many of them coming out of multi-generational farms , but also many of them becoming first generation farmers .

Zach 1:39:33

And really starting the process again , and so women are leading the charge across the world on this reconnectional land and reconnection to growing systems and the nurturing of their communities . And I think they're often kind of dragging their reluctant husbands along . And because we still very much have this wounded masculine state , it's not unusual that the man kind of takes over the vision once it starts being effective and runs with it and gets the glory and all that . But it was really his wife that started raising the flags and waving the flags for change long before anybody got credit for it . So I take great excitement about the film projects is gonna help us tie our understanding of these deep biologic systems soil , water and air back to human relationship , because the earth is gonna heal itself 100% . The Sahara Desert 14,000 years ago went back into the grasslands . We didn't plant those grasslands , we didn't have to do any of that . It turned back into the most verdant soil systems in the world in a short 7,000 year period because nature does that . So nature's going to do her thing again and if we go extinct to the next 100 years she's gonna become roaring back and so and the stress that we've put on the planet is gonna accelerate that recovery . Even so , we are part of the solution . Even if we don't stay . If we do choose to stay and we accelerate into this future , we get to see the beauty of a new earth . The earth re-invigorated will present new species to us . It will show us new plant life , new hybrids of nutrient density , new intelligence within our animal systems . Those are all going to emerge in the thousands of years to come and if we participate I think we can accelerate that timeline and I get very excited to see what new species is coming out of the African desert in 30 years if we do the right thing , you know , if we really kind of align ourselves with these natural systems and cycles and regenerative natures .

Zach 1:41:30

So the film project has attracted the best film crews that you have in Australia . That really represents some of the best globally . Our directors , our producers , have accolades from Academy Awards all the way down through . They've made some of the most dramatic , influential docs in the last 10 years . So phenomenal team on the production side . And the storytelling is going to be riveting because Australia has this extraordinary moment of recognizing indigenous wisdom , recognizing the wounds of colonialism , recognizing the needs for reparations at the human level as a new basis for building the community again . So you guys are way ahead of North America in that front and you also have just some of the most dramatic landscapes for filming , and so it's going to be a beautiful film that I think will change minds and hearts all over the world .

Zach 1:42:24

So on the fence is the film project as it stands . It may go through iterations on the titles and things like that , but we're looking for a couple more executive producers to join with financial support for the film . We're raising $3 million in this next effort here . The first million needs to be secured by the end of the year for us to kind of keep on course with bringing our producers and directors into their full fruition of mapping out specific programs and farm relationships from the hundreds that we've identified . We need to narrow that down to kind of six or 10 really compelling stories for the first season .

Zach 1:42:57

But we can see that this could be the next chef's table kind of thing that people all over the world are turning in and tuning into season nine of Chef's Table , not because it's talking about food , but it's showing the humans behind the genius of really artistic and beautiful food , and we are going to show you the people behind the growing of food and it's going to move you to not just tears . It's going to move you to transformation . You're going to change your relationship to your farmers , to your food systems through this film system .

Update on big business engagement around the world

Zach 1:43:30

So , looking for a couple of executive producers , I want to be a part of one of the most important film projects of our times and bring this thing to fruition and birth this thing . We've got film projects going all over the world and I really believe this one in Australia could be our kind of gold standard coming out of the gates , because the team around it is so phenomenal and the stories that need to be told here are so riveting .

AJ 1:43:51

It truly is . You mentioned last time you were here too , you started to work with some pretty big companies around the world . Has there been any significant update on that over the last 12 months ?

Zach 1:44:03

Yeah , I mean , every Fortune 500 company right now is doing deep , deep soul checks , so they're all looking at bankruptcy soon . So Nestle on down Nestle's largest food company in the world are realizing that they are insoluble very shortly . The CEO of Nestle and I've had some discussions and he has been able to publicly come forward without losing his job , which is pretty significant . He has come forward to announce to the world that Nestle has a portfolio of products that 97% of which are bad for your health , and has also announced that by 2030 , they intend to have 14 million tons a month of regenerative supply chain for their new foods that they're trying to create . And he's desperately looking the world over to do merger and acquisition of healthy foods and healthy things , whatever they can bring to the community , because he knows he needs to phase out 90% of his portfolio of foods and so what are they going to replace that with ? And so he has a and obviously is bored because they're not firing him for saying these things feel a deep need to rapidly find radical pivots and radical solutions for their company , because the consumer is just leaving .

Shift Towards Decentralized Economy and Healing

Zach 1:45:17

They don't want the Nestle portfolio anymore . They're having to reach deeper and deeper , and this is a real deep human tragedy is when Americans wake up and like , screw this , I don't need fast food for my children . I need to stop doing that . They immediately have to go find new vulnerable populations that haven't made that realization .

Zach 1:45:35

So right now you go into Africa and these deep , deep poverty spaces that we're working in .

Zach 1:45:39

In Africa we're in townships where the average income is like $750 a year , and so there's deep poverty , deep hunger , deep nutrient depression and all the children in the preschools are drinking refined apple juice from the United States and like it's just so extractive and destructive that these processed foods get further and further and more and more vulnerable populations to maintain the bottom line of these companies that are producing foods that people shouldn't and don't want anymore . But it's the only thing available in these little townships because of the weird government subsidies and all the other shenanigans that happen to boost up the processed food industry . So Nestle's pivoting and Coca-Cola's pivoting all these companies are starting to realize they don't want to be part of the problem , they want to be part of the solution . It would be a miracle if most of them were able to make that pivot . Most Fortune 500 companies just go out of business Of our original Fortune 100 that were named back in the 60s , there were only one company left in the Fortune 500 . And so the biggest names in the 1960s are just gone .

Zach 1:46:50

And you wouldn't recognize 80% of the companies that were on that list . The only company that is left it doesn't fall into the Fortune 100 anymore , but it's still hanging on at the bottom of the Fortune 500 is GE . And General Electric survived because it diversified its portfolio of companies so thoroughly . So decentralizing corporations , decentralizing systems of economy is why GE survived .

Zach 1:47:17

But all the other ones are gone 99% are out of business , and so when we wake up and decide we're no longer gonna be consumers but we're gonna be producers , we're no longer gonna be dependent on governments , we're gonna build government . We're no longer gonna wait for reparations from colonialism , we're gonna build the system that makes colonialism obsolete . When we shift into this thing , things are gonna have to change so fast that I think it's absolutely impossible that most of these Fortune 500 companies can pivot , because they are so entrenched in the old models of what consumers wanted and they can't make the change fast enough . And so we're gonna see a decentralization instead of a Fortune 500 list that dominates the world economies , I think we could see five million small companies born out of your backyard

New course/intensive workshop just run?

Zach 1:48:00

that are gonna become the basis of the new economy . That makes sense .

AJ 1:48:04

I can't help but think similarly . Finally , you just ran a course of sorts , a gathering or a retreat I suppose I often don't like that word , but anyway , that's another story Of a few days , I believe over the last weekend , akin to the courses you run , I'm imagining , and one of the farmers footprint team , Dave Murphy , who runs his breath work stuff down in Sydney now , was part of this doing that sort of thing . So I'm curious what emerged from a gathering that went to these places that we've talked about ?

Zach 1:48:36

today . Yeah , it was a great vision as far as footprint team Instead of running around the country just telling the inspirational stories of what's going on and asking for money , giving opportunity for people to engage in self-transformation . So that was the vision of this thing to start to pivot our relationship to new members of our community to try an offering like this and we had 20 people signed up for the three-day event and it was our first experiment and can we create these environments where we bring the philosophy of food systems and philosophies of natural systems , natural law and , ultimately , the healing stuff that had been doing in my clinics for many years ? Could we create a hybrid model where we could create these transformative environments ? And it went off the rails good , it was just so fun . The six moderators , including myself , I think we're so changed by it as well , and we all finished it saying we got to do more of this . This is so rewarding at a community level , but it's also so vital to our own continued transformation , our own deconstruction , and so super successful .

Zach 1:49:41

It included very high-bibration food offerings in the context of deep discussions around who are we ? How did we get here ? Where are we going ? And looking deep , deep into the human condition . I realized that we can do these radical moments of healing where we don't just create scar tissue at the wounds of our emotions or as we move to this spontaneous remission event where we go back to some original design , where we simply create a healthy human body . We forget the 40 generations of trauma that are expressed in our genetics and epigenetics and we become this new thing and we're seeing examples of that throughout medicine now over the world of like wow , these events , these miraculous events of complete reprogramming biology , can occur . And if that can be done in one human , why can't it be done in all of us ?

Zach 1:50:33

As the exciting premise and so watching people over that course of a few days in the meditations , we did a very exciting workaround voice . We did these coordinated voice exercises where the whole group 80% of us which self-identifies , we can't sing by the end of these three hours . We're doing these complex five-part harmonies and you know disparate rhythms and it was unbelievably cool . What Murray , who will be again here at our event tomorrow ? He's one of the most talented musicians in this area but he's so talented at helping us , as people that don't self-identify as vocalists , become part of a vibrational experience of harmony together and that set the stage then for the breathwork that we did later in the evening .

Zach 1:51:19

And it was just . It's so humbling and startling how available and willing humans are right now to complete radical transformation and startling how available that is to us , the speed at which people were able to reconnect to their inner child , see their own death , had ancestors visiting dead , parents speaking to them , like it was just like full-on plant ceremony kind of level stuff , through just community and breath . So if we come together , sing together and breathe together , we will have off-the-rails experiences of healing and we will create a society that we can't even imagine the beauty of .

AJ 1:52:04

It is interesting , isn't it ? For all the hard instrumentalist effort we put into bringing about change , when the change can swim in you like that , and not that it doesn't take work , but can then ultimately can happen in almost an instant . It's fascinating when it's together like that in process , like it's almost don't do it by yourself , kids .

Zach 1:52:27

Yeah it is a warning Trying to do this stuff in isolation can actually be really challenging , harmful and overwhelming , and so doing it in community is critical , and we've seen that in our journey of intrinsic health eight week program .

Zach 1:52:42

The group coaching is so much more effective than individual coaching .

Zach 1:52:45

Again and again , which is mysterious , and a lot of people aren't comfortable jumping straight into the vulnerability of a group .

Zach 1:52:51

So we still have a lot of people doing the one-on-one stuff . But watching six or eight people heal together , you get this vortex of transformation where you get to witness another human being changing in front of your eyes and it suddenly opens up that avenue for yourself faster and more furious than you could have done on your own self-discovery . So we are going to start healing in community and I agree we can probably rebrand the word retreat for the world and really call it a revolution or regeneration , like these are going to be gatherings of human revolution , evolution that's going to usher in new genetic codes where we lose ourselves of fear , guilt and shame , as we have all these indigenous prophecies that in this time that we're in we will lose fear , guilt and shame and we will start to express a biology that is reconnected and is now in a state of abundance and self-affirmation and self-empowered realization of our capacity to manifest and create , rather than keep flipping the coin of the victim perpetrator storytelling that we've been

Music has been critical to Zach's survival

Zach 1:53:50

stuck in for the last thousands of years .

AJ 1:53:53

Here's to that . Well , mate , you might remember , we don't leave without touching on music , so it's funny you were talking about singing and stuff . A bit of time has gone since we actually did a one-to-one podcast we were on stage together last time became a podcast , so you didn't get to choose a piece of music , and I have to tell you though , because you chose Charity of Fire the first time , my boy is still playing this , because he's playing that on the piano .

Zach 1:54:23

Amazing , one of the best pieces ever .

AJ 1:54:25

It is , it's true , but here's this nine-year-old playing Charity of Fire . It's a bit of a spin-out because I remember it as a kid , as a nine-year-old , you know . And it's all because of you when your influence finds its way through the world . Hey , but in all seriousness , today I was actually already thinking to bring in your personal music journey at this point , and then I did see a guitar .

Zach 1:54:51

They're on the couch .

AJ 1:54:53

Like , if you feel like speaking a bit into that and maybe even playing a little something ?

Zach 1:54:59

Yeah , yeah , music has been critical to my survival . I'm not sure I'd be here without it . It's carried me through some of my darkest times , for sure . And we are creators . We are potent expressions of what we would call God . The fabric of this universe is bringing apart chaos into centropy all the time , and so we're creating order out of chaos as a universe , and the place in which we do this as humans , without harm is in our art and in our music . Every place else that we seem to touch we do damage , but our art and our music elevates the human and biologic conditions around us to the point that we now understand that the only human practice that has really been consistently witnessed to turn on our regenerative genomics turns on the enzymes of cell repair , dna repair , stem cells . Everything else is any form of spirit that we can call a spiritual chant , song or dance , and so when we dance around fires , we turn on these mechanisms . When we sing and chant together , we turn on these mechanisms of regeneration within us , and so it's fascinating that science is starting to reveal that indigenous practices around the fire weren't some primitive expression . It was literally the technology on the planet that allowed life to occur here , at its vibrational capacity , of being sensory and beings that are capable of love . Very few species within the universe are capable of having this frequency of love at the same way in which we manifest it , and so our music is ultimately the vessel by which we get to move forward by . And so , in the same way that we use that voice technique in the revolution process last week and a group of people , for myself the vibration of a piano in front of me , that huge harp of strings vibrating , the guitar on my lap or a cello between my legs or whatever instrument in my drum the gembe is one of my favorite instruments and the vibrations of these instruments within my body system , I know , are leading to my revolution of health and vitality that I get to be blessed by . I've walked through this earth so free of discomfort for so long now , and I think it's the vibrational reconnection that music allows me that has afforded me such luxury of health in so many ways . It helps me metabolize through my own stressors , fears , traumas , helps me metabolize through my own doubts and securities and all that and turn it into pure creation . And so writing songs , poetry , creating a piece of art .

Zach 1:57:31

I just started painting for the first time this year , I decided I was going to learn how to paint . And it turns out you don't have to learn how to paint , you just have to remember that you already know how to . And so I created my first acrylic painting and it's of a six-winged serifim . And it just came out of me , like I couldn't even believe it , the first strokes of the brush . I was like wait a second . That's what a brush feels like on canvas and what is that texture right there ? I know that texture , I know how to play with that . And suddenly I have this six-winged creature coming out of this canvas that , as maybe amateurs , it might look to somebody . I am blown away by how good it is , I'm like that's my first piece of art .

Zach 1:58:07

Are you kidding me ? That's ridiculous . And so I'm very excited that we can remember how to create elementally , and all of this is within

Response to an Attendee's Charge of Speaking Psychobabble

Zach 1:58:15

us to be creative forces . So , yeah , music is critical .

AJ 1:58:18

Oh , zach , yeah , Okay , before we go to music , to actual music , you've just triggered in my memory . At Groundswell earlier this year , you remember the bloke who got up and asked you why do you talk such psycho babble ? You remember that bloke . You had a lovely answer at the time . I was so curious too what your answer would be , and you said well , you basically said yep , I know I do , but when I see the farmers you talked about , when I see what they're doing and how they're doing it , they're tapping something else .

AJ 1:58:51

That sure harnesses science but transcends it . There's something else going on , and so to hear you talking like this about and I relate to this about music , yeah , I think it's not a stretch to say kept me alive too , that it is . There's a transcendent aspect to it , but that's utterly grounded and physical . So it sort of applies right through this . You know the real . Your answer to his question in that moment really applies to the lot , which I find interesting , right , because this is a point where some people , like him , are struggling to understand what you're trying to communicate in these ways .

Zach 1:59:30

And they're frustrated . It doesn't fit into their metrics of value or their metrics of change or their metrics of understanding . And that's using a language that sounds spiritual instead of scientific , was his point , like that's what I think , when he meant by Psycho Babel . You're not talking scientifically .

Zach 1:59:46

And what I was telling . The reason he reacted that way is because I was telling the audience at that moment stop trusting the science , because science doesn't create . Science witnesses the creation , but it doesn't create . Science is a body of observation of the beauty and miracle of life , but it doesn't create life . Science does not create life .

Zach 2:00:07

Therefore , when somebody rushes around and says you need to inject this because the science says to understand that , as a fallacy of logic , that just cannot even be managed , it's like saying trust the linoleum . It just absolutely has nothing to do with the power within you as a living being , has nothing to do with science as a body of information that we understand the beauty of nature by the metrics and systems of understanding nature are not the things that create nature . And yet he couldn't handle that and he said flat out that's a very dangerous premise , that science is not true or science is not the source and you can't trust the science . That's very dangerous . I would counter with I think it's super dangerous to trust that science is the source of the world and I can actually prove that it's not . But I did just meet him right where he was at . I was like of course you feel that way because if I had heard myself speak right now , 15 years ago , I would have walked right out of the room .

Zach 2:01:07

I want to give myself three minutes of airtime in my brain 15 years ago because I am seeing the world so radically different than I did then . And that doesn't mean I'm 15 years ahead of him or something like that . It just means that we are capable of transformational understanding of the systems we live in when we start to open up the doors . And I believe he could be innovating on a farm in five years because he was there at an event called Groundswell , so he had put his toe in the water , curious about what is this regenerative movement . And here he is , a farmer managing all this land . You know he's under stress to come and witness this thing or be curious about this thing . So there's thousands and thousands of farmers worldwide that are now Regen curious . They are really starting to be like all right , that's getting to be too loud of a rumble to ignore and I have deep crisis and failure happening on my land . If I don't resolve this , I know I lose my family farm in the next 10 years . I need to start investigating other options . So that's like you said 50% of farms globally not just in Australia and the US 50% of farms globally are in economic stress and are one crop away from bankruptcy , basically . And so you are have this pressure cooker of failure and stress on the current chemical model of agriculture and it will fail period within next decade . And so we need we . We're going to see increasing excitement for this , and it won't surprise me if he has a Kundalini event and walking across this farm in three years , because we're seeing that all over the place , kundalini being a description of these huge energetic spiritual awakenings and discharges within our bodies . It used to take yogis 20 to 30 years to have a Kundalini experience spontaneously . Farmers never heard of yoga , never heard of mindfulness , never meditated . Having Kundalini experience right in the middle of this farm is happening in the Midwest , and so there is an energetic awakening of our human spirit right now . That is irrepressible and has absolutely nothing to do with our cognitive , intellectual beliefs of what's going on around us . It is simply going to happen , metamorphosis happening on this planet . Right now the planet and our species are going to go into a regreeding , regenerative rebirth , re-invigoration process of biodiversity . And and whether this version of human body gets to still be here in 80 years , I actually don't care , because it might be a completely different version of physiology that follows us out of this extinction . That'd be cool .

Zach 2:03:29

What if our new , most intelligent species is based on the genetics of an octopus instead of a monkey ? Nothing says that . That octopus can't suddenly start talking and start building cities underwater , and we are going to go through these seismic changes in intelligence within our planet . The reptiles certainly didn't predict birds . The reptiles didn't predict mammals . It happened because of their own stress , and so we can't predict how beautiful this world gets over the next million years .

Zach 2:03:58

But I think we can participate in how good it gets the next thousand years if we really put our innovation to the observations we're now making in science of how brilliant the imagination of nature is and how we can align our intuition and our ingenuity with natural systems , with natural law , with our own divine capacity , and we'll just create that new reality that makes the whole system currently obsolete so fast decades at the most . So you know , all this talk that we're going extinct is absolutely true . On one side

Speaking of the Octopus - Craig Foster’s new film upcoming

Zach 2:04:30

, our current expression as humans is going extinct . But as a species , do we go extinct if we really make this metamorphic jump to being the butterfly we're capable of being ?

AJ 2:04:41

Yeah , it's interesting you mentioned the octopus . Knowing your mates with Craig Foster in . South Africa . That story still reverberates around the world itself , let alone his ongoing work . Yeah , his ongoing by work .

Zach 2:04:52

He's got a new film coming out that I'm super excited about . Really , he's just an amazing master of observation and nature and he and I were just on the beach and instead of jumping right straight in the water to go swim through the kelp which is my favorite thing to do with him but instead he said he wanted to take me on a beach tracking experience and show me how to track wildlife in the water by what's happening on the beaches . And it was dumb-founding . All this kelp had washed up in a storm you know had happened days before , and the amount of life on these beaches was bonkers , trillions of these little crustaceans , little guys running around cleaning up the mess and doing all this work . And it's just bonkers beauty , biodiversity on those beaches . And he showed me how to watch the tracks of insects and their jaw marks along the kelp to tell you exactly who's out in that bay right there , which types of urchins are out there , which types of sea snails are out there when the sea hairs are , and so he's telling you what's happening underwater over there by being a penultimate observer of nature .

The Power of Witnessing Beauty

Zach 2:05:54

So humans are capable of this observational capacity , and quantum physics is beautiful in that it's revealed to us the observer effect .

Zach 2:06:02

When nature is observed , it actually becomes more solid , it becomes more real In the moments that a photon is behaving through two slits to do all the possible pathways it can . It does them all simultaneously , and so it's non-particle state , it's in a wave that can do all things at once . But the moment you put a sensor that can observe the thing , it doesn't even have to be a human eye . You put an electromagnetic sensor that will then witness that photon . It can only pick one path . It has to become a particle and express itself as physical reality . And so this bizarre situation is that if there is not an organism to witness nature , it actually is non-local . It's in a billion universes at once , it's all over the place , it's doing every possibility at once . But then , when observed , it becomes crystal clear on its beauty that it chooses right now . And so when Craig walks those beaches , I feel like he's actually manifesting the life within the water and that every time he observes and knows that it's there , it's becoming having to choose crustaceans , having to choose octopus right at that moment , like it can only do , this physical manifestation in this next millionth of a second , because it's being observed and it's being loved creates the vibration of this evolutionary effect .

Zach 2:07:17

If witnessed , reverence , respect , sovereignty , seen in all living life forms , the cascade of evolution , I think , just accelerates through eons of change , through non-linear time , through worm holes and galaxies . It's just . We become this generative force of reality when we witness and when we observe nature and the beauty around us . And we are so well equipped to see beauty . And so , if one man can walk the beaches of South Africa and manifest an ocean , when we turn eight billion people back to nature and let them observe the beauty there , and then , in this much more humbling experience , let nature see us , we will become more real , our manifestation will become more crystalline .

Zach 2:08:03

When we are seen by nature again and when we roll down the car window and breathe the trees , and when we get out of the car and run through a field of wild flowers , when we taste honey straight out of the honeycomb , when we observe the bees and their work , when we see the farmer toiling in the field and stop to appreciate their effort and speak to them about their love of earth and what they're discovering at the metaphysical level , observing those life within their soils ,

Zach plays a tune live

Zach 2:08:30

the richness of your day will be so much better . It's impossible for you to be depressed when you are in observation of beauty . It's impossible for you to be anxious , it's impossible for you to be exhausted of being human if you keep those connections going .

AJ 2:08:44

I'm so glad we ended up there because I went home after you said last night the song Particle man . You started singing Particle man and I had to go look it up .

Zach 2:08:55

That song is great .

AJ 2:08:57

So there's another one . There's a bonus track for people to look up as well . Enjoy that listen . But yeah , how do you feel would you pick up the guitar for us here ?

Zach 2:09:04

That'd be wonderful . I can try if you tolerate that . It's a funny thing . Instruments are such an interesting creation , right ? And so this is a spruce top little guitar that was sitting in this little farmhouse when I walked in the door and it took me a few minutes to get it tuned up and it's probably out of tune again , but I'll check the tune for a second . So these strings are made from these minerals mined out of the earth , and some human had to have the ingenuity on how to consolidate those minerals into steel and then wrap those in a very fine super wrap that goes around a core of steel . And so just the string of a guitar is such an extraordinary innovation that allows this to become a bell-like tool for me to create within . Maybe I'll do this .

Zach 2:09:59

Willie Nelson has a great quote that if you play more than two chords then you're just showing off . So at risk of showing off , I will limit myself to two chords to show you A very good . So this is one chord and it's an E major here . And the way in which my brain is able to coordinate a few fingers across the strings , it can create little mini harmonies and patterns and rhythms within that single chord . This is an A minor E minor .

Zach 2:10:41

That's your E minor . Yeah , sorry , that's your E major , e major into your A minor . I am playing small pieces of a tree strung with strings of minerals to create this sound and it just blows my mind . If you haven't seen a luthier , a guitar maker , do their work , it's almost a must in life . It will change your perspective on a lot of things when you watch a luthier do their work . It's exquisite watching them build a guitar or a violin or whatever they've got their hand to . It's such an exquisitely delicate art form .

Zach 2:11:21

The thinness of these pieces of wood is extraordinary and my guitars have been with me the guitars I play on most of all at home have been with me for 30 years now . Now they can weather all the changes in the weather . The changes in my state of Virginia are extreme . We go from dry to extreme humidity levels . We have 100 degree temperature swings , like it's so dramatic . And yet my guitars just sit there and these thin little expressions of tree waiting to be played .

Zach 2:11:51

And one phenomenon that you find with a guitar that I find really fascinating is that it changes its tone in the first hour or so that you're playing in when you first pick up this guitar . I picked this up first two days ago and it hadn't been played in quite some time . You could tell Dust on it and everything else and it sounded really tinny and was lacking any kind of mid-range to it because the wood had become brittle , because it hadn't vibrated . But as soon as I picked it up and gave it kind of 10 or 15 minutes of love and let that vibrate in my lap and stroking the strings for a little bit and forcing that wood back into its memory of motion , it just woke right up . And now it's got this bell like quality within the middle . And these are old strings and old strings don't do their best work , and yet it's just so warm and lovely to feel it . And all I'm doing is playing two chords to honor Willie Nelson and his simplicity of understanding .

Zach 2:12:43

Beauty is not complex . Beauty is in its essence . Now I want you to close your eyes and experience those toes . These two chords tend to remind me of the sun slanting through the afternoon through the green leaves and a tree against the gray bark .

Zach 2:13:25

When I see things like that , I get this overwhelming sense of beauty that leaves me feeling bizarrely melancholy . I have this little ache inside of me when I see that level of beauty . I think the ache is there because I don't know how to tell you how beautiful it is . I don't have words in my English language , I don't have the capacity or the poetry within me to tell you how beautiful it is to be witness , in the living life form , to the beauty of a tree that's vibrating in the afternoon warmth of sun belting in from millions of miles away To light up an experience for my occipital lobe of the brain to blow its mind over the beauty and the intricacy of tones and colors and vibrations and changes of pattern . And that's the expression of a tree in an afternoon sunlight . And it makes me feel a little bit hollow for being a human so disconnected for my nature that I don't remember how to tell you how beautiful it is .

Zach 2:14:27

And so , in the vibrational experience of being human , I can sit here and I can tell you that there is something begging to come through you that is remembered at a deep level and it's aching to be expressed in you . And it might be a piece of art , it may be a song just saying it , may be something deep inside of you that has absolutely nothing to do with what you're throwing 90% of your weight and effort into it a daily basis and yet it's starting to bother you that you aren't expressing that thing and it's starting to get uncomfortably to be alive without that expression of yourself . So this is an invitation in two chords to tell you that you are a human being born out of the divine nature , the laws of exquisite divine expression , of a beauty that is expressed in 2.5 trillion galaxies throughout a universe that is too big and beautiful to witness as a human being . And you are a vibrational expression of the imagination , of that collective energy field to create that face of a child that came and self-organized itself in the womb of your mother . And you are . And I'm just amazed that I get to know you and I get to see you and I get to worship you and the way in which you walk through this earth right now , and I'm blown away that I get to feel the skin of a child , and so this hand grabs mine on the playground .

Zach 2:15:39

What it feels like to push the swing is that child vaults into the air and ignites and laughter with a sense of aliveness that I have forgotten is possible , and I become more childlike and listen to that laughter and I start to laugh and I start to run around that playground and I want to fit down that slide , even if my butt doesn't land right on that anymore . This is the place we live . It's called Mother Earth and it's birthing us again . We are coming through our toddler hood of of human species and we are ready to start to run again . We're going to walk into this new world that comes out of our capacity the beauty of nature . We're going to eat new things and we're going to share new stories and we're going to tell new jokes that will make ourselves laugh until we pee . That's how it feels to be human right now .

Zach 2:16:25

I know it's all possible , but I cannot see it yet for the amount of suffering that is on this planet .

Zach 2:16:30

We are killing our own children , we are torturing them in cities , we are bombing them into oblivion in the neighboring villages .

Zach 2:16:41

We hate each other so much because we can see the beauty in the other and we are afraid to acknowledge it because it would mean that we've got it all wrong , that we're doing the wrong thing and that we are part of the heart of darkness and it's expressing itself through us .

Zach 2:16:53

And so we're so afraid to admit who we are and how we've come here and why we are in this state of affairs . We're in , but the vibration of music and the tone of a tree that's played by steel strings might just remind us to start to stretch a little bit further and change the way in which we look at one another , change the way that we make love to one another and start to really embrace one another , hold each other , wrap our arms around each other , re-express ourselves as a species . There's so much opportunity , so much potential , so much love in the air , so much opportunities to recapture what we know is true and re-express ourselves . And so I'm here to honor you and hope that you are inspired through a long conversation today about the beauty of the world and the

Music and Concluding Words

Zach 2:17:40

nature of food itself , the nature of farmers and their resilience and their desire to feed the community around them . And you are that community and you are being fed by some farm or somewhere , and so I encourage you to go find that person in the field and reconnect .

AJ 2:17:59

I'm glad I asked . Thanks for your generosity , mate . Great to see you again . Zach: Love you , brother . AJ: That was Zach Bush MD . For more on Zach, Farmer's Footprint and Project Biome , see the links in the show notes . And thanks to you generous listeners supporting the podcast for making this episode possible . If you've been thinking about becoming a member or other kind of supporter , please join us . Just head to the website or the show notes and follow the prompts . Thank you - thanks , too , for sharing the podcast and continuing to rate it on your preferred app . The music you're hearing is regeneration by Amelia Barden , and at the top it was Green Shoots by The Nomadics . My name is Anthony James . Thanks for listening .