Zach Bush MD

“It's not an asteroid coming in. It's not nuclear war. It's not a killer virus. We are the weapon of mass destruction.”

In the first of this six-part series, creative studio Accept and Proceed’s founder David Johnston meets with renowned, multi-disciplinary physician of internal medicine and internationally recognised educator on the microbiome Zach Bush MD.

In light of the current coronavirus pandemic, the duo explores the explosion of chronic disease, the morality of the advertising world and the impact of consumer behaviour on our internal and global ecosystems.

Transcript

EVA_ZachBush

David [00:00:11] Welcome to Endless Vital Activity, conversations to inspire radical action. I'm David Johnston, founder of Accept & Proceed. We are at a tipping point for so many world problems. And as storytellers, we have a responsibility to use our work to create change. At Accept & Proceed. We believe the cross pollination of minds and ideas is vital. We can't find solutions in isolation, So connection and collaboration are critical. Throughout this series, we will engage in wide ranging conversations with radical thinkers, artists, scientists and activists about the problems we've been given to solve. We are seeking new perspectives to reimagine our world. In this episode, I'm talking to Zach Busch, M.D., a physician specialising in internal medicine and an area that specifically treats hormone imbalances in humans called endocrinology. Zach is an internationally recognized educator on the microbiome and how it relates to health, disease and food production. He is also the founder of the Seraphic Group who, through their multiple businesses, have the mission to restore our planet's natural cycles of human health and ecology. Zach seems to me to have an all-seeing eye, he has skills similar to writes such as Bill Bryson and Uri Noah Harari, whereby he's able to take you up to a bird's eye view on very complicated subjects and distil an overview from them. He's applying the rigour of science, strength of humanity and the intelligence of nature to transform our world. And having been lucky enough to spend time with him and his team in Charlottesville, Virginia, I saw firsthand the love and compassion with which their organisation is run. Zach speaks from the head and heart simultaneously and in full paragraphs due to his intellectual prowess. I think it's fascinating. During this conversation, we cover off consciousness, putting our planets at the centre of design, rewilding the media landscape and the transformational power of heart led design. We go on quite a journey and it's worth hanging in there for the ride. As Zac ends with a powerful rallying cry to the creative and advertising communities, asking What will we do? How will we use our positions to affect public behaviors and bring about positive change? This is something that's very close to Accept & Proceeds’ hearts and mission. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. 

Zach [00:02:31] David, so glad to be with you, man. 

David [00:02:33] Right. Great, great, great. Thank you for joining me so early in the morning around about this time, Zach, we were due to be collaborating on the talk at the design and director's festival here in London. However, the festival has been cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic. And I've no doubt that it would have been an incredible experience had it gone ahead. But today instead, I'm sitting alone in a podcast booth here at Accept & Proceeds offices and I'm excitedly anticipating the conversation we're about to have. But I'm happy to admit I'm a bit intimidated every time I've spent time with you or listen to previous discussions. I've always been amazed by the breadth and multiple perspectives of wisdom that you have. So I'm quite interested about how you do that, Zach. You seem to be able to communicate in a way that's drawing down from almost a higher place. How do you develop that skill is a personal question I have for you. 

Zach [00:03:28] I think it's a consistent willingness to surrender what I think I know and be willing to speak from a place other than my mind. I think that all of us have the capacity to speak from a more centered space than our mind. And I think all of us do that on a relatively regular basis. And then we can train ourselves into that more and more. But the patterns that I see in my life right now are ones that look a lot like healing in some ways, a regeneration of whether it's tissue from a flesh wound or all the way to the deep injuries that happened in the psycho emotional space or the soils of the planet as we work with farmers right now with their chemical farming and helped them begin that transition in that journey into a different space of regeneration and soil care and the microbiome and all this richness of life, that's how it starts to feel, is that there's just a thousand voices speaking. You know, a single voice at some point, and you start to be able to to speak for something bigger than yourself. And I think that's what's happening to me and I think many people around the planet. I think we're speaking for something bigger than ourselves. And that's an exciting chapter for humanity. 

David [00:04:53] It really is. It really is. It reminds me of a quote I actually read yesterday, or someone sent me that I love, which was 'You are not a drop in the ocean but the entire ocean in one drop.' I really like that idea, that we're all connected to the entire sort of globe. And I suppose we kind of only restricted by our own kind of egos and psyches. Obviously, this podcast is focused on radical ideas around the world. We have been given to solve and this is something you've dedicated during your time and your energy to in relation to the future of our planet and human health. So I'd love to start talking about human health and its roots in the microbiome. Can you give us an overview of what you've discovered and why it's so significant? 

Zach [00:05:36] Yeah, the work started about a decade ago when I left the university where I was doing cancer research. In my cancer chemotherapy development world, I was trying to find avenues into cell death and cancer cells, how to turn on Aptos or cell suicide. And I was working on communication networks in the cell specifically around mitochondria, which are little organisms that live inside of ourselves, and they actually teeming inside of ourselves. The biology textbooks are very inaccurate in the way that they show us this, they'll show us two or three mitochondria inside of a cell and they'll show us that they're kind of weird looking bacteria, double walled bacteria looking things. But they don't say that they're bacteria. It says that these are little organelles that produce human energy. They're the power plant for the human cell. And that was very much my mindset until the genomics world started to really fold. And by the time I was doing my cancer research, it was obvious that these things were non-human entities. They have their own DNA strand, that is quite interesting. They have 37 genes and there's three species of them. Bizarrely, there's three species of these little guys that live inside of ourselves and they can replicate just as bacteria do inside of ourselves. And they can also be inflicted by toxicity. And as they become damaged from toxins that we may consume or breathe, they become deficient in energy production. And that's really how we see age occur. So ageing processes at least 50 percent due to a loss of this communication system within the cells. And as the mitochondria fail to produce energy, they fail to produce the electrical communication network that we run on the inside of the environment. In the years that followed. Once I left the university, I started a nutrition center because my chemotherapy had been based in vitamin A. compounds and gotten a glimpse of just how powerful nutrition could be to change the course of things like cancer. So, I started a a clinic that was focused on using nutrition to reverse chronic diseases of all types and that was 2010. And after a couple of years of doing that, I realised that the nutrition books weren't really working in my patients. About a third of them were responding as expected, but then there's two thirds that really weren't. And there was a third in there that were actually getting worse, not better on health food. And that took me into the journey of the microbiome and the microbiome. Research, of course, was starting to really explode between 2010 and today. And it's been an amazing journey into understanding that the communication network outside of the cells is actually not at all related to the human cell or even the mitochondria. In this case, it's due to the other microbiome system outside the cell, which is the bacteria, fungi, parasites that power the outside world, the external to the human cell. And an extraordinary journey has been to understand that those bacteria and fungi in the human gut on our skin and internal organs, we now realise the whole body is an organic garden and is a system of complex ecosystems that dictate the cellular health and vitality or in its damage can again predict disease just as damage to the mitochondria can predict cancer. We now know the damage to the microbiome predicts cancer very specifically. In fact, if you lose these bacteria of specific species, you're prone to breast cancer. You release these species, you're prone to prostate cancer or colon cancer for another species. So, with an extraordinarily eloquent, you know, connectivity, we now see chronic disease stemming from a loss of soil health at the microbiome of the human experience. 

David [00:09:28] Okay, so you believe that chemical agriculture has become the single largest threat to human health? 

Zach [00:09:34] I think that's safe to say that there's you know, when we look at the toxins that we face today, the energy sector is hot on the tail of agriculture. And so some people might still say the energy sectors is the most toxic thing. But I think when we look at the microbiome and its new role as kind of the foundation of all of life, not just humans, but for biology to happen, we need this microbiome. And it's the agricultural system that is closest in its toxicity to this microbe microbial foundation for human life. And so we've been focused the last eight years on the study of Roundup, and its active ingredient, which is glyphosate, and understanding how that molecule has come to undermine and really accelerate this chronic disease epidemic that's occurred over the course of the lifetime of the use of that chemical. The chemical was discovered in 1970 and then went into practice to use in 1974 and then widespread use in 1976 as a weed killer in the United States, Canada and Europe. And then by 1992, we were spraying our food directly with it in the form of wheat. And that would then, our lab has demonstrated that the interaction between Roundup and glyphosate and wheat, it would engender this whole new area of epidemic of gluten sensitivity and coeliac disease, an autoimmune disease to wheat. And then 1996 would come and then we would start spraying corn, soybean and all these genetically modified crops that were genetically modified not to do anything but be roundup ready. And so, we didn't get Janeck on my farm to be healthier or be more resilient in in know famine or drought. We had politically engineered them so we could spray indirectly with chemical. And so that's what we did in 1996. And over the course of the next decade, we would see the biggest explosion and chronic disease ever seen on the planet. And so we've been working on the exact mechanisms by which roundup does that and undermines not only the microbiome, it functions as a potent antibiotic in the environment, but it also disrupts the human gut and vascular and systems creating leak. And so we've got leaky gut, leaky brain, leaky kidney tubules, and that is now kind of ground zero of these chronic disease epidemics as well as human fertility. We've seen a 50 percent drop in sperm counts in Western countries since the advent of this chemical. So we're well on the way to our own extinction through our undermining of biology on the planet. Today, we'd pour four and a half billion pounds of glyphosate into the world's soil water systems and we are breathing in. It's in 75 percent the air in the United States and 75 percent of the rainfall. And that's an extraordinary journey into toxicity. 

David [00:12:21] All this has obviously led to our current health crisis, not the current corona virus, of course, but the rise in a whole range of health issues, some of which you just touched upon. How do we recover from this Zach, and make some positive progress? 

Zach [00:12:38] Mother Nature is so graceful to us. I think it's fascinating to see the intelligence that's been baked into nature. We've been very fortunate to be part of a discovery around the communication network of microbiome. In 2013, we were studying some soil science and that relates to plant nutrition. And in that found a molecule that looked a lot like the chemotherapy I used to make. And particularly it had the capacity, it appears, to communicate at the electrical level, just as the mitochondria had been in my cancer research. And so that led to a big start to a exciting project. We start a little tiny biotech company in the back of my clinic and started doing some extraordinary experiments around how the microbiome can coordinate human cellular response to repair and healing. And it's been an awesome story to say that nature has an antidote to Roundup. And amazingly, she planted it in her soils sixty million years ago. So it's almost as if anticipating the insanity of our atrocities on the soil, she would plant an antidote of a communication network from a microbiome diversity that preceded our presence here, and it's important because and fascinating in its eloquence, because we've so killed the biodiversity on the planet. We've destroyed 97 percent of the grasslands of the world. We have depleted another 97 percent of our agricultural soils from critical nutrients. And so we have so damaged that micro ecosystem within the soils that we no longer produce this communication network in our big soil systems. There's pockets around the world, particularly in northern Russia, northern China, northern Canada, up in tundra areas and the like, as well as high mountain areas around the world that are still resilient and still showing microbial density. But it represents a tiny, tiny part of the arable land on the planet. But excitingly, you know, the Microbiomes Communication Network is a very stable molecular family, and we were able to extract that from fossil soil as well. There are no bacterium fungi left from 60 million years ago. We have their language and we have this eloquence within the chemistry of nature. And when we put that back in the human cell systems, we can within minutes see the human cells be kicked into gear to repair from the damage of Roundup and other pharmaceutical chemicals. And so it's a fascinating thing that Mother Nature would engender such an opportunity to tap back into a deep wisdom and intelligence from Mother Nature that is echoing through time and space to help us through this time. 

David [00:15:40] Absolutely. And I mean, that was beautifully put, but it also echoes my experience of Ion Biome, which really within a day or two, I felt more fortified and on a daily basis, I still enjoy taking it, as does my entire team. And in fact, anyone I meet who will listen, I give a bottle to and always report positive effects from their health, and of course, you know, you see that all this affecting human consciousness as well as human health. The connection between the gut and our minds is a powerful one isn't it?

Zach [00:16:12] It's continuous, it's so fascinating. You know, this this is where my interest really lies, is that human health as an isolated event is the worst thing that can happen to the planet today. We are the most destructive, most consumptive species that's ever been here. We have sucked the life out of the marrow of this planet over our short existence and never faster than the last few decades. And that's why I'm on this podcast with you, because that has been fueled by consumer behaviour and nobody controls that better than the advertising world. And so as we start to step back and realise that human health and if it's going to just drive more common human behaviour, we will see our own extinction even faster because our consumption is literally pulling the biology right out from under our own feet. And so without a rising consciousness, without a change in fundamental human behaviour and our relationship to nature, we are the biggest problem. And our health and our survival is the biggest threat to the species around us and we've, by ten thousand fold, increased the rate of extinction over the last 30 years. And that ten thousand fold is now claiming to extinction one species every 20 minutes. And that rate has not been seen in fifty five million years. And the last time we saw that was with the fifth grade extinction, which included the dinosaurs famously, but we lost a eighty seven percent of life estimated, was disappeared over a very short span of years or decades. And I believe that we're seeing the exact same thing right now through the same mechanism, which was death at the topsoil. So at 55 million years ago, that was an asteroid that hit and covered the earth in a layer of dust that choked out the top soils. And we saw a collapse of of plant life and soil health on the planet and subsequently very quickly lost the larger species to starvation and collapse and global shift of climate and everything else. And so we're doing that now, we've killed the top soils, we're accelerating for that cataclysmic changes in climate. We're seeing the extinction accelerate and so we are the weapon of mass destruction right now. It's not an asteroid coming in as we've made movies about. It's not nuclear war. It's not some killer virus out there. We are the weapon of mass destruction, the most dangerous thing. And so we need to quickly come to a reality that we wrote ourselves out of the definition of nature. If you look up nature, many dictionaries define it as plant life, animal life, mineral density, anything non-human, literally, anything non-human. And so we wrote ourselves out of the definition of nature, and we are displaying that in our philosophy on human health. Are are human health as being demonstrated in spades right now that we think that viruses are attacking us, which is completely erroneous mindset and viruses built us. We are more than 50 percent viral DNA at the human genome, 10 percent are made from retroviruses like the corona virus. And so we are literally the compilation of viral genome that's been slowly built over millions, if not billions of years. And so we are the compilation of nature, we are not against that. Nature is never attacking life, it's always there to create adaptation and bio diversification. And if we oppose nature, nature is going to have no choice but to to create a cataclysmic event for us. And so we are creating in our opposition our own demise and this is where we need the shift to happen. And as you mentioned in the question, the gut is the beginning of consciousness. And then the neurochemistry of this is absolutely fascinating. 

David [00:20:22] I'd like to if I may just kind of circle back for one second, you touched on, obviously, the global health crisis as well as climate change and so many different kind of paths leading to the point at which we're at. And, of course, this was all a critical situation before Covid 19, but what do you think the lessons that Covid 19 are trying to teach us are?

Zach [00:20:46] So, you know, so I'm producing a movie right now on this that's three hours long. Some I'll try to compress this into a few minutes here. The virus that's being talked about right now is not new. Coronaviruses have been around since the human record at least 700 years, but some decent science is suggesting maybe twelve hundred years back we can show that coronaviruses were circulating in the human population. And so not new, and the phenomenon of viral transformation is everyday occurrence, it's the most common thing on the planet is a viral mutation. And so viruses mutate in two different forms. One is drift where there's slight changes in the genetic sequences that may change the shape of a protein or the activity of a protein or the surface protein of that virus a bit, and we see that every year with the flu strains. And so every year, three to six species of flu virus kind of traffic around the planet. And they've all had a little bit of change since the previous year. But they're not vastly changed, they remain H1N1 typically as a very common viral description there of their genomics. Then we can have shift so if drift is the day to day experienced occasionally, which might be, you know, every millionth of a repeat of a genetic repeat or reformation of that virus, which is, again, happens very quickly. That can happen- well, around the world. we've seen about twelve thousand eight hundred new viruses, i.e. shift events, happen since 1976, and I'm sure that we're logarithmically off on that but we've only been able we've observed twelve thousand eight hundred, but probably millions or at least hundreds of thousands of events have happened that we haven't observed. But with twelve thousand eight hundred of these kind of shift events happening since 1976 and they seem to be accelerating, the more pressure we put on the microbiome, the more stressed state that we induce in bacteria, fungi and like the more genetic information of adaptation and stress they will exude. And so viruses are made by a stressed out biology, bacteria, fungi, humans, animals. We all produce stress signal in the form of viruses and so humans can produce them. As much as you know, we hear about swine flu and bats and all this, that's actually it's a terminology and it makes it sound like it literally came from a bat. And and that's been so misperceived that we show bats flying around the Chinese marketplace for something like that. That's science fiction really. The genome moves in space and time all the time. So all species are genetically communicating and coded is a new version. It's a shift event of an old Corona Virus, and it's a mild variant on what we saw in 2001/ 2002 with Sars. It's a mild variant on Meurs, which was 2012. And so every eight to 10 years, we're seeing a Corona virus make a shift, and we're seeing influenza shifts costs much more frequently than that. And so 2017, we had a horrible flu season, way worse than this Corona season has been. We had way more fatalities in 2017 than we did in the last few months and there was a devastating increase in the number of pneumonia deaths in the world and everything else. So 2017 was a grim time, we had a seven percent mortality rate from that flu. This this year we have a zero point one or maybe zero point three percent mortality rate from this one. And we've actually had fewer respiratory deaths in the United States than we have since 2015. So it's actually been quite a mild year of total respiratory death in the US. And so it's been blown out of proportion by a second event that's happening around the world, which has also gone viral, which is media fear campaign of the United States and our CDC and NIH have seemed to, you know, conspired on a pretty massive misinformation campaign, but even if they were unaware of the extent of their own misinformation, they certainly knew the fear that they were losing, and so they created a really fantastic advertising PR company for a virus that is common, a virus that's been in our experience many times before. And if we gave the same PR company to lung cancer, the whole world would be in terror because one point eight million people will die this year from lung cancer alone. We've only had two hundred thousand deaths that have been somehow related to the presence of this virus. And certainly we need to sort this out in the next few months, but it's clear that nowhere near that two thousand actually died from direct complications. A virus was indirect or secondary events following perhaps exposed to the virus that that led to many of these deaths. But even if two hundred thousand was the total number, if you compare that to two point eight, or one point eight million deaths of lung cancer, you start to realise it's not viruses that are going to kill the human species. It's chronic disease. It is the explosion of chronic disease, one in two males in the United States now get cancer before they die. One in three women. We have this extraordinary new disease epidemic going in our children. The United States recent Medicaid screens are showing 52 percent of children with a chronic disease or disorder. That's compared to the 1960s when we had one point two percent of children with chronic disorder disease. So not only are adults dying of cancer, our children are suffering massive epidemic of cancers, brain cancers, leukemia’s on down to autoimmune conditions, severe asthma, allergy, eczema, and not to mention the whole neurologic injury spectrum of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder down the autism spectrum that has been exploding over the last 10 years. So we have a real crisis on our hand that doesn't look like a virus. The virus is a genetic communication network that built not just humankind, it built biology. We  share the 20 thousand genes with other mammals. We only have twenty thousand genes and so we are so similar to other mammals and it's not because a pig has different genetic information. In fact, if you clip one hundred seventy eight pieces or clip the human genome into one hundred and seventy eight puzzle pieces and simply rearrange them, don't delete a single nucleotide sequence, just rearrange them, you've got a pig. And so we are pig rearranged, and that rearrangement is a great example of shift. And so we didn't change the protein structure, we didn't change the genome, but we rearranged it through different clippings. And retro viruses are very important in this. And a retrovirus has empowered us to do things like have a stem cell. Stem cells have this unique ability to become pluripotent and replace any cell type that's needed. The mechanism by which it's allowed to sneak across the boundaries of cell types is literally a retrovirus that got inside inserted into that genome to allow flexibility. And so the flexibility of the mammal in development and the many species that are out there that are so diverse and yet mammals, you know, all the way from the ocean. And some of our mammals within the ocean, all the way to the monkeys that we talk about so often, that's all the same rearrangement. It's a viral shift, it's viral flexibility, and so we've created a fear campaign around an event that by the CDC zone numbers, it's not been a catastrophic year of any respiratory death. Certainly people have died, people die every year from respiratory death. And it's looking like the risk factors are really around pollution and drug use. And so the two drugs that are most commonly used for cardiovascular disease, ACE inhibitors and Nabi’s are the blood pressure medicines. And then on the other side, the cholesterol medicine, statins. These things induce an upper regulation of the receptor for the virus in our lungs. And so if we weren't on these medications, we would have a very balanced relationship to this genetic information that we call a virus. When we stress the system and create an artificial receptor environment in the lungs by medication use, we are regulated that that receptor. And it turns out that air pollution carries some common toxins that induce hypoxia or a loss of loss of oxygen and will make us present as if we are dying of lack of oxygen. And that's how people are dying from it has not actually deaths from pneumonia. They're dying from multi organ failure, from lack of oxygen. And the virus doesn't do that well. And the virus doesn't cause hypoxia. It's the toxicity of the environment with medications on the on the front end, combined with the incredible toxicity of the air we breathe in many cities around the world now that's inducing this this downstream injury. And so Harvard's zone studies show that each microgram this tiny little amount of parts per million of air pollution per cubic metre of of air. Every time we by one microgram increase that pollution, there's a 20 fold increase in risk of death from it. And in a city like Wuhan, where we saw the highest death toll outside of New York, we see the highest levels of air pollution in the world. And New York is a close second. And so in these cities where we have the highest amount of air pollution, the virus acts as a transporter of that air pollution toxicity into the bloodstream and and then the compounds within that air pollution and air toxicity can induce it. Interestingly, we know that agricultural spaces cannot do it through a different set of chemicals and so whether it's air pollution from agriculture and some of our rural towns and cities or transportation and energy toxicity in the air in our municipalities, we can create this perfect storm event.

David [00:31:10] Zach, obviously there's quite a lot of fear around the pandemic, as you pointed out. Is there anything we can take away from this as a society? 

Zach [00:31:18] We just learnt something profound in this. This is the best opportunity we have to change as a species that we've seen in my lifetime. We have never... we've been told forever that you can't change human behaviour, you can't make the energy sector stop all suddenly the whole economy will crash, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what? We just crashed the economy by fear, a fear paradigm around a virus that actually hasn't done much more than we see a common virus of the flu. But we proved in that fear journey that we can stop the machine of human consumption nearly instantaneously around the planet. And there is immediate repercussions of benefit. And interestingly, one of the benefits is a drop in air pollution. And so Wuhan Province went from, you know, concentrations as high as one hundred and fifty to 250 part parts per million of this tiny particulate air pollution down to 40 in a two week period. And as soon as it went below 50, suddenly everybody stopped dying of Covid. And so not only did we solve the...  we knew right then at that moment, we should have known. Oh, my gosh. This is not a viral problem, this is a literal air toxicity presenting itself through the avenue of a virus. And we need to just simply tell everybody to go about your normal business, in fact, we want you to get outside much more, but instead of taking transportation, we want you to either ride a bike or skateboard or the electric trains and let's clean up the air quickly so nobody dies of this current flu season/ Corona season. And so we could have done that and we would have had a fantastic amount...but Instead, we tended to push people into artificial air spaces like hospitals and see a huge mortality rate. We have 88 percent mortality in New York hospitals for those people that are ventilated. Eighty eight percent is a higher mortality rate than any other disease in the hospital. And so we are creating the perfect storm in our artificial air systems somehow for this event to occur, this mortal event. In contrast, you know, we could have learnt from countries like Sweden and the like that said, you know  and said, we're not going to sequester people away. In fact, we're going to increase the outdoor activity of everybody and see what happens. And of course, they've had one of the best courses with this fires. There were seven states in the United States that decided not to quarantine or sequester the people away. And they had the lowest death tolls in the country per capita. And so we did the wrong thing in a lot of cities around the world and we failed to learn because and the reason we failed to learn quickly was because of the fear. We were so told that this was the virus killing people, that if we failed to ask the deeper questions quickly enough to get the real answers. And so it's a lesson to us of the power of human fear and its ability to warp science, warp perception, warp our own behaviour as physicians and scientists. The statistics are so easy with that very first group cruise ship in the United States that was part in Oakland Bay for 14 days. We already knew the population statistics. In that one experience, we knew that the mortality was probably going to be around zero point three percent. And they came out and said it was going to be 30, 30 fold higher than that. And so there was just so many simple mistakes made early on, and I don't know if they were volitional or just induced by the warping of fear, but it's irrelevant because what stormed out after those statistics was this massive fear paradigm, trying to build 16 hospitals in five weeks throughout Wuhan. And we thought we were going to have this overwhelming death toll. They discharged their last patient from from that first hospital. They built the first two hospitals in six days, literally from the ground up built to 1000 bed hospitals and so the industriousness of the Chinese people and their organisation for such a thing should teach us something, because the United States and the U.K., we were scrambling to even get masks on people's faces because they were made in China. We can't even make masks, let alone hospitals, in six days. And so we should take a caution of that, of how lazy have we gotten in the West by outsourcing ingenuity and industriousness to the East. And so that's a cautionary tale on the other side. But but the big picture is we should have known by, you know, certainly end of February, but really by mid-February that China had not had the crisis that we thought they were going to have. They closed the hospitals within a week of them finishing the 16 hospitals. So there was no need for it. The same thing happened in New York, this massive fear that we're gonna have, you know, this mass of death and so we moved the Navy ship up there, we're going to build all these field hospitals and none of that ever came to fruition. In fact, if you look at the census in our hospitals, we increased the number of beds by converting normal beds into acute care beds. So there was about an extra thousand beds, but in a city like New York, that was a very small increase. And we never actually tapped those out. And so the hospital, it took the highest toll, was running about a 92 percent census in their acute care beds. The rest of them were down in the 70 percent range. So if you watch the news, that's not the story you get. You get the New York's been overrun and everybody's dying. And then you look at the CDC is respiratory mortality data. You realise, wait, no, actually, we're having less fatalities than we did even last year or certainly than twenty seventeen. And so the power of fear is is really potent. And I challenge all of you in the advertising world to change that. I believe that advertising is always preying on the negative and the advertising today preys on our fears. We're afraid we're not beautiful enough, we're afraid that we don't have enough stuf, we're afraid that somebody else is going to get ahead of us. And the tactics and advertising has been playing on that human emotion very powerfully and I believe we need to correct that. I think there's an ethical demand for the change in the advertising industry. We'd like to get into kind of where the advertising industry going in the next 15 years. And why are we at the tipping point of not just human biology? We're at the tipping point of of ethics and morality, and advertising is in the driver's seat. 

David [00:38:07] I love this idea of rewilding the media landscape that I touched upon, and just to give you another anecdote, about a year and a half ago, we actually, first of all heard you know, Extinction Rebellion are an amazing organisation that have only existed for about 18 months, but achieved so much in that time. But when I first heard about them, I wanted them to come and give a talk at our studio. And we had about 250 people turn up here, and I guess it was because Extinction Rebellion were tapping into something that we were all very concerned about, which is, of course, climate change. But I was just... It started this train of thought that if we were to open source our media channels and our social platforms, and we were to enable them to be not driven by promotion of our own organisation, but rather bringing about an equilibrium or a harmony around the worlds in the way that now, you know, you're seeing advertising spaces around London being open source effectively for good causes and for good causes being given away to, you know, homeless campaigns or campaigns around encouraging people to dig deep and find resilience through this time, not generating commerce of finance or capitalist mindset at all. So I love this idea of rewilding the media landscape. So how could we rebuild a broken fire system that builds community and lifts people up?

Zach [00:39:29] I think it's going to evolve through an understanding of feedback loops and continuous cycles, life cycles of content and materials. And so how do we disrupt that dead end a linear process for products and all of that? And I think marketing is going to have a very important piece of this. You know, our advertising needs to start to tell everything and make sure that we're considering the entire lifecycle of our story. And we can't just say this makes you look beautiful anymore. If it makes your face look beautiful because you're painting over the wrinkles and then you find out you've got 180 chemicals in there that are carcinogenic to that woman and increase your risk of breast cancer or what not. And then that that plastic tube is dumped into a landfill with residues of chemicals that will take thousands of years to break down in the microbiome, we can no longer act like that, we can never hide the rest of the story. We need a rise in consciousness, a rise and responsibility of the marketing and storytelling around our products to include Mother Earth. This whole one percent for the planet movement was, you know, I guess it was a step in the right direction. It was one the first step, but we can't have products like...Clorox being an interesting company, they've got a massive portfolio of products they're trying to diversify into more Earth friendly products. But the vast majority, their business is still selling bleach, which is one of the most harsh and difficult chemicals to get out of the water system and kills the microbiome brutally, and so here's Clorox trying to pitch themselves as a new, you know, transformational company that's trying to find, you know, healthy things. I think it's Burt's Bees. they bought or something like that, so they're trying to find these kind of nature oriented stories to create this kind of greenwash across their company and I don’t think it's just greenwashing, I think there's a sincere desire there to be less negatively impactful and find things to invest in. But that's right now, what's happening, it's the shuffling of the deck chairs and making things look less bad. We have to not do one percent for the planet is not good enough for Clorox to do one percent. They need to stop doing the 99 percent of their business towards damage to the planet. We need companies to step up and say the top line of our company, not the bottom line, not one percent of our bottom line is going to go to the planet. Our top line is going to be soil, water and air. And in that, our products have to work into that and it's not gonna happen overnight because we need materials, engineers and material scientists to come up with solutions for us. We need the energy sector to step up and understand how to get plastics back into the carbon cycle so that it's not a dead end in our oceans and landfills. We need engineers to be called into action, but they won't be until we put value on those waste products. And so we need to close the loop and put value on plastics so that nobody's inspired to dump it into a trash can because it's so valuable that they're going to go collect the money on the other side as it goes back into the energy sector. And so there's ways for us to behave like mitochondria. Mitochondria know how to break down carbon from fats and sugars. Fat and sugar are pretty much the exact same thing, they're just long carbon strings and the mitochondria break those down into the exact same molecule. And one simple enzyme step to a single code. And this little molecule then becomes the the mechanism by which electricity and light energy are produced by the cell and communication network and everything else, and so we know how to do carbon conversion into light energy at the molecular level and we know how to do that at the macro level. In fact, it inspired me to start a company a few years ago called Resource Dynamics, and we're working on carbon conversions. We built a 40 foot mitochondria that that converts carbon wasted to carbon energy, and you can do that in the form of biodiesel, you can do it in the form of electricity, but it's easy to liberate energy from any carbon structure, whether it's farm waste, like the marijuana king that's helping the marijuana industry is producing massive amounts of hemp cane that are just rotting in American fields right now. Off gassing, you know, methane to accelerate global warming for a health product that we call it. And so, it is a great example of an industry that immediately needs to clean itself up because it's about to surpass cattle and methane production in California. And so, we've got this failure of storytelling with planet Earth at the top. And so, I think as we think about and imagine a landscape of marketing and advertising, that brings a regenerative reality in, it's going to have to tell the whole story. And at the top of that story and at the end of that story is planet Earth and the consumer. And its interaction with that product needs to be an element within the story, not the focus of the story. 

David [00:44:48] I'm fascinated by the idea that heart- led design could solve many of the challenges we have been given to solve from the macro to the micro. And you talk a lot about operating in a higher vibrational state, which is also about a deeper level of consciousness. So why is that practise so important to you? 

Zach [00:45:05] Well, I think it's the essence of life, and that's why it's important. It's important to me because life is ultimately short, and we should celebrate its ethereal quality. Does anybody really want to live a thousand years? You know, some people say they do. I don't think I do. I think I want to see the other side that I get to see through the eyes of my patients that are dying on my hospice service or whatnot. And I want to I want to expand again; I want whatever legacy of information that I've been blessed to participate in. I want to see that grow beyond my capacity and not be limited by my personality or my professional acumen or business accomplishments. That sounds really boring for the world to see a thousand years of me. I can hardly stand listening to my own voice for five seconds. The cool thing is we can change our vibration. We can literally change the frequency at which our cells resonate. And therefore, we can transform material within us. We can transform matter around us, through our attitudes, through our vibration, through our spiritual experience, through our connectivity to Mother Nature or through our disconnect with Mother Nature. We can drop our vibration quite easily. Emotion is one of the most powerful ways to drop vibration. And so if you have a fear based campaign that your consumer feels inadequate because they're not don't have your makeup or your product, if you if you are of that bent, you have created a low vibration consumer- and that consumer is not going to be loyal to you because they are they are in a fierce state and they will be susceptible to the next ad that comes through to tell them that they're not good enough because they don't have the other product. And so they're going get that. The high vibration advertising, a high vibration message will will create loyalty in that individual. And to do that, you're gonna have to show them something bigger than themselves and that they are so beautiful for being something bigger than themselves. They can see the beauty around them. If you show it to them and then they can see themselves as beautiful when they realise they are part of that beauty. That's the mission that we have. We need to recognise beauty and a much deeper level. 

David [00:47:22] Beautifully put. I feel now more than ever, brands are going to have to access the energy of the heart to succeed in moving forward. And as an organisation, I truly want Accept & Proceed to continue to explore that. What rituals and practises can be put in place to aid heart centred design do you think? 

Zach [00:47:41] I would look at the people around you that you love. I would look at the nature around you that you love and find truth there. And you know, my call to action for for this audience, the advertising world. And you know what I hoped to share at the conference that we would have spoken at is that over the last 20 years, we've seen the biggest erosion of civil liberties in history through the ownership of our data. Human curiosity itself has been co-opted by a company called Google. Somebody gets curious, they go search something, they've got an idea they're going to pursue, suddenly that data is being sold to advertisers. That is about to go through another cataclysmic explosive growth as we go to the Internet of Things. 5G Is being deployed around the world as we speak. Not, I don't think, for pure military darkness’s, as some of the conspiracy theories think. I think it's to own more of the data and that's why companies and personalities like Bill Gates are buying up all the stock of the biggest companies in 5G, because they know the value of information, they know the value of data. And it's valuable only because it can be sold to advertisers. I can guarantee you that the tech companies have absolutely no impetus for ethical behaviour. The governments have showed no stomach for preventing the invasion of the Internet of Things and the encroachment on our privacy at that level. And so, it really lies with advertising agencies and the advertising world to decide what are you going to do at this moment where everything is owned, where every piece of data is owned? Did I just push a bread into my toaster? Did I just brush my teeth? This is about to be known to you, and you have the option to buy that data and nobody's going to stop you. There is no government going to stop you from knowing every detail about my life. I don't like that, but I can't seem to stop it. And so my my ask to all of you is, can you guys be the human ethos that steps between me and the inevitability of the once again massive explosion and higher trajectory of human consumerism to suck the life out of the planet? Can you guys step in as a filter? And say, OK, if the data is going to be given to us, if we have the right to buy all of this data for advertising, what are we going to do with that? What ethically are we demanded to do? If the planet literally hangs in the balance right now? If we are really at the eighth, sixth extinction event, as we are, if we've lost 50 percent of life in the last 40 years as we have, if we are going extinct in the next 100 years for the collective consumptive destructive behaviour of human consumerism, what is the ethical demand? Can you guys step into that place for us? Can you, as advertisers make an extraordinary shift where it's not heart driven, it's human driven. It's not just human driven, its planet driven. There needs to be a soul and a consciousness given back to humanity through the storytelling about advertising, marketing that will make consumers understand their impact fast enough that we can change our consumer behaviour. You are about to be handed the biggest change in civil liberties in history. Can we have a moment that was perhaps similar to the founding fathers that came out of Europe and ultimately won its own independence from from the British government? That crazy bunch of rebels came up with a beautiful set of documents that said something of the potential of humankind. If we could allow everybody the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of of individuality and success. If that could be given, everybody. Maybe would have a great country. We've, of course, given all of that away in recent years. And we are in a collapse as a society, as an empire. And we are now looking towards a future where either another empire rises, or society transforms. And nobody is in a better driver driver seat than you guys are to challenge humanity, to step up and show them the path. Show them the path back to our nature, show us the story of our own history, show us the future of our products that come in line with Mother Nature instead of the line against Mother Nature. You guys are in the driver's seat in a much bigger way than politicians are. You guys shape public behaviour much more than are our regulators and legislators and policymakers. You guys are the storytellers of our people and our people respond to story. And so, I ask you to tell us a story of survival, tell us a story of regeneration, tell us a story of reconnection. That's my hope. 

David [00:52:41] Thank you. Thank you. That's a hugely inspiring call to arms, and this has been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you, Dr. Zach, I really appreciate it. 

Zach [00:52:52] Thank you, David. And thank you to the whole audience there. 

David [00:52:55] Wow, thank you, Dr. Zach Bush, for this fascinating conversation. The hugely inspiring call to arms resonates with me in many ways. Here, Dr. Zach is speaking directly into how our perception of the future powerfully informs our actions in the present. So much of what the future really holds is unknown, and media often chooses to inform a negative, catastrophic, in fact, vision of the future. As a creative community, we can use our work to describe, visualise and ultimately manifest a world where we want to live. Thank you for listening to Endless Vital Activity. Let's bring about positive change, one conversation at a time.