93 Zach Bush, why all health issues come back to how we treat the soil

How did a medical doctor end up going deep, very deep on soil, and discovering that almost all health issues can be traced back to how we treat our soils? Learn about the role of glyphosate and other chemicals and why after seeing all this doom and gloom, he actually has a lot of hope for the human species.
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In this episode we welcome today Dr. Zach Bush, a renowned multidisciplinary physician of Internal Medicine, Endocrinology, Hospice Care, and internationally recognized educator on the Microbiome as it relates to health, human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future.

More about this episode on: https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/2020/10/12/zach-bush.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to another episode of Investing in Regenerative Agriculture. Investing as if the planet mattered. Podcast show where I talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land, grow our food and what we eat. And it's time that we as investors big and small and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet In March last year, we launched our membership community to make it easy for fans to support our work. And so many of you have joined as a member. We've launched different types of benefits, exclusive content, Q&A webinars with former guests, Ask Me Anything sessions, plus so much more to come in the future. For more information on the different tiers, benefits and how to become a member, check gumroad.com slash investing region egg or find the link below. Thank you. How did a medical doctor ended up going deep, very deep on soil and discovering that almost all health issues can be traced back to how we treat our soils? Learn about the role of glyphosate and other chemicals and why after seeing all this doom and gloom, he actually has a lot of hope for the human species. So welcome to another episode, today with Dr. Zach Bush. Dr. Zach Bush is a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, hospice care, and international recognized educator on the microbiome as it relates to health, human health, soil health, food systems, and a regenerative future. Welcome, Dr. Zach.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Thanks so much, Colin, for having me on. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

And for anybody that doesn't know your story, what does a doctor do looking at health I mean, every doctor should do

SPEAKER_01 1:59

that, but not many do. So why are you doing that? postdoctoral specialization there at the University of Virginia. And in that journey, I worked into endocrinology after four years of internal medicine work, which was kind of hospital-based and a little bit of outpatient care, doing chronic disease management mostly and compensation of those chronic diseases in the hospital. Things like kidney disease, liver disease, gastrointestinal diseases, cardiovascular, stroke, heart attacks, moving into the cancers and all of that. And you tend to rotate through many different ways wards, especially when you're in residency, you take your on the bone marrow transplant ward and cancer wards, and then you're suddenly on the GI ward. So I had this very holistic, I guess, image of the current landscape of chronic disease in the United States that was certainly accelerated, if not emerging for the first time in late 1990s, early 2000s. And it was just a coincidence that I showed up at this moment in history where we hit this brink or tipping point of human health, where we saw a sudden epidemic phenomenon in chronic disease, which had never been seen before. Epidemics had always been relegated to a world of infectious disease and things like this. But to see things like cancer double rates in just 20 years was impossible based on our current model at the time of what is cancer. Cancer is supposed to take 17 years to develop in an individual. It's supposed to be an accumulation of genetic breaks that go unrepaired and end up with dysfunction. To see it double in just a short period of time in an entire population with a very heterogeneous genetic background that the United States has, to see that explode, explosion happen simultaneous to this massive surge in neurodegenerative diseases in our children appearing with autism spectrum disorders by the time they're one and a half, two years old, moving into attention deficit hyperactivity disorder for those that hadn't been diagnosed with the autism. And then really bizarre dysfunction of immune system. We saw severe allergies and environmental sensitivities and intolerances emerge in that same period of time, late 1999 early 2000s, the phenomenon of gluten sensitivity emerged for the first time. It was just like this bizarre explosion of dysfunction, and ultimately what we were seeing was that humans living on Earth were starting to fail to live within Earth's environment. You think back to those Star Trek movies that we grew up with. You see Spock land on the planet and teleported down, and he uses his telecommunicative cater back to the enterprise to say, good news, this is amenable to life. There's oxygen here. There's water. that whole concept of a planet that's capable of supporting life was starting to decay. And we were starting to see children born intolerant to their environment, as if the planet was suddenly not built for them. Suddenly the planet was not amenable to their survival. We're seeing kids with cancer by the time they're two years old, five years old. Nobody's seen solid tumors develop, like sarcomas and things like this. We used to see those as 70- and 80-year-olds, but now we're seeing osteosarcoma and these bizarre cardiac sarcomas and soft tissue tumors and It didn't make sense. And of course, I had no history. I was a brand new physician and everything else. So it's like, okay, well, maybe this is the state of affairs. But by the time I was a chief resident and on faculty teaching residents and med students, there's nothing like teaching to learn something, right? That's what they say. And that certainly was the case for me. And I suddenly went in that year from really believing I was at the pinnacle of knowledge in this space of being a physician and the scientific mind and all this. By the time I started teaching it, really digging into literature, I realized this is new. We've never had this situation before. We've never had this degree of cancers and everything else. Not to mention, we were right at the beginning of the obesity epidemic in the United States. We were seeing skyrocketing rates of obesity and metabolic disorders, diabetes and the like. That shaped a lot of my decision going to endocrinology. Endocrinology is the focus of hormones and how they dictate and coordinate human health and beyond human health. Any multicellular organism is going ultimately rely upon this endocrine system of signaling communication to coordinate complex systems

SPEAKER_00 6:57

what made you choose to go in there because you saw this explosion of 10 20 types of very serious diseases and circumstances you could have chosen any different path to dive deeper into any of them separately but you chose this specific path do you remember why or how that happened

SPEAKER_01 7:16

yeah i do it had to do with a real desire to find a cohesive relationship root cause for what was going on in my patients. And I loved cardiology. I loved nephrology, which is kidney disease study. I loved my neuropsychology stuff going on. Some of my early research was in neuropsych, understanding the plasticity of the brain and how it changes. But I realized that if I was going to go into any of those, I'd be pigeonholed into one viewpoint. And I was seeing diseases happen across all organ spectrums. So I felt like If I go into cardiology, I'm not going to ever understand what the root causes of this situation is. So the endocrine system, which dictates all of the organ systems at once, seemed like a good place to go if I was ever going to get some sort of holistic understanding of the mechanisms and before i was going to go into medicine i actually had no idea i was going to be a doctor i had no plans of being in medicine at all in my early part of my life i was a mechanic and i did construction i was always working with my hands i wanted to be a robotics engineer got accepted to an engineering program at the university of colorado and then only as a 19 year old can have this kind of drama is i had a girlfriend she broke up with me cheated on me whatever and i was like so heartbroken i convinced myself that I was so heartbroken as a 19-year-old, I needed a year off just to recover from this, which is so dramatic and silly in retrospect, but it completely changed my life. In that year off... So you did need it. Yeah, I needed it. And for reasons I didn't understand, I took that year off. And instead of going into my engineering program, I went to the Philippines with an aunt of mine who was working with a group of international midwives birthing babies over in the Philippines. And that was my turning point. That's when everything kind of fell apart in my previous world. I had had never seen poverty like what's happening in the squats of Manila, outside of Manila and Quezon City there. I had never seen this degree of malnutrition. I had never seen so much of what I saw there. I had never seen this level of injustice towards women and children. I had never seen this level of abuse of a society. The Philippines has been chronically abused by occupying nation states for hundreds of years. And so it was just a really broken human system that I got introduced And out of that was this birth of children that was so extraordinary. And these children were resilient. I watched babies born into the squalor of what seemed like filth at the time and just this complete depravity it felt like of human. And yet these children were resilient, healthy and so hopeful and full of joy and running around with plastic bags taped up like a soccer ball and they would play for 10 hours of sheer joy in a parking lot with a fake soccer ball that they taped together. And I wasn't seeing that level of joy in my own life as a child. You know, I wasn't seeing that same level of exuberance. And so I was starting to have this dissidence between what the West would call wellness and wealth and what I was seeing on the ground there. And I was seeing this connection to mothers and children for the first time in a way I couldn't have understood it previous to that. And that whole journey was starting to set me up for this reality that I now live in today, which is where is the foundation of life? And then how do we define once we're alive quality of life and how do we foster that quality of life which goes beyond your blood pressure and your cholesterol level and all this it goes into things like your sense of spiritual connection to the mother earth your sense of thrive within that mother earth your sense of providence from that mother earth and nature that we were developed within and so that I think is you know what set me up for this journey into a deeper and deeper dive onto where are we coming from Why are we here and why are we starting to fail as a species? How is it that we've brought ourselves to this brink of extinction? And, you know, the numbers were very clear by 2005, 2010. We've got less than 100 years left as a species at our current rate of decline. And now that number

SPEAKER_00 11:19

has accelerated. Can you explain that a bit? Because for some, that might sound as a shock that they can see the chemical levels in some of the reports out there. What makes you say we have less than 100 years as a species?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Yeah, there's... two important phenomenon happening in human health right now to conspire to extinction. And the extinction of humans is just symptomatic of a deeper extinction event of planet Earth itself. The Earth has been through five great extinction events in the past. And this is now going to start to get us into how did I find myself in soil. When you start to study the previous extinction events, the last one being the easiest to refer to here, which was 55 million years ago, there was seemingly an asteroid that hit the surface of the planet. And in that asteroid, percussion on the surface of the earth, there was a huge cloud of small particle debris that was airborne at that moment and then settled on our topsoils around the world and choked out creating an anaerobic event. And we lost topsoil over a course of a few years, maybe a decade, something like that. We had this complete collapse of the ecosystem. And it was short enough lived because it was a single hit that we lost about 85, 87% of life on earth. And then it launched into a massive, beautiful recovery, which we could go go into later as we start to think about the regenerative capacity of nature. But first, it's important to realize that the collapse of soil, if it's short-lived, will preserve the oceans. And so if the oceans don't acidify, you'll lose somewhere around 85% to 87%. Of the four other great extinctions that preceded the last one, there was two of them that were severe enough collapses of the soil architecture in this relationship with soil and air that the oceans acidified. And when the oceans acidify, as much as the soil is damaged Then we see about 95, 97% of life on earth destroyed. And so this is now kind of getting us to this current moment where in 2005, we're starting to look at the collapse of the planet. We're starting to have to come to terms with the fact that we are seeing rapid acceleration of decline of ice pack and everything else that should take millions of years is suddenly taking decades. And so we're accelerating somehow these natural cycles of earth and it's warming and it's cooling periods and all that. Somehow we're doing something to accelerate that. And more importantly, And we were doing something to really screw up the air quality. We were starting to get huge amounts of carbon substrate in the air. That's not just CO2. I think CO2 and methane have gotten too much play in some ways. A lot of air time. But small carbon particulate that can no longer be absorbed into the ground is probably a bigger problem for biologic health in some ways. And so we're failing to get carbon back into the soil systems. And of course, you know better than I did in 2005 that the death of the soil, the death of the microbiome and the fungi and the living, breathing life forms there is what set us up for this collapse of biology on Earth. When you lose that topsoil, you can no longer breathe as a planet. The entire respiratory cycle of the planet relies on soil carbon cycling. This whole concept of carbon sequestration that the U.S. government has put out there as this big ESG, it's a completely bogus in this concept. We're never supposed to sequester carbon. We're supposed to cycle carbon. Carbon is literally the backbone of carbohydrates and fats that turn into the energy that we would produce in our cells. And so in a fascinating way, you can't have a single cell survive without carbon cycling through, whether it be a bacteria or in complex cells like ours, we rely on the little bacteria called mitochondria that live inside our cells. And these bacteria outside of our cells, mitochondria inside of our cells, are in concert working to break down carbon back into an exchange of electrons where we can move oxygen and hydrogen on these carbon backbones. And so in that relationship of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, we create life. And when you start to sequester carbon in the atmosphere because the planet can no longer breathe it in, or you start to sequester it in giant tanks because you've paid engineers billions of dollars to pull it out of the Robbing the earth of its vital potential life and life is disappearing so that's a long story of how a physician finds himself feeling pretty worthless in this chronic disease epidemic that we're facing and we get to this point where and as a physician you're sitting in an office and you're seeing patients all day long and the best you can do is lower their blood pressure a few points or lower their blood sugar a few points by putting more and more drugs and they come back three months later they look better they come back in six nine months they look look worse again. So you increase their meds, you change their meds up, and they look better for a moment. And then they come back. By the time I'd been doing this for 10 years, it definitely felt like a dog and pony show or smoking mirrors, like I am not making anybody better. In fact, the more drugs I put on, the worse these people get over time. And it was when one of my patients, a young woman who already had severe obesity, metabolic disorder, peripheral vascular disease, and neuropathy by the time she's 18 years old, she committed suicide. And And that moment was a huge wake-up call for me. And for those of you who are not physicians, it's hard to explain what it feels like when you're put in a position of responsibility for somebody else's health and then something like that happens. And suicide has this very intense side of it. It's not like somebody died of a stroke. It's not the same experience where when you've developed a relationship with somebody over years of care and you know their family and you know their dog and they're dying of a stroke. And you see their family pictures because they want to show you that. And you become part of this person's life. And you feel this sense of responsibility to see what's coming down the pike. And I didn't have the wherewithal to see this depression sneaking into her life. We talked about depression. I had her on antidepressant, but I never really got at the root cause of that thing. And she ends up dying from suicide. And that moment was definitely one of the many slaps in the face that happened to me between kind of 2005 and 2010. It started to make me realize I was not equipped to deal with this problem. I was a finger in the dike of this explosion of chronic disease happening. And I was getting more and more desperate for some sort of solution for my patients. And so... In that journey, I happened to be doing chemotherapy research at that point in 2005. My endocrine research had taken me into tumor management of endocrine organs, the pituitary gland base of the brain. And these tumors didn't have good chemotherapy options for them. And so I started to develop a unique vitamin A compound approach to killing cancer cells through something called apoptosis or programmed cell suicide. And so here I'm watching under the microscope the effort to turn on the cell suicide in cells, realizing that if a cell realized it was not part of the greater good, when a cell realizes that it's too damaged to repair itself, it commits suicide. And for me to see this young girl at 18 commit suicide in the midst of my research, understanding that a cell knows when it's no longer, it's doing more harm than good and it will kill itself, I was terrified to think that this woman felt that, that this young woman at 18 years of age, her whole life ahead of her, had so much confidence disorder and disease in her life and she's watching her mother, 20 years older, get amputated below the knee because of her severe peripheral vascular disease and diabetes and all of this neuropathy that this girl at 18 is already starting to suffer from. She's so hopeless that she can participate in a positive way of humanity that she eliminates herself from the situation just as if one of my cancer cells comes into the realization of what it is and realizes it needs to die to be replaced by healthy tissue. It's an intense thing to think that our children may be getting to the point where they realize that humanity is functioning as a cancer on the planet and humanity is sucking the life out of this planet in the same way that a cancer cell and its damage does. And I think that this rash of suicides we're having in young people over the last couple of years and especially the amount of narcotic overdose and opioid addiction that we're seeing in these children are speaking to the reality that at the biological level, We have fundamentally disconnected ourselves from the reality that we were born into, which is nature. And so this is setting us up for that tough question of like, where is our extinction event heading? And this is, again, a long answer and I'm famous for a lack of brevity. But as we start to look at this accumulation of damage and disconnect from our natural capacity for life, we can start to chart this out at the public health level and see the decline on the planetary level. We're seeing the extinction of one species every 20 minutes. We've had a 10,000-fold increase in the extinction rate over the last 40, 50 years. And this is from the microbiome of the soils to microorganisms and small life within the oceans to large life within the oceans. Some estimates are now that we're at 92% extinction rate in our oceans already. And so we're getting to this point of just catastrophic collapse around us. And the human side of that is showing us this chronic disease epidemic in children, coupled with the phenomenon of infertility. And so while chronic disease will certainly...

SPEAKER_00 21:19

And those are the two that gets to say we have less than 100 years. That's where you get it. Which in some cases, if you look at all the huge collapses that are happening, it sounds even like a lot. Obviously, it doesn't sound like a lot because it's only 100 years, but it also sounds like a lot if you look at what is collapsing around us. But still, I'm seeing, okay, how did you get to nutrient density, to foods to soil because I know many other people probably around the world many other doctors are seeing basically as an engineer they're just just between brackets tweaking the medicine seeing a patient nine months later some patients they might be losing some patients or not but not many and actually very few end up going that deep into soil microbiome and really going deep into where health comes from and where life comes from so I there are some steps there that we haven't covered yet

SPEAKER_01 22:26

it was a slippery slope for me I mean I was very fortunate to be doing the research I was doing. So this vitamin A compound that was killing cancer cells more effectively than a lot of chemotherapies out there was interesting to work with because after a few years of working with it, I came to realize that that comes naturally in a carrot. And it took me years of studying this vitamin A compound before I made that connection, which just shows you how divorced my 17 years in academic medicine was from the concept of nutrition, but eventually came to realize, wait, this isn't food. And so that's interesting. I wonder if that's part of the piece of the puzzle. And it was actually a really intense night with one of my patients in one of my first clinical trials. So I got approval and went through multiple years of getting this 5-A compound into an initial clinical trial. But not in a form of a carrot, I think. Not in a form of a carrot. Yeah, it was in a fancy pharmaceuticalized, chemicalized version of a carrot. And so I had this drug and I sat with this patient and I spent 45 minutes trying to convince this woman to take this capsule or these six capsules in her hand. Every fiber in her body was telling her not to do this and I spent 45 minutes breaking her down with a combination of fear and guilt and this patriarchal hubris that I knew better and I knew her tumor and without this I'm the doctor I've got 17 years of science and blah blah blah. Finally she took these and I couldn't figure out why I felt so dark for the next couple days after that experience. because it seemed like a success. I had my first patient enrolled in a clinical trial, the novel chemotherapy. I was supposed to be winning the game right now. I should have been at this pinnacle of exuberance. Instead, I just felt depressed. It's taken me years and years, over a decade, to figure out that piece of the puzzle, which was, at that moment, as a physician, I broke the spirit of a human being. She ended up doing something that, at this deep body-soul level, she wasn't supposed to do. That chemotherapy therapy went on to be totally fine for her she didn't have any negative side effects or anything like that like it didn't seem to do any harm but the harm had been done through my lack of respect for her and my lack of willingness to let her follow her own intuition and I broke her spirit through a combination of fear and guilt so that was the worst I had ever been as a physician it was a slow realization of that combined with some tough questions she asked me in those 45 minutes about the nature of this chemotherapy and how I came to believe that it would heal her. And what it really revealed was that at no point in human history had cancer been caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And that was suddenly this daunting realization of my God, no matter how good I get, no matter how good my drugs get, I'm never going to solve this epidemic of cancer because I'm in the wrong space. And so as I started to see this complete collapse happen of my whole system at that point, as soon as you start to ask those kind of questions, you realize there's no pharmaceutical drug that's going to solve any problem. And so I had$200,000 of school debt and 17 years invested and I put my family through just tough years of working 120 hours a week in the hospital and had young kids and I had put my family through it and I put us into huge debt and I was depressed and didn't know what my direction was. But that vitamin A saved me. I kept thinking, you know, about that, like that carrot. Why does the carrot have that in it? And so I started studying nutrition. And in 2008, I dug into a bunch of books. One of them was Neil Barnard's program for reversing diabetes. I had been trained in the third best endocrine program in the world, the largest endocrine faculty in the world in our division. Like I was pinnacle and nobody had told me that you could reverse diabetes. I was just like, what the hell is this doctor saying to reverse it?

SPEAKER_00 26:18

How many hours do you think you would have spent on, let's say, food and nutrition in your studies?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

There's only one course taught on food and nutrition. It's taught in your first semester of medical school, which by the time 10 years later you're a practicing physician, you have no memory of. And looking back into those nutrition textbooks that I was taught for that one semester, It was completely bogus. There's not a single mention of nutrients. There's not a single mention of soil. There's not a single mention of minerals. And it's still the case? Still the case. You're taught about carbohydrates, protein, and fat. That's it. That's the whole paradigm you're handed. And you're taught about calories. And calories are causing the collapse of human health. We're eating too many calories, which is completely bogus, obviously. Our athletes eat 9,000 calories a day, and they're the leanest, best biologic specimens on the planet. caused obesity and killed people, they would not be performing well. So we just have completely the wrong lens on this thing, nutrition. So in some ways, it's less about not enough nutrition. Thank God they only teach that for three months because it's so wrong. That's a good point. Yeah. Imagine if they were teaching all the years. Yeah. If they just drilled that into us harder, we'd be impossible to remodel. But in the end, this realization took me to 2010 where the whole university was in free fall, as was that academia in that area of the recession. So 2008 brought about a huge collapse. By 2010, the NIH, our National Institutes of Health, had made radical cuts on research and all of this. And in 2010, the University of Virginia, where I had all my clinical research at, lost our funding from the NIH for our General Clinical Research Center that had been funded since 1969, just to give you a sense of just how bad that recession was on research. And so suddenly our division was in complete collapse and I needed to find a way out. And I started interviewing at other big universities and all this and just had this deep sense of it's just going to be more of the same. So I just started calling out to literally God, universe, nature, whatever I could think of, just saying, show me my next path, show me my next path. And through that, a huge moment of visioning or downloading, however you want to call it, happened to me while I was in my lab one day and just drew out all these Venn diagrams, all these companies and investment strategies and everything else that can be used to change academia and experience. from the pharmaceutical model and all this. And I didn't know how to deal with it. I had never started a company. I had no idea on how to start a company at the time. And so it was overwhelming and daunting. But as I went through the next few weeks, all the doors started to slam. And I think when the world wants you to go a different direction, it makes damn sure you go a different direction. And in this case, I had a complete deconstruction of my life in the next six months. And finally, in the end, I had one path to follow. And that was to this massive diagram of all these clinics and anything else. And a friend of mine's dad was in town and I had mentioned to her that I didn't have any idea on how to start a business. And she said, well, my dad's in town. He's a consultant to small businesses and startups and I help him. So this guy kindly listened to me for four hours and then said, all you have to do is start this one little thing down here, which is, I think you said a one little clinic, go start that, do that well, and maybe all of this other stuff will happen. And so that's what I did. In 2010, I left the university and went to rural Virginia into a food desert there, which was in the end, the only place that I felt confident enough to teach nutrition was a place where there was no grocery store and everybody was eating out of gas stations. I figured I could do better than a Twinkie. And that was pretty much my level of confidence. I set the bar very low. Yeah. Yeah. I had to set it low because I did not know what I was talking about. And so I just started teaching nutrition and I started studying the hell out of it. And it turned out that my biochemistry background, cell biology, pharmaceutical background became incredibly helpful because in 2012, when we were studying kale and it's failure to make my patients better

SPEAKER_00 30:10

this superfood yeah so it's interesting because kale is being ill like please put it in every smoothie etc etc because it's going to do magic and you found that it wasn't doing its magic it wasn't doing magic

SPEAKER_01 30:24

it wasn't doing magic in fact it was making my patients worse in a lot of cases i was having patients increase their inflammation markers as i increased the amount of kale in their life and it took me a couple years of seeing that phenomenon happen before i really realized that maybe it really is the the kale like is it possible that superfoods are actually becoming toxins somehow which gets us back to that interesting shift in the planet like when does the planet become intolerable or unable to support life if our superfoods are failing us what does that mean so that's actually the moment that we started looking into soil science and my colleague William Vitalis brought in a 90 page white paper on soil science and I was blown away that anybody knew anything on dirt that would fill 90 pages of a white paper and so I started diving into soil for the first time in 2012 and in that first few minutes of looking at that white paper William shows me this molecule and he said like this is an important one for soil because of I can't remember what he said but I'm sitting there looking at that thing and blown away because that molecule on the right side of it looked like the chemotherapy I used to make and I had gotten to the point in my mind where I understood medicine could come out of food but I had no inkling that medicine could be as deep as the soil and so that was the moment We started a biotech company and we started doing soil extraction to understand what kind of medicine is within the soil itself. And of course, these molecules were carbon-backboned oxygen-hydrogen carriers that we call redox molecules. And so that was my excitement. That was my big shift. And that's why I've become so profoundly excited about the microbiome because it turns out it's the bacteria and fungi within soil that makes this medicine. And so the idea that the microbiome was making medicine within our soils and ultimately within the soil of our gut closed the loop on a bunch of science that was emerging between 2008 and 2012. Because of genomics, we were starting to be able to sequence the genome of the human

SPEAKER_00 32:16

gut. What does it mean when somebody says that, like we were able to sequence the genome? What does that in layman's terms actually

SPEAKER_01 32:23

mean? The amount of bacteria in a human being is so astronomical. You're looking at 1.4 quadrillion bacteria and at least 30,000. We're more bacteria than ourselves. I mean, we're a carrier of bacteria. We're more of us, basically. And then even more daunting than that is there's 10x more than the bacteria of mitochondria which are also bacteria that live inside our cells and so you really outnumbered 100 to 1 if not 1000 to 1 by these other creatures that are around you and within you and so that was a we were starting to come to terms with the scale of that but we had no idea how we were going to ever categorize all that until our genomic sequencers evolved to the point where we could take that massive population and sequence the entire genome of that.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Sequence basically means mapping, mapping your

SPEAKER_01 33:11

gut microbiome. Yeah, exactly. And so when we say sequencing, you're figuring out the sequence of amino acids that will line up for a protein are patterned off of the nucleic acids of DNA. And so when you start to map that sequence of DNA, you're starting to see the linear patterns there. You can start to cipher species and, more importantly, their behavior. And so with the advent of epigenetics and now microRNA, we can actually start to understand and not only what species are there, but which species are active and which species are stressed or which species are turning on which genes. And so that started to allow us to see some amazing things that we had never even imagined about cancer, which was that when you have a shift in a loss of bacteria in the soil system, you get this cancer in the organism. That seemed impossible. How can the bacteria in your gut predict which cancer you get? In fact, that was exactly what was happening. You miss these bacteria, you get breast cancer. You miss these bacteria, you get prostate cancer. These bacteria get lung cancer. That just didn't make any sense. And in my lab group at the University of Virginia where I was making chemotherapy, we used to joke about this because the studies were coming out of UCLA and all this. It was like hippies in California thought this, but all of us on the East Coast, Ivy League schools, we were serious. We knew that it was not about bacteria. We knew it was genetic sequencing and mTOR and all these crazy intracellular human pathways. But certainly bacteria had nothing to do with cancer. By the time 2014 rolled around, it was just, you know, it's just stupid obvious now that we were completely wrong about our entire cancer model. And it's entirely about the soil system and that soil system predicting health or disease in the individual now has been mapped back to everything that's gone epidemic. Autoimmune disease, obesity, diabetes, all of it maps back to the gut microbiome and damage to it as the initial pathology, the initial physiologic.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

So the question is why? Because we have been, I mean, some are saying, let's say since the invention of agriculture which obviously was not an invention, it was a gradual transition. We've been farming, in many cases, not regeneratively. We've been farming extractively, some cases slower, some cases faster, some cases actually relatively regeneratively, but it has been small pockets of exceptions, especially indigenous peoples have been able to manage landscapes in a very different way. But on a broader scale, we've been mining soil, but we've never had these huge spikes, like you were saying, in the late 90s and the 2000s. So what has changed For anybody that knows your work, I'm asking a very obvious question, but for anybody that doesn't, what has changed since then? What changed over the last, now 2020, let's say 25, 30 years?

SPEAKER_01 35:46

Yeah, that was the question we started to ask ourselves. I didn't know in 2012, but I understood that it looked like our soil systems were collapsing, but I didn't know anything about why. And it was my chief science advisor, John Gilday, a PhD out of Johns Hopkins, geneticist and incredible cell biologist, who first did the thought experiment. He actually came up with the idea got the flu. And for the first time in years, he was laid up in bed with a high fever. And all he did during that four days in bed was read that 90-page white paper that I'd given him. And at the end of that, he called me on Monday and said, Zach, I think what we actually have here is something much different than we thought. I think that we actually have the antidote to Roundup. And as a pharmaceutical guy, I was like, roundup. It took me a couple of seconds to even place that word in my lexicon. I was like, isn't that like a weed killer? He's like, yeah, and it's in our food and it's in our water. And there's some data coming out that it can damage cellular systems. And we've been using this compound now. We had figured out how to extract it from soil. And we were using these compounds in our clinic and seeing unbelievable results. I was thinking of it as a cancer treatment, but we were seeing things that had nothing to do with cancers. change. We were seeing things like autoimmune disease and just inflammation itself. And it didn't seem like an anti-inflammatory. I couldn't figure out why it was doing any of the things it was doing. And so John was the first one to come up with this thought experiment where he said, I think that this is actually changing the chemistry and biochemistry around bifosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup. And so that was the moment we started shifting to this compound. And in the first few months, I was just thinking it as a pure toxin. And it was unbelievable what this thing did to our cells. We were studying human cells of different types and kidney tubules and gut cells and it just destroys them it's an unbelievable toxin and so I was

SPEAKER_00 37:34

in this mindset which is why farmers loved and love them so much because it just kills and just Roundup is the brand name and glyphosate is the ingredient which now also actually you can buy you don't only have to buy Roundup you can actually buy them in other forms and shapes you just saw what it did to human tissue and to non-human tissue it doesn't only kill weeds I think that's a very understatement claim

SPEAKER_01 37:57

yeah Yeah, that's an understatement of the URI for sure. But it's interesting, the deeper you go on that chemical, thinking of it as a toxin was bad. I was like, oh my gosh. And it turned out that John was right. This soil compound acts as an antidote to that damaged cell. So then the question is, you know, but we're seeing this human disease accelerate in this short 20, 30 year period. And Roundup certainly got introduced at the beginning of that journey into this chronic disease epidemic. But there doesn't seem to be enough of the toxin in the water and food systems to directly cause all of that disease. But I had already come to the conclusion that the microbiome was predicting disease. You didn't need a direct toxin. And it turns out that I saw just a, like a, I don't even remember how I saw it, something online. We didn't, I was not on social media. at the time. I don't even know if we had Instagram in 2013. I don't think we did. This little blurb came up about an antibiotic function of Roundup, and I was like, wait, hold on, what? Nobody's ever told me that. And diving into that, I suddenly realized this is the smoking gun. Yes, it has toxic effects directly on human cells and is predicting cancer and other diseases through that mechanism, but how much more harmful would it be if it actually functioned first as an antibiotic and destroyed the microbiome? And in the end, that's what our data now really points to, is that we destroyed life on Earth the moment we put billions of pounds and we currently spread four and a half to five billion pounds of this chemical globally every year when we start pouring billions of pounds of an antibiotic into our soils which are with a water soluble antibiotic that then will be picked up by the rainwater or irrigation systems and washed into our fresh water and down into our oceans and during that path evaporates into the air we breathe and the rain that then falls that antibiotic is now percolating through all ecosystems of the planet to destroy the fabric of earth, which ultimately was built on the backs of the microbiome. And so this is why soil has become the most important topic for any investor, any CEO out there, any person, any person that wants to be alive, any mother who wants to have children, anybody on any track needs to come to terms with the fact that the most important thing that we need to do is rebuild a microbiome ecosystem on the planet. It is paramount to the survival of our species. It's paramount to the survival of the planet as we understand it. And the speed at which we're destroying that microbiome has never been seen in 55 million years. It's been that long since we've seen this level of devastation to the microbiome. And this time, we are the cause. We are the cataclysmic event that's causing this, and it's through our treatment of soil. And so it's just incredibly simple in the end. We don't have a chronic disease epidemic in the end. We have a soil death process happening in front of us. And if we don't see it that simply we're going to miss it. If we keep chasing running away from viruses as if they could be run away from, hiding in our houses as if we can hide from a virus. We are so backwards in our medicine and our public health response, our consumer understanding of viruses. We are just in the dark ages, literally, of the science that's out there today. We have 40 years of science proving that the microbiome and viruses are the reason we're here. We should not be spraying. I'm watching football players and baseball players, young healthy men being sprayed with chemicals before they can go into practice so that they're sterile. That is the stupidest thing we've ever done as humans. I'm seeing municipalities repurpose their fire trucks and all the way to their snow making machines to spray chemicals into the air to kill viruses so that they can get back to work from pandemic. It is the stupidest thing that we could ever do is to think that we're going to whore ourselves into with better and better chemical technology sterilize the planet so humans can be here. We won't be here because of the sterility. We have to end this war on the microbiome. We have to end this catastrophic holocaust on soil that we are currently perpetuating.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

And the ocean, I think. And I definitely, I will unpack the investor bit because you briefly mentioned that. But just to be clear, the smoking gun is round-nubbing glyphosate. Is that the only one we just got? very unlucky because there's so many other chemicals we have been spraying pumping spreading on everything like is there a cocktail of things is it mostly glyphosate what have you seen like if we get glyphosate gone for sure companies will come up with a lot of other very nicely sounding things that obviously don't harm us until we find out they do like is it glyphosate or are there is there a whole let's say army cabinet full of smoking guns here it's a great question

SPEAKER_01 42:44

yeah and you know it's interesting when you look chemicals that existed at the time that glyphosate debuted it was our primary chemical we were spraying in the US was atrazine as a weed killer and atrazine and the nicotinamides you know second to those are profoundly carcinogenic have horrible toxin capacity on everything from the brain to human cells of all types and so you think well glyphosate actually came along to be the less toxic thing so we're better than atrazine the war to end all wars it's the war to end all wars we were going to be safer and more effective and it was more effective you know roundup was way more effective than atrazine and killing weeds and so it was this panacea of oh here's something that's not as toxic and works better and so it just went crazy like but it killed plants and so you couldn't spray anything too close to the crops you had to watch your concentrations and you had to be very careful with it until 1992 we realized well we could spray our wheat and legumes directly with this to as a desiccant dry it out faster to harvest quicker and so we started We started spraying our food directly in 1991, 92. And then by 1996, of course, we had the debut of the GMO Roundup Ready crops. And so now we're spraying not only the crops that need to be killed right before harvest or dried, but now we're spraying everything. So it's corn, soybean, alfalfa, and the whole cascade. And so in that journey, we became addicted to this chemical. And so is it the worst one or is it really better than atrazine? As a small aside here, it's interesting to know that we have so much Roundup resistant weeds in the Midwest. west of the United States, the number one chemical growth sprayed in the United States today is atrazine. And so the 40 years of warfare failed completely and we're back to atrazine again spraying our crops. So is atrazine worse than this? And certainly as a direct carcinogen, I would say atrazine is probably worse. 2,4-D is the new one that's really coming on hard. Dicamba fortunately just got banned in a number of locations and all that. But Dicamba and 2,4-D are a direct relationship to Agent Orange, which is so is glyphosate. They're all organophosphates. And so this cocktail that we've created is now necessary because we have so much Roundup resistant weeds. You can no longer just spray Roundup. We spray Roundup, Dicamba, or 2,4-D, or Atrazine in this chemical stew that's just like a disaster to life. And so we're spraying our fields in the United States now with these multi-chemical stews that will destroy things. But within that mix, I hold glyphosate as the primary ground zero of of the global injury because of the way glyphosate works. So glyphosate damages the shikimate pathway, which is an enzyme pathway that undermines amino acid production. And importantly, it blocks three of the most critical amino acids in our nutrition, which are the essential amino acids. These are the ones that we can't produce as human beings. So we need to get them from either the bacteria in our gut or the plants we eat, which of course get those either through plant manufacturing or fungi and bacteria. There we get back to the kale question. We get back to the kale. How did kale become toxic for humans is we started growing in an environment where it was blocking the ability of kale to make medicines within it and we were left with a chemical residue that was breaking down the boundary of the human gut. And so this is the leaky gut phenomenon you hear about in the press. Leaky gut is really interesting in that it's reliant on a protein structure that's directly blown apart by glyphosate and then we have a hard time rebuilding it because glyphosate has taken away the ability for us to have these essential amino acids and critical building blocks for those proteins. And So not only does it injure the cells, it's taking away the antidote or the reconstructive regenerative capacity of the cells through the deletion of these essential amino acids. There's nine essential amino acids out of the 22 amino acids that make up all the 280,000 different proteins that make up the human body. And so it's very much like the alphabet. So you've got 26 letters and you've got five vowels. If you start to drop out the vowels, you start misspelling all of the words. That's what's happening with the essential amino acids is we drop the essential amino acids out of the nutrition, we're starting to misspell all of the proteins in the human body. And that's how an infant at 18 months of age can have a cancer that used to be seen at 80 because that child literally has misspelled all of the detox pathways, all the repair enzymes can be misspelled and therefore dysfunctional in their enzymatic three-dimensional structure. And so we have got this gatekeeper drug, if you will, or this gatekeeper injury of glyphosate, which is destroying and undermining the workhorse of the body, which is the microbiome then causing direct damage to the tight junctions, which create this leaky sieve of the gut, the vascular tree, the blood-brain barrier, and our whole body is now overwhelmed every single day. When we breathe, when we eat, we're going to start to develop sensitivities and allergies to our environment because we can't keep the environment at bay. We can't keep it outside the body. And so the environment is now moving into the immune system, and now your immune system is in a constant battle against the environment you live in. And this is how we define a planet that no longer is amenable to human life. It's not because the planet's Because the human no longer can tolerate life on Earth. And so with our extinction looming, if we continue on the path that we're on, we'll disappear and planet Earth will recover. And not only will she fight her way back to some sort of previous normal, she's going to come back more regenerative, more resilient than she ever has before. And my excitement about that is the evidence that we have in that fossil record. Every time we've had a great extinction event, we have an explosion of life right after that. And those few million years that unfold in the following, it's not like the Earth will bites back to some previous normal. Instead, we have more biodiversity and more intelligence in the plant that's ever happened before. And I think that's going to happen again. And interestingly, that happens because of the viruses. When you put organisms under stress, they produce more genetic variants to allow for adaptation and biodiversity to occur. That's what viruses are. They're not living organisms. They have nothing to do with the microbiome. They're not part of the microbiome. They are literally the language of the microbiome and the language of multicellular organisms to one another. We communicate genetically through the viral. And so here we are running away from this virus as if it's going to kill humanity. We're going to die for the lack of vital life on Earth. And in the process, we will see the viruses survive us and they will code for a more complex, more resilient and more adaptive biology on the other side of this extinction event.

SPEAKER_00 49:05

And so the choice is, do we want to be part of that transition or not? And I want to transition a bit because I'm going to be very conscious of your time and ask a few questions on the investment piece because I've heard you in many interviews and recently you've started mentioning impact investing and our impact investors as well and so I'm changing gears a bit in this piece to make sure we can answer a few of those questions or at least I can ask them to you this is a question I like to ask I've been asking it a few times over the last months and in some cases people have never thought about this amount of money but I think you have what would you do if tomorrow morning or today like after this interview you'll be in charge of a 1 billion dollar investment portfolio so you can freely invest it it's not a grand portfolio you can make some grants if you want but what would you focus it on what would you use it for to put that that amount of money which is i mean people have said on the podcast it's a lot and it's nothing at the same time what would you use a billion dollars for to put it to work

SPEAKER_01 50:01

yeah before i would mobilize that money i would want to make sure that i had the right terrain and so when you pick the wrong time to invest it's a disaster even if you're investing the right thing so timing is everything and it has nothing to do with the time on the clock has nothing to do with the year. It has to do with the terrain that is set at that moment. And so I've known that, you know, and all of us in this space have known that a massive revolution is necessary and is already afoot. We have a$1.5 trillion U.S. agricultural system globally, or around$2.7 trillion estimate or something like that, which I think is an old estimate, a couple years old. So give it a$3 trillion global ag industry, and it's already shifting. And that's only to measure That's

SPEAKER_00 50:47

only the...

SPEAKER_01 51:16

industry of chemical ag has to pivot because the farmer is seeing their soil and farms die and they're going out of business and the consumer wants things to change now. So this was the moment we were waiting for in a lot of ways. But to get that moment ripe, you have to do awareness. And so before launching our impact investment fund, we've been working, we launched a nonprofit with the intention of creating awareness. The nonprofit is a storytelling agency that is running around the world, explaining everything that I've talked to you about the last hour in great detail and showing the science behind that to physicians, to consumers, to special interest groups, to investors and saying, here's what we've created. And with that awareness comes the opportunity then to mobilize money. And so we've been doing this kind of in a stepwise fashion, come to realize the problem. Then before trying to trigger the solutions, you need people to understand the scale and scope of the problem and the simple solutions that exist to that problem. So awareness has been our effort. And over the last two years, we've reached millions of consumers globally now. And I feel like we have a literal army behind us now of people banging the drum for change. And it started with Mothers with Autism. I launched my whole science and everything else in 2014 with Autism One in the United States, one of the largest autism events in the world. And there was 40,000 mothers of autistic children. And those mothers have become one of the most vocal and powerful groups I've ever worked with. They are more knowledgeable about autism and chemical toxicity than any physician out there. And these mothers are so well self-educated and they're mobilized for action. And so I think it's intriguing that moms are at the front of this transformation effort and are really going to give us the opportunity for massive transformation to the industry. Mothers all over the world, whether they have autistic children or not, are becoming increasingly aware of this crisis of nutrition within the home and the vulnerability of their children's health. They're 52 to 54 percent of children with a chronic disorder is that you know more than one in two children having eczema allergies asthma obesity diabetes precocious puberty all these things and moms are just very aware of this even though the physicians tend to continue to deny this and not see the scope of it they can give the children more

SPEAKER_00 53:33

medicine yeah giving the kids more meds patching up the job but let's imagine the audience is there the awareness is there and you have raised this one billion so you haven't the raising part is done yes or 10 billion 100 billion whatever amount you need what would you feel focus on? Because I'm very interested in the decision-making framework of people, what they focus. They're limited by definition. It's always limited resources and time and money and obviously other resources on. So what would you do if you had a nice portfolio basically to put to work? What would be a few things you would say, okay, I absolutely would do X, Y, Z?

SPEAKER_01 54:05

Yeah, the first two things is knowledge. So you've got a knowledge gap now in the farmer as much as the consumer. And so you need to close the knowledge gap of what does it mean to stop counting my success pay on bushels of grain coming off my land and instead start thinking about carbon in my soil, nutrient density, microbial density. So you have a gap. So launch a Regen University, which we're working on there to do that globally. So get the knowledge gap closing. Simultaneously to that, though, the knowledge gap isn't limited at the soil. The knowledge gap also is in the direct consumer interface. And so as we went to mega farms, our farmers failed or were extracted from the relationship to the consumer. In the United States, our farmers have gone from about 60 cents on the dollar of consumer spending getting back to the farm in the 1950s, 60s, to today where we're at 14 cents on the dollar getting back to that farmer. And so we extracted the farmer from that relationship. We ultimately extracted the wealth of the food system from the farmer, and we're now handing that to middlemen and the rest. So we have to re-educate the farmer on how to re-enter that relationship with the consumer. And, of course, we have all of the tools to do that today. The Internet is allowing for this direct-to-consumer commerce to happen in a huge way. And so the knowledge gap is in multiple levels. You solve for the soil thing, which is actually pretty easy because farmers deep in their tissue know how to manage land. They just have been taken away from that knowingness. But it doesn't take long to close that gap. The bigger gap is then to find them the importance of what they're doing. And in the end, I think that the secret sauce is interesting there. It's not selling a product. It's telling your own story that's going to create the direct consumer demand. Let the consumer see your passion, your spiritual purpose within your soil system, within what you're doing, that's going to inspire that consumer to be your devout supporter and love your products. And so get the human back in the farmer again is a really critical piece of this investment strategy. So you're investing in knowledge base, you're investing in an awareness campaign back to the farmer in some ways. Simultaneously to that, you need to rev up the capacity for those farmers not just to learn the soil science, but actually to procure the alternative toolbox. And so zipper up a couple of companies that are able to expand their technologies to help procure inputs that are more expensive typically, so biologic inputs and things like this, instead of the chemical ag, small molecule stuff. And so bundle purchasing, bundle the capacity for farmers to know not only what to put in, but how to procure those at an affordable rate, and then how to make the transition. How do you wean soil off of the chemicals? How do you get all of that? That can be done with a couple of companies that are strategically placed next to each other to do the education and procurement and wean these farmers to their own success. And so that pattern is kind of the step one. Next, you're investing in infrastructure. And so everything from distribution or storage, you know, you're moving from the farm to storage units, then distribution from storage out to the secondary storage, which is kind of the beginning of that last mile distribution, which is always the most challenging part of any infrastructure is the last mile. And so that final storage site and then the last mile you know, kind of micro distribution events. In that whole thing, my investment strategy is going to really contain that concept of decentralization. The reason we got to the problems we did was through the belief that we could scale things globally. We could come up with an innovation. We could come up with a shipping thing and scale that globally. We need to lose that concept of centralized and kind of globalization of scaling.

SPEAKER_00 57:40

We need

SPEAKER_01 57:40

to...

SPEAKER_00 57:41

Everything is the same. Every tomato you ever plant, if it's cancers or Or even

SPEAKER_01 57:48

this truck is how we're going to distribute it, and so therefore we need to buy these trucks all over the world. It turns out that every single environment needs its own microcosm variation of what you've seen or what you've done. And so I'm going to be interested to invest in companies that are innovative. But then instead of letting them try to scale that globally and pour more and more money into them to scale, I'm going to ask them to become seeds literally in the soil of competition. all over the world. You've got a good innovation. You've got a good idea. We're going to now seed you into different environments. We're going to start companies all over the world now that are going to take your innovation. You're going to become a stakeholder within that company, but you're going to let the local innovators take that and adapt that through the local ecosystem, through the local culture, and create a culturally sensitive, culturally relevant, and ecosystem relevant product on that side. Now you might be a stakeholder as an innovator in 10 or 50 or 100 different companies around the world and get to have the joy of watching success like pouring out all over the place with innovations you could have never come up with because you have such a narrow cultural and ecosystem worldview. So that's what I would start to invest in is a decentralized empowerment system where successful entrepreneurs can become more successful than they ever dreamed through a decentralized system of spread or seeding rather than scaling. Finally, then you need to solve for kind of the last couple of major pieces in there, which are are kind of around this transition to the consumer industry and CPG kind of companies. And so you need to simultaneously bring in demand from your Fortune 500 companies and those that are really controlling those supply lines to help them start to make the transition in their CPG brands. And so that piece, again, has all of those tiers of awareness, knowledge, and infrastructure, delivery, all of that.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Because it's very tricky because they're being completely used to commoditize everything. And this is completely deep commoditizing the whole supply web, basically. And that's going to be a very big challenge for a lot of these huge brands that are not known. They usually don't even know their end farmer they're buying from indirectly, usually from 16 different steps. But they do need to know it if they ever want to play in this new game.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:04

That's exactly right. And in the end, what I've just described to you is an ecosystem strategy for investment. There's an ecosystem that needs to be invested in to make this transition happen fast. I do want to emphasize that this game has already been won. I believe humans are here to stay. I don't think we're going extinct. I think we are going to win.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:23

It's a good thing after an hour of doom and gloom. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 1:00:27

it is. It's important. And I really believe that this game of transitioning agriculture has already been won. It's happening too fast through too many different farmers now to be stopped. It's multifocal. It's got all of the right stakeholders at the table. It's already won. We are going to be a regenerative agriculture system in the next 20 years. If we aren't, we go extinct. But I don't think we're going extinct. I think we're too smart. I think we're too innovative to let us go down that path. But we don't have the time for the linear change that typically takes to happen. In the linear journey, it takes a farmer five years to make the transition in their psychological head to make this change on the farm, whereas biology will change in three months. And so we can't wait for every farmer to wait that five-year psychological journey. So we need to accelerate that. And so this Impact Investment Fund that we're putting together is not about trying to micromanage anything. It's to inspire everybody to go faster about in the lanes they're already going and then synergistically and strategically zipper them together into more functional units. Too often, an innovator or an entrepreneur fails because of that inventor mentality of like, I've got the best thing and I don't want to let anybody steal my IP.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

I hear something of a vitamin A component somebody told me half an hour ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

Yeah. Yeah. And so there's an innovative approach to investing now today where you can overcome that by showing synergy. You're going to keep your IP. We're going to allow you to have it. We're going to make it a lot more valuable by zippering it together with a couple other pieces of IP. And so instead of saying, oh, I'll license your IP and scale that globally or I'll put a team around that and you just sit down and that's where the inventor recoils and says, no, that's mine. You can't take that from me. You show an entrepreneur synergy and I can make you far more successful as if we're together a couple of other people. That's a much different story. And I think we can solve for the inventor mentality with our investment strategy. We're going to invest in synergy between humans. And this is, again, this is a biologic model of economics. If we look at the microbiome, its secret is not because there's some mega perfect fungi. There is no perfect good bacteria. The truth and the vitality of life that comes out of the microbiome is founded upon its biodiversity. And And so if we allow entrepreneurs to start to realize that they are part of an ecosystem of brilliance and they can start to be part of a hyper intelligence of innovation by connecting one another, then we change the whole stratosphere, if you will, of potential. We're going to push up the level of rise radically as we empower entrepreneurs to do their best work together. And when I say together, it's not like I'll come around one idea, bring lots of ideas together, find the synergistic relationships they're in and now you've created a fungal mycelial bed of intelligence and the mycelium are the hyper intelligent ecosystem on the planet and so that mycelial communication network that's pushing nutrients all over a farm hundreds of miles that mycelium can move a specific nutrient to where it's most needed this reality is getting at the potential that we as humans could start to function as we've never functioned before in concert together we have always acted in siloed vessels or in single little that will innovate for the world and then try to scale that in an empire kind of building. If we allow ourselves to become multivariate, multidiverse in our bio ecosystem of investment and business strategy, we haven't even seen that level of innovation before. And so this is how I think we're going to solve for the cataclysmic loss of life on the earth right now is we're going to innovate faster, transform faster, change the world faster. It is the most important event that's ever happened in the history of investment. There's not a single thing more important If we don't fundamentally shift that, we go extinct. But more exciting, we've put an extinction level stress on the whole planet, which means we have more viral intelligence on the planet than we ever have before, which means that if we stop the extinction and we start to realign with nature, we're not going to participate in the recovery of some previous life. We're going to see the explosion of biodiversity and intelligence on the planet that's never been seen before because we have that level of biologic intelligence and adaptation built within the biome today. The pandemic of today is the potential for tomorrow. We need that mentality and we need to invest strategically to manifest that future.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:57

I want to thank you so much, Zach. There's a hundred thousand other things to unpack and to ask. And I hope it's not the last time we talk, but I want to be conscious of your time and make sure you can go on to your next course. And thank you so much for taking the time today to share more on the connection, healthy soils, healthy people, healthy ecosystems, and everything that comes with that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:17

Thank you so much, Cohen. It's been a real pleasure to be with you. I just appreciate what you're doing as a voice box and communicator for this entire industry and the opportunity to shift the world. You're really sitting at a a brilliant position doing here at Fulcrum for the industry. And thank you for being that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

If you would like to learn more on how to put money to work in regenerative food and agriculture, find our video course on investinginregenerativeagriculture.com slash course. This course will teach you to understand the opportunities, to get to know the main players, to learn about the main trends and how to evaluate a new investment opportunity, like what kind of questions to ask. Find out more on investinginregenerativeagriculture.com If you found the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast valuable, there are a few simple ways you can use to support it. Number one, rate and review the podcast on your podcast app. That's the best way for other listeners to find the podcast and it only takes a few seconds. Number two, share this podcast on social media or email it to your friends and colleagues. Number three, if this podcast has been of value to you and if you have the means, please join my membership community to help grow this platform and allow me to take it Thank you so much and see you at the next podcast.