Kriben Govender: Hey, you guys. Kriben Govender from the Gut Health Gurus Podcast. I've got a background in food science. My colleague, James Shadrach, has got a background in psychology. We have got a guest for you today, Dr. Zach Bush, MD, coming live from the US. Zach, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Zach Bush: What a pleasure to be on with you guys. Thank you, everybody listening, for your time and attention and interest in this subject. We're really going to be knocking on some of the most important foundations of the human health, human epidemics of disease around the world, and really the financial wellness of our nations going forward. So excited to have all you guys present. Thank you for being so kind to have me here as a guest.

Kriben Govender: Our pleasure. Zach, what we like to do is, just to set the scene for the audience, who is Dr. Zach Bush, MD?

Zach Bush: You're making it sound very mysterious there. But, yeah, I think I'm on a lifelong journey to figure that out as well. I think that's part of why we're here. It's to figure out who we are and why we're here and where we're heading.

Zach Bush: I am, I think, a reformed or continuously reforming medical doctor. I spent 17 years in the academic experience of becoming a doctor and going through all my postdoctoral training. I became triple board-certified first in internal medicine. I went on in internal medicine in the hospital environment to be chief resident and teach residents and students and faculty at University of Virginia.

Zach Bush: Then went on to a fellowship training in endocrinology and metabolism, which is the study of hormones and how they regulate everything from the brain to a neurologic function to organ systems, things like the thyroid, reproduction, different aspects. It was then on faculty in endocrinology at the University of Virginia.

Zach Bush: Decided to leave my research in 2010. My research was in chemotherapy development in cancer and how it related to nutrition ultimately, like how does metabolism or the fueling of the machine have to do with cancer cells. That was my niche was finding chemotherapeutic nutritional agents, vitamin A compounds and the like, that could disrupt cancer metabolism at the mitochondrial level.

Zach Bush: I left all of that in 2010 to start a nutrition center in a poverty-stricken area of Virginia, a little town of 550 people, serving about 40,000 rural people who really were in a food desert; no grocery stores of any quality, et cetera.

Zach Bush: In that journey, I had to continuously be deconstructing my understanding of not just being a doctor in human health, but really deconstructing my understanding of biology itself. What does it mean to be biologically human? That has a lot to do with things like inflammation, immune function, all these general topics. But, interestingly, excited be on your show because you tie in the psychology so well.

Zach Bush: The psychology and mental health turns out to be very tied into nutrition now. We know that have turned over the last decade to this whole gut-brain axis as a huge new understanding of human physiology, and that makes it sound like the human gut is tied to the human brain. While that is true, and every day more true, the new science over the last three or four years that's really pointing to the microbiome, the ecosystem outside of the human is actually regulating the gut which is regulating the brain.

Zach Bush: In a very interesting fashion, we can say that the first brain, from my perspective, is now the microbiome. The second brain is the gut and how it deals with the information of the microbiome. Then the third brain, the central processing unit, and nothing more than that, is the human brain.

Zach Bush: We have to stop thinking of this as the cognitive center of human experience. Start to understand it's only our relationship to nature itself that would initiate the opportunity for self-identity in a world of consciousness, for the initial thought, for the maintenance of healthy brain function.

Zach Bush: 90% of the serotonin made in the body is made in the gut lining, the [inaudible 00:04:19] cells. 50% of the dopamine is made in the gut lining and another 40% of the total body is made in the kidneys. So 90% of dopamine, 90% of serotonin. That's a whole new world for understanding neuropathologies, neuro health, all of this.

Zach Bush: Who is Zach Bush is starting to become really I am a product of my environment, and my environment is certainly my microbiome at the individual level. I'm starting to understand myself better and better in relationship to I'm only as healthy as the ecosystem that I live within.

Zach Bush: If I limit my experience to drywall boxes that we call houses, plastic off-gassing cars, and a carpeted, artificially-infused office space, if that's my environment, I can't actually be Zach Busch. I will be some sort of diminishing version of Zach Bush, but I won't be the full self-identity, self-encapsulated, self- purposed machine that I should be.

Zach Bush: That's at the individual level. But what I'm finding in my own life is my spiritual wellness and my own psychological conception of cognition is starting to rise as I get more and more integrated into the macro community as well. It's only through interacting with beautiful people like yourselves that I really get to see myself in its fullest measure.

Zach Bush: This is the phenomenon and the beauty of community and my one excitement about technology. In general, I think the information technology age has threatened human health on many, many levels. But the one silver lining is connection. The ability for us to sit here and look at each other ... You're at 3:00 a.m. there, so it's kind of you guys to be up in the middle night for me, I'm mid-morning here in Virginia, and yet we're having a real communion together through this technological thing.

Zach Bush: We can celebrate the opportunity we have to become a global community outside of the manipulation of the third parties that has historically determined who your network is, who is your sphere of influence who can help you move to your next level. That's now become freely accessible to the vast majority of humans. Carry a cell phone, you're connected to the world.

Zach Bush: I am excited that while we continue to understand the extraordinary relationship and opportunity we have in the microbiome, that's our micro-ecosystem. Our macro-ecosystem should mirror that in opportunity. That's a long answer that I'm starting to think lays the foundation for the rest of our conversation.

Kriben Govender: Absolutely. Zach, what does it mean to be human?

Zach Bush: Wow! Such a cool question. I think this is something that's always been batted around by the spiritual world, religion giving us some constructs over the last 5,000 years, no matter if it's in the pre-Christian world where we have the Roman and Greek mythologies predated by the Persian mythologies and going back in time. The spiritual religious realms have been batted around. What is it to be human? What are gods? What is outside of human consciousness? Where's all this coming from?

Zach Bush: That, of course, went into conflict in some ways with the scientific realm as the Persians developed the science. Then that matured through the brilliance of the Greek philosophy and starting to really wrap systematic thought processes and philosophical structures around the science. We're good 3,000, 4,000 years into collision of religion and science in regard to this question of was is it to be human.

Zach Bush: My [inaudible 00:08:04] about being alive right this moment and in the part of my career that I'm in right now is I feel like, for the first time in 180,000 years of human existence, we're knocking on this moment now where religion and spiritual belief systems are cross-secting scientific evidence. We're starting at what is the fabric of being human? But it has a lot of structures that haven't been preached to or understood in the spiritual realm.

Zach Bush: What is it to be human, you are ultimately made of the same fabric that the stars are made of, that the planet itself is made of, bizarrely, even the vacuum space out there between the planets. You're made of the same fabric, and that fabric is a combination of atoms and their system. An atom is the building block for what would be an element in the periodic chart. The periodic chart becomes the building blocks for a molecule. A molecule becomes a building block for a cell. A cell becomes the building block for a human organ. Human organs become the building blocks for a whole 70 trillion-celled organism that we would call human.

Zach Bush: But one thing that we have to hold on to, because right now if you go into a doctor, they're going to do maybe a CT scan or an MRI and take pictures of all your organs, and they're going to convince you that you're an organ system creature and you're built up of two kidneys and a liver and a brain and the neurologic system and two lungs and heart. It's a rudimentary belief system about who you are and what you are physically.

Zach Bush: What's been lacking in modern medicine, which is anything but modern when you start to consider the physics of the situation, the modern medicine continues to look at the solid part of you. The problem with that is that only 0.001% of you is actually solid. 99.999% of you is actually vacuumed space.

Zach Bush: That is truth based on the structure again of the atom. The atoms that make up the entire universe are inherently a tiny, tiny bit solid. There's a tiny little solid core made up of protons and neutrons, which, bizarrely, actually have the same structure. A proton has the same structure as the black hole that's in the center of our galaxy. It's a double tetrahedron.

Zach Bush: Bizarrely, that double tetrahedron is the three-dimensional Star of David or the star on the Muslim flag or it is the two dimension ... If you project the three-dimensional structure, which is called a 64 double tetrahedron, down into a two-dimensional structure, it's actually the flower of life.

Zach Bush: That two-dimensional design of the flower of life, if you haven't seen this thing, just Google flower of life and you'll see a million different depictions of this, and you'll find out that that depiction was actually etched with some sort of laser technology. We don't know what it was, but predating the Egyptians, whoever built the pyramids 10,000 years ago, etched this flower of life into the structures, into the blocks of many other pyramids.

Zach Bush: All the way back 10,000 years, somehow they knew that this was the secret to life itself. This was the structure that was the fabric of everything. To find out now in just the last few years that that flower of life, when popped into a three-dimensional structure, is a 64 double tetrahedron, which was the structure of our proton, which is the structure of a black hole, you start to realize what is it to be human? To be human is simply to be yet another face, another pixel version of the expression of the universe itself.

Kriben Govender: Wow!

Zach Bush: That sounds very heady and very grandiose on some level, and yet we have some very interesting concrete proof that this actually plays out at the macro level of being human and being in the human experience. These experiments were done on college campuses.

Zach Bush: Before I tell you what the study was, I need to explain to you that a black hole, whether out in a galaxy or representing the structure of a single proton in one of your atoms, is a structure called a double torus in regard to its motion. It's a gravitational field that pulls everything inside of it. People are familiar with the black hole concept, right? It's such a powerful gravitational force. It even pulls light into it.

Zach Bush: Well, part of that thing that's getting sucked in at the proton level is actually the electron itself. We think that the electron is being sucked right inside the proton into the black hole and then spitting back out, and it's cycling in and out of there in an extraordinarily fast millionths of a second speed of rate.

Zach Bush: The black holes out in the universe also are taking in and spitting out electrical data. Stephen Hawking, the famous astrophysicists who passed away recently, Stephen Hawking became famous for discovering these particles that are coming out of this information stream, out of black holes in the universe, and so they got named Hawking particles. He held that that was this random information flowing out of black holes.

Zach Bush: It turns out that many other physicists, and including himself in the end, would agree that there seemed to be structure to that information, meaning that there's some sort of data or knowledge that's flowing in and out of black holes. He and other physicists have proved that all the black holes are connected through wormholes or some other phenomenon in the astrophysics quantum world, such that any black hole putting in and out information would have the same information exchanged across all the black holes in the whole galaxy, and then in the whole universe [inaudible 00:13:59].

Zach Bush: As such, every single proton within every single atom within every single molecule within every self, we have complete singularity of access to information as well. How did they even start to look at this as a possibility of really being the fabric of reality we live in, because this sounds super weird?

Zach Bush: What they do is they take two groups of students and they put them on opposite sides of the campus. They gave both groups a very complicated crossword puzzle. They asked the first group to start and they time the length at which they could finish this crossword puzzle. No communication, physically or otherwise, to the other group. The other group had to sit and wait for this team to finish.

Zach Bush: They finish at 48 minutes. As soon as they finish, they wait I think it was five minutes or 10 minutes. They waited some number of minutes. Then they start the second group to solve the same crossword puzzle. They've done this many times now across different environments and always the second group finishes a few minutes faster than the first group.

Kriben Govender: Wow!

Zach Bush: Meaning that there's an exchange of knowledge, there's an exchange of information through the experience of the first group traveling through vacuum space in connection to all of those black holes within each of those individuals.

Zach Bush: That's a test environment on a university campus, but as an entrepreneur who has started a bunch of companies now, I get to bump into a bunch of entrepreneurs and thought leaders around the world now, and I see this happening actually on the macro, macro level, which is once an idea comes up through an inventor, as a new revelation happens, within a few months, I find out that somebody else over there on the other side of the world had the same thought within the same few-week period, and over there there was somebody else that almost had the same thought over there.

Zach Bush: Knowledge is literally percolating up to the fabric of humanity, which is very hopeful to me, because if we look around, we have a complete desire in regard to our species in that every technological leap forward we have made has accelerated our consumptive behavior. We consume resources faster and faster and faster as a species and we're literally gobbling up the world's resources in regard to food, mineral resources, oil and gas, air itself, fresh water, you name it. We're using up the precious resources on earth and don't have a way to recycle that energy. If we don't change and if we don't break out of the behaviors and technologies that we currently depend on, then we're going to be extinct within roughly the next 60 to 70 years.

Kriben Govender: Wow!

Zach Bush: That's a daunting and sad scenario. How do we know that? It's because of the current rate of extinction that we have on the planet. We're losing one species to extinction every 20 minutes. Even in this short podcast, we're going to lose two species that may have been even unnamed and undiscovered will disappear from the planet. Over the last 50 years, we've lost 40% of the biodiversity on the planet. We're nearly halfway done with the complete extinction of biology on the planet at the macro level. In [inaudible 00:17:10] years, we expect to collapse completely to the point where human existence becomes unviable on this planet.

Zach Bush: It's not too much of a coincidence, I believe, that the billionaires around us who built this consumptive environment, the Amazons, the Facebooks, and all the advertisers out there that have built our consumer behavior and capitalized that, they are working on space travel. They're trying to figure out their exit strategy off a planet that is literally collapsing. They are trying to build their own lifeboats to jump off the Titanic because the Titanic already hit the iceberg.

Zach Bush: Everybody who can see at this macro level because of their, level of influence or whatever it is, can see that everything is not viable. There's not a single sustainable company on the planet right now. With this understanding, they start looking for lifeboats off the planet.

Kriben Govender: Wow!