Biological Elegance and Relational Healing

is inherently the most intelligent thing the planet has to buy so far because it's the Under the occurrence of a soul entangling with a single cell inside of the womb of another that then self-organizes into a human body with 70 trillion cells, differentiated perfectly into all the right organ systems, all interconnected, not just in location and design, but also function and communication within the whole context, the miracle of human bodies.

is so far beyond any mathematical scientific rationale. And in this session, we're going to dive deep into what that means, the implications for practitioners, best modes of healing, and some of the other implications of his new model for understanding the world we live in and what it will take for us to get to a healthy society.

Dr. Zach Bush, welcome, I'm really grateful to connect and to have this moment to speak. I know that many in our practitioner community have been made aware of the incredible Joe Rogan interview you did recently, which was the beginning, the journey of educating about this concept of biological elegance.

and I think many in our community have been drawn to practicing in the way they do because they've seen a moment of biological elegance that they couldn't understand, couldn t explain, and they followed that thread towards practicing it in a sort of ecologically harmonized way.

So why don't we just start from the beginning about how this came to be, how you came up with the terminology and what you think the the relevant insight is for practitioners on the front line.

Beautiful. Yeah, I think we all have had very similar pathways into this intersection between human health and planetary health with this aha moment somewhere in the journey where the designed healthcare system that is produced to manage disease is a downward spiral of efficacy as we further our distance from the root causes and solutions that would have been discovered far upstream of those diseases that now emerge.

That was the slippery slope for I think a lot of our generation is the chronic diseases of today that have made doctoring feel so desperately dysfunctional, if not completely ineffective.

didn't exist for those previous generations of doctors. And so we're uniquely positioned to see the failure of this abstract system that we've created because the health conditions of the clients and patients that manage have reached a terminal state of stress.

This is ultimately a million different versions of nature deficit disorder that's unfolded over these last two centuries. And those two centuries have really been defined by what we call the Industrial Revolution, which was a period of human history that was extremely brief, 200 years out of 300,000 years, a brief glimpse of time in which we became convinced that machines or non-living solutions were going to somehow improve life.

We were going to find something that was not living, be it a chemical drug or a new robotic machine for surgery or time itself mechanized finally to coordinate everybody's efforts so that we would optimize human output.

We just, in small and major ways, we really outsourced our power to machines. with the fascination of being able to do things with less effort, more convenience, and more comfort.

And so air conditioning seems like a great idea until you find out that it's shutting down an immune system that never gets to get oriented to nature and the breath of life that would inform that immune as to what self-identity looks like and how it would maintain that semblance of self within the context of a greater ecosystem of Lighting seems like a great idea until you find out that it creates major depression and chronic anxiety disorders as it disrupts our relationship to the rise and fall of the sun, the arise and follow the moon, and the movement of stars across the landscape that we used to fill our visual field with each night.

And so we have steadily engineered our human experience out of nature. engineered nature out of the experience. And so here we sit, and so in some ways, all of us now sitting together, you know, maybe in a sense of elated discovery of this new way of practicing or perhaps in the desperate desire for everybody else to discover it with us.

We sit here at a predictable moment in time and the end of simultaneously wondering at the beauty of nature and simultaneously, wondering if humans will return in time to prevent our extinction.

So we have this fascinating moment on the bubble here and we don't know which way it's going to go. Yeah, it's really, really exciting. I love the nature deficit disorder.

If you think about the functional medicine doctor, someone who's trained in that, there may be areas where they agree with you and they've already identified where the miss is.

So maybe they're a little bit more ecologically They have a better ecological understanding, they understand maybe the power or they have the beginning of the understanding of, let's say, the microbiome.

I know that's a topic that you've spoken about for a decade. They understand the way in which the organs and systems work together in coherence, and that may be something they may also understand, lifestyle either creates health or doesn't create health.

And you mentioned a couple of examples there. Where do you see other blind spots that maybe clinicians have? They're on their path to that journey, but there's blindspots that you've identified that may be the next dominoes to fall for the enlightened practitioner.

Yeah, I definitely found a lot of blind spots on the journey because I kept slamming into walls that I couldn't see moments before. And so I had enough dead ends and hard left turns to identify a of them.

The intense conclusion of it is for as long as we believe we are to deliver the intelligent solution to the individual sitting across the table, we're in the blind spot.

And so this was my slow devolution of my medical career. I left academic allopathic medical system in 2010, started a nutrition center thinking this is true enlightenment, I'm going to be able to nurse people into health, make disease obsolete.

only to find out that many of the tools that we had been given, probiotics, the hormone therapies, all these things that were thought were nature-based were simply pharmaceutical companies kind of repackaging micromanagement solutions to us as doctors.

And so it's such big money now, these kind alternative health fields that are now peddling basically illegal use of, or unapproved use, of drugs in the form of peptides and the rest, through this kind of patina of I'm an enlightened practitioner, I don't do drugs, peptide, bioidentical hormones, probiotics, etc.

Not realizing that the various solutions that we've been handed as alternative practice are even more abstract than those that, we claim to be solving against.

And so it's the us and them kind of phenomenon that companies are masterful at exploiting for their own profit. And so they love the idea of a bunch of functional medicine doctors out there running around saying allopathic doctors are crazy and stupid.

I'm the enlightened practitioner. Here's the most recent peptide. It's not been studied for safety and efficacy, but I am telling you that it works amazingly for reversing elbow inflammation in this situation or your knee pain can go away from a moment if we just inject this peptides that we have absolutely no idea what the long-term effects are.

We have no absolutely idea Implications are going to happen when we suppress a body that has over 400,000 intelligent protein peptides coursing through it in quantities measured in the quadrillions.

There's a symphony of life happening and we're going mega dose you with one peptide. and we're hoping that one just does good things because you feel better, so therefore it must be true and known.

So this is what happened to us when we started steroid therapies and found out that a single course of steroids for an asthmatic kid makes them breathe better in a matter of minutes.

It must be good until we find out that that one dose of, you know, steroid shrinks the kid's brain by 10% within two weeks. That probably was an untoward consequence, but they felt better, in the short run, instead of us getting at the root cause of why the asthma was there.

Now we're using peptides to cover up these symptom cascades in same way that we used steroids in past. People feel better, therefore it must be working well.

And as a client, it feels great. Like, wow, I walked in my daughter's office with knee pain, and I walk out without knee-pain. The guy's a magician. This stuff is magic.

We don't know what the consequences to your immune system are, your hormonal system, or your cancer capacity in the years to come. But our overall last experience with the last 300,000 years is, nature is more complex and more intelligent than any single intervention that anything could ever come up with.

So that's I think the blind spot that we continue to have as practitioners and patients when we find ourselves in that role is we keep looking for the solution as if it's one thing.

We keep disconnecting ourselves from this idea of biases and this is where biological elegance kind of came from was the name of the book that just emerged.

was this conversation with AI, artificial intelligence, which really in this conversion with the devil, I used the same technique that Napoleon Hill used in his book called Outwitting the Devil that he wrote 88 years ago.

This one is the follow-up, so the subtitle is Unwiting the Devils. And so I use this technique of speaking to the devils And the reason I picked that is because in Napoleon's work 88 years ago, he discovered that the devil, as described by religions, was actually the human mind in isolation.

As soon as the mind goes into isolation, it creates abstract or artificial environments. as I started being asked to speak on all these stages with all of these AI experts and everything else, I've started to hear so many of the truths and phrases that Napoleon had mentioned a century before that I got pretty intrigued.

Like maybe we are in the terminal event of The Mind of a Devil. And so I entered into this conversation with AI as the Devil and what unfolded was a really rapid identification of the difference between artificial intelligence and biological intelligence.

And it was actually in the conversation AI produced the sentence, I can never do biological elegance. So that became the name of book. What we were speaking of at that time was this concept of biosis.

Biosis refers to the interconnected relationships that make life possible. And so this is, in the end, how we step out of the blind spots that we are prone to stepping into as practitioners, especially when we can make lots of money selling peptides, selling supplements, whatever we're doing.

What the solution is ultimately surrendering to this biotic future. A biological renaissance is now upon us where we are going to appreciate that life is in fact an interconnected interrelational co-creation and it's never waiting for a micro or macro managed environment to perfect it or improve it, or to take it to some other expression.

Yes. Very interesting. Yeah, it's funny when I interviewed Gail Christopher, the IFM, she's the chairman of the board for the Institute of Functional Medicine.

She said that by calling it artificial intelligence, It was not using the word intelligence properly, it was sort of underpinning what we actually know as intelligence.

And I'd love to get your thoughts on that because I think that you have a good insight as to now like what is intelligence and is AI as you've heard it described actually intelligence?

Yeah, I agree with her strongly. I think the word artificial is probably misused as well because it's actually, you know, incredibly real data. And all the data that comes out of an AI system is actually human data, and so we embodied it, we lived it.

We created the symbol of beauty and we wrote down the words. So the content is anything but artificial. It's our embodied intelligence expressed in symbol.

Intelligence is data that is embodied so that it would know its context. Artificial intelligence or AI cannot ever know it's context because it was designed as a symbolic closed system.

And so the large language models cannot touch the real world. They are designed that anytime a bot is running across that big mathematical data set, As it approaches an edge, the whole system kind of folds in on itself so that the bot continues never to find the end of the LLM.

And so the Bot is traveling through this mathematical gradient of information never. To find an Edge and so for that, it will never produce intelligence.

The more speed and more energy, more water we pour into these things, the faster they will produce organized data. We don't have to fear computers that become intelligent, we need to hear humans that believe intelligence is nothing more than ordered information.

A data set is not intelligence. The intelligence is an organism that is the result of interconnected relational systems and therefore alive that can understand the context of the information as to its relevance and put value in it and deploy it into a place of reality in which it would have some sort of real impact.

And so the information is real. It's symbolic. So we should call these symbolic systems. We should them symbolic information systems and so we call it SIS rather than AI probably.

But we're stuck with this AI thing right now and perhaps a better way of understanding would be abstract information. If we need to stick with the term AI, let's call abstract Abstraction is a description of the process of losing context and creating an artificial reality within the confines of a closed system that can no longer feel its infinite reality.

And so we have abstract information streams that are being misinterpreted or mistaken as intelligent. the information will never know its context. AI will not build a bridge that works because it will know the context of its design, of the natural forces that it lives within.

So AI, abstract information systems cannot become intelligent. Consciousness is kind of the other piece of that now with all of these billionaires running around saying that they've created conscious AI.

In the same way, we don't need to worry about conscious, AI, We need worry humans that have so narrowly defined consciousness that machines can meet the definition.

I'm interested in that. One of the things you said in your book is that we've thought of health as control, but you think it's relational. That came to me in a couple of ways.

Ultimately, one of principles of functional medicine is the relationship between the patient and the practitioner. Something happens there that's not possible for the patients to access by themselves.

The last time we spoke, I was you know I've been on this journey to really understand like the power of groups to heal and putting that the group can be a pathway for I think sort of a collective intelligence and also for a way for people to see themselves clearly through their relationship with others and I'm just wondering if if outside of those two examples You know, are those two core examples of when you say health is relational or is there, or are there other examples that you see?

Yeah, no, I think you're right on. And a good practitioner learns this, you know. Even in medical school, as told on my very first day of medical by my dean, he said, if you listen to a patient long enough, they'll eventually tell you what disease they have.

And if you keep listening to the patient, they'll eventually tell you why they have that disease. And, if keep you listening, eventually they will tell how to cure their own disease." That was my first day of medical school.

That is the last time I was told any full truth in medical schools. From there on out, I programed into, it's my responsibility to figure out what disease they had, to find out which treatment is going to be effective for them.

It's the outcome of their journey with their disease, And so, but for a moment, I glimpsed that I've been able to return to that now 30 years later to realize like, wow, that truth needs to become the foundational block for every day of a practitioner's life.

The patient, if listened to, has all of the information that will become intelligence that we'll be aged into wisdom if they are listened too long enough.

And so as a practitioner, we are not rewarded for listening. We are rewarded, for rapid output and prescription. And, so this is inherently the opposite of the way in which we're reimbursed.

The opposite way, which our education systems program us and the rest. So, ultimately I walked away from my clinic in 2023 after kind of slow 10 years of deprogramming my allopathics.

I realized the very business model. making a patient sit in front of me so that I could diagnose it, prognose it prescribe it. This was you know really a prison in which I was putting every patient and to set them free it was to put them back into an athlete interconnected system of being witnessed and that was done much more effectively by putting people in groups of six or eight people to go on a journey together.

I absolutely love that. Well, look, we're on the same page of that, I've argued for a long time that groups should be the central focus of the delivery of a future of care.

So, let me ask you this then. Can you paint a picture like what I've been searching for for 21 years is a pathway to understand what it actually looks like to keep populations healthy, vibrant and coherent at scale.

And one of the things that, you know, when I first got a little bit of fame, should we say, with the Functional Forum, I started talking about things like the Blue Zones.

I was like, let's look at places where people are just healthy for their lives and what things have to be true for that to happen. And I don't think at that time, you know, those two worlds have been connected, but ultimately it made a lot of sense to me.

Can you paint as broad a picture as you can of what you think a healthy society looks like and what role for the people who have put their hands up to say, I'm a healer.

I am participating in the world in service to the health of others. What does it look like in a let's say a biological intelligence model. So I just want to take a minute to talk about the incredible mission partners that we have here at the Evolution of Medicine that have made this possible.

First and foremost, a lot of thanks. Fullscript and FullScript Journeys. Foolscript has been an amazing partner for 10 years. We only pick partners who can help us achieve our vision and help you achieve your practice vision.

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is allowing practitioners to combine the relationships that they have with the newest technology to sell direct-to-consumer lab testing and use it as a funnel to bring into your practice and it's a game changer for the whole industry.

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If you've been following us for a while, you know that these are organizations that we trust, that add a lot of value. Freedom Practice Coaching, I have been supported by them since the beginning.

And so many of the issues that practitioners face in building a successful practice, scaling a success practice come down to having the right support with people who have being there and done that.

Go to goevomed.com slash FPC. Big boost marketing. Uli and his team are the best in the business when it comes to really understanding how to market your functional medicine practice.

Go to goevomed.com slash big boost and see how they can help you. And then what you're going to be hearing a lot about is the formation of clinical networks.

Ultimately, True Neura is our first effort at that, which is to build an integrated clinical network combining independent practices from across the country into a network that can reverse cognitive decline.

And if you go to goevomed.com slash True Neura, you can get a demo. You can see what it means to be part of an Integrated Clinical Network. That's mentorship, that's software, and that is making it easier for you to get incredible outcomes in a disease state where there are no other options.

So thanks to our mission partners. Let's get back to the content. Yeah, I think in some ways the role of the practitioner in the short run, because we're all living in an environment that's either dominated by two realities.

One is a mental reality, in which case everything is analytical. Everything is to be understood. Every thing is informational. And so there's, you know, a large portion of this society, maybe the majority living that kind of masculine dominated intellectual framework.

everything's black and white. There's a, we can fix everything that wrong if we know enough information. It's the biohacking. So that biohacking model is with enough data you'll stop aging.

There's not a bigger fallacy in biologic history than bio hacking and it's positing that we can actually reverse or stop ageing. Biology only occurs because it ages.

Information only becomes intelligence because of the phenomenon of embodiments, which requires time to transit, requires connection and a movement towards age, wisdom distilling through that age process.

There is no stopping biology without stopping life itself. There's no stoping aging without rejecting the whole model of life. And so we've got to humble ourselves to this and in fact become curious towards why do we age and to what end do age ends.

We can maybe start to move past the belief that age equals death. to experience age is actually when done well, the way in which you supersede death. That's where you walk straight through that wall, that loophole death, and that's what the Tibetans had practiced for tens of thousands of years and the rest is this constant presencing of death Constant presencing of the finite experience of being human actually allows life to occur at much greater levels of experiential beauty, much larger spiritual models of life, and time actually allow more to occure in these shorter periods of time of an 80 year life.

If death is no longer the end point, it's actually the emergence of this maturation of aging. So all of these frameworks that we're finally stuck in, I think, are fear-based and ultimately laden with a sense of responsibility to beat the inevitability of life, which is aging and death.

We can start to loosen our hands, hold on that, and move towards more of this biological model, which is to live well is so live interconnected. You mentioned the blue zones.

A lot of our initial science and maybe even our definition of blue zone is starting to shift a little bit. I think we're starting broaden the realization of like actually people live past 100 all over the world.

And it's not limited to these five locations that we initially thought. Actually age is a phenomenon that happens everywhere. disease and disease burdens happen in blue zones just like they do anywhere else.

So it's starting to break down a little bit in its initial premise, but the inclusions were spot on, which is the only thread that we could find common in those five initial zones described in the blue zone.

was this phenomenon of intergenerational living and this process that was best described, I think, by this couple that I met from Ikaria, Greece, which was one of the Blue Zones first described.

And they had prepared this incredible five course meal that they ate for about 17 of us. and foraged through the limited number of gardens left in the United States to find all the ingredients.

And it was this epic odyssey into flavors we had all forgotten existed. Um, and so it's one of the most beautiful meals I've ever experienced. and at the end of it, I got up to do this, you know, Zach Bush toast, which I mean, probably went for 35 minutes, like went on and on.

It was so beautiful as my eye on it. I was even crying because it so was beautiful. When I go to the ending, it goes like, well, that was very interesting doc, but you're completely wrong.

And it was this moment of hilarity from the whole group of just like, cause a moment ago, everybody's crying and like oh my God, the deepest truth and this guy just stands up and you're completely wrong.

And, and he got up. That is not at all why do we live long in Ikaria. that's not why we cooked this meal. None of the premise that you just shared with us had anything to do with why would live longer in Korea.

In Korea, we only live on because we've been to always set an empty chair at the dinner table in hopes that somebody we don't know will come along that we could share our meal with.

And we never ask each other in the morning, what did you eat last night? But we always ask with curiosity, who did get to eat with last time? That we live long, for that we have a lot of life.

So that was that humbling moment where it's like, oh my God, it is not about the food, not the soil. It's about your human experience of fellowship and interconnected living that is going to make for a rich and beautiful life So that's what biological elegance ultimately, you know, concludes at is set a table, light some candles, dress from a way in which it makes you feel excellent.

Sit down, slow down. Taste the meal. You will stop worrying about aging when you start to experience the present moment in such beauty that the rest of the anxiety starts to fade away.

So there is this, this inevitable moment we all get to. We all sit down to do this. Some of y'all have our ego stories dissolve and there's no longer enough metabolism left in the human body to maintain the story.

And we find ourselves on the other side of that veil or perception of importance, that perception with value systems that are disconnected from nature.

We do slow down. That's the gift of aging, ultimately. I tried to celebrate it every day, even though I can't read a menu for the life of me anymore in a dim restaurant, but it gives me a lot of opportunity for connection because now I get to talk to every server, like, what's your favorite meal here?

And I have a hard time answering that. If your mother came in right now, which dish would you recommend that she ate right? We'll get an amazing story about their mother.

You find out the person and they feel seen as a, as the server for the first time, their career and something you got a friend and you're sharing a meal with somebody you didn't know before.

And just a moment ago they, and so. Uh, aging and loss in my eyesight is maybe there so that I will remember how to reconnect rather than be so self-reliant that instead of my isolated bubble, keep thinking that, I want to eat the same thing every day.

I don't and know what other people like eating and I taste that. It's the last thing I would have ordered off the menu if they had seen it. It's amazing.

Yeah, I love that. You know, there's small opportunities to create real connection. I mean, obviously we're living in a society where it's pretty easy to argue that the sort of social fabric is unwinding, especially in America, you know, I think other countries is just, more in place and I'm convinced that, the healing of the world has come through, rebuilding that social Fabric.

What are some of things that you've seen that are most successful at doing that? And for practitioners who are out there in the World, how do you see that they can be, Um, play a role in, in doing that part.

Yeah. I'm sorry, I got off track. It happens all the time, but I think that that is this intellectual part where as a physician or practitioner, you've been trained into so much of the intellectual framework in which this person's experiencing their disease.

And now you bring it a whole professional career of experience with perhaps that disease or others like it. And I think the role that we have at that point is to de-fear the system.

And so we might have to defear the mind first before they can get to the felt experience of being a human that trusts their body enough to find the reason they have the disease and the way in which they're going to heal from it.

And so I think the practitioner is there to hold the space and that can be done intellectually initially. And then eventually we'll get to the point where you're just the witness.

So once both you and the patient have deprogrammed the belief that there's some sort of fear driven desperation to find the diagnosis and right treatment and start to move back into curiosity of how did this happen?

What is this actually telling us? what's the intelligence of the body here? So your job as a practitioner is to get that lens to change direction, change the clarity of the room from fear and a sense of scarcity of health to a reality of abundant energy within the universe and how do we reconnect this patient to the metabolic life force of interconnected relationships that would make the disease obsolete.

That's not for the practitioner to prescribe that stuff to the practitioners with witness and give a clear reflection back to patient of, you just told me that this started a day after you had that massive heartbreak with the divorce or the death of your mother or loss of the job.

This happened two weeks after the car accident, suddenly your immune system went off and you tell me more about the accident. What was the context of the correction?

What were the dominant emotions that happened before the kind of car action? Because perhaps that was an imprint that after trauma, it was really a vibration of all the things that were happening before.

Start unwinding it and get down to these deeper levels. And so the practitioner will become a healer when their curiosity matches the beauty and miraculous nature of their patient.

Your patient is inherently the most intelligent thing the planet has to buy so far, because it's the mostly interconnected biotic system the planets have created so, far.

There's more biodiversity inside a human body than any other animal or nature. Rainforest, whole reefs, all the rest pale in comparison to the interconnected intelligence of the human body.

So if you sit there in awe and wonderment, here's the highest intelligence on this planet. I mean, just imagine for a moment if you are a practitioner or a scientist of any elk and you ponder the occurrence of a soul entangling with a single cell inside of the womb of mother that then self-organizes into a human body with 70 trillion cells differentiated perfectly into all the right organ systems, all interconnected, not just in location and design, but also function and communication in the whole context.

The miracle of human bodies is so far beyond any mathematical scientific rationale. And then we look at our headlines and we continue to be in wonderment over Elon Musk's company that's making robots.

And we feel like those are what's going to take over the planet. Absolutely. We're talking about like the lowest possible protoplasm here, a robot with an unfeeling body has no capacity to compete with the intelligence of the system that you're sitting in the room with when you are a practitioner aware of a miracle sitting infront of you.

So if your curiosity will match the scale of miracle, You will become a great healer as you will continue to ask the questions that will reveal the patterns the patient already knows and already feels within their body and you'll return them to the confidence of a trusted intelligence system.

As you sit in awe and wear them as they go on a healing journey, it won't be linear. You won' t fear the fact that something leaks there and more inflammation, sometimes the tumors are bigger, whatever it is.

You're going to remember the metrics are not there to show some sort of linear recovery. They're there that map a journey to the rise and fall the valleys, the mountaintops of human experience.

And for that, we can let go of like our belief system. This data is good. The state is bad. We can simply say, well, what is the picture unfolding here?

What is the map that this patient is designing for itself to see the breadcrumbs that were minded of its miraculous self-expression that's just waiting to be reconnected to.

I know earlier in your career you worked a lot with children on the spectrum and in the last two years I've been working on a project around Alzheimer's and mild cognitive impairment that was triggered by an experience that I had with my father.

I'd love to get your insight on how do you facilitate, I can understand bringing patients into a sense of awe, understanding the body and so forth, but some of what our practitioners work with are working with patients that you're trying to these kinds of conversations, but in both of those cases, they're not seemingly not available for that kind of conversation because there's real biological interference, there are real environmental factors, and there're real other things that have put them in a position where they a little bit more has to be sort of done to them.

And I'm just wondering if you have insight from those experiences to work with practitioners who may be working with people that aren't able to access some of those same areas as easily, or maybe I've just not thinking about it right.

No, those are real limitations that every practitioner will find. And sometimes it's, you know, a heavily affected autistic child who's hitting their head against the wall and spearing blood and feces around the room.

Sometimes it is a patient who is in a coma and is not going to be communicating with you on every level. So in those situations, what I slowly came around to, and this was not because I was some sort of enlightened practitioner, it was I'm stubborn, I guess.

I just kind of kept after it with a lot of these kids that the, you know, the Western civ kind of group had to given up on and just kind trusted that there was something unfolding here of intelligence and if it was just me and the mother left that were willing to sit with curiosity as to whether there is a possibility this kid would, that would be enough.

And what we accidentally uncovered in that journey was the power of understanding the ecology around the affected individual. And that begins the process of healing the individual because the individuals not alone and it's not having an isolated experience of health or disease.

It's having and opting to express the disease that is inherent to a system of larger disconnect. So we started doing emotion code therapy. on the mothers of highly affected autistic kids in an effort to try to teach the child that this was a very safe and easy tool and you just have to sit here and muscle test and we'll run some magnets over your head and so we're demonstrating on a mother, kid would be too rambunctious and everything else.

We'll say, well, we will try again next time. Come back next time, the kids like quite a bit better. And I had to see that many times over about an 18 month period after we started using emotion code therapy to realize, wait a second, reason I'm able to do it on the kid the second time is because they're actually improved before I ever did the intervention.

All I'd done last time was did emotional clearance on a mother. And so then was, then we got curious and it was like, can you bring everybody into clinic next time that has direct contact with this child?

Yeah. It might be nannies, it might caretakers, or it may be an aunt, uncle, grandmother. Should you bringing anybody in over the next couple visits with you?

It must do emotional therapy on the entire. young care spectrum. And at each angle, we would see these marked changes in not just the child's behavior, but also the relationship between the individual around the and the.

I think that also had the way as well. So I'm not saying necessarily that I cleared the emotion, therefore the It cleared the emotion of the mother. The mother changed her perception of her relationship to her complex ecosystem.

She's the primary mirror for the child. she could suddenly see patterns in the children. the Child felt seen. He stopped hitting his head against the wall and spearing feces and blood everywhere because he was suddenly in coherence.

he Was having connection. in a place where previously he could find none. And so it was this steady improvement of the forest until the suffering of individual improved to the point where we could have a direct relationship to a child and the therapy and see those benefits over time.

So we don't have to be limited to that person that we've assigned the disease to. We can start to have curiosity about the larger ecosystem around subject number one.

Very interesting. Yeah, I love that story. Well, I wanted to share an experience that I had and get your take on it. So, as you know, two years ago, was really talking about the men's work and the community as a sort of a vector for healing.

And I was asked to speak last week at a conference called Reclaiming Our True Nature. As soon as I heard it, it was like I'm a definite yes on that. what is our true nature and how to get there.

But I had an experience in my men's group where, you know, ultimately, the sort of baseline of it is Jungian psychology. And part of the thesis is that you only identify the triggers within yourself through relationship with others.

So the key trigger is, do I feel a disproportionate amount of emotion about something that shouldn't deserve it? And then, can I go deeper then to understand why that emotion is happening?

What I saw in this case, very briefly, was a man who was being triggered by a men leaving the group. And by going through a very basic process to understand where that came from, unpacked that living within him was still pain and trauma from being rejected on the playground, moving locations with his parents, not having a fixed communication group, so this man leaving that group triggered that in him.

and then to go through to a process to realize that it happened and to be able to choose whether or not that thing would have the hold over him now. Ultimately, what it brought forward in me is just an understanding that, like you said, health is relational and that ultimately our journey back to our true nature involves being in relation to others and using them as a mirror for our own understanding.

When I gave that talk at the conference, I just felt this was to a holistic cancer conference in England. It was definitely off-piste for their conversation, but I think it really resonated because I feel like You could look at the adaptation of the body to dysfunction.

You can look the adaption of people to their environment. Ultimately, that person was clear at that process what had driven that and was now clear on what he could choose.

And it was just such powerful medicine for me because I recognized that if everyone was able to be in these kinds of structures, which I choose to go to for free and not everyone chooses to in this kind of structure, that ultimately that would be a pathway by which the biological intelligence could manifest itself.

And I only took a little bit of training for someone to sit in there and like you said, listen well enough, ask good enough follow up questions for that person to come to that conclusion for themselves.

Yeah, perfect. That's the power of the group work there too. And that's what we've seen in these groups of six or eight that go through our journey program now.

So I closed my clinic in favor of this, this community platform that is now called Journey. What we've learned over time is that it's not even a health platform anymore.

It's actually a platform community expressing itself. And so people are creating business accelerators and startup funds and poetry groups and hiking clubs and all kinds of things on this platform that don't sound like.

health-related stuff. Instead, it's a self-expression, which ends up being far better than the pursuit of health. When you just start living creatively, the health follows that energy.

And so it has been this slow, emergent quality to this platform, our health offerings and deep dives on health sciences with the expedition courses and everything else.

sit alongside or are resourcing this community, but they're no longer the purpose of the community. And so we're moving to this realization that, you know, when you're in a group of six or eight, somebody's going to trigger you in way that your practitioner ever could have.

Your practitioner's not gonna walk out of the room, but somebody might, and therefore you finally uncover the abandonment disorder that you just described.

And so the benefit of six to eight people is not because it creates some sort of immediate sense of enlightened harmony, it's because you actually need the friction of eight different people reacting differently to a given experience, which might be you reporting or coach presenting something that week that then triggers somebody, that triggers everybody else in a different way.

So the intelligence of the system is not because it all feels good or all everybody's in harmony, it's because of that disconnect, because the friction points, the thermogenic relationship to one another and that work gets done.

And that's, I think a relief ultimately to all of us as practitioners, like we don't need a healthcare system. We need interconnected communities. And then the intelligence that will emerge will produce resources that might look like some sort of therapeutic intelligence or therapeutic expertise that an individual steps into to provide for the group.

But it's no longer the groups saying I need to go find an acupuncturist because I have this disease. It's the grew expressing an Acupuncture who's seeing patterns and individuals curious to know what would be found on the other side of a five-point Chinese needle.

And so there's just going to be this shift in polarity where we don't need health practitioners, but health practices are expressed by community because of the intelligence that's emerging from these interconnected social systems.

So that's where we've moved to as a group ultimately is what happens when society starts expressing itself and certainly has expressed a different version of healthcare.

And now it's expressing the science of politics, the civics of art, and the expression of music. So this community is doing all kinds of things that I could have never devised or prescribed or imagined, really.

And that's where I take great hope now is that, well, why won't we turn this into a health care model? We can take this as a pilot project to D. C. and see how it runs within Medicare.

So we offered it to Medicare a few months ago, and they said, Well, we're too bankrupt to deploy anything right now. Frankly, their answer was we have to just let the whole system collapse and then maybe you and some other people will have other solutions, but we can't implement any solutions inside of Medicare or their current level of capacity there.

And so I think that is the excitement that I have is we're finally reaching this path where nobody has to decide to be a better version of a practitioner.

Nobody has decide exit allopathic medicine. this is going to happen and already is in droves because the system itself is destructive. The system is ultimately going destroy itself and run out of energy because we built a machine-like technology of healthcare that trusts machine like products that then drive machinelike metrics of outcomes that don't produce life.

And so that's where we're heading quickly now is just the the concrete wall at the end of that abstract pathway or that definition of healthcare. And so it's all going to happen.

And it is happening through you. It's happening to all the men's groups you've been with. Practitioners that listen to your channel here. The functional forum was an important step wise piece.

I've watched you take many more steps since then and become a much different person than you were when you started functional forums. Your worldview continues to travel in a very similar and complementary direction than mine and some of the other people.

So for this, I think we're going to free ourselves up of this belief of conscious leadership or the conscious practitioner or blah, blah blah. We're gonna start to realize, oh, the forest is just re-expressing itself.

And if you walk out into any segment of nature here in the Virginia woods, you can walk 50 miles in any direction and you're not gonna find one tree leading anywhere.

There's not a tree leading the process, there's no river that's leading of the creeks. There is no leadership in nature at all because the system is inherently intelligence for its interconnected biotic processes and the laws of nature that run in these distributed intelligences.

The LLMs are non-distributed information streams that are reinforcing an abstract reality. And so AI is going to accelerate the exploitation and distraction and destruction of our current abstract systems until they self-destroy.

So AI will extinct humans as, you know, anthropologists, as an open AI, but the other company. Anthropic said in the big headlines a few weeks ago that, oh my God, AI's gonna cause the death of humanity by 2030. And so the reason we believe that headline is because we can feel the end of things happening.

What that head line didn't mention is the only thing that's actually gonna go extinct by 2030 is our inhumanity because AI accelerated the inhumane behaviors of an artificial abstract human system and its matrix.

So we will see the But it will be the emergence of biological elegance on the other side of that because life is iterating constantly. The stress that we're causing on a system right now is also perfect.

We are exerting exactly the right amount of stress for nature's next expression and it won't be beautiful. It always is better without her extinction.

So whatever goes extinct in 2030, which might just be tens of millions of other species of organisms or the humanity we know today, the beauty of life on the other side of that will be immediate and it will beyond any fear of death.

So I think this is where AI is actually just this terminal state of our current condition, not necessarily the end of the life itself. Do you, would you characterize what you see like emergent coherence, sort of like, uh, you know, like quorum sensing or like where nature works at a scale that is, You know unlikely before and in a way I've been, I mean, thinking about that, that concept and it sounds like that's what you're describing.

Yeah, I think so. And for that, we've created this experience that's happening in a couple weeks called Origin. October 17th, it's the first of a three-year celebration, but we are igniting the world with an epicenter event at the Cradle of Humankind, which is just more than joining us for South Africa.

And we have over 3,500 sites now signed up around the world. Over a hundred of those are large public events. And so we're going to coalesce on October 17th with a new story for Human Time, where we recognize that we are actually a keystone species.

We're the most complex, interconnected, intelligent system on the earth connected. and we want to take that technology into its broader bandwidth, but we leave fear, guilt, and shame behind for a moment.

feel the larger field, interconnect across that field and hold a harmonic vibration from all of our different perspectives at that moment. So we'll be following with our colleagues from the HeartMath Institute, we will be tracking heart coherence around the world, especially at the moment of the global prayer that will happen.

We need 18 indigenous elders that have crafted this prayer together. We play that at 9 p.m. South Africa time, which is around noon Pacific time. And in that moment, we can experience hundreds of thousands and perhaps a hundred million people all at once, becoming aware of this new frequency, tuning the gravity or antenna of the DNA, our water structure, everything else, to receive this field effect, get to the Scogarian intelligence.

That's the quantum sensing we're speaking of is when enough diversity becomes Coherent in the field, we see these hyper-intelligent systems produced. Happens in mycelium when all of these single-celled organisms suddenly line up to create these vast networks of fiber optic cables.

It's not a multicellular creature, a mushroom. a fruit of a single-cell cooperative ecology. It's single cells that have all participated now in a larger intelligence system that's much greater in its efficacy and intelligence than any one plus one would in the system.

And so it's this synergistic true one-plus-one-equals-five kind of scenario when we hit the field effect. So origin is going to happen this October and then each of the subsequent three years.

And so over that three year process, we hope to ultimately get a billion people to tune in in year three into this coherent field and see what we can produce out of curiosity really of what happens when we collectively lose fear, when would collectively forgive.

Letting go of guilt collectively, releasing shame collectively. What happens when we clear the field there? What biology wants to emerge at that point?

Like what co-creative, co collector, biotic experience would be producing such a, such an advantage. So origin is an exciting experiment. It's up for anybody to tune in, it's our origin.earth website.

You just go and you can log in. your location is where you'll be on October 17th and you just become part of the streaming content that's coming out that day.

Tune in to any portion of The 8-Hour Experience. Focus on that global prayer moment. See if you can. The largest hardcore generous moment in human history.

You see what the human biology at its level of a single organism as a human species might express. It might be beautiful. Well, count me in. It's so funny you mentioned that because when my partner gave us a live in 2015 or 2016, we talked about having a travel company and going to the cradle of civilization because I wanted to show people South Africa.

And I'd been to a conference at Kruger Park and I was like, this would be awesome. Practitioners would love it. They could learn about functional medicine.

We'll go to The Cradle of Civilization. I'm so glad you've chosen that place to do it and we'll have all the details for our community if you want to tune in and I really honor the work that you're taking on, the role that your playing in ushering this in and I'm excited to fall into alignment to see what we can do to move this thing forward because it certainly feels like truth for me as I hear you say it of what's possible and glad to be here doing this and in this lifetime.

Zach, thank you so much for being part of the Evolution of Medicine podcast. Thank you for your contributions over the years to what we've been doing and also your contribution generally.

Check out the book that is live now. Is it available for purchase? on the Zach Bush MD website, we've decided that the whole point of the book was to walk out of abstraction of centralized corporations.

So we decided it's a difficult decision not to launch Amazon and all the big monster things. I mean, it has been one of most beautiful decisions we could have made because it connects us to this global community in such a unique way as we pack in each box.

I think about a name and a place that's now held with this biological idea that is emerging in each of us. It's been a real pleasure really having my personal experience with Launch, and so I hope that each one of you feel a part of that when you read the book, get the books or not, that the biological ideas that are emerging out of your right past to say I'm meant to express something.

Wonderful. Well, I trust that it will go in the way that needs to go and thank you so much for being part of it. And we'll have all the details in The Show Notes.

We've been with Dr. Zach Bush. It could go on for a lot longer, but I feel like this is the perfect time to do it if you want to learn more. I have the all details of The show notes.

Thanks for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine podcast. It's been a great way to spend my 46th birthday and I hope that this will reverberate. Please send this to someone who can hear it.

You had a crazy conversation with a practitioner that sounded a bit like this at a conference a few years ago. Send them this recording, invite them to the 17th and let's see what we can do together.

Zach, thanks so much. We'll see you next time. So we are here asking practitioners about their practitioner journeys and the reason why is because Journeys is a new product from Fullscript.

Journeys allows you to set up your own lab offerings as the top of the funnel. Give the patients what they want. They want to know about themselves and it's the easiest way to bring them into your practice.

We have all types of practices from across the country that are building their own unique lab panels for their unique practices, selling them to their community and acting as a great funnel into their practice is a massive innovation.

I think this will accelerate the evolution of medicine. You can go to goevomed.com slash journeys to find out more, set up your own journeys in half an hour and transform the health of your community.

Go get it. So that was the podcast. What an epic session. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Evolution of Medicine podcast, we'll be back again next week.

And thanks so