#2529 - Zach Bush

**Zach Bush** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Zach Bush** (0:14)
I'll stick with the water from now. I never figured out how to do the coffee thing.

**Joe Rogan** (0:18)
You never figured out coffee?

**Zach Bush** (0:19)
No.

**Joe Rogan** (0:20)
Really?

**Zach Bush** (0:20)
Do tea things.

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
Well, tea's nice. Tea's probably better for you, I guess. But man, it's so hard to know. Well, here, I'll ask you, because you're a health expert. How convenient. Because there's all this conflicting information about coffee. Like some people say coffee's really good for you, it's like an amazing antioxidant, and it has all these positive health benefits, and other people say, no, it dehydrates you, it's bad for you, it's too much caffeine, it's bad for your... What do you think?

**Zach Bush** (0:50)
I mean, I think this is one of the next advancements of humankind. We're going to stop demonizing anything nature's provided, and we're going to start looking at our relationship to it instead. And I think it's fundamentally your relationship to coffee that's going to determine whether it's a health benefit or detrimental to who you are.
There's been so many fad diets, so many fad moments, and the science has never supported any of it. The science is always looking at the human system as if it's an isolated system that studies the impact of a chemical, caffeine or otherwise on it. You're not an isolated system. And so if coffee is part of a complex ecosystem of your microbiome, the soil systems of your body, then it's gonna supercharge you into health. But if coffee sits there as a drug that is bypassing the felt sense of being human, then you're probably undermining your potential to be alive fully, and it's becoming a distraction to life.

**Joe Rogan** (1:44)
Or you're doing your best to be a good office worker. Which is why it's the one drug they provide at work.

**Zach Bush** (1:50)
Exactly, if you're committed to machine-like behavior, it's your best asset.

**Joe Rogan** (1:54)
It is kind of interesting that caffeine is the one drug that is provided at most offices.

**Zach Bush** (2:00)
I would say that that's indirectly true. I think that the one drug that's most provided at offices is actually performance-based, machine-like reward systems.

**Joe Rogan** (2:12)
Okay, so human-engrained drugs.

**Zach Bush** (2:15)
Yeah, the brain contains every neurochemical you'd want to control behavior. And so we've created office environments that reward machine-like behavior for 150 years. And so this is how we've ended up looking like we do as a humankind.

**Joe Rogan** (2:30)
Yeah, very bizarre pattern that we found ourselves in that was created to make better office workers. So we've molded human behavior around office work. We've molded human behavior around the one thing that people really, for the most part, don't want to be doing, which is terrible.

**Zach Bush** (2:46)
Yeah, I was blessed to sit by thousands of deathbeds. My third subspecialty in medicine was hospice. I sat by thousands of deathbeds, and not a single person ever told me a day of their life in an office.
They just don't even remember it. It's consumed 40 hours a week of their life, and it just can't compute. It doesn't integrate into your sole experience at the end of things.

**Joe Rogan** (3:10)
Yeah, even if you're making a ton of money, at the end of the day, you're still locked up for eight hours a day, doing something you probably don't want to do.

**Zach Bush** (3:21)
We're getting into a big piece right here. This is really the secret of everything is, when did humans become abstract? When did we stop being living systems?

**Joe Rogan** (3:30)
So do you think that that's just our ego, our delusions that allow us to think that we're not a system, that we're just, this is me, I'm Mike, I know what I'm doing.
I'm just going to drink my coffee and go to work because that's what you do. You have a job, you get it done. And then there's like these narratives that get reinforced in the media. Like the guy who shows up for work every day doing a job that sucks, that guy's a hero, right? We love those guys.

**Zach Bush** (3:57)
That's it, that's it.

**Joe Rogan** (3:58)
And you're rewarded for it. And the guy that writes poetry and sits in his backyard, oh, fucking hippie.
You know, that ne'er do well.
Unless he sells a bunch of books. And then we're like, the guy was a genius. Then he's Hunter S. Thompson.