#0081 - Zach Bush: The Naturalistic Fallacy and the Noble Savage

So, Marsh, how did Joe introduce Zach in the

show notes? Zach Bush, MD, is a physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology, and hospice care.

He's the founder of Seraphic Group and Farmer's Footprint, a nonprofit dedicated to regenerative agriculture.

Okay, well, is there anything else we should know about? Yeah, I think there is.

So Bush was indeed a medical doctor.

He was on a fairly conventional career path.

He did a fellowship in endocrinology and metabolism.

He did an internship in palliative care.

Some of that will actually come up in this interview with Joel.

He's going to spend some time talking about how he spent time with dying people and things like that.

But then he significantly diverged from that mainstream path.

And that's really clear in this conversation.

We'll hear him talk about how diseases aren't caused by germs, but they're actually caused by having separated yourself from nature in some way.

And that divergence from the path, that's brought him a lot of attention over the years.

a lot of online followers.

And partly that's because in 2019, he hired a PR firm explicitly to position him as some kind of health guru.

And I'll put a link in the show notes for that.

And then during the pandemic, he promoted a lot of ideas that just weren't remotely based on science.

He got into trouble in Ireland in 2023 when he appeared on a podcast to claim that taking antibiotics causes depression.

And that is something we'll actually hear him repeat in this show as well.

So I've got some links to all of that, including a really good profile on him written by our friend Jonathan Jerry at McGill's Office for Science and Society.

Those will all come in the show notes.

Okay, so on this episode, what did they talk about? They talked about drinking coffee, how life is perfect even if you're dying.

Nature is better than machines.

Chemicals are evil.