The Antenna and the Instrument

Zach Bush spent three hours on Joe Rogan's show in July, and by the end of the week the internet had sorted itself into the two camps it always sorts into. One camp heard a physician finally saying the thing out loud. The other heard a man with credentials saying things that are not true.

Both camps are right, which is why neither one is interesting.

What is interesting is the seam running down the middle of his own argument, because that seam runs through most of us.

What he has

He is right that a body is not an isolated system. He is right that the interesting unit is the relationship, not the part. He calls this biosis and I have no quarrel with the word.

He is right that the Amazon is not wilderness. It is a tended forest, planted and managed across tens of thousands of years, and the science caught up to that only recently.

He is right, most of all, about language. He points out that English hands you "tree" as a noun, a static thing, when the languages that never lost the thread would hand you something closer to a verb. Treeing. A doing, not a stuff. This is Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy and it deserves her name on it, but it is true, and it explains more about how we ended up here than any chemistry he offers.

And he is right about the antenna. That the human body is a receiver of enormous bandwidth, that most of us are running it at a fraction, and that the reason is not mystical. We stopped feeling because feeling stopped being useful in the rooms we built.

Hold all of that. It is the good part and it is worth keeping.

What he does next

Roughly forty-four minutes in, he says something clarifying: technology is not bad. He says the problem is that technology is not integrated into natural systems. That is a symbiosis claim, plainly stated, and anyone who says he wants to abolish the machine has not listened carefully.

But watch what integration means when he shows you an example.

His example is an Egyptian scientist drawing sacred shapes to recode a 5G network. The tower is permitted to remain, on the condition that it submits to a form he considers older and higher. That is not two systems in exchange. That is one system granting the other a pardon.

And half an hour earlier he had already said the quiet version: that a machine can never win, that the only path forward is biological and not technological, and that when someone offers you a machine you should thank them and keep walking.

So he holds both. Symbiosis in the stated position, hierarchy in the worked example. He never reconciles them, and the unreconciled gap is where the whole argument starts to cost him something.

What the ranking costs

If biology has to win, then every fact has to be recruited to the side of biology. And that is when a careful man starts reaching.

He says high fructose corn syrup is a mirror image of natural fructose, chemically flipped so the liver cannot read it. It is not. It is ordinary fructose and glucose, made by rearranging glucose with an enzyme. There is a real case against the stuff, about dose and speed and liquid calories, and he walked past a true argument to pick up a false one.

He says the chemotherapy vincristine is extracted from algae. It comes from the Madagascar periwinkle, a flowering plant, and the point he was making about extraction from living systems would have landed better with the right plant in it.

He says Agent Orange and glyphosate are chemical cousins. They are not the same class of molecule at all. That single false link is the bridge his entire Cambodia-to-Roundup narrative walks across.

None of these were necessary. That is what makes them worth naming. A man arguing for reverence toward the living world does not need to invent the chemistry of a periwinkle. He reached because the ranking demanded it. When one side has to win, the evidence stops being evidence and starts being recruitment.

Where it collapses

Here is the part I cannot get past.

His proof that biology beats machines is the pyramid.

A pyramid is a made thing. Two and a third million stones, cut, moved, and set to true north with an accuracy we would struggle to reproduce. Whatever built it, it was an instrument, and it was built by people who wanted to do something they could not do with their hands alone.

His other proof is the Amazon, which he correctly calls a managed forest. That is a forty-thousand-year-old technology. Someone selected those species. Someone maintained three gardens in three microclimates so that in any given year one of them was thriving. That is engineering. It is patient, gorgeous, low-extraction engineering, and it is engineering.

His third proof is the Achuar house, thirty-foot ceilings, built and then deliberately burned every ten years so the household is not held in the same energy it has been carrying. I love that practice. It is also architecture, which is to say it is technology, plus a ritual for renewing it.

So his three best pieces of evidence for the supremacy of biology over technology are three technologies.

The binary does not survive contact with his own material. To be a keystone species is to be a maker. That is what the word means. The beaver does not leave the river alone. The wolf does not leave the valley alone. Wherever a keystone species sets its foot, the world becomes more itself, and it does that by building.

What is the actual question?

So the question was never whether a thing is natural.

The question is whether the thing returns you to the field or carries you further out of it.

That is a test you can run on anything, and it gives different answers for the same object in different hands. A phone that makes you reachable by your daughter returns you. A phone that reads your face for nine hours does not. Coffee inside a morning you are present for returns you. Coffee as the fuel that lets you not feel a job you hate does not. He actually says this himself in the first two minutes, about coffee, and then spends the next three hours forgetting he said it.

I work with an alembic. Fire, glass, and time, applied to plants. Separation, purification, and the reunion of what was separated. Spagyrics is technology by any definition anyone would accept. It is also the least abstract thing I do, because it puts me in a room with living matter for hours and refuses to let me look away. The instrument did not take me out of relationship. The instrument is how I keep the appointment.

The still is not the opposite of the plant. The antenna is not the opposite of the instrument. They are the same gesture, which is a human being reaching for contact and building whatever it takes to get there.

Bush is describing a real hunger, and I would not have written this if I thought he was a fraud. He is a man who has sat by thousands of deathbeds and come back with something. But he built a hierarchy to hold it, and then had to keep feeding the hierarchy facts it had not earned.

You do not have to choose between your body and your tools. You have never had to. The pyramid was both. The forest was both. The house that gets burned every ten years was both.

What is the last thing you made that brought you closer in?