Bankless - The Centralized Food Production Crisis | Anthony Gustin

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Anthony Gustin is the host of The Natural State Podcast, author of the best-selling, “Keto Answers,” and former sports rehab clinician turned entrepreneur, amateur farmer, investor, and advisor. You might be noticing that Anthony isn’t a crypto bro. However, as David explains in many Bankless episodes, crypto principles can be seen in many other industries as well—including the food industry. ------ 📣 Forta | Help Make Web3 a Safer Place https://bankless.cc/Forta  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🚀 ROCKET POOL | ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/RocketPool  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  🌴 MAKER DAO | DECENTRALIZED LENDING https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE STAKING https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 7:35 Anthony’s Background 11:35 Centralized Food Production 14:08 Divergent Food Products 20:29 Fake Food Ingredients 22:30 Government Lobbying 25:40 Corn Subsidization 28:07 Remaining Problems 31:20 Disconnection to Food 36:11 Fragility Monocrop Culture 42:40 Systems Breaking Down 48:26 What Anthony’s Excited About 51:07 The Path Forward 1:05:00 Regeneration, Carbon, & Methane 1:20:19 Sustainable Scaling Solutions 1:28:43 Advice For You 1:32:18 Sunburn & Seed Oils 1:36:08 More Advice 1:38:58 Anthony’s Question to David 1:42:36 Closing ------ Resources: Anthony Gustin https://dranthonygustin.com/  Ground Work Collective https://groundworkcollective.com/  Anthony’s Twitter https://twitter.com/dranthonygustin/  Anthony’s Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dranthonygustin/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people. And each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cyberpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down. And it always has been. Lately, these shows have really not actually resonated with that intro. So I'm considering redoing that intro. But that's a conversation for a later time. Today on the show, I'm having Anthony Gustin, and this is the podcast that I've been teasing about on crypto Twitter, all about food production, the decentralization of our food production, carbohydrates, and what we need to do about it. Now, if you are expecting an episode where David and his guests just rant on carbohydrates and nutrition, this is not that. This is, I think, one of the most informative, educational podcasts that I've ever produced on this show. And also, it's critical information for you to know. The decentralization of our food production is something that we must do in order to live on this planet for more than the next 50 or 100 years or so. This is a code red. This is a fire alarm. And Anthony helps me tell the story as to what the hell is going on with our highly centralized, highly fragile, systemically risky state of food

production. And one of the cool things I'm actually really proud of on this episode is there are a number of words that we use in the crypto space that we carry over to talk about this conversation. Centralization versus decentralization. Fragility versus anti-fragility, scalability of systems, culture, cultural diversity, and not just culture is in like music and arts and literature, but culture and cultural diversity of a biosphere. We also talk about just like debt and how we have the Federal Reserve with a bunch of debt on its balance sheet and our soil has a debt to pay with a lack of nutrients in it. We do a very fun and creative job of carrying over a lot of the parallels and the themes that

you've been listening to on the bankless podcast for the past six, eight, ten months, and applying them to this world of regenerative agriculture. And so while it's a little bit weird, it's like, why is this crypto podcast banklist doing this thing on regenerative agriculture? It's because these same patterns exist. And so hopefully you've been learning about these themes on bankless that we've been pounding into your head. And now we can take a step back and take these themes into a different corner of the globe and apply them in a new way. And we can learn to refine what it means to be decentralized. We can learn to refine what it means to be anti-fragile, and we can take some of these lessons and apply it to a new industry. And hopefully you can go from

zero to 60 about the world of food production because it's really important. Food production is really important. We joke on bankless that if we can recreate the money and if we can recreate the financial system, there are so many positive downstream effects as to what we can do for the world. The same thing applies with food. If we can recreate and reconstruct how we organize our food production systems, there are so many second, third, fourth order consequences that are so positive for this world. It recreates our relationship with our own human selves. It recreates our relationship with our community and our family and just reorients our spiritual awareness of what it means to exist in this world. So this is something that I hope you hear in my voice.

I'm extremely passionate in. I extremely much believe in this. No, this is not a nutrition advice podcast, but if you got pulled into it because of my rantings on crypto Twitter, ha ha, I hope you stick around for the next 90 minutes because this is, I hope, going to be one of the most informative podcasts that you'll ever listen to. And it's a nice beat off the path of crypto while still using crypto principles and crypto values. So Anthony Gustin, he's a personal hero of mine. I've been listening to his podcast before I've been podcasting. He's just super sharp, super taxed and he's got a great head on his shoulders. So I hope you enjoy this fantastic podcast all about regenerative agriculture and decentralized food production. We're going to get there right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors. that make the show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that is going to completely change how we use Defi and NFTs. Some of the coolest new NFT collections

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So go download Ledger Live. If you have a ledger already, you probably already have it and get started securely staking your crypto assets. Anthony Gusson, welcome to Layer Zero. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. So listeners won't know this because they are just being blindsided by my food tirades on Twitter. But there's actually a ton of context and backstory to this. Part of that backstory is I started relentlessly listening to podcasts.

And one of them was your podcast way back in the day. I learned about podcasts through the lens of nutrition and keto and good physical movement. And one of yours was the first podcast I started listening to. So I have to thank you for getting me into the world of podcasting. And it's actually quite an honor to have you on my podcast so many years later. Well, the honor is mine, man, to have you listen to my show in the first place and then to be in yours. Well, okay. So actually, can you give you a little bit of a background on yourself?

Like, what's your educational background and what do you do and just who are you for the listeners. Yeah. I don't know how to hell even do this anymore. So I'll start just very simple. I grew up super fat and sick in the Midwest, became a functional medicine clinician. I got a doctorate and chiropractic and master's in sports rehab. Did a bunch of functional medicine work. Then it went into online world and started figured out that you could use the internet to actually help people instead of in person. So then launch a bunch of e-com health-based brands, quip foods, perfect keto, a bunch of other stuff. Then switched more into investing in advising and now I'm a small farmer. So I don't really know how to concisely have that make sense anymore, but that's the easiest thing

I can do. Yeah, but for one big theme, if you could zoom out and just focus on one theme, your podcast has gone through a couple rebrands, but now it's, what is the name, something health? The natural state. Natural state. Natural state podcast. Yeah. And would you say that that's a good summary of the theme of your career trajectory? Yeah, I think it's just the investigation of why are humans so sick and how do we fix that? And I think it started with humans and then it's transitioned now into so many other things. I mean, it was physical health first. Then it was, oh, man, our emotional health is messed up. Our spiritual health is messed up. The planet's ecological health is messed up. Like so many indicators of health globally, universally are just completely

destroyed. And the more I dig into it, the more it's obvious how many common threads there are. Sure. And so it's, man, so it's fun to get into farming because I'm using more of the land and paying attention to the health of animals and then how that impacts humans and how all of this stuff is intertwined and how I think, I mean, even mental emotional health, spiritual health, et cetera, when you strip humans away from the food system, a lot of that also degrades. And there's a lot of really great people who write about that. But yeah, it's just, once you start going down this rabbit hole, I think it starts to all makes more sense. And I, you know, the thing of the more you learn, the less you know is very true for, A lot of stuff that I've been to, but yeah, the health overall that I can perceive with my senses, I guess is what I'm interested. Certainly. And I think listeners who are probably wondering, like, why the hell is there this, like, nutrition health podcast coming out of a bank list, this crypto podcast? The answer to that is that I think this is going to be a very fun exploration into the ties,

not between crypto and food production, but with the words and themes that we use. Anthony just used the word like Rabbit Holt. We are very familiar with that in crypto, but it goes far beyond that. We're going to talk about the decentralization of our food production and where the centralization of our food production has created a lot of significant second order consequences that are bad. We might also use the word scale. How do we scale this effort? And overall, I think you're going to find that there is a pretty strong mapping of some of the concepts in crypto to some of the solutions that are also broken about our current food system.

Like our banking and financial system is not the only broken part about this world. There are many other broken parts about this world. And while many in the crypto industry are like myself are maximally bullish on, well, if we can fix crypto, we can fix so many other things in the world. Well, Anthony is going down that same rabbit hole, if you will, but saying like, well, if we can fix our food and our mental health and so much other things, you can fix so much else about the world. So the concept of food and nutrition and health is completely divergent from crypto.

toe and finance, the structures here are actually the same. And that's what I want listeners to walk away with at the end of this episode saying, oh, I learned something about a completely different industry, but the patterns are still there. The patterns are still the same. Anthony, you think we can do this journey together? You have to do it, man. I'm ready. All right. So let's start with the current state of things, the problem statement. Our current food production is highly centralized. Can you illustrate just like the centralized nature of our food production? And what are the consequences of this design that we have in the world? I mean, I guess to illustrate it, I would ask the listener out there, and no judgment to your listeners, I'm sure they're all amazing people, but how many of you know the soil of which your food came from? Have you seen it? Have you seen where the food grows, whether that's plants, animals, animals, animals, animals, or even packaged food, or even packaged food? Do you know where that comes from? The chances are that comes from an enormous multinational corporation, whether it's plants, animals, packaged food, whatever it is, that is beholden to their shareholders to make a profit on you eating food. They don't have your health interest. and then I don't have any sort of connection to the food system for you. It's just about making money. And it's not like it's a bunch of different places doing this. We're talking about a handful of multinational corporations and that's it. And so the centralization of food in the food system in my mind comes down to a few big corporations and them trying to make profit of you. That's it. There's so many problems which that leads to. But that's at least like the core root of it is that I mean, I tweeted this

couple weeks ago. The problem with our food industry is that it's an industry. There's some things that I think make sense from maybe some centralization and maybe some oversight regulation, et cetera. And some that I don't think that should be the case. And one of those is our food system and what we consume as humans. And so this really just boils down to, as all things do, just raw human incentives. And we see the same problem like perhaps playing out in the healthcare industry. You know, pick your industry, like the web two, social media, Facebook, Instagram industry. There are human wants and desires and needs, and then there are corporate shareholder interests, and those things diverge and they create a bunch of problems. And because, like,

you layer on a bunch of hypercompetitive capitalism, the winners start to, like, snowball. And all of a sudden we have these incentives that are highly divergent from the actual, what we would desire to see manifested in the world based of our human values. Would you agree with that? That's 100% correct. Okay, so can we talk about the perils of centralization and our food production? What is the food products that come out of these centralized manufacturers, and how are those products divergent from what they otherwise would have been in a more natural state, if you will? Yeah. So people give me a lot of shit because I talk about the

plant-based industry quite a lot and use them as example of how the food industry is pretty messed up. And the reason is because they give me more material to work with and they give me more examples. We saw this a long time ago with, and again, we have these big corporations, we have these big institutions, the government namely American Heart Association, American Diabetic Association, etc. That make up the decision of they tell us what is healthy to eat and then they sell us the food and they have all the marketing money to put all the stuff out there. So they have all the money, they have all the information, they have all the credibility, they have all the distribution. This is not good for our health. And when it comes down to it,

all of the food industry is centralized. And I also think that factory farming from a meat perspective, animal race perspective, is also abhorrent. And we shouldn't support that. We'll get into that in a second. But when it comes down to it, the ultra-processed food is by far in a way, the worst thing for human health. And this is stuff that's been engineered by food scientists, again, these massive corporations to be as addictive as possible using the cheapest ingredients so that way they can make the most money. So you're a repeat buyer, they have most margin, and on and on the cycle goes. Meat doesn't have that much margin. That's why, yes, the conditions are awful because the same thing, the incentives for price lead to really poor animal conditions.

By the end of the day, it's still far healthier food. Yes, there's ethical problems with it. Yes, there's a lot of ecological problems. Yes, it's not the healthiest food because there's other examples, regenerative models, which I'm sure we'll get to you later in the episode, but overall, these fake food alternatives are what are destroying your health at large. And I think the most, when you think about centralized food, it's possible. Because if you go in your backyard and raise an animal, have a garden, et cetera, and you go to the grocery store and buy meat and vegetables or fruit or whatever, it looks roughly the same, right?

So even if the distribution and manufacturing and all that stuff is centralized, it's not leading to as many problems, relatively speaking, because you can still make that at home. But when the food becomes such that only a multi-billion dollar company can make complex supply chains that run across the world and these huge elaborate factories with ultra-expensive machinery that cost crazy amount of money and have complex systems with parts from all over the world, distribution, fossil fuels that run all of this stuff, now you're making. things in these, again, huge multinational corporation factories that we call food. This is not the case. This stuff is what poisons people the most. And as you know, my material, I've been on a tirade against carbohydrates for a very long time. And that's, just to give a clarification on that, it's not real food carbohydrates that I really care about at all. If you eat real food carbohydrates, again, stuff that you can grow, stuff that you can pick off of a tree, fruit. I grew melons

yesterday, I ate them. I have a garden here with melons in them. Awesome. Potatoes, whatever. I don't really care. It's the super processed foods that, again, can only happen in an ultra-centralized sort of dynamic that come out, that poison the entire system. They're terrible for the environment. They're terrible for our health. They lead to crazy health care costs. And that's where I think we get into trouble. Is this maximalized, over-processed food. Carbohydras go to control. We can now consume 300, 400 grams a day. You're eating real foods. You never get to get that point. And so that's where I think the crux of the centralization issue comes into play. And let's make it really concrete for the listeners. What's an example of one of

these foods? Are we talking like Cheetos, Doritos, Oreos, this kind of stuff? Yeah, that's a quintessential stuff, which I call, you know, big food. Big food is, you know, the general mills, Procter, and Gamble, these big companies where if you are especially 30, 40, 50 years old, plus, you know these companies from your childhood, the box cereals, the chips, all this type of stuff. It's really only like four companies that own all of this stuff. There are all these different brands, but it's only about four different corporations that own all of it. There's now, though, a new big food that's coming out, which is the impossible foods,

beyond meat, all this type of stuff. It's the exact same model. It's the exact same model, but they're putting a new skin on it. And so just like when we had margarine before, people used to have homesteads. where they churned all of their own butter, made their own fat, it was totally fine. Then we had Crisco come along, Procter & Gamble made Crisco, which was hydrogenated oils, said, okay, this is way better. And then we had this huge, like, anti-butter crusade happening in the world. But only this factory could provide a super clean, convenient fat. Turns out this kills people.

We figure out 50 years later. And the reason why they do this is because, again, the incentives are not aligned with human health. They're aligned with a corporation making money by selling its food that's not actually food. And so the same thing's happening across all animal foods now. There are fake meats, fake beef, fake burgers, fake chicken, fake chicken nuggets, fake shrimp, fake fish, fake eggs, fake milk, fake butter. And it's the exact same thing we had when we had margarine,

which is stuff that you cannot make on your own. If you did not have a lab in a factory, you can't make this shit. Where does this incentive come from? Like, why is it more economic to produce all of these fake foods than it is to get the real foods? Like, I'm assuming their cost of production is lower. Is there a common denominator as to the ingredients that goes into all these fake foods that make these foods more economically viable than the real foods?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is that they are nutritionally poor but energy dense. And the way that this is done is typically by, you know, the old version was super high fructose corn syrup, things like that. So you take these enormous monocrops. So you plant either seeds or other sugar-containing things, sugar-king, corn, et cetera, and these enormous fields. And you have huge combines, which are a giant tractors, that go through and harvest these things.

And you have factories next to the... Can you define monocrop? Yeah, monocrop is a very large swath of land that's planted in one type of plant. That's it. There's mono-one crop. So in nature, diversity is resilience. and the same thing I think across any sort of system, diversity breeds resilience. And so when you put something in a monocrop, this is why we've had to now increase year

every year pesticide use, fertilizer use, et cetera. The one crop growing in a huge area, monocrops don't exist anywhere in the world. Yet we do this, we centralize all the food intake, we centralize the crop into a huge farm only grows thousands of acres of corn or soybeans or sugar cane. terrible thing environment, then that gets distracted and then turn into these ingredients that are super cheap because they're done it at scale. A lot of times these are subsidized by the government, which that's another huge long story. But then those are made into cheap ingredients, sugars and seed oils, which one combined are pretty much the most toxic thing in human

can consume. There's a couple words that you use there. You know, monocrop, one crop for a wide swath of land is very fragile. And I'm going to put these into crypto words and say centralization, puts everything into one sort of system, and that makes it very fragile, whereas the inverse, biodiversity is robustness, it's anti-fragility. And I'll translate, like, diversity into decentralization, where there is no top-down coordination of these systems. There is just bottom-up auto-organization of nature, making it highly robust, highly anti-fragile, and also misaligned with corporate shareholder profits, which is why they killed the decentralization and at a centralized system in that place. And actually, I do want to go next right into government lobbying because when we

talk about the banking system, highly centralized banking system stays entrenched and incumbent largely because of government regulation. And so can you take us through that same parallel through the food industry and talk about how it's kind of been able to support its own business model through government lobbying and regulation? Yeah, how government has screwed up the food system is very long, probably several books long, many documentaries long. But the biggest thing is getting into and incentivizing farmers to grow certain crops or not grow certain crops. That's, I think, one of the biggest problems.

I think the other really big one is demonizing certain foods, so the recommendation of certain foods. So when we come out with things like the food pyramid, now it's the my plate, people actually pay attention to these things. And so over the last 50 years, for example, we've eaten more grains, we've eaten more vegetable oils, which are recommended. again, you can't eat these things on your own. You can't grow all this stuff on your own. We've eaten less animal products and it's been catastrophic. And so these two things are the most important.

But I think one of the things that our government has screwed up the most, which again, I think is it is a mirror for our financial policy is we've exported this type of thinking to the rest of the world. And so there's been countless communities in self-sustaining civilizations, tribes, et cetera, all around the world, that we go and we think, oh, these people, they're impoverished. They don't have much. Let's give them our nutrition. We hook them on our shitty oils, flowers, sugars. They forget within a generation how to make their own food.

Then they're now beholden on this, again, centralized food system exported from the U.S. It sounds a lot like the path of the U.S. dollar. Yes. To me, it's the same exact thing. you strip away all independence of these sovereign communities and hook them on something that they didn't ask for and then the whole system's crumbling under them. I mean, it's insane. One of the tinfoil conspiracies that I have is that the corn industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries that exist to my knowledge. Basically, we have manufactured corn, like what's it called when you

tinker with the evolution of a species? GMO. Yeah, we've created this corn that is like optimized to produce high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup being extremely addictive and like lighting up the same centers of your brain that like heroin and cocaine do. But now it's in our food. It's like nine out of ten aisles in a grocery store is filled with box stuff that has high fructose corn syrup in it. And it also happens to be the most heavily subsidized industry that the government subsidizes. And it's also one of our biggest exports to the rest of the world. So we have this like pseudo drug that we have this very centralized food production, big food, manufacturing all of this stuff, doing research as to like which flavor is most desirable by the consumer.

All happens to have high fructose corn syrup in it. And then it's not only our like the opiate that we consume internally, but it's also the opiate that we produce and send it externally. Just like we have the United States economy and the globe just addicted to the U.S. dollar and addicted to like free, cheap money, we also. have a globe that's addicted to cheap, subsidized, highly addictive carbohydrates, which, as you've alluded to, like, are fake food. You can't grow them in your own backyard. It doesn't resemble any of the good carbohydrates, like out of fruit or, like, something like that we're familiar with. And so these

parallels between, like, getting the world financial system addicted to cheap money seems to run directly with getting the whole financial system addicted to cheap calories. Does that resonate with you, too? Yeah, I mean, and it's a house of cards that we can take. need to build. I mean, all this stuff with centralization across the board is very few people are winning and is screwing the entire population. I don't know if that's how you view it overall, the whole financial system. But that's how I see it with everywhere else that I look where I see. Before we start to get into like the solution behind this whole thing, is there any parts left that we haven't talked about about the problems of this whole state of food in the globe? Yeah, I think that

we talked about the problem of ultra-processed foods. I think that's very obvious to a lot of people. but I think that there's a lot of harm when you centralize a lot of other things in both animal and plant agriculture. People are eating real food even. The centralization of food has led to overall the disconnection of humans and their food system. And then that severing has led to a lot of weird assumptions and obsessions, especially with people who, you know, are vegan. And again, some of your listens are vegan. I'm sure they're great people. But overall, there's an argument generally that death is bad.

We saw this with COVID. everyone was so afraid of dying. And I don't know, the technocrats out there also listening, like, we don't have singularity yet. We're not living forever. And I think there's this expectation that we will. We will dominate nature and we will live forever. And when you actually participate in killing animals, growing them, killing them, growing plants and killing them in participating in the food system, you have a connection that is irreplaceable.

And I didn't really get this until I started hunting and then even more so after I started farming. I have this small farm in Texas. And it's something that you can't buy. And it creates a different perspective on food. And it's hard to even explain until you experience it. But I think that that separation of humans of nature has actually led to a vast majority of our problems. Like I said before, digging into our mental health, emotional health, physical health, all these things. I think the root is really the separation of humans from nature, which brings back to the natural state of all the stuff, is an organism in its natural environment.

and us in our natural environment would be mostly procuring food. I stayed with his hunter-gatherer tribe last year in Tanzania. And that's the bulk of the quote-unquote work they did was going out to hunt and gather food. And that connection of life and death always is, I think a spiritual reminder for people who would generally disconnect with it. But even to bring down a practical example, they used to have, even as soon as like the 1920s, they used to, when there were cities and we stopped having everybody in homesteads and everybody sort of eating from the land, they would bring animals into the city still alive and slaughtered them there because it was the freshest way to do it and freshest way for people to get meat.

And it was this big spectacle where children and families would come and watch the animals get slaughtered. Now, we may think that this is crazy and barbaric or whatever, but it gave them appreciation that things die, life is sacred, it's important what you put in your mouth, don't waste things. And now we're so disconnected because of centralization of even real food that people have no concept of where this cut of meat comes from, of where this broccoli is grown. They don't know that the broccoli maybe was grown also in a monocrop with terrible conditions. The farmer was abused and sprayed pesticides all over.

We're completely disconnected. So it leads to all these weird, other perverse things in our life. I think this is a really important conversation and something I definitely feel strongly because there's these documentaries that exist out there that, like, show you the perils of, like, factory farming and why you shouldn't eat meat. And, like, they did the whole, like, secret, bring in a camera, secretly bring in a camera and film some of these atrocities that haven't made its way out to the mainstream. And then now it's, like, a Netflix video and then it's turned, like, 10 million people to go vegan because of how, like, poorly these animals are treated in these factory

farms. And I'm privy to this argument that the people that work in these factory farms where it's a holocaust, like every single day of like these cows that are put through these terrible living conditions, they're cramped quarters, they're all diseased. And the worker that has to work and observe these conditions, it begs some, whoever does that job has to be so incredibly desensitized and brutal because they are taking the responsibility of like the whole world to understand what it means to kill an animal on their shoulders. So rather than like all of us as individuals participating in this process, which has, in our ancestors, been like a very ritualistic, ceremonious, coming together, community-oriented process. And it's taken the butchering of an animal

and just, like, centralized it into one very, like, evil-looking location, like the factory farm. And so these few people bear, like, the burden of, like, being the butcher for an entire globe's population. And those people become insanely desensitized to the livelihood of the animal. So they are extremely brutal. They're also paid minimum wage. They're just paid to slaughter animals. But like when you watch these videos of like inside factory farms and you see these people have absolutely zero care for these animals because they're just a product to them, it's because we've forced a few members of society to butcher everyone's animals on our behalf rather than like us partaking in this adventure, in this ceremony together. And so like the centralization has like you said, like disconnected us

from our own relationship with food. And now as a backlash to that, instead of people getting closer to their food, perhaps like going and finding their local farmers market, instead they just go to like this pre-package, pre-food and Safeway or whatever, they become vegan because they think that that is the answer instead. Like if we want harmony with animals,

we much become vegan rather than having an alternative closer relationship with their food. Would you agree with the assessment? Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, centralization not only forces, these hired mercenaries to take that responsibility. That's a great phrase. In that just nightmareish situation, it also shrouds the amount of death that is normally occurring in all food production, no matter if it's in your backyard or in a large scale.

It shrouds the truth, really. If you go out, if I go out to my garden right now and pick something, like, I'm stepping on 50 bugs to get out there that are going to die. The plants are dying all the time. If you are alive, you. depend on death. Anything alive depends on death, plant or animal. And generally speaking, most of the plant production requires far more death than animal production, even the centralized factory farming, which a lot of people don't like to understand this, but when you account

for the amount of death on a monocrop system like we talked about before, there's so many snakes and rabbits and gophers and bugs and all these things get just get crushed through when these fields are harvested, that when you're looking at raw death, I mean, all that stuff is wiped clean. And when you see these fields, you see more of a void than you see an active thing that's living that's going to die. And I think that that's the contrast, again, with the centralization that, like, it hides the truth, which if people just participated in, like, killing an animal, especially, is not an easy thing. I've done it a decent amount now. And I don't think it's ever or something that I don't take ultra seriously

and understanding that a living thing needs to die for me to be alive. It's a very important thing to go through. And I think that if more people could participate with it, we wouldn't have the stigma we have now about it, which would again lead to people to this false narrative that somehow being vegan allows them some free pass ethically, which factually does not.

Right. Can you talk a little bit more about just like the fragility of a monocrop culture? I really like what you said where if we see a monocrop pasture, or just like a field of just like one crop. That's like 99.9% other things had to die for that one crop to live in that one space. And like we've created this farmland very far away from the cities, very far away from our mental space. But just like the diffusion of one thing to be alive, when you're alive and you're breathing air, that's air that somebody else could have breathed.

There's a limited amount of air on this planet. And if that metaphor doesn't land with you, well, I mean, there's other resources that we can talk about to. like water also is paid for money like food like if you buy food that makes food more expensive for others like your existence there's a limit as to how many humans can exist on this planet and so like your space comes at the cost of other space and so when we clear out like these areas these swaths of land and just put monocrop culture it forces everything else who have died in its wake whether it's animals or other plants but also can you really talk about just like the fragility that that makes in that biome when we have a significant

monocrop culture paradigm? Yeah, I mean, I alluded to it earlier about how much destruction you have to do to do it. But I think that the most important thing is that we have these monocrops based upon an artificial support system that should not exist. Same thing of that financial system. It has all propped up on stilts. And if any one of these things topple, we are screwed. So we are at a point now, the only reason we can feed the amount of people we can feed right now is due to this thing called the Haber-Bosch method that was invented after World War I. These German scientists basically figured out how to make synthetic nitrogen, which allowed monocrops to be very, very productive. After that method, our population in the world absolutely skyrocketed. But now, because we do that,

again, we've never seen monocrops in nature, ever, doesn't exist anywhere in nature, and we do it, and we have to kill all these species of plants that naturally occur. We have to destroy the habitat of thousands of different animals. But not only that, now we're starting to spray artificial fertilizer on that so that we have crazy yields. That destroys the soil underneath the plants. The soil gets extracted, so we have to

spray all this stuff on top. And then we have to start, because it's an unnatural ecosystem, we get huge amounts of locusts, huge amounts of pests. We have to pay pesticides and then herbicides, because other plants are coming up. And that stuff destroys the ecosystem even more. And so

now we're basically engaged in this constant escalating warfare with nature, but all these chemicals, all these tractor parts, all these fossil fuels are all, again, dependent on these enormous fragile corporations that are harvesting the nitrogen, the fossil fuels, the pesticides, the herbicides, from every corner of the earth to centralize it into one field to spray it everywhere, to come up with this artificially cheap food-like substance that we can seem that makes it sick. It is the most insane thing that I don't know why most more people aren't freaking out about this. And this is why I hate vegetable oil so much is because as much as you hate about hate on

corn, and I agree it's a huge problem, especially in the United States, worldwide, five out of the top five, greenhouse emitting crops, top five land use for crops, top five water use for crops, all go to making seed oils, vegetable oils, which are basically growing these huge amount of crops, pesticide use, herbicide use, fertilizer use, all seed oils, top five, all of them. So that way we can make cheap, rancid fat that is poisoning people. Close my mind. Biggest problem. I think it's worse than any sort of carbs.

It's the monocrop that I am most gutted by when I see it happening. Again, it's most removed. It's not grown on the highways of the U.S. This is what we mostly clear rainforests for. Amazon is not cleared for beef production. Amazon cleared for seed oil production. and then when the land did not support that, they have to bring cattle back on to bring back the fertility of the land, which is what animals do. And then they take them off and plant seed oils back in there.

We'll dive into that angle a little bit because that's illustrative in of its own right. But I'd just like to bring up the fragility of when we have this monocrop cultures, which is like a system of food production where it feels like holding water in your hands. Like if you have these monocrop cultures, first you have to prevent all other future plants from growing there. So you've got to deweed it. then you have like this food source not just for humans but for bugs too so you got to spray on the pesticides and like you said it's this escalating like arms race to protect this monocrop culture from nature because it's like this temporary order where the easy state of the universe is entropy this is like fake order like monocrops are just fake order and we have to like keep on making this order structure to not fall into disarray and fall into nature

and then like you said that el leucer like we need to have all these supply chains that are shipping all of these pesticides and other goods to help keep this monocrop state of agriculture alive and working. And as we all know, in the last year and a half or so, our supply chains have really broken down. And you've talked about these fragile companies, but we also have fragile, like, supply chains and nation-state relationships. And when we have this state of, like, global monocrop culture, food production, along with geopolitical instability, all of a sudden, like, not just that, like, of parts of our food production become fragile, the whole damn thing becomes fragile. So this is actually like a national security issue.

This is a global population food, a sustainability issue. Do you fear of a world where like all of a sudden like the whole system breaks down because our supply chains break down and we literally cannot produce the food in our systems in the way that we do today anymore? It's not a mistake that I am now on a farm. Oh, got scary. It's been a well thought out thing. Like, okay, well, I mean, I'm just lucky that my interests also align with my D-N-Da-Day scenario.

And it's not a matter of if, in my mind, it's a matter of when. And maybe it's in 500 years. Maybe it's in 50 years. Maybe it's in five years. I don't know. But the machine we have cranking right now is inherently not sustainable. It is nowhere even close to sustainable. It is intensely extractive and intensely destructive. And again, what I said earlier, does anyone know where the actual food comes from the soil? The soil quality is you're grading so rapidly because most of these monocrops, which is what all the plant-based people will actually depend on to survive and what we're exporting to all these other foreign countries to help them survive. So our population is dependent on all these cheap calories to survive. That is going to crumble eventually. Like we're not in a path to figure

out a way to do this. There's no fermented food. There's no lab grown thing that's going to save us. All of those are extractive processes. Just like if you have a national debt or a personal bankout and you keep spending more than you're earning, eventually you're going to screw yourself and you can be completely belly up. And that's where we're at. Like, we are so negative on an ecological balance sheet. We're not even close to sustainable. And so when I think about food production, centralization, things like that, there is no form of sustainable centralized food production. And sustainable would just be we're making the same amount we're spending. Regenerative, which is what I advocate for is you're earning more than you're spending. So the soil fertility is

improving, the biodiversity is improving, the waterways are improving, the food production is improving. All the other stuff right now is declining rapidly. And I don't want to be at a point where I am caught my pants down and don't have any access to food, or at least the food that I want to eat. And again, it's something I'm already interested in fully, and I don't mean to be alarmist. Everybody needs to go get their own farm. But yeah, it's not a mistake that I'm learning when I'm learning. You can get real skills and living on a farm. Certainly. You definitely alluded to it, but I'll just make it super concrete. The federal bank in the United States has an enormous amount of debt. The central government of the United States has an enormous amount of

debt. We cannot pay it back. Therefore, we're about to go through this currency crisis on a global scale. And I think you're drawing the metaphor of you can apply that same thing that bankless has been talking about in all of all last five macro episodes that like we are going to have to come to terms with our debt by inflating our currency. At least we have that escape valve. food production, if you're telling me that we have a debt to the soil, as in we have pulled out all the nutrients of our soil and replaced it with poison of pesticides and et cetera, that is not something that we have an escape valve for like we do our US dollar currency. That is something that is going to have to come to a head. It doesn't sound like this is a, you know,

Anthony, what is the probability of this 20%, 40%, 60%? This sounds like this is a, an inevitability based on our current paradigm of food production. Is that correct? Yeah, it is, there's a term in agricultural called carrying capacity. So, for example, if I have 100 acres, I maybe have 10 cattle and they're totally fine. Ecosism is good. At 15, yeah, maybe they're still good. If I go to 20, those 20 cattle are going to survive for a while, but they're eventually going to eat too much of the ecosystem because a natural ecosystem is a finite resource. You can not make more of it randomly if you just want to, even though we think we can right now because we, you know, don't like to. think of any sort of limits to the world anymore. And then what happens is those 20 cattle now, instead of like 10 crushing it, living as they would, now there's not enough resources for even five. Instead of the population plummets to blow five. And then the grass starts growing back, and then we start getting about to 10. And there's always this balancing act in nature. You see it with wolf and deer populations. And we wiped out all the wolves and now the deer are going crazy.

Like there's this ebb and flow always. And then when the deer get too much, then they start eating too many plants. And then those plants go down and the population balances out. And I think humans are just, we're past that point. We're up to the 20 cattle range where we're consuming too much of our environment and a finite thing. The levy hasn't broken yet, but I think it will due to a lot of calculations that I've read and that I've done myself around rough estimation. Again, we're propping this all up due to artificial means of artificial. artificial fertilizer, extracting, extracting, extracting, extracting. Again, this is a finite resource. We cannot continue to extract things without putting them back. And we're not putting them back. Yeah, unfortunately, it's a matter of when, not if. But should we perhaps move this conversation to the putting it back part of this conversation? Yeah, I mean, it's the most important thing. And to be fair, I don't think that it's going to be tomorrow, the food system collapses in three billion people die in the next week sort of thing. I think it'll likely be over hundreds of years. But it's a challenging thing. When you think about solutions as a segue to that

that I try to think about in balance all the time is you essentially have to play these two games. One is try to get us off all of these things. But if you do that, you again, you go from 20 cattle to five and then you have to build back up. And I think that it's going to be a very painful thing. If we stop, for example, if we stopped all the seed oils, if we stopped all the high fructose corn syrup, but we did all these things that from the surface seemed like a good idea, it would be pretty awful for a lot of the world. Or you can say like, okay, well, let's, let's not do that because it's very harmful. Let's keep building the population. And then maybe we go to 40 cattle and then plummet to one. And that's way more violent. And so it's like, okay, either way, it's like the worst trolley problem

of all time. And so I don't think there's any good solutions to be fair, but it's something that I'm always thinking about personally. And I know it doesn't sound very optimistic. That's just where my brain's at. But again, not to think about it in terms of good or bad, but just we see this in nature all the time. And it just is a thing that happens in nature. And humans just haven't gone through it in our sort of like history that we know of and are like modern global civilization. But we've gone into it in the past probably thousands of times with hunter gatherer tribes where they've overhunted an area that, you know, grew to 500 members and then had to die down to 100 members and then to sort of ebb and flow always through history. I think we're

just at that point where we're contracted and we're going to go back. But I'm hopeful for a lot of really cool things that are in the works of basically how to start, you know, there's no going back. There's as much as I, you know, think people idealize hunter gather tribes. Like I said, I stayed with one last year for a couple weeks. It's a crazy experience. There's no going back to living like hunter gatherers. I think that assumption is insane. It's more like I get excited for how are we moving forward and how do we really evolving and changing through this process and learning and coming up with like new amazing things to implement. So that's what I'm excited about.

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when the carrying capacity is like only 10. But if we got that far, it would crash even further. Again, just to keep on putting this into metaphors that we've been using on bank lists, this very much sounds like the Fed trying to have a soft landing, for example, with their monetary policy. They kept on allowing for free money, loose money to be. rampant for too long, and then all of a sudden, inflation showed up, and now they have to turn on the interest rates, and then all of a sudden, like, because we were too hot for too long and the interest rates come, all of a sudden we crash. And the idea is that if that goes

on for too long, it would send us into a depression. If it goes on for a little bit too long, it goes into recession. And if it goes on for just the right amount of time, you end up at a soft landing. And so, like, hopefully we can create a soft landing with a new paradigm of food production. Let's go ahead and get into the second half of this conversation, which is, the optimistic side, the path forward, the path through is not necessarily a happy path. It's perhaps a little bit of a painful path, but on the other side of this, it is an optimistic one. Maybe you could guide us as to where this conversation to start with regenerative agriculture and like sustainable food production. Yeah. So again, it's sort of defined these terms earlier as extractive is

99.9% of what we're living in. Vegetable, produce production, fruit production, nuts and seeds, animals, processed food, everything is extractive. And I think there's a small outlier that is sustainable. Basically, it's the same sort of ins versus outs. And then you have regenerative, which is you're putting more into the bank out than you're spending. So you sort of restore things, which is, honestly, if we sustain things where there right now, I still think we're sort of off the cliff.

And we need to, like, if we sustain debt and we're in the red, that's not good. Do you want your bank count on a negative balance? Do you just want a bunch of credit card debt? Of course not. Do you want a much of federal debt? No. We need to at least get to break even. And then try to start getting ahead and like saving a little bit and having some

reservoirs. That's why I think we need to be focusing. That's why I think insustainable permaculture or things like that are not really great models. And so when people talk about plant-based stuff and we need to do this for the environment, things like that, the reality is, and this is why I'm doing all this stuff on my farm. I have a bunch of produce that I actually am not even interested in eating just because I want to experience what's the best possible way I can grow these things? And generally in agriculture, you have inputs and you have outputs.

It's really that simple. And so can an ecosystem, like, survive? Like, can I grow on my farm things without any external inputs? And what has the most amount of inputs versus outputs? And it seems to me so far, and I've scoured many books, researchers, et cetera, that plant production, most vegetables actually are the most resource and intensive things possible. And people go, what are you talking about? I heard, you know, that meat and all this stuff. And there's this report out of whatever and we can get all that stuff. What's generally not talked about is the longevity

of these things and what's required. So for example, you cannot grow produce, especially in Texas, that doesn't have incredible fertile soil and a lot of water. The fertile soil needs to be the, Dick, you need to have animals for that fertile soil. And we don't put animals back on the land. The soil fertility collapsed and you can't grow anything. What are the animals putting into the land that is adding stuff to it? The animals chew up all of the plant matter. They're basically fermented in the stomach.

They poop and pee all over the land. And that adds both nutrients but also microbes. The most important thing is the feces are a very biologically active thing. And so they're licking the ground. They're spitting all over. They're peeing all over. they're pooping all over it. And that breeds ecological diversity in microorganisms.

Those microorganisms go into the soil and create a living web of microorganisms that end up breaking down the rocks that are in the soil, dirt, into nutrients. This is the biggest thing that people I think don't understand about how nutrient cycles work is that you need microbial activity to break down dirt into soil, into nutrients. and then the plants, the seeds, extract those nutrients. But if you just grow the plant and take the plant away and then keep doing that and you're not adding back any of that fertility or any of that microbial activity, you screw the entire system.

Again, you cannot do that indefinitely. I think a close second to that would be chicken and pig production. I think a huge lie that the agriculture community has told people, which once they find out they're going to be really pissed about, is that pasture-raised pork in chicken. is a huge scam. What I mean by that is that 99% plus a pasturated pork and chicken are fed GMO corn and soy. There may be some organic outliers and even these outliers are fed mass amount of grain. So you're having to grow an enormous amount of grain externally, truck it in and feed

these pastured animals corn and soy. Which again is not even close to sustainable. You're having to rely on monocrops for these animals to grow. At least these animals are putting in fertility, they are and that's why I consider them like a very small step above the plants is because they're adding into an ecosystem somewhere and they're making more nutrient-dense food than than plants generally are for humans. But that is an enormous issue as well. I mean, I've been dealing with some feeding issues on the farm, like trying to figure out one, what's the most sustainable crop, what's the most local crop, where are the most healthy species appropriate things. And again, it comes down to caring capacity. When you look at chickens and pigs, a pig, a wild pig,

wild pigs have a huge problem here. I have eight pigs and we're having to feed them over the course of six months, about 6,000 pounds. Oh, no, sorry, 12,000 pounds of grain to grow up. How do they do this in the wild, you ask? Well, they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres. And so if you're growing food for humans, I could maybe have one or two pigs on my entire property. I got to if I have grain, I could have hundreds of pigs on my property. And so it's just not a feasible thing to have either chickens or pigs on a property without external inputs, grains, et cetera. And so sort of what you're left with, again, when you're looking about what is good for the soil long term, what is good for the biodiversity long term, what is good for the waterways,

what is good for all this stuff? Generally speaking, for the busted land worldwide that we have, and this can be repeatable everywhere around the world, is remnant animals. So these are animals that go around eat things that humans cannot eat, generally in places where we can't even grow plants to begin with, and then their presence there, rotating them around, like how nature would have pushed them around with predators, leads to reclamation of the busted ecosystem.

For every ruminant you bring on a property, seven species minimum are thought to then re-enter. There's a bison ranch here that's outside of Texas called Rome Ranch. and I've seen them now over the last five years just more and more action their entire property has changed into this oasis

it was this dead land when they got it and I think they were like a year into it when I first started visiting there and now they're six years in and it's been five years since I've first been there there are like countless species of birds that they hadn't seen before

there's insects butterflies, snakes, beetles, all these things even when we got our pigs here and again this is a system where, again, they're bringing in fertility. It's grain-fed, yes. I looked into when I first got them the first week, I saw so many types of things that I had never seen in our property before. Beatles, worms, snakes, et cetera, around these animals. Like, life begets life. And this is the thing, again, when you're planting these huge monocrops, animals are meant to be in large herds.

Plants are not meant to be in large monocrops. And so we can grow hundreds, thousands of bison at a time, hundreds, thousands of ruminants. They are herd animals. They're meant to be in enormous pots. And that brings ecological diversity. It builds the soil carbon. For every 1% of soil organic matter that you add, which again can only be done with animals, it only goes negative with any sort of plant material you do. If you're growing vegetables, it only soil organic matter goes down.

With animals, it goes up. And for every 1% per acre, you store an additional 20,000 gallons of water. And so you're storing more water, which is, again, in Texas, we have this crazy drug going on right now. I mean, most of the U.S. is in a crazy drought. It's very important. You restore the ecosystem. You grow grass way more.

Even if you pull a chicken tractor, again, this is not even remnant stuff. Chicken tractor is something where you have pasture-raised chickens in this little pen and you move it every day. I've had friends where I go see it. And there's a very clear difference between where the chickens were and where the chickens weren't. The grass is like five times higher in green the entire season. Where it's not, it's basically a barren little wasteland.

Again, where the animals are. And this is the, the, the, problem with this is people have all these stats that they measured some fucking methane from some cattle and said well methane stays in the atmosphere and there's greenhouse gas therefore the cattle is killing the entire planet and they haven't actually gone to the farm to see what it's like when a herd of cattle is managed appropriately is an ecological oasis and you don't get that from a fucking factory that's producing impossible burgers like go there and see what sort of ecological diversity have you have humans in massive buildings burning fossil fuels

There's a theme that I want to pull out here, again, connecting it to the world of crypto. The sister podcast, Green Pill, and it's hosted by my friend Kevin O'Waqui, who's a big proponent of this meme called Regenerative Finance. And it's all about making financial structures that are regenerative. They feed back into themselves. There's a loop of regeneration that allows for sustainability and inclusion and diversity in the participants. And it's like this thing that he sees the pattern for.

hasn't yet been able to like meme this thing into existence, but it's definitely working on it. And when you tell me that there's this world of regenerative agriculture where we have these large ruminant animals that are in harmony with nature, so we have the yin and the yang, you know, the animals in the soil, and having the animals walk around and have biodiversity spawn in its wake is like the sustainable agriculture side of things. And there's this thing that I've been obsessed with in the world of crypto is I'm obsessed with cryptoculture. And I think if we layer on regenerative finance. We layer on like the ability for artists to create NFTs and those NFTs, be able to have feedback loops inside of their own economies. We get to spawn new culture because

of all this new art that we're able to finance. And we have this financial system that is regenerative that can create actual human culture in its wake, right? And culture works twice. So culture, you know, art's performance of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively, the word culture that people are familiar with, it also means to maintain tissue cells, bacteria, organisms, in conditions suitable for growth. And so we have this world of regenerative crypto economics, regenerative finance, trying to create human culture and make human culture more economically viable so we can have a flourishing of crypto culture. And then we also have regenerative agriculture, where we're trying to create a harmony with nature, and we're trying to establish a back-and-forth

conversation between plants and animals to have a self-sustaining agricultural system that allows culture diversity in the wake of these large ruminant animals to hopefully restore a lot of our broken ecology that we've created over the last 50, 100 years. One question I have, Anthony, is as these animals, you talked about like the methane coming from the feces of cows, but then instead, when we have like these large plants being grown in its wake, how much carbon is actually being sequestered as a result of these plants being grown. Is there any conversation to be had there? Yeah, I mean, a very basic study that was done just comparatively speaking between regenerative beef and impossible burgers. For every impossible burger made is 4.5 pounds

of carbon that goes into the atmosphere. It's a carbon emitter. For every pound of regenerative grass-fed beef that is grown, 4.5 pounds of carbon goes into the soil. And it's the only thing has been shown, again, ruminant rotational grazing, which is not the same thing as grass fat. A lot of times grass fat actually is bastardized. And it's just a bunch of cattle out. Think about the 40 cattle out on one big field, but they're given alfalfa pellets and their ecosystem is artificially propped up. So this regenerative thing is very important. They have a diverse forage. So they're eating diverse plants and they're being moved around in a species appropriate way. That mimics a natural ecosystem. That's the only thing that's been showed to produce food that is

sequestered carbon. But even still, I think that, I think people, when they look at the sustainability, regenerative, extractive nature, focus solely on carbon. I think it's a silly thing to get so single metric-minded. It's like looking at human health and assessing overall human health on calories in versus calories out. It's insane. It's one simple metric. I think it's a terrible metric in isolation. I think it's the more you optimize for single metrics, GDP is another one. Optimized for GDP. It's all great. Yeah, well, does that tell you anything about how people are functioning in an economy? No, of course not. And the same thing with carbon and carbon, it gives you essentially no information about how the ecosystem is actually functioning or the longevity

of that ecosystem, the predictive longevity of the ecosystem, which is in my mind the most important thing. Again, looking at the carrying capacity, the predicted longevity is what I'm most curious in. Can we keep doing this? Yes or no. And if we can sequest your carbon for the next 20 years, the whole system breaks apart because we have too much carbon. The guy was talking to this venture capitalist. He was raising all this money for this green fund. And he was all thrilled about their technologies. One of them was, he's like, yeah, we have this company of Australia that's doing this

really cool thing. They're creating these sensors that are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and they're putting it in the soil and they're making these little carbon rocks. I was like, what do you mean? They're making these carbon rocks. He's like, yeah. So it crystallizes its carbon and puts it into the soil. and it's not going to break down for like, you know, I think 100,000 years, what the estimation is.

So you're just going to pull carbon from the air, make these carbon crystals, and fill our soil, which we need to grow things in. Which is something that can't break down. With a field of carbon that can't break down for hundreds of thousands of years. Like, this is the type of shit that happens when we look at it from carbon in versus carbon out. And it's a complex biological thing that when you try to simplify it, just ruins the entire way that you appreciate and interact with the whole system. And also, it's just like to illustrate methane, for example, everyone thinks cattle are bad. Why? Because they bar up and fart. And why is that bad? Because it has methane. And why is methane bad? Because it's a quote-unquote greenhouse gas. But when you track methane, it is part of a biogenic cycle. And so the methane that the cattle excrete, which I think it's absurd that people talk about living creatures emitting greenhouse gases. It's insane. It gets reincorporated back into the soil and the water, we need that methane to keep the whole thing going. It's part of a living

cycle. It's not like we're taking it from one place like fossil fuels, burning it and going in the atmosphere. It's part of a thing that goes around. And there used to be 75 million bison in this country, hundreds of millions of antelope, et cetera. There are less cattle than there were bison before. And we're saying that the less ruminant animals now have the methane. That's the problem the problematic thing. It's just these simplistic ways to view things without looking at in the entirety of the complexity, which I don't think we can put on a checklist. It's not that easy, which is again why coming back to solutions here, the centralization, like you talked about, the executioner and the slaughterhouse killing thousands of animals a day, that guy or girl has

not even been to the field where the animals are raised. So why would they even care about the animal's life? They're just pulling the trigger. So the more that you, can support people who are actually doing farming, whether that is plant agriculture, growing fruit, growing vegetables, growing animals, I don't really care. Those people who are actually interacting with the land, who are living on it and are responsible for maintaining that, if you're doing that and you're actually that person, the chances are extremely low that you are going to take poor care of that thing. And so again, going there, seeing for yourself, what is this ecosystem like? Where is my food coming from. I think this is a vote for resilience in literally where you live.

And this is the thing too, right? How much of your food is coming from further than 45 miles away from you? If it has to or if it does, that is not a very resilient situation you found yourself in. Or do you want to extend it to 100 miles, 200 miles, whatever, driving radius. I was looking at different places to move. If we were going to stay in Austin or not, we were looking at farmland, looking at some cities. One of them was in the south Charleston. There's basically no farms in like a 300 mile radius in the entire city because it's all swamp land. And again, I'm not doomsday. I don't really like a mad max sort of, I don't hope for this stuff to happen. But I just find that really weird that all of the food, this entire city is consuming, has to be coming from so far

away. It's a dependency. Right. And it's a dependency on something that you need to do every single day to stay alive, which is scary. Three times a day, typically, yeah. And people have said, zero idea. This, again, it was the most important things for the tribes of the night's with is finding food. And it's the thing that people know least about how their world works and they're least connected with. Blows my mind. One thing you said about like, oh yeah, everyone hates cows because they fart out methane and they poop and that also has methane. And everyone hates that because it contributes to greenhouse gases. I think the reason why everyone hates it is it because it's largely happening in a centralized paradigm where all of these cows are all in the same

spot. They're pooping in the same spot and all of that poop isn't being put back into the soil. And I don't know what happens to the methane when it's all happening in one spot. But I would imagine in a centralized paradigm, all of that regenerative part of that cycle is not happening because we've centralized it too much. So when people hate on like meat and red meat and cows because of their methane and their byproducts, what they're actually hating on is the centralization of these things. The argument here is that if we decentralized the physical locations of large ruminant animals, things go from evil to good. Things go from unsustainable to sustainable. Things go from the methane goes and turns into a greenhouse gas to being reintroduced

part of the cycle. Is that a fair take? Yeah, this is the biggest thing that people complain about when I talk about this stuff online is, especially the people with vegan in their profile to proclaim to the world what they eat, which is weird. Well, we have this in crypto Twitter. It's like, what chain are you a part of? It's the same. level of tribalism. It's funny. Get very mad because they say, well, there's this factory farming stuff and blah, blah, blah. I should eat plants instead. But again, talking about my experience as a literal farmer doing the best I can in all these systems and researching the best I can do. If you go from eating factory farm meat to eating plants, you're leaving out the eating the regenerative animal,

which is a total option for most people where they're at. They can look up, actually built the free resources. Go, it's near home. Let's go to groundworkcollective.com, actually, if you want to find. We ported in like 2,500 farms in the U.S. that have regenerative standards to them. And there's other regenerative farm finders. 99% of people can drive within, you know, a couple hundred miles and find some farm doing this. Yes, it can be expensive for what it is right now. But if you buy for a half or a whole, cattle or split it with friends, it's actually much cheaper than even the commodity stuff that you can get, the processed food, the plants, the feedlot beef.

if you go buy direct from your farmer and buy the whole animal and have that relationship, they'll throw in stuff for free, they'll give you discounts. It's remarkable when you actually have a community and know the person that you're buying your food from and know where your food's grown, how different it is and how much easier it actually becomes. When it's just a math problem of some forms of cattle require all these inputs, all these external feeds, all these external capital expenditures to maintain their livelihood versus the regenerative agriculture, regenerative cattle model, which is how do I make a plot of land

where this cow and this land is just self-sustaining doesn't require any capital inputs. That's the whole point of that whole model. And so naturally, I would imagine it would be cheaper than the alternative mechanism, which is like, okay, I need to spend money to feed my cow. It's interesting about animal agriculture versus plant agriculture, especially when you're talking about doing things the quote-unquote right way. If you're doing plant agriculture, where you're doing no till, which means you're not devastating the soil. So what happens with these monocrop fields is that every year, once the crop's done, trache goes through, cuts all the plant matter down, and then scrapes and digs through the soil so they can plant again.

Well, when you scrape through, again, I told you that soil is a living thing, tons of all this microorganism, when you scrape the green stuff off the top of that soil and you expose that soil of the sunlight and the UV light, it kills all life, all microbial life. in the soil and basically kills the soil. And then you plant back into that. And so if you're doing production especially in a what's called a no-till way, which is a way I recommend people to look for if they're buying a lot of produce, no-till, which means they're just planting straight into the ground. It's harder because you have to read all this stuff. But it's a very linear input to output from a human labor perspective. So if I have one garden bed versus 10 garden beds, that's 10 times the

amount of work for me as a human. If I have one cow or 10 cows or 100 cows, it's the same amount of work. It scales exponentially for labor. So same thing with chickens. Like I have 20 chickens right now getting systems down. All I have to do basically is give them some feed, give them some water and take the eggs. That same scale works from zero chickens to about 200 chickens of collecting the eggs and all that type of stuff. So it takes about the same amount of time. But if I quadrupled or 10x to my garden space, that'd be 10x more time for me. 10x more resources. Whereas the animals, it's all exponential, which is a very interesting thing.

One thing you said that I have a question on is just how sustainable is this when we talk about just like a geographic area question, where you talked about how you had like these pigs and they require acres and acres and acres of land space in order to be sustainable. If we scale this model of regenerative agriculture out to the whole entire population of 8 billion people. Do we have enough physical area on this planet to sustain the entire population using this model? Well, this is where a thing comes back to what I'm excited about is we don't really know. And I think we're starting to figure out really interesting things. So, for example, the carrying capacity thing, we currently see cattle as, you know, in some places, it's like one

animal unit is what you call cattle per acre. We're finding out that if you do it in a region, And that's been known for all of like animal husbandry time. It turns out if you do rotational grazing in some places, you can forward it six X that. We didn't know about that. And so using old calculations, maybe we're like, oh, yeah, we're screwed. But we're starting to find out these new models in different regions that are really interesting. And I would say even if we can't, it's worth trying to figure it out. Because again, look at this soft landing thing.

If we can only feed four billion people in a regenerative slash sustainable way, that's going to be much better than if we. say, oh, screw it, we can't feed those people and we can only feed, you know, 500 million people eventually because we collapsed our entire ecosystem. And sort of like, I'm not even convinced right now that we have enough clean water for the world to drink clean water and not to get sick on. Does that mean that we shouldn't try to still drink clean water and to improve the capacity of filtered water? No, let's continue to do that. And so I don't think about the, the scalability of it per se. I think about how can you, with context, replicate what you're doing

in one place and another place. Because this is the thing about nature. You need humans, you can't offload this stuff to machines. You need humans, a living thing to be in a living ecosystem to sense, what does this need? How do we respond? How do we interact with stuff? It's an art. And that may differ from my plot of land. I mean, it does differ. I have friends all around here are farmers, five minutes this way, 15 minutes that way. They all have completely different land, completely different needs, completely different animals. That close, it changes. And so you're not telling you, like here versus another country, another continent, man, we're going to have very different approaches, but the principles are maintained. How do we start having this look

like a normal ecosystem? We've hunted all the megafauna off the planet, basically. So we don't have any perspective on what it should look like. When I was in Africa visiting this tribe, we went to some of these game parks. It's very clear to me, oh, this is what it actually should be looking like. We have this immense cornucopia of living things large and small that are inhabitating this entire area that live in harmony together. That's what we need to be doing. This guy West Jackson writes a lot about this. He's old now, but doing some really interesting stuff. His concept of nature as measure. But now, like, we've essentially destroyed all areas where we should look at and be like, that's what we should aim for. It's really hard to imagine what nature should look like because we've turned it

all into a zone of extraction for humans. But yeah, I think it's incorporating animals, increasing biodiversity, increasing soil, microbiological activity, increasing water quality, increasing water holding capacity, sure sequestering carbon. Like there's a variety of things that you could probably make some sort of judgment call on. There's like what I can think for for humans, like there's a bunch of different measures you can look at. But the end of the day, you can have everything on paper. When you look at somebody, you can tell. This person does look healthy. You know, their skin's a little weird. They're, you know, something's wrong with their energy or whatever. Like, you have this intuitive sense. This person is not healthy. This person's not a

healthy organism. The same thing happens when you're on land, which is why I want people to actually go to the farms and see it. Because when you see it, you go, oh, it's sort of like, sort of like porn, you know, you know when you see it. There's not like this hard land. You know and you see it. The same thing with ecological health. The same thing. Let's talk about scaling this out to the whole world. You just laid out a bunch of principles. Is it as simple as getting as all these, as many farmers as we can to start operating their farm under these principles of, you know, increasing, you can't remember the term, like how much water a land can hold increasing the biodiversity? Is the formula for producing a world that is sustainable and regenerative as simple as getting

all these farmers to follow along on these same regenerative principles? Or is there like a more coherent, like direct strategy for scaling this whole, like, revolution out to the whole world. Yeah, this is where I think it's interesting. I heard this guy, Frederick Lawa, talk about it. He's this Belgian food scientist guy. He made a really good point that changed my mind. I used to think that it's like, all groundwork, bottom up sort of thing, grassroots, like everyone, every man for himself, got to figure it out. He made a good point, though, that sort of top down, centralized things are not always bad. In this case, like having some sort of communication or organization level at top where people can share learnings and figure it out and be like, hey, these are the general

things that we're finding and working here. Now you try it there. And some sort of system, I think it would be helpful. Again, it's not going to be able to be like, hey, what worked for me in central Texas is going to work for you in Mozambique or in Costa Rica or in India. Like, does not work that way. Again, I told you somebody five minutes away, their land is completely different. How the hell could it work for somebody across the world? And so I think it's about getting people back on land and actually being intentional about this stuff, which I think is the most important thing we need to solve is land access. And I don't mean to be the guy coming to a cryptocurrency podcast talking about how blockchain is going to save the world. But I think that there are models there that I think

as land prices go up, most people who want to get into farming can't afford land. So how do you do? But a lot of people want to support it and want to be part of it and interact and have like ownership in their food system. And I think some sort of shared fractionalization of ownership of land needs to happen to have more people get back on land. Bill Gates is now the largest farmland owner in the United States. That's an enormous problem. Do you think that he owns all that land because of he understands a little bit of what we're talking about here and all of a sudden knows that land will be super scarce in the future? Man, you know, we could go down the conspiracy rabbit hole Bill Gates all day long, the microchips and the whole thing. But at the end of the day,

I don't know, but I get the sense that it's not good for the average Joe who cares about their if it's like if some billionaire owns tens of millions of acres in his underground layer, I can't go interact with that the person. Like you need the person there who's doing the thing, you know, regardless of what it is. And so to have somebody own that much land is terrible. I'm talking about centralization. Having one person remotely owned that much land, you can't give a shit about the land that you own if you don't interact with it ever.

Anthony, what advice do you have for the listener? What do we need to do? And let's start from like the easiest. actionable advice, which is what food can people buy that doesn't interrupt their day-to-day behaviors because if it does, they're not going to do it. What's the easiest, lowest hanging fruit that people need to do to help be a part of this movement? Yeah, so I think about what you not do and what should you do and what you should not do is buy anything with the seed oil in it, again, for the ramifications in your health. Can we define seed oils and it's like, let's make that super

obvious? Any oil that doesn't come from a large fruit that you can actually really squeeze fat out of, So with avocados, olives, palm, coconut, these are things that you can squeeze fat out of it. You can literally squeeze in fat, come out. Seed oils are just growing these seeds in massive monocrops that we talked about earlier. And we press these seeds and have to use harsh chemicals and high heat and all this weird machinery to extract the stuff out of it. Then we deodorize it so you can't tell it's rancid. But the things that you'll probably see are soybean, safflower, sunflower, sunflower, corn, cottonsea, canola, rape seed, grape seed, rice bran, peanut, or some exact.

examples of seed oils. They're in literally everything. There are 99% of restaurant foods. Again, they're completely destructive to the planet. They're awful for human health. I actually think the more that I thought about going through the arc of perfect keto and all the work we did there and working with thousands of people, I think that most insulin resistance and carbohydrate intolerance actually comes from exposure to seed oils with break your mitochondria which don't allow you to process carbohydrates effectively because there are so many people that stopped eating carbs, felt really good, you can introduce real food carbs, still couldn't handle it.

I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. And then we started playing around with seed oils and cleaning up the fat and their diet, finally corrected. So if there's one that you shouldn't do, it's eat these things. They, once you consume them, they stay in your body for two years

because they embed in your nervous tissue and your cell membranes. And then they auto-oxidize. So they create inflammation in your body for up to two years after you eat them. So if you eat chips that were cooked in soybean oil or whatever, or you eat a restaurant meal,

And again, 9% of all restaurant food is cooked with this stuff. It's insane. Because of the margins. Because of the margins. Because no one can tell it's in there because it's a flavorless thing. That meal lives in you and causes inflammation for two years, which is absurd. So if there's one thing you should not do it's that. And then refined carbs. I think are second to that. But the easiest thing to just do to not even think about what should I avoid is just buy as much local food as possible, have the relationship with the farmer. Go to the farmer's market. Go to that website. I said earlier, our ground work collective. com, use a farm finder or whatever farm finder you want, go visit a farm because no farmer anywhere can make a seed oil. You're not going to go to a farmer's market and see a bottle of like artisanal canola oil. It's a possibility. So it just filters out everything and you go, okay, great.

I can know where my food comes. I can have a relationship with the person who's grown my food. That's, in my mind, solves 95% of any worry about what should I eat. eat, how much should I eat, whatever, like it'll give you seasonal foods, it'll put you into ketosis in the winter likely. Like you'll get some swings in and out of carbs versus not carbs, protein levels or not. And I think it's just like a really easy way to think about nutrition. That's really, really, really good advice. Go to the farmer's market, establish a relationship with a local farmer who fits the rule of a farm that is perhaps close enough that you could eventually walk to if you had to walk really, really, really far. And there's a, there's a

also the conversation of like sun burning in seed oils. This is kind of a meme on crypto Twitter. Can you walk through like the relationship between sunburns and seed oils? Yeah. So what happens again, I told you that the seed oils embed into your tissues. So they also embed into, you know, heavily into your skin. And also the vast majority of skincare products, especially that women use, have these seed oils in them, which is really crazy and ironic, especially sunscreens, because you're putting on this thing that has this highly oxidizable and highly damaged by UV fat on your skin. So then you have this thing on your skin and your skin's made of this thing that gets highly damaged in the sun. And so there's a lot of anecdotal stuff about people cutting out seed oils and still having a massive reduction in the

incidence of sun sensitivity and sunburns. There's a lot of egregious examples where people say like if you cut out seed oils, you're not going to burn. And I think that's insane. I think if you live in Canada and they're inside for the year and then go on a trip to Cancun. I don't care if you don't eat seed oils, you're going to burn because there's no graded exposure to the sun and your body needs to build up melanin to have, you know, you need greater exposure. But yeah, it seems to, you know, when you take away the thing that destroys the skin and literally destroys the DNA, my hypothesis and a lot of people have done really great work on this, the dots between seed oil consumption and skin cancer prevalence are insane. And so you don't think people, you know, had skin burn

sunburns in the past. Of course they did. We also didn't have sunscreen. And so now we have this massive amount of sunscreen, but our skin cancer rate is going through the roof. It matches almost exactly. It looks like cigarettes and lung cancer. It's a very similar chart. And the same thing looks with obesity and heart disease and diabetes and skin cancer and C.O. Not to say like we know exactly all the mechanisms, but I think that we'll elucidate it eventually. And it'll be a primary driver, but it looks very close. Get those damn things of your diet. This is definitely something I can speak from experience on where years and years ago before I went down on this path of just like understanding nutrition would super burn, super hard. And in the last few years, in the last two years,

I'd say, there's been a number of times where I've been out in the sun far too long. And I'm going to be, I'm always thinking like, oh, man, I'm going to really regret this tomorrow. And I wake up the next day. And I'm not that bad. Not bad at all. It feels like a superpower, honestly. It's like, oh, I can last in the sun. The other reason why, like, some people burn in other stones, as you've alluded to it, is, you know, hunter-gatherers generally were far more skin-exposed than humans are. We hide indoors for nine months out of the year until we wait for it to be, like, 85-plus,

and then we rip off all of our clothes and go to the beach without having any sun exposure for the last, like, nine months, and then we burn. So, like, you combine, like, a lifestyle that doesn't have any seed oils with a lifestyle that puts sun on your skin light as much as possible throughout, the whole entire course of the year, and all of a sudden, like, your sun immunity, your sun resistance is super, super high, and you also have a nice golden glow. So this is the lifestyle I've been trying to live for the last few years or so. I think it's smart. Anthony, is there any other tricks or tips or advice that we should all be following here? I think it's, how can you be

part of our community and how can you live locally? I think is the antidote to many of our modern problems when it comes to, you know, I said I was digging into emotional health, spiritual health, ecological health, I think all of those things tie back to us, again, not being in a real natural state in a union with our environment. And that environment includes, like, how are you you showing it for the people who live around you? Do you know your neighbors? Do you actually have a real community? Or is it just a bunch of friends that you have in a city, like like-minded people? You know, how much are you actually engaged with the people around you versus just ordering stuff on Amazon? Do you support your local businesses? Do you buy from your local farm? Do you know where

your stuff comes from. Do you have any skills you can offer people in the real world instead of just typing away the keyboard for strangers on the internet? These are the things I think are important that actually when I see people adopt them, you know, people can master their nutrition. And they go, oh, I still have these chronic diseases. I still have this depression. I still have this anxiety. Are you going outside? Do you interact with nature at all? Do you move your body through space? These things just seem very basic when you think about it. But when you look at an average person, especially you live in a city, they never had this sort of connection with their natural environment because their natural environment is shrouded from them. So they leave in this concrete jungle.

So it's really hard to do. And I'm not trying to tell people everyone needs to go live in a farm like me. But you can do it in small steps and just try to live more locally, which again, if and when things get tough again, I mean, you saw people who did this COVID times pretty resilient and did pretty well. And people who didn't were fragile and it was scary and a lot of fear, anxiety. Certainly. Well, Anthony, that lesson is definitely one of the reasons why I wanted to pull you on this because what we say on bankless frequently is like if you fix the financial system, you fix so much that's based on the financial system. And quite a large part of the world is based on top of the financial system. I would say most of it.

But food, literally the whole entire world is based on the food system. The food system has so much more than just food production. And it also has just values and ethos and sustainability and just like community all based in mind. And so I think together, if we can fix the financial system and if we can fix the food system, with some of the strategies that you've brought to the table here. I think we have a fantastic world ahead of us. It doesn't sound like it's easy, but good things are never easy. And I think the first step of achieving that world is, like we always say on bank lists, tell stories about it. So thank you for coming on to the show and helping me tell the story. Yeah, I have one question for you.

Sure. How do we, if we take down the financial system or rework it or whatever, how do we get away from this world where we have these corporations extracting a less profit and thus not having any to actually take care of the human population. How do you imagine a reworked financial system incentivized properly for the food system, if any? Yeah, that's a big question. I think it doesn't necessarily have to do with the food aspect of it. But bait in that question is, how do we just prevent the re-centralization of capital and money and finance back to look exactly like something that we already came from? Like, how do we prevent that the centralization of resources and capital? But my answer for that would be we have this cool brand new invention called Private Keys, which really disrupts equilibrium in a way that we have never seen before.

So we have this meme in the Web3 space where we have this system that can distribute ownership to the individuals. And so there's this like meme of Uber on the blockchain. Uber actually did try to give its Uber drivers equity, but they were hamstrung by regulation and just like a system that didn't support that kind of strategy. with private keys, we have ways for these Dow's, Defy apps, we'll call it whatever you want to call it, to put ownership straight into the hands of somebody with a private key and not have to go through a payment network like Visa, not have to go through a commercial bank like Wells Fargo,

and doesn't have to ask for permission from a regulation standpoint. And so, like, in the same way that you talk about getting closer to your food, we can also have people getting closer to these institutions that own capital. And these institutions that own capital used to be built in the meat space, you know, nation state regulation built on the lawyer pen and paper contracts. But in the Ethereum world, they're built on code and they're inherently community oriented. And there is no middlemen that separate the ownership and the asset being owned. That is, in my mind, this thing that it has a new sustainable equilibrium

because we have a bankless financial system that is a direct relationship to community ownership to the actual community. There is no mediator between this relationship. And so as it would relate to food production, I would hope to extend the same pattern of, like you were talking about how do we divvy up land and have it be fracturalized so people can own this plot of land and maybe that's their source of food. There's something there in this pattern where we have a more direct relationship between ownership and the same way that we have a more direct relationship with our food production.

It's a little bit like, you know, step one invent a blockchain, step one, step two, put private keys into everyone else's hands. Step three, inform everyone about sustainable regenerative agriculture. Step four, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step five, have a regenerative financial ecosystem that is paired with a blockchain. I don't know about step four. I think it would take a lot of time and experimentation and iteration and innovation, but question mark, it'll just happen, question mark? I don't know. Yeah, I think it's a little bit past the headlights, but I'm excited for it. Certainly. Anthony, it's an honor having you

on the podcast. Thank you so much for, I think, making one of the most informative podcasts that I've ever made on the show. Well, thanks, Ben. It's fun to speak to audiences that maybe are not primed to a lot of stuff that I typically talk about because I go on, you know, health, wellness, nutrition podcasts all the time. I think it's same stuff people here. But yeah, I'm just curious what people are, the feedback is going to be like. So if anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly, Twitter DM, Instagram, DM, and I try to answer as many as possible and happy to help anybody along the way. I am of service to you. Awesome. After this show, I'm about to ask you what resources you want us to put in the show notes.

So listeners, Anthony's answer will be in the show notes. It'll be his Twitter, some of the websites he's mentioned and some other things. On that note of a new community, like I said, the parallels between like money, finance, crypto, decentralization, anti-fragility. I really think that will help it land with a lot of people and hopefully point a lot of new people to this very, very important cause. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.