The Centralized Food Production Crisis | Anthony Gustin

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. Cyberpunk's 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 like 50 or 100 years or so. This is a code red. This is a fire alarm. Uh, 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.

Uh and there are one of 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, uh, culture, cultural diversity, and not just culture as in like music and arts and literature, but culture and cultural diversity of a biosphere. Uh, there are we do a fan, 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 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. Uh and so

While it's a little bit weird, it's like, why is this crypto podcast bankless 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 a 60 about the world of food production because it's really important. Food production is really important. We we joke on bankless joke 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 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, haha, gotcha. 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. Uh, and it's a nice beat off the other of the path of.

Crypto while still using crypto principles and crypto values. So, Anthony Gustin, he's a he's a personal hero of mine. I've been listening to his podcast before I've been podcasting. Uh, and he's just super sharp, super tact, 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 gonna get there right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Anthony Gustin, 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 they actually had 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. Uh when I learned about podcasts through the lens of like nutrition uh and and keto and and good physical movement. And it was 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 here's here's what here's why I'm having a actually uh can you give a little bit of a background on yourself? Like uh uh wha what's your educational background and what do you do and and just who are you for the listeners?

Yeah. I I don't know how the hell to 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, got my doctorate in chiropractic and masters in in sports rehab, did a bunch of functional medicine work, then went into the online world and started figured out that you could use the internet to actually help people instead of in person. So then launched a bunch of e comm health based brands, quip foods, perfect keto, a bunch of other stuff, then switched more into investing 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 and you zoomed if you could zoom out and just focus on one one theme. Your your current your your podcast has gone through a couple rebrands, uh, but now it's uh what is the name? Something health?

The the natural state.

Natural state, natural state podcast. Yeah. And would you say that that's a good uh summary of the theme of 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 has transitioned now into so many other things. I mean, it was physical health first, and 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.

And so it's that'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, etcetera

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 the the once you start going down this rabbit hole, I think it's it starts to all make more sense. And I, you know, the thing of the more you the more you learn, the less you know is very true for a lot of set that up into. But yeah, just the the health overall that I can perceive with my senses, I guess, is what I'm interested in.

Certainly. And I think listeners who are probably wondering, like, why the hell is there this like nutrition health podcast coming out of Banklist, this crypto podcast? The answer to that is that this I think this is going to be a very fun exploration into the ties, not necessarily not between crypto and food production, but with the words and themes that we use. Anthony just used the word like rabbit hole. 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 how like scale. How do we scale this effort? And overall, I think you're going to find that there's 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 this, while the concept of food and nutrition and health is completely divergent from crypto and finance, the structures here are actually the same. And that's what I want let 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, do you think we can do this journey together?

Let's 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 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 which your food came from?

Have you seen it? Have you seen where the food grows, whether that's plants, animals, or even packaged food? Everything comes to the ground at some point. Do you know where that comes from?

The chances are that comes from an enormous multinational corporation

that, 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 interests.

And they don't have any sort of connection to the food system for you. It's just about making money. And it's and it's not like it's, you know, a bunch of different places doing this. These are

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 off of you. That's it.

Mm-hmm.

So it

It boils down to that. I mean, 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 a couple weeks ago that 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 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 the healthcare industry. You know, pick pick your industry, like the web to social media, Facebook, Instagram industry. There are humans, 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 hyper competitive capitalism, the winners start to like snowball, and all of a sudden we have these incentives that are highly divergent from the actual what sh we would desire to see manifested in the world based on our human values. Would you agree with that?

That's 100% correct.

Okay, so can we talk about the perils of centralization in our in our food supply, like uh and our food production? What is the products, the food products that come out of these centralized manufacturers, and versus 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 an 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 like we have these big corporations, we have these big institutions, the government namely, American Heart Association, American Diabetic Association, et cetera, 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 food the all of the food industry is centralized. And I also think that factory farming, fro from a meat perspective, animal race perspective, is also abhorrent and we shouldn't support that. And we'll get into that in a second. But when it comes down to it, the ultra processed food,

Is by far and away the worst thing for human health. And this is the 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 a 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 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 is possible. Because

i if you were going in your backyard

and raise an animal

Have a garden, etc., 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 of all that stuff is centralized,

it's it's not leading to as many problems,

relatively speaking,

because