Forest for the Trees: A True Terpenes Podcast Episode 1 with Future4200/Dustin Powers

Happy Holidays! True Terpenes has an extra gift for you this holiday season. We want to welcome our new blog: Forest for the Trees a True Terpenes Podcast. True Terpenes’ Ross Hunsinger (@sugarsugarltd) and David Heldreth (@theyogibear13) join unique guests on Forest for the Trees to help our audience explore the road less traveled in the world of terpenes from cannabis or essential oils to farming, cooking and food.

The podcast came just in time for your road trip, flight or just spending some time hiding from family with your headphones in. Our special guest for our first and second episodes (we just couldn’t cram it into a single episode) is Dustin Powers, better known as @Future4200. He’s best known for providing a vast knowledge of cannabis extraction, permaculture and science at his forum www.future4200.com or at his Good Life Gang https://goodlifegang.tech/

You can listen to Forest for the Trees on Google Play, Apple Itunes and Spotify or read the transcript below:

Transcript:

Ross Hunsinger:    Hey, this is Ross from True Terpenes and you are listening to the Forest For the Trees podcast, our first foray into having the conversations we want to have with the people that inspire and inform us most in the vast ever changing space that is legal cannabis and hemp.

A little while back, my dear friend, coworker, and one of the brightest minds I know, David Heldreth, and I were in Las Vegas for MJ BizCon 2018, saw an opportunity to sit down with a number of people that were coming in for the convention that we might not otherwise have had the chance to talk to.

We invited them over to the AirBnb, which was, at one time owned by the man who inspired Joe Pesci’s character in the film Casino, and had some great conversations with some of the best and brightest in the industry.

One of the most compelling conversations we had was with Dustin Powers, also known as Future4200, who is truly a steward and pioneer working in his own special way to bring common sense, community, and personal values to the new frontier of legal cannabis and the ancient, yet timely frontier of land stewardship and permaculture.

Our conversation was long and organic, much like the man himself, so we figured with a long weekend in sight, many of you might find yourselves traveling and in need of a respite. Consider this our offering to you, along with our most sincere wishes that you find yourself with the people that matter the most this holiday season. Same goes with the rest of the year, too, it just doesn’t come with a Christmas pretext.

On that, as this conversation is an adult one, there are instances of mild profanity, and depending on your listening environment, you should be aware that there are occasionally naughty words. I also had a terrible case of laryngitis at the time, and the room we were recording in was a cement box that definitely has a bit of echo. You’ll be able to hear both, but that’s Vegas and that’s showbiz.

Alright, without any further ado, our interview with Dustin Powers.

We are here with the man himself, Future4200, Dustin Powers. Welcome. David Heldreth, as always. Thanks for coming the time to come on out, man. Appreciate it very much.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, there is hot stuff going on in Vegas this week so it was a good time to link up with you guys.

Ross Hunsinger:    Absolutely. MJ Biz, is that what brought you down?

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, pretty much. I didn’t come last year because I didn’t have anything to sell but this year I have been pushing the Good Life Gang pretty hard so I decided to make a trip out.

Ross Hunsinger:    Talk to us about Good Life Gang. You know we like Good Life Gang.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, everyone likes the Good Life Gang.

The Good Life Gang takes care of you. It’s a service, almost like a membership discount program. You sign up and you get discounts through all the different vendors through the cannabis processing field. On a deeper in, it’s like bait, so I can get all my hash friends into permaculture. That’s kind of like, long term plans for it but the model is good food, good hash, good people. Sign up, get deals through all the vendors, get SOPs you can present to your fire marshal, or if you are trying to get money for funding, setup. It’s a full suite that can get you set up on ethanol extraction, hydrocarbon extraction, sauce production, distillate production, [inaudible 00:03:16] remediation, et cetera, et cetera, down the line.

Then, we also do Gang events, which is where we have meetups on my farm, we get everybody some grass-fed beef and we shoot the shit.

Ross Hunsinger:    That’s awesome. That’s, I think, one of the things I am really appreciating as we go along in the legalization, normalization process, is seeing these people that are acting as shepherds and stewards of the scene and the culture. We clearly are affiliate members of the Good Life Gang. Huge supporters of all of your initiatives.

It’s kind of cool. We were talking with the guys from the Cannabis Chefs Union yesterday. Same thing, trying to show people how to navigate those waters. Gathering like minded people, bringing them all together, long term plans.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, definitely. Especially as the industry is, you know, tightening down and choking out, so, if you are small and by yourself it’s a lot harder to survive than if you are small and have a lot of people to work closely with because building those communities and those networks is how we can scale up together.

Ross Hunsinger:    Exactly. That’s, again, been a theme, I think. It’s been really clear for everybody that’s been involved, there’s life rafts that you can get on or other people with a party out that you enjoy hanging out with and can tolerate their company. Absolutely. It really is kind of cool.

It’s, like you say, it’s both stratifying pretty quickly… Or, has stratified pretty quickly, but it’s also… People are attritioning pretty quickly, too.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, definitely.

They come and go, right?

The Gang is derivative of the whole open source model that we had for Furture4200 and Future4200.com, which was all just an effort to continue on with the model that The Skunk Farm was designed originally, which is that if you provide open source information, you become that guy. I really realized this when we first bought our property out in South Bend, it was right before legalization.

When legalization happened, it was the first place where everybody flocked and they issued licenses immediately. All the initial licenses for production processing in Washington state were in little old South Bend. I got a job as the general manager with one of the facilities. We hired Skunk Farm as a consultant because they were the guys out there that were sharing all the information, you could fact check them right there.

Right off the bat it was like, look, you can give everything away and people will pay big bucks because now you are the guy. I have been playing that model all the way up to the Good Life Gang.

Ross Hunsinger:    I mean, it’s the guy that created the California Roll. He didn’t get any credit, he just kind of propagated it, and that’s a wonderful thing.

We talk about that a lot, too. David, TheYogiBear13 on Instagram, for those that don’t know. We are all about that open source information because again, the rising tide lifts all boats.

The more information that’s out there and the more information that we do exchange, the more it challenges you in the dominant paradigm that you function in. That’s what it’s all about, as far as I’m concerned.

David Heldreth:    Definitely. For anyone who doesn’t know, look up Sci Hub and search Google’s collar for anything that you want to know, and that’s just a good baseline. Everyone needs to do that, if you are trying to learn anything.

Also, Future4200 is, as you said, beyond the Good Life Gang as just a great source for anything cannabis related from cultivation on to the extraction, as you were mentioning. It’s just grown so much since you launched. How long has it been now?

Dustin Powers:    About six months.

David Heldreth:    Yeah.

Ross Hunsinger:    Has it only been six months? Dude, that’s crazy.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, we are at one million and three quarters unique views right now, and we are doing, like, 13000 a day.

Ross Hunsinger:    That’s awesome.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, it’s going.

Ross Hunsinger:    [crosstalk 00:06:42] It’s a really active community.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, it’s powerful and it’s friendly. It’s all volunteer moderation through the software that the forum is on. We started running into an issue with the CBD, where we were just getting spammed to the max. It doesn’t have really great spam control, and what they do is they encourage you to leverage your community to be… If your community is not going to control the spam, the maybe you shouldn’t a community. If you actually have something worth it, then the people that are there, they care about it, let them flag.

We set really strict flag protocols for CBD, that’s why you barely see any spam anymore because there are so many people that are active that, if you see spam, you are supposed to click the flag. Then, that… If you get two flags of spam, you’re automatically shadow banned until an admin comes in and cleans it up. That’s been working really well for us.

Ross Hunsinger:    Yeah, community top down. The whole way through. That’s a really cool stewardship of culture and, again, exchange of information. It’s pretty amazing.

Dustin Powers:    It helps us keep Future4200 free, which is the overall goal forever. There was never going to be any advertising there, it’s always going to be free. Part of that means that the community has to be involved in some of the moderation.

Ross Hunsinger:    I mean, that’s what… Not to seg into a deep conversation about society at large, but that’s been a recurring them, as well. Self policing, self management. All of it.

That, actually, I think ties into transparency, open source. It’s the whole, everything.

Dustin Powers:    Of course. That’s new wave, that’s the age of the… The information age. This instantaneous communication with each other. I see… People see me posting all the time, like, fuck the government or anarchy but that means that I don’t want somebody else governing over me. It means that I should be responsible for governing self. It’s not that there’s no government, it’s self Government because, look at these systems of positivity that I put forth and how successful they are.

We should… It doesn’t make any sense to run negative credit card businesses, they are not as successful as positively minded ones. Why wouldn’t you run it that way? That’s self regulation, right there.

David Heldreth:    Because, as you mentioned before, these cycles, before we got on the air with everybody. People see the short term cycles and they’re not seeing the bigger picture so they miss that model and then they inevitably fail. You have that cycle where people don’t see them failing, they seem them succeeding, so they replicate it.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah.

I understand that it’s difficult to… This model, this open source model. I gave away all my cards and a lot of people want to hold IP type because they are in this fear model where that’s all they have. If they don’t have that then what do they have in the industry? Then they are nobody again.

Where, when…. So, when I released the pesticide tech, it was who cares if I make a million dollars on this or zero dollars on it? I can always go back to the farm and grow more food. I’ll just give this away. That’s the Skunk Farm model, right? That just snowballed.

Now, every single time I get… Give all this stuff away, or enable ways for people to get stuff or build community. It always pays itself back tenfold. That positive forward wins.

Ross Hunsinger:    [inaudible 00:09:43] the guy that propagates that, right? There are people that come back and are like, what about this? Again, just pushing everything forward is –

Dustin Powers:    Right. And [inaudible 00:09:51] is mentioning towards the patterns. This is now… You are identifying successful patterns, which you can see these in nature, as well. Then you can replicate these.

Permaculture is a designed science that is based around identifying natural patterns and applying them to life. Not just agriculture, but to business and to friendships and relationships, and everything.

These things all intertwine completely.

David Heldreth:    Definitely. It’s… I think, as you said, it’s just seeing those patterns. Not even noticing them. I find that, inevitably, I doubt myself a lot of times when you start doing things. Learning to stop ignoring your innate ability to identify patterns is one of the hardest parts, to me.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, definitely.

Or, you are stuck in the wrong patterns, too. That’s the hardest one for people, it seems like. Where do I go? What is the step out?

I think that’s why permaculture is so often associated with agriculture because that is a lot of people’s first step because if I can start producing food on land that I own, well, then maybe I can stop worrying about all those other things in life that are dragging me down. Like a job, or, you know, being beholden to someone else.

Once you have that freedom, then you can much more comfortably live a life that’s positive forward and gives everything away because who cares? Right?

David Heldreth:    Like you said, freedom… It’s that freedom. The thing is, freedom. People thing about it as something that they’re entitled to but, it’s also in the mandates that you take care of yourself. The ultimate freedom and the ability to do that would also come with removing all these safety nets and things.

Dustin Powers:    For sure. You take risks. That’s, kind of –

David Heldreth:    That’s real.

Dustin Powers:    That’s why we have society the way it is now right? We have to wade through this let’s get safer and safer under the guise of freedom.

Ross Hunsinger:    That circles back to externalized regulation, right? That’s the whole… it’s all the same guys, it’s all connected.

Let’s talk about permaculture more, though.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah.

So, I got into it… I was driving all over the country doing crazy stuff in the medical market, we’ll call it. I started getting into listening to podcasts and I found this one called The Survival Podcast with Jack Spirko. His model is preparedness for when times get tough, or even if they don’t.

It’s all about… What’s the most likely thing that is going to happen to you tomorrow? Let’s plan for that. Is it going to be a meteor strike, or are you going to be hungry? Most likely, you are going to be hungry so we’ll put the meteor strike at the end and we’ll put hungry up near the top. Now, let’s plan for being hungry tomorrow.

We can buy food. That’s a good step. We can store food, that’s a better step. We could grow food, and that’s the best step. No matter what, we are going to be hungry tomorrow so we should put a good portion of our investments towards dealing with that one first. Let’s buy some land. Let’s grow some food.

He got me into permaculture as a design science for when you do buy the land. How can we produce the most amount of food with the least amount of long term work? What’s the most natural system? What kind of natural systems can we repeat so that these things can be overly abundant without us having to put a whole lot of influence into it down the road. Our input, as apex predators, as humans, is design.

We are here to guide nature through natural patterns of success and just tweaking little bits here and there. Not bull dozing the whole place and row cropping corn until everything’s dead. That’s stupid. We’ve evolved to be smarter for a reason and it’s to manage agriculture to broad scale in a way that makes it so humans should be working.

We should be doing all this grind and all this bullshit that we do. That’s not what we evolved to be really good at. You look at these ancient cultures and, like, the Native Americans? They were living life. They didn’t have jobs, they weren’t commuting to work, they were like, eating, fucking, and smoking weed. What else is there?

We’ve evolved into this. We now have 40 acres up on the coast and we spend a lot of time doing those three things. It’s a lot of fun.

Ross Hunsinger:    That is, that’s life happening.

Dustin Powers:    Oh, definitely.

David Heldreth:    I mean, speaking of the traditional culture, like you said, look how the Indians would use fires and also drive buffalo off cliffs. Why are… Once you have the food, use that, store it. You don’t need to do all these other things that we do.

I think we don’t even realize because we look back and we think America was what it is now, environmentally, at the time. It doesn’t even look anything like we think it does.

It’s also interesting to think of permaculture and how people are afraid to plant invasive… What they consider to be an invasive species and what makes a species invasive. Some of the rules that, it makes sense, because we are keeping things the way they are but why is what they are now natural?

Dustin Powers:    Right. Compared to when we got here. And we’re not even looking at what was 100 years before that. Was it significantly different?

Ross Hunsinger:    The spectrum of what gets passed between generations of actual import is pretty limited, right?

Dustin Powers:    Yeah.

Ross Hunsinger:    I recently saw that they found archeological evidence of a parrot breeding operation in New Mexico that predates what we thought to be breeding of parrots, when parrots entered North America, about 2000 years.

Not that the parrots necessarily were a story that needed to get passed between generations, but that’s a pretty significant step in the evolution and development of the parrot that we just lost because it was not a part that got communicated forward. There was no record for it.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, and all the other skills that go behind raising a bunch of parrots.

Ross Hunsinger:    Right?

Dustin Powers:    The common knowledge of what people were doing 2000 years ago is a lot less than, you know, intricate cages and you’re feeding them. You’ve got agriculture because you are feeding these parrots some kind of shit. You’ve got them all stacked up and you’ve got free time to tend to parrots that you’re breeding. Like, what? That’s pretty advanced.

Ross Hunsinger:    Absolutely.

It’s strange what, generationally, we pick up and leave behind.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah.

The plants… The farmer on the farm… The guy that I bought it from planted a large amount of bamboo, various types and sizes and all kinds of running and clumping. All the state agencies, the conservation district, the guy… I’m really good friends with the guy that runs it, he’s always giving me a hard time. He’s like you gotta get rid of that bamboo. It’s like it’s been in the same spot for 30 years and it’s grown a little bit bigger around. The only spot where it’s ran are the ones where we planted raised beds all around it and it’s run to the beds and shot up. That’s the only place I’ve seen it invasive.

It’s only invasive if you don’t use it for something valuable. We cut the chutes and fry them up and eat them. They’re good. Or I feed them to the animals. It’s awesome. Less work.

David Heldreth:    That’s exactly the same thing. Similarly what you are doing with your cows as well, would you like to explain that?

Dustin Powers:    Yeah.

We got the cows on an intensive, holistically managed system. Sorry guys. One of the downsides of the cannabis realm podcasting.

So, I’m not really a cattle rancher. I’m more of a soil tender, or maybe, a grass farmer every now and then. A real goal there is to… You want the cows to eat the top third of the grass and then you don’t want them to come back until that grass is grown 150 to 200 percent more. Now we have more of a solar collector.

Add on top of that, the cows have been applying pressure to the soil which opens up different areas for nutrients to come through. Also, the fertilizing as they go. Then, when we mix in the chickens, they spread that fertilizer out. The overall goal being that this grass starts growing faster and faster and we start sequestering more and more carbon into the soil while producing the high quality beef, eggs, chicken, and mushrooms. You know, the list goes on and on of all the things that are produced in this little system.

Just by managing the movement of cattle. Cattle are incredibly efficient at turning grass into nutrients but they are terrible at deciding… Maintaining the health of the pasture. In traditional, or natural systems, you look at the role of the predator, the apex predator. The wolf and the bison situation, or the lions and the elephant situation. The wolf… Where we are different from the wolf is that we have an intrinsic knowledge that we are what we are and that what we are doing has effects. The wolf just does it, and they do a lot better job than we do.

A lot of times, we overthink it. If we thought about it a little less than we might be able to do a little better, like the wolves. That system proves itself in the plains in North America, which are some of the most abundant, fertile soil known to man. When we showed up here, it was 15 feet thick of top soil. That was because of the wolf bison situation, along with the microbiological connection of the grass fungi that are controlling and suppressing the uprising of trees, for the most part.

That symbiotic system is one of the most productive known to man and can easily be leveraged. Even at scale, we are significantly more profitable in our small little scale per acre than your average cattle farm and we’re not trying real hard.

If I had several rows of fruits and nut trees, maybe some oaks and [inaudible 00:18:53], start mixing the pigs in there too. Get a fruit and a nut production, maybe some grapes off on the side. Now your income streams are diversifying so it doesn’t matter if beef prices crash next year because I’ve got all those eggs and all those other things we’ve talked about already. Now I am more stable and my income per acre has gone through the roof compared to a traditional farm.

You hear these guys saying the reason cattle farming is the way it is right now is because that’s where the most money is made. It’s like, nah, that’s not true. Small craft beef farmers make way more money because they are selling them to Mitch. Now, there is a lot to be said for some sort of middle ground. People argue, well, how do you get food to the poor people?

Really, the answer is reconnecting people to their food production. It goes back to the… We have poor people because we have work. If we didn’t have work and everybody was connected to this system and was just living, and fucking, and growing weed.

Ross Hunsinger:    There wouldn’t be any poor people.

David Heldreth:    Move people off the city space lifestyle and move people back to the [inaudible 00:19:47] lifestyle. That’s the problem. People just need to connect to the land as you said. It just… Most people don’t notice that. People think that they don’t have a green thumb so they just don’t even try and it just takes time.

It’s always that first step of just doing something and then you can do it. Which we were talking about a nursery earlier today. It just… That’s always the thing. Taking the leap of faith and seeing that you can do… That you can do pretty much anything.

Dustin Powers:    Man, I grew up in the suburbs of Tacoma, and I dropped out of agriculture school. Like, I failed my way to success here. It’s not hard. Now, you guys can come out and see how we’ve done it, learn from my failures and get it a lot cheaper. That’s part of the Good Life Gang.

David Heldreth:    It also, going back to what you were talking about, is that not only can you be more productive, but the quality of the meat you are producing… I’ve eaten it, and I just have to say it’s incredible. [crosstalk 00:20:34]. You have to try it, Ross.

It was some interesting stuff you guys were posting recently about the terpenes in pasture raised goats and cheese and beef, meat, things like that, that actually increases the terpene content, and I am sure other aromatics as well, in the meat and cheese of those animals versus those that are kept indoors or fed with hay or elephant grass.

It’s also better to eat.

Dustin Powers:    You are talking about some leading edge beef science right now, too. Traditional thought was that it was all about intermuscular marbling. The fat, the white fat that you see intermuscular, not that big piece that’s on the outside. Really mixed into it. That’s why when you look at waigu, it’s almost a complete Y, and that’s the far end of it compared to the prime, which is somewhere in the lower end, or select prime.

David Heldreth:    12 percent, right?

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, something like that.

On the topic of waigu, it’s something like 80 percent or something insane.

Definitely one small part of the whole intrinsic taste of beef. A lot of has to do with phospholipids that you can’t even see that are down in there, and some of the terpene contents. That is directly affected by the plants that the cows are eating. Yeah, you’ll get your Kaifo feed farm cow, and it’s eating corn, rounded off corn pellets and that’s pretty much it. Versus its… I don’t have grass fed beef, I have pasture raised cattle because they are eating grass and legumes, there’s clover all over the place. There’s veg, there’s random shit. They clear out the blackberries. They’re getting a very diverse diet and that nuances on the flavor of the meat.

David Heldreth:    Actually, one thing they are mentioning in some of the articles is that changing the gut bacteria of these cows, because that’s involved in the digestion and creation, can even further shift these profiles in meat and things. It’s just… I mean, these things are happening in our body, I’m sure.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, definitely.

As a good cattleman, maintaining… Or, measuring and watching the pH of your cattle urine is an important part of the process when you’re developing soil health initially. I don’t do much anymore, I found that they are way better at it than I could be so I just give them free choice of the minerals and they do their own thing, re-mineralize my field.

David Heldreth:    What about any hemp? Sorry to jump in.

Dustin Powers:    You know, I tried giving them hemp. Well, that’s not true. I gave them trim from the flower that I grew up on my other farm this year and they just refused it. The goats liked it.

I’ve heard that it’s better before it goes into flower, before it puts [inaudible 00:22:58]. But then –

Ross Hunsinger:    What about the mineral bar? I want to talk about the mineral bar.

You have a… you let the cows –

Dustin Powers:    A mineral bar, is that what you called it?

Ross Hunsinger:    Well, it is… It’s fun to call it, yeah. [crosstalk 00:23:10]. Other than a salt like, I mean?

Dustin Powers:    Oh, yeah, we’ve gone past that. It’s called Free Choice Minerals from Free Choice Enterprise.

Ross Hunsinger:    Shut up.

Dustin Powers:    I think we are using eight different… They’re not just individual, but they’re little blends. The idea being that the cow has an intrinsic knowledge of what the fields deficient in, in the minerals, and they’ll eat more of those ones. They piss out 90 percent of this expensive mineral that I give them but it becomes much cheaper and much more effective to re-mineralize fields through cows versus just trying to guess and spray and hoping it doesn’t wash off.

I learned that through Greg [Joobie 00:23:43], he’s a smart guy.

Ross Hunsinger:    That’s fantastic. I’m kind of mind blown. That’s really awesome.

Dustin Powers:    We can’t do a better job. That’s one of those systems, it’s one of those fine examples where we can’t do better than nature.

David Heldreth:    We’re missing those patterns.

Dustin Powers:    Yes. We could spend millions of dollars on a computer that can maybe use light art to analyze this and can kind of get close. There’s people doing that but my cow does it way cheaper so why wouldn’t I?

Ross Hunsinger:    That’s a wonderful hack into the natural systems things. That’s brilliant and I have to appreciate that deeply. [crosstalk 00:24:15].

David Heldreth:    You also mentioned a different mushroom biodiversity that you’ve noticed in your field as you’ve been doing that changeover and the cattle are moving. What changes have you seen?

Dustin Powers:    The one… We’ve got one side of the pasture intensively managed. The cows are on each little paddock for six hours and then they move. We’ve got [inaudible 00:24:31] latching, automatic gates that drop and they move off. They don’t come back for up to 180 days, depending on the season.

Then, we have a large field next to us which we’ve been putting up temporary fence and grazing based on how the pasture looks. So, on the left side it’s all structured out, it’s in a big grid. They’ll be in the same spot every single time. On this side, it’s wide open and we just use the mobile fencing. It’s just a single line. You can put up five posts across this line. It’s 10 acres, put up a couple of posts and then string a single little line that can follow how the grass looks, or where the grass looks best. We can follow it around and that’s where they’ll be at this time.

The one that we intensively managed is, by far, doing the best. It’s gotten the most action from the cows, the regrowth cycle is now four or five re growths a year versus the one side where we’ve been creatively grazing, we’re getting maybe three.

Part of that field, the guy hates. That gets, like, maybe one maybe two full cycles. It gets cut and then grows back and that’s it.

Ross Hunsinger:    I’m sorry, there’s a real identifiable pattern there.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah. More grass on this side. Less grass on this side.

That means more beef on this side. In turn, what’s driving this life, is the amount of… Is the fungus. The microbiological activity in the soil. You can go and dig in the soil and pull it. You’ll see earthworms on this side, and it’s live. You can tell the difference.

We’ve only been doing it on this property for about two years. Two and a half years in this spot. The effects are clearly evident. There’s no mushrooms in the hayfield. There’s very few in the one that I’ve been not grazing as heavily. The one that is heavily grazed, there is 10 different types, constantly fruiting. There’s still mushrooms. I took some pictures the other day of some crazy mushrooms that were growing out of the field, there.

They weren’t there when we started. You are definitely starting to see the effect. This gets into the carbon sequestration, as well.

David Heldreth:    That’s what I’m saying. You are just getting all that carbon in there. That’s what’s often forgot.

Even when you talk about cannabis growing, everyone talks about CO2, but that’s not the only source of carbon.

Dustin Powers:    Right. This is the fallacy of organic farming because you miss the whole point that you need to holistically plan systems that are not only going to give you a yield, but it needs to also take care of the Earth. The core principle of permaculture. Take care of the Earth first, then take care of your people, then get a surplus, then get rich on it.

If you do those first two things, you’re going to get rich. You’re going to have a massive surplus of whatever it is. You can’t just blanket it by saying well, the poison we are putting on here is not as bad, right? Well, your bandaid still sucks because the gaping wound is not going to be healed by any bandaid.

You gotta re-approach the situation. Modern agriculture is a failure. You know what it’s really good at? Overpopulating the Earth full of hungry, poor people. That is the failure. That’s not the right way to go about it.

Ross Hunsinger:    That are also out of shape.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah. That are… Well, in this country. The Africans, they’re pretty –

Ross Hunsinger:    Fair.

Dustin Powers:    The Indians? Any of those kids that have to go miles to get water. Yeah.

David Heldreth:    Work seems to be the lack of thing in our country. Not work, but actual work, the drive, the need to seek your food out, like you said.

There’s food, but it’s all high carbohydrate, which goes back to World War II and World War I, that time period, when we created this need for industrialization to feed the war movement, which answers [crosstalk 00:28:00]. With the pharmaceutical industry, as well.

We went from plants being the primary medicines, all medicines, to being these pills that you can take to the war and keep in a bottle and be good forever.

Dustin Powers:    Right. So you see a lot –

David Heldreth:    That’s the same thing with the food. So preservatives… We always forget that these were temporary measures for war, not life.

Dustin Powers:    Right. But we went with it. That’s the truth, that’s exactly how it played out. That’s a tough one.

Ross Hunsinger:    Talk to us about nutraceuticals because we’re talking about pills that make you last forever. You can –

Dustin Powers:    Pills that make you last forever, the ones right next to those. They’re the same spot, not the same effect.

Where to even begin on that one? My favorite one is still, by far, moto phenyl or modafinil.

Ross Hunsinger:    That’s what we were talking about earlier.

Dustin Powers:    That one was… Holy cow, that literally changed how my brain works with sleep.

David Heldreth:    Are you taking it now? Are you –

Dustin Powers:    I brought some with me, but no, I didn’t. I was going to take some before the podcast.

David Heldreth:    I haven’t actually tried it. I’ve been so curious about it. It’s one of those ones that I’m like, I need to eventually but I’ve never –

Ross Hunsinger:    Yeah.

Dustin Powers:    Awesome. It’s interesting. It’s really condition specific, so it depends on what you’re doing. A few little negative side effects the militaries have with them is people will go off the deep end and they get into some weird shit, all of a sudden be obsessed with something weird. I’m like alright, I quit, I’m out. I don’t want to go –

Ross Hunsinger:    I mean, set and setting is always a thing with any drug you take, right?

Dustin Powers:    This one’s a big one.

Ross Hunsinger:    Yeah.

David Heldreth:    The thing is, is you call it problem but it sounds like [inaudible 00:29:28] they are just in the military.

Dustin Powers:    Yeah, exactly. So it’s like –

David Heldreth:    Perhaps it’s working really well.

Dustin Powers:    It’s working better than the amphetamines, that’s for sure.

For me, I was able to just completely restructure how my mind uses sleep. Not in… I have no reservations about that probably being not a good long term health solution.

Ross Hunsinger:    I mean, also, congratulations on the birth of your recent child –

Dustin Powers:    Thank you.

Ross Hunsinger:    … I think that’s probably –

Dustin Powers:    Why I don’t get enough sleep.

Ross Hunsinger:    [crosstalk 00:29:57]. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a good synchronistic… Those are synergistic things to be developing.

Dustin Powers:    Honestly, man, he’s the chillest baby I’ve ever seen. He’s on his good little sleep schedule, life’s good.

Ross Hunsinger:    Awesome, man.

Dustin Powers:    Calm parents, calm baby.

Ross Hunsinger:    You’re just maximizing your home.

Dustin Powers:    … A goal of mine was to never have a kid unless I could actually raise him. Not just have children that you pawn off to the school system and pay for it. But that… I’m actually going to raise a child in a permaculture system. We’re going to be riding their bikes around all day. We don’t have no job. We have food growing.

Ross Hunsinger:    Thanks to you, once again, for tuning in.

The Forest For the Trees is a production of True Terpenes and the views expressed are solely those of the hosts and guests.

Our thanks to Adrian Waltham and Phantom for our intro and outro music. You can find their work on Soundstripe, and you can find us back here next week with the second installment of our interview with Dustin Powers.

From all of us at True Terpenes and The Forest For the Trees, be well and be grateful.