Awarepreneurs interview - Mathew Britt

Welcome to Awarepreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to make the world a better place through social entrepreneurship, and it costs you nothing. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Matthew Britt, and our topic is a new business model rooted in nature and regeneration. Matthew is driven by a lifelong passion for innovation, connection, and nature. He brings over 2 decades of entrepreneurial experience to his role at The Commonstead, a company redefining how we live, build, and thrive through sustainable, self-sufficient living technologies. At The Commonstead, Matthew is the Chief Execution Officer for the Food Biome And he also leads strategy and partnerships that empower homeowners, companies, builders, and communities to integrate smart regenerative systems for food, water, energy, and wellness.

The Commonstead is dedicated to accelerating the global shift towards resilient, abundant living by showcasing the world's best innovations in sustainability through education, technology, and demonstration. A former national champion hockey player turned entrepreneur— I was a lacrosse player, Matthew.

I played a little of that too.

People, people People say that lacrosse is like hockey on grass, right? Turned entrepreneur, Matthew has built and scaled multiple venues— ventures with a mission-driven focus. He is a part owner of Food Forest Abundance, a global movement designing and installing permaculture food systems that decentralize food and medicine production. He's also a founding partner of Unitree, a blockchain company aligning human energy with nature's regenerative Power through Land Back digital assets. Matthew is deeply committed to helping people reconnect with nature and reclaim self-reliance, blending advanced technology with timeless natural principles to create true abundance. He's also the co-host of Seeds of Abundance, a show that spotlights visionary leaders and entrepreneurs providing real-world solutions to the world's greatest challenges. Matthew Britt, welcome to Awarepreneurs.

Hey, Paul, thank you so much for having me here today. It's great to be with you. Happy 2026, and I look forward to bringing some value to your audience.

I'm super excited you're here. So, Matt, your path, it weaves through solar permaculture systems that help communities capture their own energy, food, and resilience. What early experiences or things that happened in your past kind of pulled you towards this direction? Especially at the intersection of self-reliance and shared abundance?

Well, I can say that in my mid-teens, I really started to question the story we've been told in many ways. And I think my first kind of real awareness came around the medicine world, you know, really pharmaceuticals. And I, I decided to really start diving into how the body can actually heal itself. And I believed so much more of our potential, the brilliance of our human design and our ability to heal itself. You know, I noticed that if I cut my finger, it healed, and I didn't have to do anything special for that to happen. And I figured, hey, if it happens on the outside, I'm sure there's things that going on the inside too, if we just provide the ideal nutrients for us to be our best. And that kind of kicked me off on my journey of questioning a lot of the official narratives, you know, not to dive into any conspiracies, but at the end of the day, I just figured that there's so much more potential that we're not necessarily aware of. And that happened at an early age for myself.

And then as I went through, you know, trying to be a professional level hockey player and ended up with multiple shoulder injuries, moving into the health and wellness world as a full-time profession, I, I did personal training for over a decade and I saw people who would come into the facility with aches and pains, mobility issues, on all kinds of pharmaceutical drugs. Told that they're gonna need to be on these things for the rest of their lives. And I completely changed that story for them by getting them moving well, by focusing on the power of their mind, their breath, by helping them with cleaning up their nutrition, eliminating processed foods, helping them with their water. And the power that was displayed from people who healed and how they would abandon these things that they have— some of them have been on for decades and were getting off of them. I just realized there's so much more capabilities within the natural systems and that it was really about me setting big picture goals around impacting billion-person problems. And I learned that very early by, you know, reading entrepreneurship books, by reading books like Think and Grow Rich and a lot of the Robert Kiyosaki stuff and John Maxwell and Jim Rohn and Les Brown and even Donald Trump books. You know, the, the more I realized that if we solve big problems and add value to the world in a bigger way, that there's really greater opportunity when it comes to value coming back to us. And it wasn't really about doing anything for money at that point.

I, I really learned that the more value I add to the marketplace, the more value comes back to me. So figure out ways where I can add the most value possible and then drive hard at those things. I developed an overarching mission for my life, which was to improve life, health, and prosperity. And that became kind of my guiding north star. And then it really allowed me to choose business that aligned with that and keep all the noise out of the way.

Beautiful. I love that. Keep the noise out of the way. You think there's a little bit of noise out there?

Absolutely. Distraction is everywhere.

Yeah, really. It really is, isn't it? So when you think about energy and water and food systems and the intersection of them, like you're doing a bunch of different things and we're going to unpack that. But if you go down to the core, what's happening there in your interest in energy, food systems and water, not just at the technical level, although I want to hear your thoughts on that, but even more so at the human level, what's going on there in 2026 as it— you're looking through it in your eyes on what's happening on those levels?

Well, those are basic human necessities: energy, water, food. If we have those things, we can create all kinds of other things. And unfortunately, we've been told a story that all of those things are scarce. I don't believe that story, and I just have to look out into nature to verify that. Nature is naturally abundant. Unfortunately, there's no money in abundance, right? If abundance is here for all of us, well, there's no— nobody making money on that side. So we are fed the story of scarcity. But my belief is we can switch all of that around by working in harmony with nature and by getting ourselves contributing to our natural environment in a way that we are currently completely turned away from because everybody's focused on making money, paying off debt, you know, getting in a situation where they trade time for dollars because they have to get the basic human necessities.

Not saying that money is not important because there needs to be a medium of exchange. However, the basics that all of us need to thrive exist already for us all to have. We just need to have the solutions put in place to take our power back. And that's really where I've dedicated the last decade of my life towards, is helping us reclaim our power, exposing people to what's truly possible, demonstrating what's truly possible, and then ideally inspiring people to take action on whatever level is right for them.

Beautiful. So, that background, that mindset, you put that together, and what that looks like now is that a large portion of your energy is going towards something called The Common Sted. Tell us about the— what is The Common Sted? Who's it for? And start to unpack it a little bit through an entrepreneur lens.

The Common Sted has been built really to provide a pathway for homeowners and business owners, but we'll focus on homeowners first. To be able to reclaim their power on every level with food, water, healing, education, energy. And from there, it's really about becoming self-sufficient on whatever level is right for them. We're not saying everybody has to completely go off-grid, as the term is often used. It's not about that. It's doing what you can, whatever is comfortable for you, to reclaim some of that power. So the Commonstead as a business has gone out and found incredible technologies, products, services that help people do that. And then we've built a model where we incentivize our, we'll call them affiliates.

We incentivize the people that work with us to go out there and spread the message to inspire other companies to start promoting and, and selling and, and becoming dealers. Of these great products, services, technologies, and also to personally talk to the people they know, residentially and commercial businesses, about integrating some of these things into their own homes or their own businesses.

Sounds great. And if I'm listening, I'm like, that sounds cool, but like drill down another level. What kind of products are we talking about here?

Yeah, we've got a number of different things. We started more on the energy efficiency side and water efficiency side, but we'll expand out into multiple biomes, is what we call them, as the year advances, getting into food, getting into energy production, on and on. But right now, the core things that the company has come forward with, something called a smart energy optimizer, a 20-plus-year-old technology that has been deployed in over 160,000 commercial businesses. The company we work with owns the original patent on the technology. And what this stuff does is actually correct harmonic distortion. It's a power factor corrector, and it's a surge protector. Now, those three things happen on a commercial level. In a residential home, we don't have to worry about power factor, but it does have the surge protection and the harmonic distortion correction.

Both of those, commercial and residentially, impact the overall electricity usage in a residential situation. 10% to 25% savings. Commercial application, 20 to 35% savings or more, depending on the number of inductive loads that a business is running. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, $16 billion a year is unusable electricity that is billed for. That is a massive amount of money that these utility companies are billing people of electricity that's not usable for them. This technology corrects that and gives them back that electricity, reducing those overall electricity costs. We have something called an AquaFlow valve, which— I didn't know this, some of your audience may— but a large portion of our water bill is air.

So we're being billed for air. Not totally for water. This technology compresses the air and actually will reduce your water bills by 25 to 30%. Substantial. We've got something called a multi-layer insulation. The product is called the Arctic Breathe— sorry, the Arctic Blanket, and it was developed originally by NASA. And when installed in the attic of a home, it does not have an R-value like traditional pink insulation does, or blown, or the spray foam. This has a reflection value of 97%, meaning 97% of radiant heat or cold from your attic is reflected away and no longer enters the house.

And when paired up with the Arctic Breeze, which is a solar attic fan that does 50 air exchanges every 24 hours, you're going to impact your heating and cooling costs by 40 to 60%. So those are a few of the products that we have currently come to market with. We do have a few more, but I'll keep it at that.

So you're helping people use less energy, use less water, and save money because they're doing that. So it's both good for your customers, they're saving money, but it's also good for the planet because they're using less water and less energy. Is that fair to say?

That is exactly fair to say. And then from there, once we've helped them save money, they can then take that money they were spending anyways and redirect it towards other things that help expand their savings and can help them on the energy production side or water production or getting into food systems, et cetera.

Beautiful. And talk to me, it's a very interesting model. Like there's other sustainability sites out there where you can go and order different kinds of insulation or different kinds of, you know, things that help you grow food or, you know, I saw a kit for like a chicken coop or your shed. It was like a solar kit with a small battery that goes on your shed to get lights to a place on a, on your property that maybe you don't have electricity installed already, right? So there's things like that on the web, but there's something very interesting about this model of having both very innovative products, but also having like real in-the-community advocates and people who are knowledgeable and passionate about this. Talk to us about that sync-up of like finding great products, but then also syncing it up with a network of people who are incredibly passionate about sustainability.

Yeah, and you bring up some great products. Those may end up being a part of the Commonstead ecosystem. But what we have done is not only are we sourcing great products and technologies and services, but we're now incentivizing and empowering, teaching and training people who align with this how to go out there into the market and be advocates, passionate advocates, as you say, to educate and expose the open-minded individual to the possibilities that they often don't know exist. Now you say, you know, there's lots of things out there. 100%. The big difference is most of the time people have to go out and search for it, and lots of times they get overwhelmed and they don't know where to start. So they make choices around often not starting, because an overwhelmed or confused mind Usually will do nothing. This now gives us a way to get people who are already interested, excited, passionate, the ability to get themselves a great knowledge foundation, a way to communicate to their network, people they know, they like, and they trust, inspire those people they're talking to to be open-minded, to learning about something that could benefit them in their life, and we incentivize our affiliates to do so.

It's a really interesting model, and it's both innovative, and I imagine there's some potential challenges there, right? So first of all, when did you start The Common Sted? Like, like, where are you on your time horizon?

So we kind of launched The Common Sted back in August of last year.

Yeah.

And as far as the time horizon, you know, we're now, uh, January, uh, 2026, and 8 months in or something like that. Yeah, quick math. August is the 8th month, so no, we're, we're 5 months, 5 months in, 5 months, 5 and a half months into the, the business model. I guess 6 and a half because we did start at the beginning of August. And as far as, you know, the expansion of it so far, we have almost 800 inspired affiliates on board. We've got dozens of resellers, companies that align with a certain product, right? So let's go back to that multi-layer insulation. Well, so we do two things here. One, we incentivize our affiliate network to go out and find dealers, resellers of those technologies.

So think about that Arctic blanket. Well, what industries could adopt something like that and integrate it into their existing business model? Well, obviously an insulation business, right?

A home builder company, right?

An HVAC company, a home builder, a home renovator. Here's a big one I like— roofers. Uh, yeah, right? So if, if Matthew as a Commonstead affiliate knows Frank's Roofing, And I inspire Frank to be open-minded and learn about the Arctic blanket. Frank realizes, hey, this is something that I could add to my existing business offering. I can bring this new potential revenue stream into my business. I can go talk to all of my old customers and potentially upsell them on making their home more comfortable and saving money. I can try to attach it to all of my new projects going forward.. And because it's not a skilled trade, meaning someone doesn't have to go get a, you know, multi-year education in order to roll out a blanket in the attic.

Literally, that's what it is. They're rolling out a blanket across the beams, cut around the trusses, staple around the edges where the soffit is. And that blanket is down there and makes this impact. A general laborer can do this. So now they also can extend their working season. I live in Canada. The roofs are covered in snow. No roofers are out there today doing roofs, but they would put somebody in the attic at a customer's house and help make that home more efficient.

And it's also a differentiator for Frank's Roofing. So we, we empower our affiliates to go talk to commercial businesses that could adopt the products or technologies into their business offering. And then from there, we also teach and train those affiliates how to go out and sell these things to their warm market, residentially or commercially, to adopt them.

Beautiful. Now, this, this business model, I'm real curious about, and I think our listeners would be too. So it's common in some spaces. I have heard most commonly used in like a digital product space where you'd have an affiliate kind of business model, but like a physical sustainability-oriented product, not common, at least in my experience. And I've been doing this for 18 years, so, you know, I have a little bit of experience. How did you land on this business model, and what are some of the pros and the cons of going about business in this way?

So the, the, the landing kind of is the meeting of two different people. So my partner Charles Thompson, him and I met through a company called Powr, P-O-W-R. They built really one of the world's first decentralized solar platforms where at first it was kind of like the Uber of solar, a gig economy type of a business where anybody who wanted to be involved in the solar industry was given the ability to do so without having to have a full-time job where they could participate by being a lead generation source. They could participate by actually being more involved in kind of coordinating deals, or they could learn how to be a closer in the business. So both Charles and I worked with that company, Charles for over a decade. I brought them to Canada and actually expanded their market internationally, worked with them for 3 years in the Canadian market, and that's actually When I first brought them here, I was more on the sales side. But quickly after we got into the market, the first partner that we were working with to do the fulfillment decided to pack up and go focus on the United States. So I did what any smart entrepreneur would do with zero experience in the industry.

I started my own solar company. So we handled power projects, and at the same time, I had to get very innovative on working in solar in Canada because we're easily a decade behind the United States. And that gave me a chance to think outside the box. And instead of doing business the way everybody else was trying to do it here, I started focusing on home builders. So I actually became a member of the Canadian Home Builders Association's Net Zero Advisory Council, worked with home builders across the country. My company actually worked with NRCan, which is the National Research Council of Canada writing the net zero guidelines. And we focused on having home builders implement solar and storage and other technologies to help their business differentiate themselves in the net zero movement. At the same time, once that— actually in 2020, I had to close that company down.

I ended up being hired at Power as their head of business development. And I spent 2 years there building their installer network across 23 US states. Helped them build their installer services, which was kind of the backend where once we brought on a new partner, we would get them trained. We'd handhold them through setting up and receiving their first projects, project management, all the stuff. And then I helped them launch their roofing division. In 2022, I came across Food Forest Abundance. I ended up trying to initially pair those two businesses together, but the CEOs, after speaking, it didn't align. But as I got to learn more about what Food Forest Abundance was up to, I realized there was a much greater opportunity for me here to make an impact around the world instead of just the 23 US states.

That's what got me into the food space. So now I had this renewable energy experience. I got into the food space with permaculture. Which literally just means permanent agriculture. And from there, we've now done business in 54 countries, over 1,000 design and builds. But what really led to the next evolution of that was, as I was talking to thousands of people about producing food at home, I continued to bump up against two main issues. One, when people thought about it, they either thought of the annual garden, that mom or grandma, grandpa, or even they used to keep. And they say things to me like, I don't have a green thumb.

Or they would see a monoculture farm in their head and they would say things to me like, I'm not a farmer. And it didn't matter how good I was with my words, I couldn't change the image in their head. So we started to send people to walk through a permaculture food forest. Duh, right? Give them a chance to experience it. And 100% of the time, the image switched, they got it, they were inspired, and they would adopt it into their own life in some capacity. So that said to us, we need way more demonstration locations. And then as we were talking about the demonstration locations, we realized we're missing a massive opportunity if we only focus on the permaculture. And why don't we begin showcasing as many different things as we can to help people be more self-sufficient? And that led us to create at Food Forest Abundance a second layer to that business model that we call a Freedom Farm Academy.

A Freedom Farm Academy, to keep it really simple, think about it like an Apple Store of self-sufficiency. It's a physical homestead location that has implemented a variety of different things that is open to the public. It's a business of demonstrating real-world solutions to people so that they can go and see them, try them, taste the food, watch the energy production, watch the water systems, on and on. And then again, decide to implement those into their own life in some capacity. So we've now got 25 Freedom Farm Academies that have been purchased. We've got 2 in Canada, 1 in Ghana in Africa, 1 in Thailand, and then the rest are throughout the United States. But here's the thing that happened. These are construction sites.

They're big projects, lots of work. So although I was forming great partnerships with companies, I wasn't able to drive a whole lot of sales revenue because there wasn't a lot of them open. The people who had bought the Freedom Farm Academies, although some of them have business experience, some of them just really were much more in line with, I want to be a solutions provider. So we were bumping up against, again, roadblocks. Well, fast forward a little bit. Charles Thompson, as I mentioned, he ended up buying a food forest from us and actually invested in a Freedom Farm Academy. But through that, him and I kind of parallel to each other were thinking about how could we do something that made more people learn about and have access to these things that are available that they often don't know exist. And Charles went on and created the idea of the Commonstead, started pulling in products, technologies.

He's got 30 years in the energy space. So he founded the business, started assembling the groups of people, and brought me into that. And that's how we've ended up here at The Commonstead today. I started with the company in August, right at the start of it. But yeah, here we are. That's kind of the backstory.

Very cool. So I have a ton more questions for you, Matt. I want to hear about the balance of your energy and Food Forest Abundance now compared to The Commonstead, where both these businesses are going. And some of what you see happening in the space that others who are either already in food systems or energy, renewable energy, what you see is coming, because this is a time of a lot of change in many spaces, including in the United States, especially in the US with some changes in, you know, government funding and things like that. There's been a lot of changes in the past year in these spaces and renewable energy cutbacks. So anyway, I have lots of questions for you. Before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor.

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Welcome back everybody. I am here with Matthew Britt and we are talking about a new business model rooted in nature and regeneration. And before the break, Matthew, you were telling us about food forest abundance. And one of my questions is, again, I'm just like this super gritty social entrepreneur because I want our listeners to get better at it so they can help more people and have more sustainable things go in the world and have a better life themselves, make more money. These two businesses. So right now, as we're recording this in mid-January, early January 2026, what's the balance of your time in each of the businesses at this point?

So just so we're clear, Food Forest Abundance will be a partner of The Common Sted, so they're complementary to one another. So we'll have our teams inside The Common Sted be able to talk about and sell and promote Food Forest Abundance. I still put an energy there every day. I'm still talking to people about it all the time. My balance overall in energy at the moment would probably be more like a 60/40 split between the Commonstead, 60%, Food Forest Abundance to the 40%. What we're trying to do at Food Forest Abundance is actually kind of reshuffle our organization, rebuild it. We've got now 5 years basically under our belt come Earth Day of this year, and we've learned a lot. We've had a lot of ups and downs during the 2020, 2021, well, I guess 2021, 2022, as things were going with, you know, the COVID stuff, there was a lot of people really looking for other solutions.

So we had a big spike and now things have kind of settled down. People, you know, were quick to have amnesia, so it's kind of slipped their mind. So we've just had to innovate. We're putting together a whole lot as far as new offer. We put a lot of attention into the Freedom Farm Academy business model. Making sure we're finding the right people to be Freedom Farm Academy owners instead of just having it open to anybody who wants to be one. And then from there, we're actually looking at raising some capital so we can expand this in a great way. We'd love to start developing more of our potentially own locations or helping fund the development of others where we can be a bit more involved.

Yeah. Yeah, you, you read my mind. I was gonna ask you about capital. We're gritty entrepreneurs on this show. People always want me to know, okay, how'd you get your startup capital, right? So you're talking about maybe doing a raise going forward, or you are going to do a raise going forward. Talk to us about how you got started. Were these bootstrapped or friends and family or—

Yeah, it was all bootstrapped. All bootstrapped. Yeah, we did everything bootstrapped. We had a little bit of investment actually from one individual at one point that kicked it off a little bit further and then some others along the way. Have kicked in small, small amounts of money, but we're kind of in a, in a rebuilding phase. Yeah.

Yep. So you're looking at doing a raise and do you have anything you feel comfortable sharing about that?

No, not, not right now.

Nope. Yeah. Okay, cool. So talk to us, let's go back to the context. You were talking about 2020 and like people were in lockdown and gardening went through the roof, right?

Like totally homesteading went through the roof.

Yeah. Homesteading and podcasting, right? And you do both. So talk to us a little bit about like some of the more recent changes in 2025. We saw a lot of changes both in the renewable space across the world. But again, I live in the US, pretty major changes in terms of policy and funding, the EV tax credit going away, you know, funding for solar projects and wind projects getting cut and clawed back and things, a lot of solar and renewables not just in the US, but certainly in the US, have seen some pretty major landscape changes. Like, have you— has that affected you guys at all? And, and if so, like, how have you navigated that?

No, it hasn't affected us, and our thought process is it's actually fantastic because now it has to be sold based on the real value that it provides, not on getting a tax credit. Solar is valuable, right? We're We're being hit with energy every day. Why are we not collecting and utilizing that? That goes back to the abundance. There is an abundance of energy that we have available to all of us. And you look at nature, that's really what nature is doing, is collecting that energy and turning it into productivity. Right. So we think it's a good thing. We think that it's wise for us to collect as much energy as we possibly can, whether that's through solar, whether that's leveraging wind, geothermal, hydro, you know, all of those things make sense.

It's a combination. It's not one solution. And then at the same time, we think it's wiser for us to first utilize what we have already more efficiently, and then the production becomes the next part of the conversation after we've utilized what we already have more efficiently. Which is why, although both Charles and I and a number of other people that we work with have experience in the solar energy space, We're not most excited about that. I'm actually happy to not be leading with solar anymore, although I still do sell solar and storage. I now lead with energy optimization. Let's utilize what you currently have more efficiently. Let's reclaim that 10% or 15% or 12% or 20%, whatever that is that we can recapture By correcting the harmonic distortion at your home or at your business.

And then from there, with those savings of anyway money, we can then use the solar or the wind or the geothermal, whatever, as the next purchase with your anyway money. Beautiful. I love that. And now I need a smaller solar array. Right? If, if my energy consumption has dropped by 15%, now I need a 15% smaller solar array.

Right? Makes a lot of sense. One of the things that I'm talking to more people about in the renewable space, Matthew, especially as these technologies get better, right, is how do I make sense? So, so we've been talking about as an entrepreneur level, but think with me from a customer's perspective, like, is— should I be looking at the water, you know, optimization product that you have first, or the blanket, the Arctic blanket? Like, sometimes people— there's so much innovation going on, and there's so many products and possibilities of how to invest. Do I get that solar system? Should I get the Arctic blanket? Am I best with the limited amount of funding I have to do something in the realm of sustainability and also thinking about trying to be efficient and save money, all— if that's my goals as a, as a customer, as a consumer, how do I start to make sense of such a wide variety of products out there?

I would definitely start with optimizing the energy that I'm already using. Yeah, I would be thinking about how can I become more efficient in that way? Yes. I'd also be thinking about if I have available capital, to making my home a better building envelope. So I'm leaking less of my heat or leaking less of my cold out into the environment and vice versa. Right from there, you know, adding things like the Arctic blanket in. And then again, once you have done those things on the energy efficiency side, then start thinking about the energy production side. Yeah, because if your home is not energy efficient, If your systems, your building envelope is leaking, well, you are putting on a larger solar system than you need to just keep up with what you already have.

Great suggestion. Thanks for that. So let's go back to this as an enterprise again, two businesses, very interrelated. Food Forest Abundance, The Commonstead. Like, again, with this business model, I like to ask people about their team size. How many people work at, or are— like, when you think of your team, because of this business model, I imagine you would have a different answer than a lot of businesses about who your team is, right? Is that fair to say? Like, so how do you think about your team? Are there layers, and who's in those layers? Just to kind of give a sense if I'm a gritty entrepreneur and I'm trying to get a sense of the scale of what's happening in these two businesses, how do you think about that question of scale and team?

With Food Forest Abundance, there's 5 of us, and then we have access to more designers. There's a lot of permaculture designers out there that we can call upon to do design work and complement the internal team. With The Commonstead, we have significantly more than that, but no, we're 15 of us-ish that each basically are responsible for a biome. We call it our council. Yeah. So we've got a council of people that are each responsible for a certain vertical and everybody is actually a chief execution officer, not a, not a CEO, like the general sense. We're thinking about it like. Get shit done.

Yep. Right. So I'm in charge of the food biome. We haven't rolled that all out, but I'm still involved in the Commonstead because I'm helping on business development, bringing in new affiliates, bringing in new resellers and partners, et cetera. Same with everybody else on the council, whether their biomes are live or not. We're all participating in growing the model. Yeah. And every one of us has an ownership piece.

So we're not being driven by our immediate compensation. We're building the value of the business model. Yeah. And we have a pathway to immediate money, but it's not driven by Matt's on this exorbitant salary. Everybody's on this exorbitant salary who's in charge of their biomes. No, we have a pathway to earn revenue, but we're benefiting on the long term from the value we're building up inside the business.

That makes sense. And so, you're in charge of the food vertical. What are some of the other— you call it a biome, you're chief get shit done officer in the food space, right? What are some of the other verticals that you have these CEOs in?

Water. Energy, training and systems and development, mindset and personal development. We'll have privatization, wealth, wealth creation. So ways to teach our people how to then take the money they're earning here and reinvest into other cash flowing assets and et cetera. Yeah. So like it's, it's, there's 12 of them. I don't have them all off the top of my head right now, but there's no, that's health. Health.

Health and healing. Okay.

Right.

Yeah. So there's a number.

Awesome. Yeah. So you've been an innovator for a long time in this space, Matt, about food systems and energy and sustainable living. Big section of our listeners. I'm the co-founder of NM Climate, our clean tech and climate tech ecosystem building organization here in New Mexico. And there's a lot going on in New Mexico right now. You and I should talk. We have a sovereign wealth fund that is one of the largest in the world, and advanced energy is one of the state economic development department's area of concentrated growth, one of 4 buckets.

So anyway, we should talk.

We have 2 Freedom Farm Academies there. Yeah, there you go. In New Mexico.

You'll be hearing more from New Mexico, I guarantee you. But because of that history, just my personal experience and bias in my network, we have a lot of listeners in the climate innovation and community building space. So for those folks who've been passionate about this and they're thinking about how do I— let me rephrase the question. If you had one or two critical insights you could share with the younger version of yourself who was maybe 5 or 10 years earlier on your kind of climate, renewable, sustainable solutions entrepreneur journey, what would you coach yourself if you went back 10 years?

Keep that network growing. Keep, keep that open mind. Keep expanding your knowledge base. You know, look for complementary people because that network is your most valuable. You know, the more people you know, and I guess even more importantly, the more people who know you, the more opportunity comes your way. And never put yourself in a situation where you feel like you know it all, because a know-it-all— what, what I've learned is the more I've learned, the more I realize how little I actually know. And I've been a voracious learner since I left school. I have learned way more out of school than I ever learned in school.

Way more. So that is definitely very important in my opinion, to grow your network, make friends, show your friends what you do, stay their friends, and then at the same time, be an open-minded and hungry learner. Because the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. But also the more you know, the, the better you are at distilling and communicating out the values that you can bring into the world.

Beautiful. Those are great suggestions. I couldn't agree more. So when you look down the road 5 years from now, what do you think the CommonStad and FFA look like? And both independently and maybe how they're syncing up together. But yeah, dream with us a little bit 5 years down the road.

Yeah, so my intentions with Food Forest Abundance and this is the big picture, is a localized, decentralized, poison-free food supply. My goal is 10,000 Freedom Farm Academies around the world. I also believe that we can make the adoption of the permaculture food systems something that becomes a near-zero cost, and Again, an audience who's business-minded would go, "Well, that's stupid. There's no money in there." I agree, but I'm not doing it for the money. Yes, I make money, but it isn't about the money. It's about the impact. And I want to leave the world a better place for generations, not just for my children, but for generations. And as I get— if we're visioning, if I get 100 food forests installed in a community, and I leverage artificial intelligence for design work, I can drive down what used to take hours of human labor to near minutes, drive down the cost, make it more accessible for people.

And then as I have those, let's say, 100 food forests, that which, by the way, naturally are nurseries, and I can inspire those 100 people each to donate some plants to the new food forest that's going to be planted at the 101st location. Now I've eliminated the cost of plant acquisition. If I can inspire those 100 people to each donate 2 hours of their time, or let's say their families, and that 100 turns to 125, I've got 125 people who each donate 2 hours of their time to build out that new food forest. Now I've eliminated the labor cost. So I've taken something that could have been tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars and driven it down to a near-zero cost. That's a tipping point where we can now start to reach mass adoption. Am I going to have food forests in every city? By the tens of thousands the next 5 years? No. But what I can do is unlock that vision of the future by inspiring those who do bring them into their lives as solutions to pay it forward.

And I can take technology that exists today, although we have brilliant permaculture designers on our team right now, The fact of the matter is eventually, and not long in the future, artificial intelligence is going to be significantly smarter than them. And that AI can learn about every single plant that grows from a perennial perspective, whether it's a food-producing or a medicine-producing or fiber-producing or whatever that is. It can learn about every single climate zone, what plants are native to that climate zone, what plants could be from another country but could work in that climate zone and have already adapted into this new environment. It could design a system knowing soil conditions, weather patterns, on and on, better than any human ever could. It could have all the knowledge about permaculture and hugelkultur and electroculture and agriculture, every single thing. It could learn all about how to heal soil, how to create a healthy soil microbiome, and just do a better design. So now I've driven down my design costs, I've sped up the time, I've made it accessible to everybody. I've now unlocked the way that the people who already have food forests can contribute to the new ones, and then I can find a way to reduce the labor costs by inspiring people to contribute.

And now I've got a system that could be mass adopted and essentially driven down to a near-zero cost.

Pretty exciting. Yeah.

And then I've tacked on Unitree, which is the blockchain tokenized system of actually having a token that's backed by a real world asset. So those people who contributed their plants, who contributed their labor, instead of being paid in fiat currency, US dollar bills, Canadian dollar bills, whatever it is, that's continually losing value. I can then instead have them pay in Unitree, paid in Unitree tokens. And as that land becomes more productive, those project-specific tokens have a solid value to them because that land has value, that land produces value, those tokens have value. And then it's a medium of exchange.

Yep. Well, that's really inspiring, Matt. Matt, I could hang out with you all day. I know you're busy. I know our listeners are busy. As we start to wind down today, is there something we didn't get to that you think would be really helpful for our social entrepreneur, climate-obsessed folks to hear about? Or is there something you want to leave them with as we start to say goodbye?

Well, I guess the, you know, I didn't touch on the Commons yet as far as a vision of where that's going. You know, the past 6 months, we've already got almost 800 people. I'm sure we crossed 800 today that are already on board with us and growing. I think if anybody wants to make an impact and doesn't know where to begin or has already been in this space and has a big network of people who are open and aware of what's possible, the Commonstead could be a great home for you to add more value to that organization and, and spread the movement. Of adopting solutions that give us our power back, right? It's time we take our power back. It really is. Right now we're being controlled, right? We have so many utility companies that have monopolies. I was talking to people today in Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada.

They've got one utility. That utility has a monopoly on that market. She was telling me that there are Facebook groups galore with people complaining about all of the outages, all of the power surges, all of the costs going up, all of the problems that having a monopoly makes. Well, we've got solutions to help them save on that money, but also to start taking their power back in other ways. So it's time for us to do that. And the more of us who do, and then the more of us who share what we're doing— don't keep it a secret. Talk to other people, inspire them. We need inspired action, right? We, we've probably, a lot of us have heard the statement, it's a small group of people who can change the world.

A small group of committed people who can change the world. Your audience, if they've been following along with you for significant amount of time, they're committed. And if they're listening to your podcast over and over again, they're committed. So we need to collaborate. The whole Commonstead business model is collaboration over ego and competition. If we're going to solve some of these real-world biggest problems, like we still got to remember, we still have people that don't have food every day. They wonder where their next meal is coming from. We have people that don't have energy.

They're still wondering, when am I going to be able to turn on my lights? Right? That should not be happening. Abundance is everywhere, but we need that collective group of people who are aware of this to continue to work together instead of seeing each other as competition, which is one of the most beautiful things the Common Set has done. We have companies who normally would see each other as competition now collaborating. They're working together to bring great solutions to the marketplace. The company that owns the smart energy optimizers is promoting the Arctic blanket. Wow, that doesn't happen often, right? So we're looking at the world in a different way. Collaboration over competition. Lose the ego.

The common stead stands for the common greater good for humanity. It isn't about me. It isn't about you. It's about what all of us can collectively do to make a positive impact.

Beautiful, Matt. Matt, I'll be sure to put the Food Forest Abundance site and the Commonstead site in the show notes. If somebody wants to get ahold of you, is there a better way to do it through those sites? How can people reach out if they want to talk to you?

Yeah, I would give them my direct email address, matthew@thecommonstead.com. They can reach out to me there. They can also find me on LinkedIn. But yeah, send me an email. I'd love to connect with people. If they want to connect to me on LinkedIn, I'd love to connect with you there. I think today one of the greatest things technology has done for us is given the small person a voice, and we never know how many people are hearing us and that impact that we could make. So, you know, let's speak up, let's collaborate, let's communicate, let's network, let's grow.

The, uh, the impact we can together.

Thank you so much for the work you do and for telling our listeners about it today.

Thank you, Paul. It was great to be here, man. I really appreciate you, the time and dedication you've put into making an impact in multiple ways, not just through your show, but the things that you're doing in your local community in New Mexico. And I look forward to building a great relationship with you too, and hopefully added some good value to your audience here today.

I look forward to it. So listeners, thanks for listening in. And if this episode stirred something in you, please share it. I know you know someone who could benefit from Matt's message. Also a reminder, if you're ready to develop a strategy for your impact business, whether you're navigating uncertainty or stepping boldly into a new phase, you can learn more about my services at paulzellizer.com. Until next time, please keep working for positive impact and Letting your values guide your business.