Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So what comes after collapse? What does sustainable even look like?
I'd say it looks like a cell. Not a corporation, not a conglomerate, a cell. A living, breathing, coherent unit, just like your body has 30 trillion of them. And every cell, it has a membrane that protects flow and it has a nucleus that centers. Meaning I call those node A and node B pretty simple. Node A is the outer membrane, the metabolic skin of the system.
It's where waste becomes input, where decay becomes designed.
It's compost and it's chemistry and it's enzyme powered bioalchemy.
The regenerative carbon and human nutrition cycle starts at the compost pile. This episode of Roots to Fruits is produced and distributed by Be Connected, a social media management firm in northeast Wisconsin.
Welcome to episode three of Roots to Fruits. Joining me once again to bring it to life, my good fellow defender of the planet, Chris Shaffer.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: So happy to be here and to help save the world one package at a time.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: I love it.
So you ever get the feeling that we're all still working inside a blueprint that's already failed?
That no matter how good the team, or how green the initiative, or how powerful the pitch deck, something underneath is just unstable, perhaps even brittle.
That's because we're still running on an old code, the extractive code. The one that taught companies to grow by taking.
That taught people to perform strength instead of metabolized truth. To silence grief instead of compost it.
That taught systems to scale output and outsource healing.
I think it is safe to say that individual, team and organizational hydration is as outsourceable as one's central nervous system.
In episode one, we introduced soft power as a different kind of force. One rooted in connection, not control.
And as a model for understanding our modern day grief.
The invisible physics of what holds people, systems and civilizations together, or hydrogen bonding. And the never recognized but always in plain sight role that the tiny soft hands of water play in life itself.
In episode two, we walked the nested loop of that breakdown. From individuals closing their internal valves just to survive, to teams drying out in the absence of real feedback. To organizations hornifying in the name of performance.
To industries procreating and defending, but forgetting how to heal and how to repair.
And what we saw.
What happens when that trauma crust forms on the culture's fascia and it stops flexing? Then comes hysteresis. That point elastic recovery is lost.
And then ultimately collapse.
But here's the twist. Collapse isn't failure. Collapse is signal. It's the moment the system stops pretending the Moment it says, I can't keep holding this shape anymore.
And in that moment, it is terrifying. And as terrifying as it seems, this is where real design begins.
Everyone starts with opened hydration valves because the system we inherited were built for extraction.
But the systems we're about to build, they're built for bonding.
They're regenerative, hydrated, signal sensitive, soft, but definitely not weak.
Today we reveal the coherence blueprint, the model that comes after collapse. This isn't theory, it's compost.
It's the slow formation of the next system, rooted in trust, tuned by feedback and ready to metabolize what the old world could not.
So if you've been sensing the fracture, this is when real design begins.
We don't build in spite of collapse.
We build with what's left when all the dehydrated valves flip back to open out of survival necessity.
When we get past the insignificant differences that polarize us, when we bond more softly to build more strongly.
But what if we build it before the existing system collapses?
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Two things that I really feel I took from that. One, I really like the word bond print. To me, that makes it very human and relatable. And the other thing that resonates really from throughout each of the series is this whole connection of how there's power in softness and that that strength is adaptive and it's attuned to different signals.
One of the things that you mentioned was compost and, and collapse. But what continues really to be circling and what I hear underneath is, is grief and our need to compost that grief. Can you explain that a bit more?
[00:05:34] Speaker A: I know it's. It's something that catches your attention when you hear compost grief.
So I think it is important to. To really help you understand what that word means and how we're defining it. So, first off, grief isn't sadness. Sadness can be associated with it, but it's better understood as blocked flow.
It's the energy of what we never got to move.
The truth that never got spoken, the love that never got returned.
The yes. We didn't say when the moment was right.
And the body remembers that backlog, but it doesn't know how to release it, so it locks it down.
And that's what I mean when I talk about the plumbing valves, these energetic dichotomies inside us, shaped by genetics and certainly by experience.
Trust versus fear. Express expression versus suppression. Curiosity versus certainty.
Every time we're in a dehydrating environment, our system quietly turns certain valves toward the closed position, and eventually they Close. And over time, they harden.
This process is to preserve what little hydration we have left. That's why it happens over time. We become brittle from it. Our fascia locks, our creativity starts to shrink. Our nervous system flattens. That's the definition of grief. It's not the big cry, the long silence. It's what happens when hydrogen bonding stops inside the emotional body.
And just like hornified cellulose, once those bonds lock, even water has a hard time getting back in.
That's why we say compost that grief. Don't bury it, don't bypass it, don't shame it. Actually metabolize it, turn it, aerate it, let it decompose so something new can root there. Because grief is mass we haven't released. And if we don't, it will collapse us from the inside.
But if we do, it becomes the soil of coherence.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: So really, grief in this context is also regenerative. And I say that because regenerative, to me, is a very healthy process.
You also mentioned energetic valves. It's helpful if you can provide more detail on that. And also the plumbing metaphor.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Yeah, because I use it thinking everybody gets what I'm saying, but maybe they don't. So you can think of the human nervous system kind of like. Like a complex plumbing system, not in a mechanical sense, but in terms of flow. Flow of truth, flow of trust, flow of connection, expression, emotion. All of it depends on these valves. And every one of those valves is built around a discernible dichotomy, a choice the body makes consciously or not, in response to its environment. Again, a very common 1. Trust versus fear.
Expression or suppression, presence or disassociation, confidence or doubt. These are just abstract qualities, but they're real. And they have felt tensions. And your body knows how to close a valve. When the environment feels unsafe or dehydrated or hostile to truth, you don't choose it. This is how you adapt to it. So our dichotomies kind of stack relative to. To how hydration and energy flows within us and our own genetics and experiences. So everyone's plumbing stack is different, but the more valves that close, the more pressurized and dense our system becomes, until eventually that. That pressure just isn't manageable anymore. And you. You just go quietly, you. You disconnect. And that's how that grief builds. So grief is this the cumulative stresses from the environment. It's not sadness. It's just a backlog of all of those truths that we never got to express.
And the love that had no outlet and all the confidence that got shrunk into self doubt. Grief is the signal that flow is interrupted. And this is why collapse shows up in generally in people before it shows up in systems because we start closing quietly those valves long before the pipe bursts.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: I really love that phrase that grief is a signal of flow, flow interrupted. I believe everyone can certainly relate to that.
When you talk about some of these dichotomies. One of the, one of the, I'd say near term experiences that, that is very relatable to me is just this calm and anxious and being both of those at the same time. Can you, can you just explore one? Let's say for instance that has some current relevance to you.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Probably confidence versus doubt.
I think I use the term group think. One of the. I had to. I gave a talk to some college students and preparing for it, I realized one of the things I've done my whole career is break group think. So groupthink is where you're, you have these questions about something but no one else is asking the same question. So you start to convince yourself through doubt that it's not the right question.
So we tend to keep self reinforcing that closing of the valve and the difference between thinking a truth and speaking your truth, like the bravery to speak a truth hard to do in a hostile to truth environment.
So I think that's one that really resonates with me.
I think another one is presence versus disassociation. So if you're, if you're in a hydrated team and you're, you, you just, you're so passionate about what you're doing, you just come in completely present, ready to do whatever it takes. But when dehydrate, especially if the leader of that team becomes a dehydrated person, performative versus you know, inviting, you start to disassociate, you start to pull away. You do the minimum, you, you click with the ones that you feel can share your hydration. So I think that that's where those. You can start to experience it for your own personal story. Like oh yeah, I remember when that valve started turning for me. Right.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: One of the ones I'd say that relates to some experiences that I've had professionally is really presence versus disassociation. I feel also in talking with colleagues, there are times when, let's say you are in a meeting and you can just feel that the energy is around something that is not said and really commonly believed to be true or the situation at hand.
But there's not a voice in speaking up and that speaking the voice to truths, speaking truth to power, sometimes and often can hold things back.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: You're spot on and we've all experienced it.
You hear the term high performance team or high performing team generally, that's a hydrated team. They're on the same page. They don't even need to talk about what that page is. They just do. And when you have an enzymatic leader that basically just ensures the team is hydrated.
A good leader is a gardener, right? They're an enzymatic leader. They, they help fertilize and, and water the teams, know when they need a break, know when they need to re. Re align. You know, that's what they do. It doesn't take long when you bring in somebody that, that switches that compassion. So here's another dichotomy. Switches the team's compassion to being protective and judgmental because you're now being judged on performance and, and being re. When you start repeatedly hearing things like we need to get on the same page by a non enzymatic leader, you start to realize that, well, why don't you tell us what the page is so that we can.
Then it just starts to deteriorate. The valves don't close right away. They close slowly over time.
And problem is once they close, the longer they stay closed, the harder it is for them to open.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: No doubt. I really love the idea of a leader as a cultivator and of encouraging the best from people with your strengths, go to where your strengths are and in the meantime, hydrate, cultivate others.
It is very much of a difference. We've all had those leaders that have that type of practice, that type of energy and it gives the team so much energy and makes the team and individuals want to perform better. We've all seen it.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: And grief is the word, right? It's probably the most underused word in modern society because you can feel grief, you can sense grief, you can read grief on people if you're tuned to look for it. Because an enzymatic leader sees it and unlocks it, waters it, gives it a break, gives it some fresh sunlight and air, does whatever it needs to do to metabolize that. And it's the same in a compost, right? That that's you're renewing carbon to renew the human cycle.
You know, another one that, that I, I've seen because I've been more on the technical side of, of the industry that, that I see this especially in, in like R and D teams and technical teams, this curiosity versus certainty. And you what you want is to inspire curiosity.
But that starts to go away when stage gate is used to demand resemblance. When management doesn't understand the nature of it, it starts to slowly turn that into certainty.
And certainty comes. There's a term called the Dunning Kruger effect, where generally those that are most boastful about what they know, know the least about what which they say they know. Because those who know the most are subordinated by the truth. That there's so much more that you don't know you don't know. It humbles you and keeps speaking truth and you get overridden by the force of opinion.
So over time, that is one of the biggest killers for R D is to take true, genuine, curious thinkers and start to poison that well with certainty and forced resemblance of what's currently being done.
And I can only imagine throughout the history of mankind how many incredible life saving and life changing innovations have rotted in a ditch of certainty.
[00:16:33] Speaker B: How would you counteract that? What would your recommendation be?
[00:16:38] Speaker A: If you're an organization concerned about innovation, I think you need to look at your leadership through the lens of enzymatic versus performative. So the leadership has everything to do with it because a leader doesn't speak, they catalyze, they enable, they trust.
And when you build a team around that, anything's possible.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: So Kelly, what does life look like when we do rehydrate ourselves? And also the systems that we live in, we can't rebuild the old and we really shouldn't. You've mentioned this new cellular blueprint and a new Kellyism, which I love, is the bond print. Tell us about the bond print.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that is definitely another Kelly ism. It's kind of like that, right? It's, it's a blueprint for a bond print because it's about bonding. If, if someone were to ask me, so what comes after collapse? What does sustainable even look like?
I'd say it looks like a cell. Not a corporation, not a conglomerate, a cell. A living, breathing, coherent unit, just like your body has 30 trillion of them.
And every cell it has a membrane that protects flow and it has a nucleus that centers. Meaning I call those node A and node B pretty simple.
Node A is the outer membrane, the metabolic skin of the system to where waste becomes input, where decay becomes design.
It's compost and it's chemistry.
And its enzyme powered bioalchemy, the regenerative carbon and human nutrition cycle starts at the compost pile. Food scraps, agricultural residue, even grief, all of it gets metabolized into energy into materials, into soil, into carbon and into coherence.
Maybe it's a green key site turning biomass into pulp and packaging.
Maybe it's a regenerative farm loop, looping nutrients back into crops. Maybe it's just a well loved compost bin behind the school.
But node A says that nothing is waste, everything feeds.
And inside that membrane now you've got node B, the nucleus, the meaning center. This is the Piccadilly Square, the community kitchen, the slow food hub, where nutrition meets connection.
Where that compost fed food gets turned into real meals. Busy parent with a soccer game tonight, order a hot locally grown meal from your phone. Maybe this time the drone delivers it.
You want to cook. Pick up the exact same ingredients at the on site store.
Curious about the recipe? Join a weekend workshop and make it with your kids.
Node B says we're not just feeding our bodies, we're feeding bonding. It's where food becomes a sacred human ritual again and we can enjoy our love for food. Where nourishment becomes belonging, where soft power enters through the belly and exits through the heart.
So if node A processes matter, node B processes meaning.
One breaks things down, the other brings people together.
And when the cell forms membrane and nucleus, we don't just regenerate materials, we regenerate culture.
Because this isn't a metaphor now, this is mechanism.
And the next system isn't top down. It's cellular and it's local and it's bonded. And when enough of these cells start connecting across land, food, soil and trust, that is the lattice.
That's not theory, that's the future.
And the truth is a lot of people have already started doing this.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: That's true. And I'm really glad that you said that. I see this.
I see people that are already doing this in their lives. They are helping their neighbors with their garden.
They're bringing, bringing things to people in need. They are teaching children how to, let's say, cook or do something new to them. And they're really finding a way to contribute and they're actually, in doing so, they're saying no to extraction by their actions. So it's really the values that are presenting as actions.
So maybe it's not really beginning something from scratch. It's about noticing already I am a part of this lattice and I am contributing to it. And really the only thing left to do is to bond it and to.
[00:21:33] Speaker A: Connect and bond further with it. Right? So yes, I mean, you don't need a business plan, you don't need permission, you just need to start where the bond wants to form with a truth for you that needs metabolizing.
A grief that you have that's ready to be composted.
A community that's quietly wanting and waiting to feel coherent again.
So you don't need to build the whole system. You just need one membrane that protects the flow or one nucleus that nourishes the bond.
And the lattice will grow breath by breath, bond by bond.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: KELLY One of the things that this reminds me of so much is something that is really in my neighborhood and that is the Dayton Food Bank.
And what's very, very interesting and I think also just inspiring about the food bank is they're not just helping economically and food insecure homes. They are also building this beautiful model that can be replicated elsewhere. They are also a hydropon greenhouse growing lettuces to give to the community. They are also a composter that accepts waste from residents. I am one of them. I'm part of the subscription service.
They are also using that compost as a contribution to this amazing garden that they have, full of a depth of produce that they also supply for the community.
So they are finding ways to actually not only build community, but to really give strength to it.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: I think that is the most incredible example of, of, of. If you want to tangibly envision these two nodes, that's it. They're, they're, they're, they have built the membrane side of it, right? So you and I were just there recently and we saw something happening right there. There's a, a structure being built on the property to do what?
Community events, educational courses. Again, integrating coherence into the model. But what I find so fascinating about what they've done there is why they did it and how it started, because it started with coherence. It started with the desire to soft bond the community. They looked at their county community as to how many families were food shorted and they wanted to close that gap. So they started with bringing food in from grocery stores and you know, other things. And then now growing composting. They're building the whole carbon cycle, a worm farm there to create again. They're just creating that because they focused on the hierarchy of needs, not just food, but nutrition. And then they start building out. So I think their motivation for what they did is why they're so successful. And people come there to see what they're doing because it's so impressive and it doesn't get bigger, you just create more of them.
And you know another thing too that I found really interesting about where you Live, which is Dayton, Ohio, is the county that you're in, has the largest transfer station. If you don't know what a transfer station is, when the garbage truck picks up your stuff, they take it to a transfer station where they dump it and all gets then moved to landfill or whatever.
They have one, and it's one of the largest in the country. And they told me how much. It's about 1.2 to 1.3 billion pounds of municipal solid waste. Businesses always going to one place. And I said, how much of that is food waste?
And they said, actually, we did a study. It's between 12 and 18%. So in my mind, I'm like, okay, 50% is a good number for the average carbohydrate content of food.
So potentially, you could be making £90 million of lactic acid right there in one place to make poly lactic acid. You want to talk about circularity? We preserve food with lactic acid. Nature naturally takes it to the same lactic acid form that we make, the polymer version called poly lactic acid. So why wouldn't we take a polymer that's proven itself as ubiquitous in packaging and take that polymer version to wrap the food for which it's monomeric? You know, starting point. Lactic acid is preserving that food. It's like, it makes sense, right? So when you talk about circularity, you can't recycle your way out of this until you shrink the circle down. You have to manage entropy in a cell. Not one giant cell from coast to coast. You have to do it cellularly or it just doesn't work. You don't build bonds top down like that, like you said, you build them bottom up.
[00:26:21] Speaker B: One of the other things about the food bank that actually connected us to them is I remember I was reading this study about compostable packaging and its results in natural composting environments. And really the study was to determine whether it breaks down. The answer is yes.
And the Dayton Food bank participated in the study. They actually said yes when asked, will you be part of this program? We're provided a number of different types of compostable materials.
And their results were so amazing that the, the.
The group that was conducting the study really wondered if they had actually put the compostable materials into the compost because they were having such fantastic results.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: Because it disappeared.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Exactly.
So they do. They are an advocate for compostable packaging.
They are not only supporting it, but they're giving it a voice and actually proved in their environment that it works and have been sharing that information. With other composters. So hopefully it will help with that municipal solid waste situation that you mentioned in the county.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: I feel like the only reason we're not converting that type of, of waste into feedstock is just fear the feedstock. The same reason we don't take building, seeing new land scraped the roots and everything scraped out to build a new building. It's just saddening that they rip out all of this natural to make it look pretty. And we don't build on old, we build new because we're afraid to build on something old. There could be a liability. There could be. So all these reasons we don't. And it's the same thing here, you know, we. Yeah, so, but there's another actually interesting thing when you, when you start to look at these little pockets of things that are happening and realize, man, I wish those would allow us together because it'd be really powerful.
University of Georgia through the New Materials Institute, did a study that was funded by the Walmart foundation, which was ongoing from work we had started years ago actually when you and I were working together in the industry.
But anyway, the question was we want to try, we want to do a home compost pilot. So they chose Athens, Georgia because UGA is there, but because Athens, the municipality was really for it and did a great job communicating. So as I want to say 80 families, it might have been 40, some was like 40 or 80 families that participated for four or six months. But what's important is the takeaway.
And the takeaway was in the beginning we had some contamination, sorted it out. But the real social thread, the coherent connection of that study, also embodied in what the Dayton Food bank is doing, is that the end result was those families got to know those haulers and a four year old gets it because we're born regenerative, we're trained the opposite.
So four year olds holding parents and family members accountable to the program manifested. What else manifested? They started eating better, they started cooking at home, they started looking at those food scraps as inputs. In a short period of time, Athens, Georgia transformed a family into coherent family connection. To see things and to behave differently. Just imagine if we started doing that across multiple domains.
It will, it's how cells work, it's how systems build, no doubt.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: And it becomes like you were mentioning the four year old. It just becomes something that they naturally do. That's how they are raised. It's just reflexive in a beautiful way.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: And my, my six year old son does this to me and every. He's now only A couple times has he done this to me, Chris, where he has caught me leaving the faucet on while I was scrubbing or doing. And he would say, why are you wasting water? And in my mind I'm like, Chris Schaefer, stop. Stop telling me that. Because I know that's a big thing for you because you were raised that way, right?
[00:30:29] Speaker B: Yes, I definitely was. So in our home, one of the things now I, I believe that the American Indians were the first kind of guiding principle, but the way that we lived in our home was take only what you need.
So use only the water that you need. Take only what you need from the earth that you need to survive. And that's, that's how I was raised. So if I am somewhere where someone just has the water on and then just walks out of their room, it makes me so crazy.
So thank you for letting me. We're close enough friends where I can just say that to you because it's, it's a way to live, to keep natural resources in the way that they were intended for use, but not for over consumption.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: And that actually kind of leads to maybe another observation that we can close on, which is when you and I were growing up Gen X, we raised ourselves. We were on bikes late at night, we were connected to the land and connected to friends that we started kindergarten with, that we graduated high school with.
Hard to come by these days.
So I, I worry about just, you know, and I've got two, two young boys in sports and I get it, like it, it pains your soul to have to go through a fast food, drive through line, but sometimes you just have no choice. Sure would be nice to have that drone deliver nutrition to my, to my doorstep as part of a community, but that's not what happens. So you worry about how they take that experience forward and how they care about these things when they're older.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: But I'm refreshed because I spent a lot of time with college students, speaking to them, working with them.
And I'll tell you, for over a decade, all I can say is these young people are going to college to change the world and they're serious about it. They just need help with what to do. So I feel like they may have been raised on pop Tarts and on the go food, but they really genuinely care about fixing these problems and saving the planet. So it hydrates me, Chris, to know that energy is out there and this show is designed to bring it together.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: I've seen that shift and it's really inspiring. You And I met a number of these young adults at a recent event at the Dayton Food bank, and it really is inspiring. They are really working to make things better in just ways that they don't even realize how additive they will be.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: Couldn't agree more. So it gives me hope that, that, and again, we got to bring that energy together because those that are hydrated and want to connect, they're, they're operating in that third eye chakra. You know, they're, they're, they're self aware, they don't go out. So they're. I, I call, I call us professional worriers versus professional warriors.
So we're not out fighting for, for gain or fighting for commissions. We're really trying to build a lasting regenerative network system.
But we, we don't, we're not that we're not one wants to go build it, right? So it's time to start building these things because we all know it's there. We feel it, we see it. Everything that's been said in this episode, anybody listening will connect and resonate to this because it's real and it's current and if we want to get out of it, we got to start connecting those bonds again. So like, like I close every show and we'll, we'll do it right now.
So first, thank you, Chris, for being on the show. I know we, we squeezed this one in because we felt it was an important message. So thank you for taking your time before a nice, well deserved vacation.
And we're going to leave it with what matters most.
Bond soft and build strong.
Until next time, this is Roots to Fruits. Thanks for tuning in to Roots to Fruits. If this conversation resonated, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to grow with us. Let's build something lasting together.
