[00:00:00] Richard, Welcome back. Thank you for being an amazing guest. The first time around, I actually realized while I was pulling this up that our last recording was done six months ago.

Wow. Maybe we should make it a regular like a cadence. We could just come on every six months and talk about more things. We’re learning about community together, cause I think both of us are sort of on this journey of discovering how important community is to our lives and to our businesses and to our families and whatnot.

Well, that was gonna be my question then, right? Because coming up with new content about community, for me every six months is not gonna be a challenge. Like this has become one of my core passions. But for you,

Yeah, yeah. So I say like the, one of the things that’s been really interesting for me is like I know I’m not sure how much of your audience knows this or not, but my company Push Button Podcast produces Elements of Community. So myself and several of my staff, they listen to your podcasts all the time and it comes up in discussion regularly cause it’s one of my team’s favorite podcasts.

And, [00:01:00] just because. Yeah, cause of the content, because of what you guys are talking about. It’s really interesting and it’s really fascinating both the guests that you have on and just the frame of how important community, the way that you teach it and the way that you describe it here on this podcast, how important that is and how far our current culture has missed the mark on that.

I feel that like an arrow to the heart, although not my heart. The collective heart.

The collective part. Yeah,

Yeah.

We talked about last time was the heart of community.

Yes, we did. And we talked about your sitting on a jury.

Yeah, yeah. Which was a fascinating experience. And I know like, since that experience up till now, one of the things that has been really hitting home for me is just more of an awareness of my role in my communities. Right? Whether that’s my family or my larger community that I, you know, that we’ve cultivated in our traveling groups.

And also with like sort of my extended family, my role in the family [00:02:00] that I have and the responsibilities that I sort of always knew were there, but never really had good language to describe before, if that makes sense.

Tell us about that.

Yeah. So like one of the things that has popped up a couple of times has been, and it might just be that like I’m at that point in my life where I’m making that transition from being a young man who is sort of under the tutelage of the older man in my life to making that transition into being the older man.

Right? Not that I’m old yet, but you know what I mean. Right. I’m making that transition where I’m no, where I’ve got more people who are listening to me than I am listening to, if that make sense.

You’re approaching your quarter life.

Yeah, exactly. Quarter life. I like that. Make it 120. And what I’ve started to notice is that I have both nephews and I have my friends sons and I have my own son and I have younger entrepreneurs who are actively [00:03:00] seeking out.

Either they’re seeking out, I don’t know what the word is, cause they’re not like saying. Hey Richard, I want your advice. Right? But there is a, you are where I want to be. And so they want to spend time with me and they want to, they want to learn from me. And they want to have a more like, I guess it more intimate relationship.

And I’m starting to see on my side that it’s not just thing that’s happening, it’s part of this whole community thing that you’re talking about, that our roles shift as we get into new stages of our life. And part of the role that I’m moving into is that I guess I don’t even know, you should call it maybe like a mentor role or, you know, I just would call it a father role, a community father role is really what it is.

And I used to think that being a father was something that you did with your children. And after you and I started discussing what community really meant that really a father in the community is not necessarily a biological thing. And it can be [00:04:00] something that, and I’ve noticed this even with my own children, that I can’t be the only father in my son’s life.

Right? He needs men like you. He needs men like my brother and he needs men like my grandpa, not my grandpa. Well I guess my grandpa too, but his grandpa. Right? They, he needs more than one father figure in his life. Because as good as I am as a father, I can’t give him all of the perspective and all the lessons and all of the things that he needs to know.

Right? And same thing with my daughters. And I’m noticing the same thing with my friends’ sons. And, you know, the other entrepreneurs that I have in my life that are looking up to me is like they can’t get everything they need from the people in their life. So it’s part of my responsibility as a leader in my community to step up and be that person.

And I guess I’ve just been feeling the weight of that recently, and I don’t really know what to do about it other than just like I’m recognizing it and I wanted to get on and chat about that idea with you because I think it’s an important aspect of community and I don’t know where it fits in your language framework and I wanna talk about it.

That’s amazing. I love it. [00:05:00] It fits into my adult framework.

Okay.

So to be in community, you must first be an adult and to be an adult, you have to accept that part of the way that you live your life is by accepting coaching and giving coaching. It’s one of the five core skills of adulthood.

So if I’m hearing you correctly, I’ve only just realized recently that I’m an adult.

That could be true. My guess is that you’ve been an adult at least as long as I’ve known you, and probably quite a bit longer than that, but yes, that could be true.

That it’s more of a, just an understanding of what that role actually means.

Yeah. Because outside of community adult means nothing. We’ve asked this question before, what is the drinking age? Cause the drinking age is the thing that we use in the US at least to sort of tag adulthood. Well, what is the drinking age?[00:06:00]

It’s 18 or 21 maybe.

It’s, neither of those.

Yeah.

Those are not actually the drinking age. Those are the age where you are allowed to buy alcohol under certain circumstances. The irony is there is no drinking age.

Yeah, it’s like, cause legally I can give my son alcohol whenever I want cause,

That’s right, there is no drinking age.

There is no actual drinking age. That’s just when you’re allowed to buy alcohol without another adult.

Yep. So, because that’s the thing around which we define adulthood, which is silly. But that’s the thing. That’s our tag, that’s our key. Most people actually have no idea what adulthood is because there is no drinking age.

Yeah.

Adulthood is not a thing that can be defined by laws.

It’s a thing that is defined in the context of community and only there. And so If you don’t have an understanding of what community is, if you’re not connected to community, if you don’t have community in your heart, in your approach [00:07:00] to the world in your approach to yourself, then adulthood is meaningless.

And Richard, you probably have been an adult most of the time that you’ve been physically mature. But it was meaningless until community meant something to you.

Yeah.

You probably were actively coaching people and actively receiving coaching. You have an absolutely extraordinary grasp of complex communication.

You probably have always espoused the ideals of fluid leadership where leadership is yours for the taking. When you can move the community forward, that next step, and then when you’re done with that, you release it. It’s not static. You don’t need to hold onto it. It needs to be available for the next person to do exactly the same thing.

Take it so that they can move the community forward. But again, all of that only is meaningful inside the context of community. Otherwise, who cares?

What’s the point of any of it, right? If you don’t have a community, then [00:08:00] whether or not you are an adult or whether or not you have fluid leadership or any of those things are not, it’s just not really relevant. And, I wanna bring up, Two examples, which I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna leave names and stuff out of this just for privacy’s sake, but things that over the last six months or so, just two short stories that for me just really illustrated the importance of my role as a father in my community. Right? And one of them was good friend of mine. He’s got several sons. And he grew up without a dad. And he grew up in with you know, he cut his teeth in the business world, learning to sell drugs and decided he needed to, you know, change his life so he didn’t finish his life in prison and, you know, put all that into growing a really cool business.

And man. And he’s done that, but he’s trying to change sort of like the generational. Negativity that happened in his life and sort of be the father that he never got to have with his children. And he has self recognized and told me on a number of occasions, he’s like, I don’t have the skills [00:09:00] of fatherhood that you have.

And he’s like, and I want them. And I see that you have them. And, we’ve had that discussion a couple of times, and I have just noticed over the course of, we’ve been friends for like three or four years now. But it wasn’t until you and I started talking about community that I started realizing how valuable that relationship is between him and I in relationship to his children because like I have responsibility to show him how to have the skills of fatherhood that I was given from my dad.

Well, may I adjust your language slightly.

Absolutely.

The responsibility exists, but it’s not yours. You as an adult and as a member of his community are in a position where you can recognize that responsibility and choose to accept it.

It’s a fluid leadership thing.

Exactly.

And it’s something that we’ve actively discussed a number of times. Him and I where we’ve talked about like, he’s like, I want to have the [00:10:00] connection that you have, and I wanna know these things. And I have actively gone out of my way to help him see ways that he can connect with his children, which is cool.

And then on the secondary note, when we’re hanging out, like when our families are together. Like actually just being a secondary father figure and realizing that’s actually the role is a secondary father figure. Not just your, you know, I’m your dad’s friend, kind of thing. Right?

That it’s more than just the relationship between him and I, right? It’s a relationship between him and I and the relationship between him and his wife and the relationship I have with his children, right? Because I don’t just vicariously have a relationship through him to his children. His children have a direct relationship with me, and that relationship is that of essentially a secondary father in their lives.

And I know I’m not the only one, right? They’ve got their uncles and their grandpas and everything as well. But it was just, for me, it was been a recognition of there’s something to that. And the reason it stuck out to me is cause it, like they’re not my nephews, they’re not like, I don’t have any familiar relationship with them.

But there was just a recognition of like, oh, like I still have that [00:11:00] fatherly role in that area of my community despite not having any blood ties.

Yep. Well, the blood’s not actually important, so here’s a quick story different from that, but we’ll, this’ll give you something to play with.

Yeah.

I have a very good friend who lives in Maryland. He and I have been friends since we went to high school together. I’ve seen him scarcely over the past 20 years.

You know, once every three years or so, we go and hang out somewhere together. Phoenix may be, or SoCal or Maine. I’ve met his wife only once at their wedding. I haven’t met his children at all. So last summer I actually had an occasion to go and spend a weekend with them. And of course that was something he was delighted to offer.

I called him up. I was like, I’m gonna be around. Can I come hang out? Hell yeah, you better. And I showed up late at night on a Friday. On time. I mean, it was planned, but it was late at night. It was time [00:12:00] for their children, their two children to go to bed. So his wife went upstairs to Tuck in the younger and the older, a young girl, six years old came down in her nightgown saw her dad, saw me jumped into my arms and said, are you gonna come upstairs and read to me? Obviously, of course, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. So I went upstairs and I read her to bed and I came downstairs and my good friend Chris and his wife were looking at me like I was either, you can’t tell, right? You can’t tell when you see this look on somebody’s face, either it’s hero worship or what is wrong with you? How could you have done that?

And you know, you can’t tell the difference between those two looks, but their mouth was a gap. Their eyes were open. They were like, what? What just happened, and apparently she has really significant stranger danger and that was wonderful and also unthinkable. It’s not something they could have planned for or hoped for.

When you, I had no exposure. I’d never met her. I’d only met his wife [00:13:00] one time. There was no way that the two girls in that family could have been prepared for me. At all when you,

No prior relationship at all?

None. Zero. When, you step into a place where community is the thing that keeps you human, it changes who you are in the world and you, Richard, very likely are going to be more able to step into that role.

In the next relationship that needs that from you. And again, the responsibility is not yours. It is a responsibility. They’re, and available for taking, you can choose to take it.

That’s a unique way to look at that cause the way I was looking at it, I was looking at it as like, because the responsibility is there to take it and I’m capable of taking it, that I should take it. And I think what you’re trying to say is that the should take it is your choice.

And it is like the other story that pops up for me is there’s another young man in my life[00:14:00] he’s 15 now. But you know, he spent time in the foster care system. He’s got an adoptive father and he’s got a, another, you know sort of like pseudo adopted father in his life. And it’s just his life’s a little nuts which is all well and good. And, you know, he’s well taken care of. He’s doing great.

But, myself and my wife, like just the friendship that we’ve developed with this young man, he has it, we’ve become good friends and I’ve realized that like he needs the kind of stability that we have as an example in his life.

Right? And he wants to come over here and have dinner, and he wants to come over and hang out with our son, and he wants to be around us and he wants to see how we deal with conflict and he wants to see how we deal with a family that’s put together correctly.

And he wants to see all of that and be a part of it because his family’s a little bit nuts. Not in a, like I said, not in any sort of negative ways. It’s just the way that his family has gotten to where they are. Right? He just doesn’t have the same like, rock solid [00:15:00] foundation that like my wife and I have.

And I have seen that same sort of responsibility of like, hey, it’s not just a I can be a secondary father figure to him. It’s like that’s a, if I’m going to be a good member of his community, I’m going to say yes and I’m going to be there for him. Right?

I’m going to take him out on, you know, in this case we’ve done a lot of he’s learning to drive, so we’ve been doing a lot of the what do you call it? Passenger seat, driving with the learner’s permit and whatnot and just, you know, spend hours in the car chatting and whatnot.

And those kind of things and realizing that not only is that, it’s calling it a responsibility is kind of a weird thing because there is like, there is sort of an element of responsibility, but it’s like, it’s a happy, joyful responsibility, if that makes sense. And I don’t know what the word is for that, where you’re like, I couldn’t see any better use of my time.

It’s Philotimo.

Philotimo, that’s a good way for that. That’s a good word for that. That because I love and honor my community, because I love and honor him, because I love and honor my wife. Why would I do anything other than step [00:16:00] up and be there for those people? Yeah. And, it’s an interesting view of the world, and I’ve started to see that more and more in my life.

The more that I’m like aware of it, you know, it’s like, you know, you see the red car and then suddenly see all the red cars, like I’m suddenly seeing all of the areas of my life where that type of responsibility is there for me to take.

I love confirmation bias. It’s the best thing ever.

Right?

I intentionally use confirmation bias to make every day better.

Yeah, yeah. To find new opportunities to do cool things for your community.

To find new ways to be delighted by it. Because if your confirmation bias is tuned in to see the joy in the gift that you’re giving, then it’s gonna see it more. When you see the red car, you see all the red cars.

Yeah. And the other thing that I’ve noticed is the responsibility is not always and I don’t exactly know how to say this, but like [00:17:00] from, like it’s not positional, if that makes sense. Right? The two stories that I told are both me to children but it’s also been peer related. And the peer relation has happened a lot in the entrepreneur space where I’ve got like younger entrepreneurs.

And when I say younger, I don’t actually mean like younger physically, I mean younger, like experience wise. And cause some of them are like physically older than me, but they’re, you know, they’re newer entrepreneurs.

So, quick pause. You have a hard time bragging about yourself, so I’m gonna do a little bragging for you.

Okay.

When we first really started to build out your business prowess as a bio, you had a hard time accepting that one of the companies that you worked for you 10X their revenue.

Yes.

And I’ve looked at your bios recently and it still doesn’t show that you have 10x A company in your bio. So I’m saying it right now for the public, for everyone to hear that I have seen your numbers and you have 10x company. You have a really [00:18:00] remarkable announcement to make in that particular vein that I’d like to open the floor and really politely, strongly encourage you to go ahead and say something.

So, yeah, Push Button Podcast. We just hit our first 10x mark for Push Button Podcast from when we started the company in 2019. So it is now the second company that I have 10x.

It is now the second company that you have 10x, Richard. That’s extraordinary.

Thank you. Yeah, that sort of experience I’ve realized like, so it’s in a couple of areas. One is the entrepreneurship and the other one is in the I don’t know if you’d call it like husband, father category. Like I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m pretty good at it. And other peers who are,

Oww, hold on. It’s not just that one 10x could have been luck.

Yeah.

The second 10x also could be luck, but the probability is much, much lower.[00:19:00]

Now we’re talking, there’s probably some form of skill in there, or in this case,

There’s probably some form of skill in there.

And, it’s the same kind of thing though, with our children and with my wife, is we get a lot of comments on, it’s like, how are, you guys have such a cool relationship 15 years in, right? How do your kids. How are they so well behaved and well mannered and so far ahead in school and have so many skills and so well traveled and this kind of stuff.

And it’s like it’s skills that we’ve developed over the course of our life. And I’m starting to see the same type of responsibility where we were talking positional into like myself and younger entrepreneurs and younger children with peers who are like, I want to know. How you’re doing, what you’re doing with your wife, or I want to know how you’re doing, what you’re doing with your children and seeing the same kind of opportunities to I don’t know what you would call it, cause it’s not really like teaching people.

It’s I don’t know if you’ve talked about this on your podcast or not but you talk about learning modalities,

I have [00:20:00] not talked here.

And so maybe this is a good time to introduce it, but one of the things that I’ve noticed is that the skills of fatherhood and the skills of husbandry are not really teachable skills in your learning modality.

Like the hard way of learning it. They’re not really those kind of skills. The kind of skills that are, and I don’t know where this fits. They’re either ancestral skills or they’re download skills because I’ve noticed that just my presence with someone else. Will change their actions in their lives, right?

To be better in either of those categories without having to do anything for it. For that to happen, it just, they’re like, I see you doing things, and they’ll change things that they’re doing because they’re like, I see what you’re doing is better than I’m doing. They’ll change that and they’ll re realize that later and realize something about our relationship is making me better at doing these things.

And I don’t really know how to describe that, but I’ve got like five or six different relationships where I’m seeing that kind of stuff happen and it’s all sort of happening in the same realm of. Like I’ve started to [00:21:00] realize how important community is, and I’m sort of getting into that age where I see the responsibility of being, you know, the, a father figure in my community.

And it’s all sort of coming together at the same time, which is why I wanted to get on this podcast and chat about it. Because I think it’s a fascinating aspect of community. And one that I wasn’t really prepared for. And I think, more people should be. Right? Because like my whole life up to this point has always been like I’m looking up to other people, right?

And I never had anyone who was looking up to me.

Bet you did.

But not that I actively was aware of. Right? And, to sort of like actively shift in that position of like, oh, like I actually have people who are looking up to me for, in different categories of my life. That there’s that joy and that responsibility, but there’s also that weight of that responsibility too that comes with that.

And anyways, it’s really interesting and to this point, I don’t yet know how I’m supposed to feel about all of that.

[00:22:00] Amazing. I see the joy written across your face, so feel that way about it. So here’s the way that I talk about learning. There are three different learning modalities, and I’m gonna talk about them in reverse because typically when people hear about learning modalities, the only one that they’re familiar with is the one that I’m going to end on.

But I’d say it’s the least efficient, the least effective. And in the world where all things are possible, it’s probably the one that I would choose last.

Yeah.

Learning modality number one download, and this is the thing that you said already. So download is it exists. It’s something that I have personally experienced.

Probably most people who are listening right now have personally experienced this and they just didn’t have language to talk about it or a way to understand it and build it into their approach to the world. It’s amazing. This is where an existing skill it that is held by somebody who has absolute [00:23:00] mastery over that skill and is in your presence, unfolds and unlocks within you because you are in the presence of a master.

I actively watched that happen not even like three weeks ago with my son. And, it’s a fun story. My son spins fire, which I know you’ve seen.

His amazing.

And yeah, he’s really good at it. And he learned to spin fire from a gentleman who’s a professional fire spinner. He does like 26 shows a month, has for many, many years.

I think he’s going on like two decades now. So he’s really, really good. The kind of like mastery that like when you watch him perform, you’re like, holy shit, this dude is amazing. And we were at this fire spinning event and a couple of the other fire spinners that were there.

My son was like, is this gentleman gonna be here? Because he taught me how to spin fire four years ago and I want him to see how far I’ve come. And his friends, his buddies all called him and said, Hey, you need to come and see this 13 year old kid that you taught to spin fire four years ago is spinning and he’s really good. You need to come see him. So he actually came out to the event.

So we just, so we could see my son spin [00:24:00] and,

Oww, cool.

It was really cool. And so they got to spend fire together that night in front of like 200 people. It was really cool. And the next day they hung out in the morning and they were just, you know, they were doing practice things and playing around and my son is go, going around all these different fire spinners and trying to learn new tricks that he doesn’t know yet.

Cause, you know, he’s pretty young in the sport. And so he’s asked, I watched him, he was working, trying to work on this trick where it goes over his head, right? And he couldn’t get it. And he talked to probably four of these other spinners who were all really good. But none of them were master level.

They were just really good, right? And he still struggled with it through the whole thing. And then this, the guy who was teaching him, his name’s JT, he goes up to JT and he finally is like, can you show me how to do this? And I watched JT in less than 20 seconds, take my son from not being able to do it, to mastering that trick in like, literally less than 20 seconds.

And my son was performing that trick on fire in front of 200 people, less than eight hours later. It was insane.

That’s [00:25:00] download. Amazing download can be done on any. Fully formed skill in the presence of any master, but they have to be actually a master of that skill. For those of you who don’t know, download is the basis by which all children as they come out of infancy and turn into child start to unpack the skills that you gave them in their infancy.

That’s download. We all think it’s the next one. It’s not, the next one is modeling. Monkey see, monkey do. Modeling is the way that we learn. Karate modeling is the way that we learn writing.

Yeah.

It’s very important to realize that the third one that I’m gonna talk about, you can’t learn writing from the third one. You have to learn it by modeling. You can’t learn karate by any other. I mean, you could download it, but most people don’t. Most of the time people learn karate. [00:26:00] By modeling Monkey, sea Monkey do.

This one, Richard, is probably where most of what you’re experiencing is happening. So people come to you, they watch you live inside of the mastery that you have as a husband. And they model themselves after what they’re seeing with you monkey see, monkey do. And that helps them to adjust the way that they’re approaching their relationship.

With their spouse. They watch the relationship you have with your children. They model that into their own life and they adjust the relationship they have with their children. They watch the relationship you have with your community. They model that and adjust. It’s an adjustment. They model the relationship you have with your community and they model it into their own life and their relationship with their community.

Interesting. I hadn’t thought about it that way.

I love it. [00:27:00] So that’s the second modality modeling monkey. See, monkey do karate writing. Those come from modeling. Language does not, children don’t learn to talk by modeling.

How do they learn to talk?

This is download. It gets unpacked in their mind. They can’t learn to talk by modeling because until the word means something to them, it’s just a noise. It doesn’t mean anything.

Yeah, yeah. And like I’ve noticed with, because I’ve had four children now and we’ve, you know, all of them have learned to talk obviously. That talking is one of those things that just turns on one day, right? They go from making noises to talking, and it’s like a switch has been flipped.

Yep. Now, most people think talking is learned by modeling. It’s not, you would you put it exactly right. They go from making noise to talking and the switch has been flipped.

Yeah, I’ve seen it happen four times.

It’s not modeling.

It was like all four of my kids, just like one day they’re [00:28:00] making noise. The next day they’re like, they’re talking and you’re like, oh wow. And it’s like, it’s not always like great, but it’s certainly talking and no longer making noise.

Yep. But learning to write, that’s all modeling. It doesn’t have to be, we could do that with download, but it’s all modeling. Now, the third modality, this is the one most people think of when they think of learning, is memorization. That’s ingesting information and coding it. It’s a very manual process.

Coding it into memory and then coding it into a skill from memory. It’s very manual. It’s, real painful. Say again?

It’s the spelling tests in school. You’ll just spell this word over and over again until you have it down, because there’s,

No memorization tables.

Yeah my niece I love kids. I was visiting my sister and her kids were just getting into the spelling thing, and I’m sitting there while my sister is reading her a book, and the book was about dragons. And she said to my [00:29:00] niece, how do you spell Dragon? And my niece said, J R A G I N.

I mean, that makes sense.

My sister looked at me and I looked back and I was like, yeah, that’s it. Why would we spell it any other way?

Yeah, yeah, I get it. I see where she got that.

Yep. J R A G I N, dragon. That’s it I cannot disagree.

Yeah.

Yeah. Learning to spell a hundred percent right, learning to spell is memorization. Most of the way that we learn skills from the point that we start to memorize in our lives, most of the way that we learn skills from that point on is all memorization. We move away from the higher level learning modalities into this memorization thing, which is individual and slow [00:30:00] and really manual.

So, here’s my question for you, and this is where I think it gets to be fascinating, because I wanna know if the chicken comes before the egg, and that is the awareness of these learning modalities is something that you have given me over the last year or so, and my awareness of seeing them happen in the community around me, right?

Of modeling and download and memorization. Is that happening? Because now I, I’m aware of them or because I’m aware of them, I’m able to have that happen more often with the people around me. Does that make sense?

A little. Yes, it does. A little bit of both. I love it, that’s such an awesome question. I’m so excited. Little bit of both. Anything that you’re aware of, you are going to activate more. So when one of the things that I’m working on in my own life right now is I’m working on strengthening and separating the strength of my [00:31:00] toes.

That’s an important skill. And for those of you who are listening and you’ve never worked on being able to stretch your toes, it makes a humongous difference in your gate. How long you can walk during the day, your hiking abilities. Like it’s huge, I learned that like 10 years ago from my chiropractor. Changed my whole life.

Yep. I’ve been barefoot and intentionally so for a very long time. Just, recently I decided to start strengthening my toes. It’s not that they were weak, I run barefoot. I walk barefoot I exist barefoot as much as I possibly can when I’m out in public and have to have rubber on the bottom of my feet because I’m in public. I do it in barefoot shoes most of the time. Barefoot’s kind of my thing.

Yep. Here’s a reason we get along with this.

Yeah. So, my toes are not weak. My feet are not weak. There, you know, I’ve been doing this for well over a decade but I’ve been intentionally strengthening my toes. And as soon as I started thinking about that again confirmation [00:32:00] bias is an amazing thing.

As soon as I started sort of coding that approach into my life, all of a sudden I started recognizing all of the different places where I could engage my toes more and better. It’s amazing. You’re doing the exact same thing with download and with modeling. It’s not that it wasn’t happening before, but because you’re aware of it, you’re using it more, you’re recognizing opportunities to use it more, and it will become more effective in your life because of it.

And in fact, it has been more effective in your life because of it. Tell some more stories about downloading your family.

So my other download one that has this is older. It’s an older story, but it is when you first told me about download, it was the first thing that popped into my head. Cause I was like, oh, I’ve seen that before. And it was my,

By the way, my favorite story about download was me learning about mushrooms. And anybody who wants to learn about hunting mushrooms, when you look it up, you’re gonna see a whole bunch of experts telling you. Here are books about mushrooms, but don’t bother because you can’t learn about mushrooms from books.[00:33:00]

You have to learn from people.

You have to download it. The only way to understand mushrooms is download. Continue.

I need to learn about mushrooms cause I’ve always been curious. And I always wanna know which ones I can eat and which ones are gonna kill me. And like, I don’t know. So I don’t eat mushrooms off that are wild anyways. But my wife had been teaching my son when he was six to ride his bike.

Now one of the things that you had mentioned is that you can only learn, download from someone who’s a master. Now, my wife is in the same category that the other fire spinners were with my son. She’s a pretty good bike rider. But compared to myself, I would be definitely more on the mastery side of like, the kind of stuff that I’ve done on my bikes with like scare at most people.

And most of them I’m like, at this point in my life, I’m like, I wouldn’t do those things anymore because I need to stay alive for my children. So anyways, like I’m very good on a bike. And when so my wife had spent like two weeks every afternoon trying to get my son to learn how to ride his bike and was, you know, going up and down the hills with him and, you know, holding the bike and he was just crashing all the time.[00:34:00]

And, you know, having a hard time with it. And then my wife’s finally like, you need to teach him how to ride a bike. I can’t figure this out. He’s not getting it. I don’t know how to teach him. And I was like, okay, I can take over. And you know, I was working during the day, so it was like one of the things like, you know, come home at night and I’ll, you know, he was excited now cause he is like, I’m gonna learn to ride my bike from dad.

It took me approximately 35 seconds. I took, I went out there and I put him on the bike and I walked him down the hill the first time and that was it. And he was done and he could ride his bike and he’s been riding his bike every day since. And my wife to this day hates me for that. She’s like, I cannot believe that you taught him to ride his bike in 35 seconds.

She’s like, cause I tried for several weeks and I couldn’t do it. And it wasn’t until you actually talked to my wife and I about this whole download thing that she’s recognized what happened there. It was a straight download skill.

And the most recent of those occurrences was with my son in the piano. And this was the first time I actually,

Oh yeah, you called me. Keep going.

I did, I called you because it was the first time that I recognized an opportunity for it and then [00:35:00] actively tried to make it happen cause I wasn’t sure if I could. I wasn’t sure if you could just turn, download on and give someone a skill that you had.

And in this case, my son.

You can also turn it off.

Yeah, I didn’t know either of those things, but I was like, let’s see if this is possible. My son was learning to play Carol of the bells on the piano. Which he’s got. He can play, he can play all the notes. What he didn’t have was he didn’t have the rhythm. And rhythm is something that I’ve got, but he didn’t.

And so I was sitting here with him at the piano and I was like, I was tried forever to do that last modality of rhythm, of like trying to explain how rhythm works and what it feels like and how you, you do it and like just, you know, trying to teach rhythm didn’t work at all like,

Memorization.

Yeah, I was like, I couldn’t teach him rhythm. So I finally, I just sat down next to him and I was like, I just like, cause I can hear the song in my head. So I was like, just feel it. And I put my hand on his back and was like, I just need you to feel the rhythm for it as he was playing it. And, I just closed my eyes and I was basically playing the song in my head and [00:36:00] he picked up rhythm and he has not had a problem with rhythm since.

And it’s insane. And my wife watched, she was standing there, she watched us do it. She was like, how the fuck did you do that? And I was like, I dunno. But yeah, it’s totally a thing. And it’s one of the things that’s sort of been in these last six months in those stories of like.

I’m starting to see the power that you have in the community when you look at your community and you understand what adulthood means and when you understand how you learn and you understand what your role is in your community and what that looks like, how powerful of a figure you can be in your space, in your community, if that makes sense.

I’m gonna add to that a little. So he can’t just feel it on his own and this is gonna be a segue. He cannot just feel it on his own cause he wasn’t feeling it before. It’s not there for him to feel that was not a thing that he had access to on his own. When you put your hand on his back, you didn’t change anything within him. What you did was change something [00:37:00] within yourself. You opened up that skill for download to him, and now I’m not going deeper down the download rabbit hole here for the listeners. Instead, I’m using this as an opportunity to segue. And the segue is this. And, I think this is a really, really important thing to say and to dive into and really wrap yourself around.

Community is not the exclusion of the individual. Community in the world of Lucas Root is a 200% model, and in a world of 100%, a 200% model is really fucking powerful.

Yeah.

Community is not the exclusion of the individual community is possible because of the individual. What you did with him wasn’t possible because of the exclusion of the individual. It was possible only because of the inclusion of the individual.

You, yourself made it possible, [00:38:00] but you didn’t make it possible just for yourself. You actually made it possible to the community. In that relationship you had with your son, it’s not familial, it’s communal.

Yeah. And it’s that realization is what, cause one of the things that you and I have many of our late night conversations have talked about this, that our world seems to have this dichotomist view that, like, on community. Community means, and this is the bastardized version of the term, right?

The community means the individual does not exist. Right? And then the other side of that is the individualistic view of the world, which says that the individual is the only thing important to the exclusion of the community. Right? And you see that play out in our politics a lot. Those two sort of like opposing worldviews.

And what we’re seeing by reclaiming this word community is what it means is you have to have the individuals, right? And the individuals have to exist inside of a community together. That’s where the real power is. And, it’s a fascinating type of power cause you know, [00:39:00] everyone’s, you know, we’re all fascinated by superheroes.

And the reality is like we have access to that level of shit, right? Like, I’ve seen it happen.

You know what I need to do? I, you know, send me a text later and tell me that I need to reach out to somebody who runs a podcast show about superheroes and have them come on and talk about access to power of superheroes.

You know, I know a guy who runs a podcast superheroes.

Ladies and gentlemen, the host of The Hero Show right here in front of you, Richard Matthews. Thank you for letting me interrupt you with that little bit of us humor.

That’s my one of the things that I really love about The Hero Show is one of the things we talk about all the time is your own superpowers. And we use that as part of telling the each individual’s story. And, the thing that I’ve always really loved is that everyone sort of has their own superpowers.

And what one of the things that I’ve noticed is that the superpowers that people talk about on the show, they almost all [00:40:00] relate to some version of how their skills fit into the way that they bring value to their community. Right? It’s the thing like the power,

Oh yeah.

Business, if that makes sense. And so they don’t always talk about it in the frame, but when you have that frame of reference for the world, you’re like, oh, so the value that you’re bringing to the world, right?

That’s what you’re using for your business. Your superpower is actually, it’s how you’re benefiting your community.

Oh, oh, that was music. So I’ve started playing with coining the term of the 200% model. And I don’t know where that’s gonna end. I don’t know if that term is really worth coining. But I’ve been, that’s becoming part of my language, that this is the 200% model. That community to the exclusion of the individual is a failure model.

And individual to the exclusion of community is a failure model. And reclaiming. Thank you for the phrase, reclaiming community is about [00:41:00] moving into the 200% model that the two of them rather than exclusive of each other. The two of them together are the superpower of humanity. Individuals make the community and the community makes the individual.

Yeah. And, you know, to your point earlier about actually calling out, you know, my own success, right? You know, 10x in a business twice is not a luck thing. It’s a superpower thing. And the superpower thing comes because I have had this in my life for a long time before I even realized it. I had the community, right?

I had a fantastic. You know, grandmother and grandfather, I had a fantastic community growing up. I had a fantastic like, set of parents that helped in a community through my whole life. And so much so that when I moved off onto my own, I was able to develop a community around myself in college and post-college and way into, you know, my adulthood like.

Like, the ability to create community around myself has given me access to power that I have had other people ask [00:42:00] me on a regular basis, how the hell do you do what you do? And for a long time I haven’t been able to tell them. And the thing that I have started telling people is that. This is my little unique phrase, right.

You’re doing for the 200%. Right? What I’ve been telling people is like, if you want, what I have, what I have is I stopped trying to be a self-made man a decade and a half ago, and instead started trying to be a community made man.

Hell yeah. Hmm, damn. Wow, can you say it again. I got shivers. I want to hear it again.

I stopped trying to be a self-made man about a decade and a half ago, and instead started working on being a community made man.

Aw. Right? And that means both ways. Meaning how can I step up and be the person that I, the best person I can be for my community? And then how can I, in the same vein, pull as much as I can from my community?

Right? Learn from them, ask from them. Ask for [00:43:00] help when you need it. Ask for advice when you need it. You know ask for a referral when you need it. Everything if there is something, ask your community. And, in the same vein, look for all the ways that you can give back to your community.

Right? The way I’ve started looking at it was a number of years ago, I had a friend of mine gave me this analogy and he was like, you need to start looking at your life. Like it’s a your community. Like it’s a he didn’t use these words. Exactly, I’m gonna fix it a little bit for him.

But it was, you should not withdraw more from your community than you deposit into your community because you don’t wanna have a negative balance. Right? And because if you get to a negative balance, you’re going to lose the power.

Right? So, I always try to deposit more into my community than I withdraw from it but because I spend so much of my time and my effort and thinking into how do I make deposits into my community, there is so much there. I have so much wealth to withdraw from, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. I love it. It’s not just residuals on your deposit. [00:44:00] Because if the community can’t hold the deposit, then you’re pouring into nothing. Right? Part of what makes it amazing is that we humans naturally tend toward strong communities.

It is our base shape, we’re not actually tigers. It’s a thing I’ve said before on the show. I will absolutely say it again, we are not a tiger. We don’t want to be a solitary animal in nature. That’s not our basic shape. Our basic shape is not one. Our basic shape is actually in community. With, ironically, it turns out the minimum size is six.

And because we tend towards it, if you pull together people who aren’t culturally reprogrammed to be individualistic, and that’s a thing. If you pull together people who aren’t culturally reprogrammed to be individualistic, they’ll tend into that community, and as long as you keep depositing in the [00:45:00] bank of that community, you will build up a savings. The whole community will together. They’ll all be able to deposit and withdraw from that.

Yeah. And it’s like, the kind of access to power that I haven’t really been able to describe. And, I know it is discussion you and I’ve had a number of times is like, I feel like I have getting to a point in my life where I have access to power that I don’t understand.

Mm. Right? And the more discussions I have about this, the more I’m starting to be able to like, understand and have the language around it. But it’s the kind of thing that like, I wish more people knew what you and I are talking about now, because a lot of the things that I see and hear people struggle with. Come back to not having access to this kind of power. Right?

And that’s not something that, like, you can build it like it’s not like excluded from, it’s built into our very structured DNA, [00:46:00] right? There’s nothing holding you back from building community and having that. And you know, cause everyone around you, that’s their default shape is in community and sometimes they just need someone to come along and help put it together. And that can be you.

That can be you. Beautifully stated, Richard. We could have this conversation forever, but I think we’d lose some of the power of that if we didn’t draw to a close right now and let people sit on it.

I agree.

I end all of my interviews with three questions. The first, and those of you who heard your episode six months ago already know this, but the first is, what is the one best way to reach you for the people who’ve been inspired by you?

I am really easy to reach on Facebook Messenger or, and you can get access to all of my stuff on my website, RichardMatthews.me. So all of my social media profiles are there, but Facebook messenger’s probably the fastest it be listed on somewhere.

Facebook Messenger, Richard Matthews.

Yup, [00:47:00] RichardMatthews.me

Second question. This is the fun one, the curve ball. You, know this question cause you hear it every week. If there was one question that you wish I’d asked during this interview, what would it be?

You know, my mind went straight to the gutter for that, so I’m gonna have to pull back a little bit.

Yes. Not that one.

Not that question. No,

And by the gutter you mean that you’ve been puking your guts up for the past two days.

Yeah, the past couple of days. That’s where I’ve been the last few days is way in there. But question that I wish you would’ve asked. I have to think about it for a second because I don’t really know.

Cause I think we covered a lot of those, these topics really well. But I think it would be something along the lines of how can we teach other people how to have access to community?

Yup.

And my answer to that is, I don’t know yet, which is why I want to see this podcast keep going, but I’m starting to [00:48:00] see.

Even with just the awareness of the things that you’re talking about, how much more power I have access to in my life, and I want more people to have that. Right? And I’m seeing that impact not just on my life, but on the people that I’m interacting with. I’m seeing that in their lives, right? Just my awareness is upleveling the people around me. And if that’s all it takes,

Cool.

Right? If that’s all it takes, we need more people to have awareness of how powerful community is.

Hmm. Yep, wow. Thank you. Do you have any parting thoughts?

When I got asked that question on other podcasts, I used to tell people to read books and I meant it. But silly me, a long time ago, I should have switched to build community.

Yeah. I was like, [00:49:00] particularly for this one, I’m gonna say if like parting thoughts, share this episode with someone. Because this, I think is an important topic. And I know we’ve had a lot of levity during this conversation, but like, this is, it’s legitimately, it’s a very important topic. If we want to see the problems that everyone is talking about online get solved, it’s gonna start here.

Right, it’s not gonna start in the White House. It’s not gonna start with your local elections. It’s not gonna start with the school systems. It’s not gonna start with any of those things. It’s gonna start with you and I and the listeners that are listening here, and the people in our community starting to actually build real communities in our lives, and it will trickle up into everything else.

Trickle up. Yes, yes. That, thank you.