Watch the full video of our conversation on the Spread Great Ideas YouTube channel.

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Full Transcript of Our Conversation

Meet Gareth Hermann and His Journey in Business

00:00.88 – Brian David Crane

Please welcome my adventurous and curious friend, Gareth Herman. Gareth is an entrepreneur and ops nut like I am. He’s an expat, also like me, a fellow lover of travel and steel ponies and an aspiring overseas real estate mogul. Most recently built and sold a seven-figure digital marketing agency, pioneering impact marketing, which we’re going to get into as far as what impact marketing is. Nowadays, though, he splits his time between Nosara in Costa Rica and Boulder, Colorado.

Why Gareth is Building a Geodome Village in Costa Rica

00:28.28 – Brian David Crane

Two nice places to be. So today we’re going to be learning what it takes to build a Geodome Village in Costa Rica and jamming on his new simplified version of EOS that is easy to implement and actually creates results. Please welcome Gareth. How you doing, buddy?

00:42.26 – Gareth Hermann

Super excited to connect.

00:44.27 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. All right. Cool. So let’s chat on the Geodome Village first on what you call a new paradigm. Yeah. What’s the background on it?

00:51.14 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah. So I believe that we have over indexed on the paradigm of individualism and it’s, we’re actually craving and needing more connection and more community.

01:06.13 – Gareth Hermann

I mean, you and I met through an entrepreneur community, right? And that’s like one of the best weekends of the year is to do the global gathering. We all get together. We’re masterminding. We’re connecting. We’re doing fun things together. And I feel like that’s really what the world needs right now. And that is what’s going to get us to these challenging times.

01:24.23 – Gareth Hermann

And my framing around this is going from the paradigm of individualism to the paradigm of communalism. And that’s different than like communism or collectivism, because those are experiences we tried socially that didn’t work, frankly.

The Need for Community: Shifting from Individualism to Communalism

01:42.36 – Gareth Hermann

And so that’s not the answer, but I would say that most people can agree that what we’ve got going on right now, especially in the US, isn’t the answer either. It’s clearly not working and it’s not creating the outcomes we all want and clearly have the resources capable of creating.

01:59.23 – Gareth Hermann

And so when I think about communalism, it’s really going back to a more ancient way of living, and I think we’ve gone away some of our core human biology. I would like to bring in some bio-neurology.

02:15.74 – Gareth Hermann

Around this, okay, well, how does dopamine work? How does oxytocin work? How does serotonin work? Well, a lot of those chemicals get released by feeling like you’re a part of a group, that you belong, that you have strong family ties, you have strong friendships, and that’s just baked in. I think you’re traveling around the world right now. You’re in the DR, the Dominican Republic. I bet you there is a strong sense of feeling of community to a lot of these different smaller villages that are probably surrounding you there. And I think that’s something that we’ve gone away from that is actually hurting us biologically. It reduces the amount of serotonin and oxytocin we receive on a daily basis. And I think that’s why we have a lot of depression and anxiety and all these other things. I think a lot of that stems from the feeling of isolation and aloneness. And it’s me versus the world until you get a partner. And then it’s me and my partner versus the world. And then you have a family to take care of.

03:08.45 – Gareth Hermann

And that is an intense amount of pressure. You’re battling in the game of capitalism against everyone else in the playing field. And that’s stressful. And most people buckle under that pressure, and it takes only a few to succeed. So I thought to myself, when did I feel the best in my life?

03:27.21 – Gareth Hermann

And a lot of the time, and maybe you can relate to this in your own story, is, OK, it was that high school sports team. Maybe it was the dorms in college. As an adult, it was like maybe a festival experience like Burning Man or another festival over the world, or starting a company and having a team. So, what do all those things have in common? Well, it’s a group of humans. They have a shared mission and purpose that they’re trying to achieve, that they’re working together to achieve.

03:55.45 – Gareth Hermann

And those humans are in close proximity and you have to rely on each other to achieve the goal. So if you’re on a sports team, you have to win. You have to get the ball across the finish line. Or if you’re building a Burning Man camp, you’ve got like four days to build camp in the dust storm. And so you really need each other. And that really creates these deep social bonds and connections that I found really fulfilling and meaningful to me.

04:19.64 – Gareth Hermann

And so I thought to myself, well, why do I have to go back to my life from these amazing experiences? How do I get that sports team feeling back? How do I get back to that sense of belonging or that these are my people? And in my story, I didn’t really have a great experience growing up in the US. I lived in this neighborhood. There was like two other kids. They were pretty far apart. And one of them was kind of a dick and yeah. It was just not fun, living in the neighborhood, especially older people, and it was not a great experience. I compare that to how I grew up, which was when I was born in Germany, and then my dad got hired to build a Waldorf school in Southern Portugal for a bunch of German farmers living down there.

Gareth’s Childhood in a Rural Portuguese Community and Its Impact

05:08.75 – Gareth Hermann

And there, you know, I grew up as a kid. We had our little house, the neighboring farmhouse. I had, Hubert was there. He was like my second dad. So when my dad would go to work, I would then go over to my second dad’s house and we would drive around on the tractor all day. And we had a farm. We had cows. We had sheep. We had chickens. We had a vegetable garden. We had a big lake.

05:30.83 – Gareth Hermann

And we had a couple of Dutch families, a couple English families, mostly German families, and a couple Portuguese families all living in this like farming valley. And we were just running around every day having a blast. So that’s what I came from. And then when I came to the US, it really sucked compared to that.

05:48.79 – Gareth Hermann

So as an adult, I’m trying to get back to some of that feeling of belonging and connection to community, to nature, and that’s the core inspiration for this project.

06:04.50 – Brian David Crane

A couple interesting interesting threads in there. One of them is,

06:11.33 – Brian David Crane

Yeah so I have this idealized version of your childhood, early childhood. You’re on this farm, communal living in Southern Portugal. and I think I’m curious as to what like why did you all leave that and what’s happened to that communal living set up since, you know, over the past 20 or 30 years.

06:36.35 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I love that you’re asking this question because for me, as you said, I’m an ops nerd, and I really care about implementation and effectiveness. And so it’s weird, I straddle two different worlds, you know, coming from the business world where all that matters is results and outcomes.

06:47.18 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, totally different worlds.

06:55.07 – Gareth Hermann

And then living in community is all about the feeling of connection and belonging and relationships. So those roles have to meet and a lot of communities out there do it terribly. They lack practical real-world experience and operations, and they lack a better term to actually be effective in being a community.

07:16.64 – Gareth Hermann

And so that’s why a lot of these intentional communities around the world get a bad rap because they’re usually founded by some sort of like a spiritually guided, visionary, semi-crazy individual that has attracted a lot of followers, and then they just go live together and it turns into a disaster. So that’s usually what happens.

07:37.46 – Gareth Hermann

And, you know, this, how I grew up was a little bit different because there was no guru. And furthermore, there wasn’t even an established community. It was just an organic evolution of people moving to this Valley and trying to get away from the nuclear fallout of Chernobyl in the 80s. And yeah, just wanting to live a more natural and wholesome life. So there wasn’t like this, we’re doing a community experience growing up. It just sort of happened. And the reason we left, to answer your question, was because you know as we got into the 90s, a lot of the kids started to get older. And this is before the European Union. Back then, Portugal was like a second world country.

08:21.34 – Gareth Hermann

It really had terrible infrastructure. There’s one highway in the entire country. you know Think like cobblestone streets. like sometimes you’d like to take the moped or someone would be driving a donkey through town. It was a different world back then. And so the education system was all road.

08:40.33 – Gareth Hermann

It was all old school, and the education system was pretty bad. So there was a sort of brain drain that happened. As kids got older, families then moved back to Germany, back to Holland. In our case, we moved to the US so that the kids could get access to good education. Not everyone did that, but that slowly would happen over time. And so the lack of education for young adults was really the primary motivation for people to leave that experience.

09:10.21 – Gareth Hermann

And at the same time, you know, the water still school is still running.

09:10.42 – Brian David Crane

Yup.

09:14.26 – Gareth Hermann

And it’s now for Portuguese students as well. And that sort of took off from thriving. The farm is still there. There’s still people living there. There’s a whole new generation of kids now, like my three sisters, who were not really my sisters but Hubert’s daughters.

09:30.40 – Gareth Hermann

You know, they all still love there. They all have kids now. And so when we go back to visit, it’s like a 2.0 version is happening. And it’s really, really special to see.

09:39.86 – Brian David Crane

That’s cool. Yeah, I have, I have a friend of mine who lives not in the valley of Portugal that you grew up in, but lives north of Lisbon, a town called Aracera. similar organic growth to it. People came from different reasons. They’ve come with young kids and they’re going through the same brain drain even in 2024, 2025 because they get to a point where the kids are old enough and there’s not a good school system for them and they wind up leaving and going elsewhere. And so it’s a real pain and they’re all looking around going like we should build our own school. They don’t really want to run a wall door, like another school, let’s say.

10:14.65 – Brian David Crane

Yes I understand it’s still happening even in 2025 so what do you envision with the new new paradigm villa or village as far as what education would look like and it’s like how are you having grown up in a Walter school and then gotten you know a traditional education in the states gone to James Madison in Virginia and you know like how do you marry the two of those.

The Challenges of Building a New Village and Integrating Education

10:39.01 – Gareth Hermann

That’s a really great question. So one thing, I think the first response to that is pick your battles. I’m not choosing to pick that battle right now. And the reason being is because I chose Nisara and Park because it has a Waldorf school already here. It has a you know wild school. It has like several alternative schools for you know kids that are young. And then it has an IB high school here.

11:07.04 – Gareth Hermann

Those are all really great community assets that I want to leverage. And you’ll hear this more in the project: what do we really need to own inside the project? And what are the community assets that we can leverage and be a part of? but We’re a part of an ecosystem here. We don’t have to do everything from scratch. And so that specifically is something that Nisari already offers, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

11:33.48 – Gareth Hermann

That being said, I am very passionate about education, and at some point, I would like to create a new school system that marries both worlds. For example, in Waldorf School, they develop you as almost like a human soul first and foremost.

11:51.66 – Gareth Hermann

And just through the way they teach, there’s no textbooks, you create everything yourself. It’s all about intrinsic motivation. If you’re creating your own textbooks, you’re doing art, you’re learning theater, you’re learning, I mean, you have to do like the Roman sports and participate.

12:10.00 – Brian David Crane

Follow your own curiosity.

12:11.62 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, exactly. It’s really amazing in many ways and you have to do everything collaboratively and you work on your own and it’s not like sit down and learn this thing. Everything’s like storytelling and I had a really amazing experience at the water school growing up until a certain point. Your brain starts to develop and I didn’t feel like I was challenged enough.

12:33.93 – Gareth Hermann

And for example, you mentioned James Madison University. I got a degree in integrated science and technology, which is a pioneer program that combines all the STEM. It’s pretty much engineering, manufacturing, computer programming, environmental science, energy, telecommunications. It’s interdisciplinary, problem solving, real world problems.

13:00.19 – Gareth Hermann

A lot of Physics, a lot of Math, and super intense. And that was the challenge that I needed. And I think what we’re capable of as humans is to yeah really be challenged intellectually. and But if you take a traditional school route, that’s all they focus on, and you get like a 30-minute recess class, that’s also out of balance. So again, you And I were talking before the podcast, and I am a really big fan of integral theory. And one of the principles in your integral theory is as consciousness evolves, transcend and include, which means don’t reject the previous stage of consciousness, take the benefits of it, include it, and then continue to evolve on top of that. And that’s my philosophy on education is how do we get the best of both worlds and integrate.

13:48.27 – Gareth Hermann

Versus you know a lot of alternate people just want to go back to the past or do this alt thing. And I think that really taking the best of everything and putting it together is what I would personally like for migrants.

What is Integral Theory, and How Does It Apply to Business and Life?

14:03.41 – Brian David Crane

So for those who are not familiar with the integral theory, describe it verbally, what it looks like visually. It’s a spiral or it’s a triangle. like how does it visually represent itself?

14:16.62 – Gareth Hermann

Great, so integral theory was developed by Ken Welber, who is an amazing philosopher and visionary. And he took spiral dynamics. So I would say it probably comes from a spiral, but he sort of maps it more in a progression you know from the bottom you know upwards. And the basic idea is that you know we started off in like red, which is a hunter-gatherer tribal environment.

14:45.42 – Gareth Hermann

Where might makes right and the dominant leader controls the village or the territory through fear, and they’re the strongest man. And then that’s valuable at that stage of consciousness because it allows you to protect the tribe, conquer territory, and you know ah secure resources in competition with other groups.

15:06.56 – Gareth Hermann

The evolution past that is is is more of a, is I think it’s blue is the color, but that evolution allows the caste system, it allows hierarchy, it allows structure in society based on role and rank and title as opposed to just pure brute force and what that unlocks is the society’s ability to to execute longer term projects and to yeah have social stratification and think strategically and execute things over a long period of time like build a pyramid or build a city or build an aqueduct which is not always possible when you’re in sort of in like warring tribe mode.

15:47.82 – Gareth Hermann

So that’s going to lock there and then the downside in that system is that there’s not much innovation or achievement because if you’re born into a cast, you’re going to stay there for the rest of your life. If you’re born into royalty, you will be royalty. And so that’s the downside of that.

16:04.88 – Gareth Hermann

System which then we evolved into meritocracy or orange which is the world of capitalism and that’s where a lot of the world lives today which is about innovation achievement individualism And that unlock really says that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you were born, if you have the best idea, if you add the most value, you will win. And so it really unlocks innovation and creativity for a population that anyone could take their shot. The downside is that it if we over focus on individualism and success and achievement, we can actually

16:47.56 – Gareth Hermann

Do things that are harmful for society that we’re rewarded for inside of the inside of the game, yeah for example.

16:51.65 – Brian David Crane

The environment. Yeah.

16:54.99 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s really the next evolution. Out of that is green, which is collectivism, which is all about the group. It’s about feelings. It’s about caring for all.

17:07.52 – Gareth Hermann

It’s really this worldview that You know takes others into consideration and wants to be inclusive and wants to play team and wants to bring everyone together and for there to be respect and harmony and peace and all these beautiful things the downside and the shadow side is that it it lacks self-awareness and so it’s Dogmatic and judgmental in its approach. So it can really rub people the wrong way because…

17:39.45 – Gareth Hermann

Someone’s being dogmatic about not being dogmatic and can’t listen and can’t actually hear it can’t receive feedback, and is just operating in a massive blind spot and so that lack of self-awareness really holds back green and then they’ll, you know that’s when you get into teal which is the breakthrough at which point you can realize that there’s value in all the different stages of consciousness, and you start to implement them and you go into that transcendent and declued model where you take the best from each and start to put them together and you’re sort of operating in this sort of superhuman state at that point to the last stage, where you are sort of in a state of enlightenment where you are everything and you’re one with everything, and you can access those states of consciousness. So that’s my summary of integral theory.

18:27.20 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s just one part of it, I should say, that’s the spiral. There’s four quadrants and all these other things, but I think as what we’re talking to, both as a starting a new village and what I mentioned, we’ll talk about later on in the podcast around teams and business, though this framework applies to everything.

18:30.02 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

18:46.96 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s why I’m so passionate about it.

18:50.95 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, how do we can get into it now because I’m imagining that as you have.

18:58.37 – Brian David Crane

Different people on the team, in the community, in the group, who are at different levels you know on spiral dynamic as it as it on the spiral as it goes upward. Somebody who’s in red, somebody who’s in green, somebody who’s in blue, somebody who’s in orange. They’re not locked in those levels, but I think if you’re at blue, let’s say at the top, again, and let’s use a hierarchy. this’s the better way to put it like You’re looking down and going like, okay, cool. You can see where this person is. You can see also as you move up and down between them. Don’t you then, again, perpetuate the..

19:45.26 – Brian David Crane

Like you have to be the leader, basically. You’re going to wind up in the same kind of like yeah dynamic of where you have to, again, lead the group because not everybody is all not is a blue, let’s say.

19:47.82 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

Leadership and Meeting Teams Where They Are on the Spiral Dynamics Model

19:57.21 – Gareth Hermann

Correct. So this is what I’m really passionate about is leadership because that leadership is being able to meet your team or other stakeholders where they’re at and being able to speak their language to have that, that social awareness, that empathy.

19:58.77 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

20:13.71 – Gareth Hermann

To understand where they’re at, where they’re operating from, what they’re trying to achieve in their own life or in the conversation or in the meeting or in the business partnership or what have you and meet them there. And again, that’s why I love this model is because you have to be fluid and dynamic. For example, there were times at magic, my last business where I had to step into red, you know, that just to get nerdy on you guys, we had the iOS 14 updates.

20:37.29 – Gareth Hermann

You know, a while back where, until that point, before that point, everyone was crushing it on ads, because we were at a data rich environment and then all of a sudden Apple and Facebook get into a war and suddenly the data quality drops and all of our campaigns start, you know, massively underperforming.

20:53.64 – Brian David Crane

Dumping, yeah.

20:54.08 – Gareth Hermann

And so, yeah. Did you have an experience of that? Did you go through that?

20:58.60 – Brian David Crane

No, yeah, I just know. I knew that was a data apocalypse, right? Like all of a sudden, yeah, everybody had built ad campaigns on the data they were getting from iOS, so that river of data dried up, please.

21:01.90 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

21:07.14 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, exactly. And so in that moment, I, you know, I had to step into red mode because the team was freaking out. If I had tried to do more of a green process and have everyone share their feelings and all of that, it would have made the situation worse. But I dropped my red. I was like, all right, guys.

21:26.07 – Gareth Hermann

Here’s what we’re doing. We’re going to create the iOS 14 playbook. We’re going to get it out there. We’re going to figure out what works now in this new thing. And we’re going to be thought leaders. We’re going to be strategic partners to our clients. And here’s the game plan. Let’s go. No time for anything else, really. We’re all going to focus on this playbook.

21:42.79 – Gareth Hermann

And so that was a red move, even though I had a pretty green organization, like one of our core values was being real. And one of the ways that we built such an amazing team culture, even though we were, you know, this has also happened to our code. We were an entirely digital business at one point, but we still had a really strong sense of culture with our core values and really deep personal relationships. And yeah that was you know I was able to bring a lot of green in as the culture, but then you know shift that. like Sometimes we had to be, hey, listen, we’re operating the game of capitalism. We’re in a hierarchy here. You’re the copywriter. you know This is your job. This is what success looks like.

22:23.53 – Gareth Hermann

You know, like, yes, you’re, you know, yeah we all value each other as human beings.

22:24.78 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

22:28.01 – Gareth Hermann

And we all have a say when it comes to our weekly Friday check-in call, where we do acknowledgments and celebrations and reflections from the week. And also, you know, did you get your four ads done for this client?

22:40.61 – Gareth Hermann

And so that was my approach is again, trying to integrate.

22:40.76 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. You have to marry the dichotomy though, basically. If I use a human, you’re paid for a certain outcome or set of skills that enable this entity to keep functioning.

22:47.48 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

22:52.11 – Gareth Hermann

Exactly. And that’s part of my struggle is, or was, for example, this is, you know by the end of the scaling magic and selling it, I was actually pretty jaded because I felt that leadership conflict.

22:54.76 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

The Emotional Toll of Running a Business and Why Leadership is Hard

23:08.60 – Gareth Hermann

Like there’s some of our team members that had been around since day one or the first year, but because the way the game of business is played and the agency model that when we were only profitable when everyone was maxed out, maxed to the brim and had a very stressful life. And that, for me, was in conflict with my personal values because I value health and wellbeing as one of my personal values. But here I am playing this game of business where I’m only making money when my team is super stressed and they’re working you know a ton of hours each day.

23:41.08 – Gareth Hermann

That’s when the model works. and when they have a chill workload and they feel excited about their jobs, I’m literally not getting paid what I need.

23:48.01 – Brian David Crane

You’re bleeding cash. Yeah.

23:49.45 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah. So that’s kind of messed up, and that was hard. Or, you know, for example, we lost a couple of big clients. I got to lay off some team members and it felt like I was, you know, one of my team members, um, you know, he, he, he, he didn’t deserve to be laid off. He was doing his job really well.

24:09.42 – Gareth Hermann

But that role just wasn’t necessary for the company to survive. And so I felt like I was on a ship that was sinking and on a life raft and literally there’s like having to kick people off of the boat. And they were my friends that I built really deep intimate relationships, but then we’d done so much great work together and that was brutal. And the it’s when you win when you operate business and leadership from a more hard open integral way,

24:39.45 – Gareth Hermann

It’s hard. It was really challenging for me.

24:43.78 – Brian David Crane

What was the, you had a co-founder in Magic, right?

24:47.59 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

24:48.71 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. What was the dynamic between you and the co-founder and why I ask that is because in my mind you have, let’s call it one person who’s the visionary or creates the, the one person visionary and the other person that we implement, right?

25:03.75 – Brian David Crane

Like if you want to use a model from communism. You have the Marx who writes the communist manifesto and you have the Lenin, the one who actually implements. I’m not saying magic was this, but just like as a means of like trying to understand the personalities. like Who is who was who was who in the organization?

25:22.99 – Gareth Hermann

Okay, so this was a very interesting situation because my business partner was the digital marketing expert and was really amazing at sales. And those were his two main strengths. So he was the CEO as a result because you know he needed to be out there, that title to get the whale clients and to work with clients that we had.

25:47.44 – Gareth Hermann

But at the same time, he wasn’t you know I had more of the business operations experience from previous startups. and you know We were jamming a little bit about like starting work in high school. You know I had my first business in high school, so I had a lot more business experience in startups. and he had some as well, but it wasn’t his own genius versus mine. so in a strange way, I was often setting the vision for like what our culture you know should be like.

26:12.84 – Gareth Hermann

And where are we going in the marketplace? and like what’s And my business partner was more like, let’s get the revenue. Let’s make the money. Let’s get the clients in the door.

26:24.32 – Gareth Hermann

And that was more his approach.

26:24.64 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

26:26.00 – Gareth Hermann

So yeah, there I was, straddling both some of the visionary as well as the operations and execution.

26:29.86 – Brian David Crane

I get it.

26:36.41 – Brian David Crane

And now it’s got to be tough for you with a New Paradigm because you have to do both, right? Like you’re trying to both bring in money, investors, let’s say, and also ensure that the people who are brought in are on board with the vision.

26:42.29 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

26:53.49 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, that they’re part of the team.

26:55.79 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, so exactly. And that’s been a ah real challenge because if I’m if I’m working with another team or another founder, it’s so easy for me to extract the vision from them, play it back to them, help them clarify it, translate that into clear goals, organize the team in terms of roles and responsibility, execute those goals, train them on time management and project management and hold them accountable to making that actually happen. So that’s really easy for me to do for someone else. But when you know it’s my vision, it’s like sometimes I struggle to articulate and clearly communicate the true energy behind the vision that is inspiring.

27:37.75 – Gareth Hermann

And then likewise, then being able to translate that into my own project plans, you know financial model, yeah the real estate you know market research work and execution of that.

27:50.78 – Gareth Hermann

It’s definitely a challenge doing both right because I’m like raising the money.

27:52.18 – Brian David Crane

Tiring.

27:56.07 – Gareth Hermann

At the same time, I got to update the financial model and like scouting land actively. I’m working on you know, de-risking the project by enrolling people to yeah purchase the first lots in the community and to build that community. And so there is seven different trains I’m trying to push for at the same time, which is incredibly ineffective from a you know from an efficiency standpoint.

28:19.36 – Gareth Hermann

But that’s where I’m at. I need to get enough momentum to attract more partners to the business, which is starting to happen. I just got a lead investor locked in a couple of weeks ago. That gave me some momentum. And that gives the people that are interested in the project more confidence, and they’re getting more excited.

28:37.51 – Gareth Hermann

So it’s often a chicken and the egg thing. And then I’m also exploring conversation with someone that has already developed a successful project here in town, which him getting involved in the project would then add to our project execution credibility, which adds even more credibility to the project. and so Yeah, and at the same time last year, I had my first lead investor back out as we got closer to putting in, yeah submitting an offer, going into due diligence. So it’s a startup, it’s a roller coaster. It’s awesome. I love it. Sometimes, I get overwhelmed and stressed out. Here we are.

29:17.11 – Brian David Crane

And how do you square this yeah this experience that you’re going through? Let’s put it this way. but how do you square the experience you’re going through in real estate with the ability that you have when you’re talking to existing CEOs or people who have a business and they say, okay, cool, like I need help with EOS. They’re not even familiar with EOS and you’re Yeah, you because you know EOS.

29:48.69 – Brian David Crane

What I want to say in the question is, you know EOS is an operating system. I want you to explain what that means to people who don’t know what it is in a second. But you know EOS, you’re you’re looking at an existing organization going, okay, cool, Mr.

29:55.45 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

30:01.16 – Brian David Crane

And Ms. CEO. This is like you’re serving as a mirror, listening to them, getting the key stakeholders involved. That’s on one side. And then on the other side, you have a real estate venture where you assume trying to operate by EOS principles, let’s say, and then also you need to wear all seven of those hats that you described or push all seven of those trains forward, right?

30:22.92 – Brian David Crane

So like you have the real estate project, which is zero to one, and then you also have one to many over here to use Peter Thiel’s example of like existing businesses where they’ve already found product market fit where they can afford.

30:24.18 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

Coaching CEOs: EOS and How to Build Self-Managing Teams

30:37.53 – Brian David Crane

To hire you as an outside confidant or consigliere to come in and advise them. So how do you like sitting in both of these worlds or is there one world that you’re more comfortable in?

30:51.26 – Gareth Hermann
I love sitting in both the worlds because for me, this real estate project, the Judom Village and the New Paradigm Village, like that’s how I want my life to be. So my vision for that is really that I wake up in the morning, it’s like 5 a.m., I can hear the monkey the howler monkeys, that’s my natural alarm clock, I get up, you know I do a little morning practice before my future kids get up and then you know help them get ready to school, but i you know I get my sort of like either morning surf or nature walk-in in the jungle to recharge and center for the day, then it’s like I want to be doing something there during the day. Once this project is complete, I just want to be sitting around in my villa, you know, with my ocean view, just chilling. like I want to be engaged in the world and active and..

31:42.51 – Gareth Hermann

Being part of what’s happening. So in that vision, I do see myself, like I’m talking right here from Outpost in Nisara, which is like this high-end co-working place where there’s a bunch of cool entrepreneurs down here and there is a lot of creativity in things happening and that really excites me.

31:44.70 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

31:58.25 – Gareth Hermann

I feel like I’ve really tapped into a unique zone of genius here in the work that I do do with companies and I want to be doing that every day. And then I want to turn off, you know, it’s, I want to go watch the cultures here is everyone stops working at like five goes watch the sunset on the beach.

32:15.33 – Gareth Hermann

And then you’re, you know, it’s an actual connection point. I don’t even have to plan anything. Just go to the beach. I know I’m going to bump into friends. And then with those friends, well, either, you know, go for a sunset surf, throw the Frisbee, have some fun.

32:26.83 – Gareth Hermann

And then it translates to a dinner, usually at someone’s house. And then you go home and your bed by like 8:39 and then and that’s life.

32:34.63 – Brian David Crane

I talk.

32:35.41 – Gareth Hermann

And so that’s the millionaire lifestyle, right?

32:36.19 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

32:38.31 – Gareth Hermann

That’s how I want to be living every day. It’s also the, what I call like the biorethmic lifestyle, like really being away, you know, from like 5G, Wi-Fi, big cities, noise pollution, light pollution.

32:51.43 – Gareth Hermann

It, you just get tired early. I wake up no alarm clock. You just sort of a life force of Costa Rica has a big impact on your central nervous system. It just sort of takes over in a way that I find very healing and recharging.

33:04.82 – Gareth Hermann

So, to to answer your question, you know this project is really about developing this community and making it making that reality possible for my future kids at the same time. Like you said, I really enjoy, if I hop on with the CEO and they’re stressed out about their date, they’re getting sucked into the weeds, day to day, their team, and they really have this cool new project that they want to do to grow the business or to expand the brand and but they just feel like they’re like chained to their you know business because now they’re at a certain scale.

33:39.47 – Gareth Hermann

It’s just a nightmare for them. And I couldn’t i can ah relate to that because that’s what I had to do with magic. The entire way up, you know we raised zero capital. So I was our project manager for every single client.

33:49.88 – Gareth Hermann

I was our bookkeeper. I was our recruiter. I was all the low-level positions until we made enough money that I could be.

33:55.18 – Brian David Crane
A jar.

33:56.44 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, I could be the HR manager until we, and then I was the Chief People Officer and then we hired a Chief People Officer. I will tell, you know, as the Bookkeeper, we hire a Controller. Okay. Then I was the CFO, um, you know, and so on and so forth. And so I know what it’s like to be in the weeds and everything and to have, you know, whatever it is, six, eight zoom calls a day and then your normal workload. And, and so we had to get super good as an agency to just get so dialed on everything from the quality of the product we delivered to the time management, to the project management. And that’s how I’m able to do this today. That’s how I’m going to do a real estate project and have my other business is that I had just become a master of resource management inside of a company. And so it’s very easy for me to go to a CEO and I’ve created a very simple framework that’s based off of leadership systems and team.

34:47.02 – Gareth Hermann

That allows us to, and then I also have some coaches that I can bring in, but we actually take the achievement of what the business is trying to do off the CEO’s hands or operator’s hands and transfer that weekly accountability to our coaching team so that the results happen with no hand holding and oversight from the CEO. And that’s something that I feel really excited that we’re doing right now that’s pretty unique because what you know when what most people struggle with is is that implementation. Usually a CEO will just be like, we’ll just work harder. I’m an entrepreneur. I know I have the skills to just make things happen. And they project those skills onto employees, which are a different kind of mindset than an animal. And so as opposed to like constantly fighting that and trying to coach the CEO or the leader to change their leadership style, we just say, hey,

35:41.28 – Gareth Hermann

You go do what you, you go sell, you go build a vision, you start the new creative project will handle making sure the team is hitting its goals and doing everything they need to to grow the business. And that gets them out of the weeds. And it also, it also helps the team because the team finally gets the support that they need. You know, they, they want to have someone to help them with their roadblocks and tell them what to do sometimes and help them figure out a hairy problem. And that’s what we do. So it kind of serves both employees and the leadership team.

36:12.55 – Brian David Crane

So then am I understanding correctly that you’re, you’re transmuting the CEO’s vision into action steps for the team or the team.

36:22.99 – Brian David Crane

If they have questions about it, they’re coming to you. I’ll say to Gareth, they’re coming to your, the people inside of, you know, the, the copes that you’ve assigned to the CEO to say, um, the CEO says, whatever, we need to hit a hundred.

36:29.38 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

36:38.14 – Brian David Crane

That’s the KPI for the quarter. What does that mean for me personally? Like what’s the dialogue look like between, yeah.

36:45.91 – Gareth Hermann

That’s a great question. Yeah. So it depends on the size of the organization, but the high performance framework is yeah the part of the leadership bucket, right? I mentioned we have leadership team and systems. So part of leadership’s job is to have a clear vision and then to clearly communicate that. So we can help with that through a workshop if that’s not clear.

37:06.69 – Gareth Hermann

That vision then gets translated into goals. I personally like OKRs because they ladder up and that solves the problem that you’re talking about. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a higher level executive, a manager, or an employee.

37:19.47 – Gareth Hermann

All of each level in the hierarchy, the goals need to ladder up to meet the company goals that make the that turn the vision into a reality. And so we do goal setting workshops to help teams that suck at goal setting, which a lot of them do.

37:34.27 – Gareth Hermann

And then..

37:34.85 – Brian David Crane

You to surface you sorry You have to surface what the goals are first for each one of those levels, right?

37:39.39 – Gareth Hermann

Correct.

37:40.33 – Brian David Crane

I don’t even know if the organization’s done that.

37:40.55 – Gareth Hermann

That’s and that’s exactly.

37:42.60 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

37:43.44 – Gareth Hermann

So step one is having that clear vision. Okay.

37:46.21 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

37:46.21 – Gareth Hermann

Then step two is you translate that vision into clear goals for each department, each team, each person. And then that creates unstoppable momentum because now you have each team member, each department working in lockstep towards the same goal.

38:00.70 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s what creates momentum. And then the last hack is to add in the support and accountability, the regular communication and check-in on each team member of each team to make sure it’s making progress. Because as humans, we get caught up in the day-to-day, we get distracted, we avoid things, we get stuck by a problem and then we just stop.

38:22.42 – Gareth Hermann

And so sometimes projects get stuck for a whole quarter or a whole year and the our methodology enables that momentum to keep rolling. And that’s where you really get to this, that we’re creating is like a self-managing team that’s executing towards its goals of lockstep. And that’s the outcome that we then provide.

38:44.94 – Brian David Crane

It’s a great dressing yard because I can imagine, you know, running teams of, well, I run different teams and that, I’ll make it personal. So I’ll come to the brand owner, the business owner and go, okay, cool. Like what’s the, what’s the KPI for this quarter? Let’s say it’s a hundred and then that tends to be where that discussion stops because then it doesn’t transmit down to the people that they actually manage to say, if a hundred is the KPI for the organization,

39:15.23 – Brian David Crane

Then your part of this is A, and this other person’s part is B. And like and that means that A plus B is going to get us to 100, or A plus B plus the efforts of others is going to get us to 100.

39:26.88 – Brian David Crane

And there’s like a yeah there can just be like this general breakdown of like they don’t understand why, what they’re doing, how how it manifests itself in the cape in the top line KPI, right?

39:39.30 – Gareth Hermann

Correct. And that’s a huge breakdown because that also gives people meaning and purpose.

39:40.49 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

39:44.08 – Gareth Hermann

If the factory worker or the copywriter or the web developer understands that what they do actually is really meaningful for the company and that people are relying on them, I believe that’s something that everyone wants.

39:56.74 – Gareth Hermann

Everyone wants to do good work. Everyone wants to be on a team that’s winning. Everyone wants to be making progress towards goals. And that’s the energy of winning, the energy of momentum. that’s what we’re really bringing here and collaboration. It’s like, hey, we’re trying to achieve this together. Lacking that, like one of the clients that I’m working with right now, they’re in fighting because they lack that and they are blaming each other. They’re criticizing the teammate because lacking that goal that the tribe is trying to work together with to accomplish, then it’s about personal achievement, climbing the ladder and..

40:33.69 – Gareth Hermann

That’s really it. It’s just trying to, you know, make progress yourself and then getting frustrated with your teammates that are hindering your progress. And that culture won’t win. That’s not going to create innovation.

40:45.21 – Gareth Hermann

That’s not going to kick ass in the marketplace. And, and that’s, and yeah, people get stressed out because then it just all it turns out it’s all about the money.

40:47.82 – Brian David Crane

And make can completely fulfill..

40:53.88 – Gareth Hermann

And yeah, it’s just, it’s not, not the world that I personally want to see a out there.

41:01.32 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, I’ve got a question on that because basically you’ve got this, again, a dichotomy of you have this, let’s call it the CEO of the brand and you say, okay, cool. He needs to care about the money. The money is ultimately what pays the salaries of these different people and whatnot. Everyone else.

41:17.99 – Brian David Crane

To a lesser degree, cares about the money and yet they need a more holistic or a nicer goal rather than if they’re in sales, then yes, they probably didn’t care about the money, but let’s assume in my example they’re not, let’s assume they’re more creatives. And the process of going from like, okay, cool CEO, he cares about the money, under bucks, under using my example,

41:43.53 – Brian David Crane

Everyone else, all the creatives, you were managing teams of creatives, copywriters, designers, that sort of stuff. How do you get them to come up with a goal or how do you get that goal to translate from one hundred over here to whatever is going to motivate them.

41:58.62 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah really easy so this and the whole point is to make sure that everyone’s bought into the company vision, and you can add in a company vision or purpose, so that can really help with the emotional engagement. And then when you do get the goal, let’s say it’s 100, let’s take the designer, let’s take the copywriter, you actually facilitate a conversation, I could easily tell them, but I find it more powerful to create the space where they discover that on their own. Okay, so if the goal is 100, how does your role tie into that?

Helping Employees See Their Role in Achieving Company Goals

42:31.32 – Gareth Hermann

I don’t know. Okay. Well, let’s think about it for a second. How might it be? you know If you do a good job, what and what part of your job would actually impact this number? Oh, well, I never thought about that. Well, I guess you know if I but do a really good job on these designs, then yeah, they’ll they’ll convert better. And if they convert better, then the client will want to spend more money with us.

42:54.67 – Gareth Hermann

I guess, right? yeah how does but oh Yeah. How does it work again with like, did we get a percentage of ads spent, right? Yes, exactly. So it really is educating and informing and helping people connect those dots. They see, wow, if I do a better job on this graphic design for this ad,

43:12.39 – Gareth Hermann

Then that helps my client win. When the client wins, they’re going to want to spend more money with us. When they spend more money with us, then we get closer to our goal. So I’m actually a key person in this team, even though I’m a graphic designer and I’m an important person as a result. And I know if I want to get a raise, like money just doesn’t grow. It’s like it doesn’t grow on trees. It’s just We’re going to have to do well as a team. If we’re crushing as a team, there’s going to be more money to go around. If we’re not doing well as a team, there’s going to be less money to go around. And just really making it clear for people that you should break down this employee mindset of just like, I show up, I do my job, I go home. And that doesn’t really work well for the employee or the business owner.

43:54.27 – Gareth Hermann

Opinion.

43:56.41 – Brian David Crane

So how are you going to square this with a new paradigm then? Because you’re asking people who come in that they need to put some money into buying land.

44:06.91 – Brian David Crane

And I imagine some of them go, hey, Gareth, I just don’t have the money for this, but I’d love to be a part of it.

44:13.09 – Gareth Hermann

Great. So in that scenario, yeah, they’ve got we’ve got a couple of different options.

44:14.01 – Brian David Crane

You want the spot for them? Yeah.

44:17.69 – Gareth Hermann

Like one, I’ve ah started a partnership with a bank down here that allows people to to loan money and get a construction loan to build a home. So that’s one option. So you can borrow money to get in the game.

44:30.33 – Gareth Hermann

And then another option is that we’re exploring um taking some of the parcels and selling them to individuals that have formed a corporation that buys the lot so that they can actually do ah multifamily or some other multiple homes on one lot so they can reduce the cost of land acquisition by partnering on going in on the land.

44:54.29 – Gareth Hermann

And that is a real piece of this is affordability. Like where I’m at in Asara, the prices are insane for Central America and a lot of these communities as well.

45:00.82 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

45:06.16 – Gareth Hermann

As you know If you think about it, it’s if you really get into real estate, a lot of the money goes into purchasing the land, developing the infrastructure, of water, electricity, roads, amenities for the community. It’s expensive. And then you have the team and the marketing. And yeah, it just gets expensive pretty quick. and so they tend to be expensive projects, especially if you want to have some cool community assets like a yoga shower, a pool, or you know people want a retreat center. That’s often not possible.

45:36.81 – Gareth Hermann

Just in a generic you know development business model because it would drive the costs too high. So, part of my one of my goals for the project is to do affordable housing and that’s where the geodomes came in because though the cost of construction is so low for the geodomes that they are very affordable.

45:54.05 – Gareth Hermann

And if we can get the right zoning designation and we can do mixed use or higher density development, then you can put it many geodomes on one parcel and then the cost of construction is really low. So that’s another affordability hack. So I’ve been really looking at all the different ways to how do you reduce costs? How do you reduce the barrier to entry?

46:12.81 – Gareth Hermann

And part of my doing that is I would like to have this model be replicable and scalable across the world because I know so many other people are wanting to live in community and build community together, but they lack the real estate development experience, the business experience, the community building experience. A lot of people just have one, like, oh, I’m a great community builder, or I’m in real estate, or I was an entrepreneur.

46:35.73 – Gareth Hermann

But you know You really have to tie all those pieces together, which is why so many of these projects fail or you know stop halfway through or don’t get traction. So it’s interesting times.

Affordability and Challenges in Building a Sustainable Community

46:46.00 – Gareth Hermann

There’s a lot of demand, a lot of enthusiasm, but then execution is poor and then also, yeah, people are struggling financially to join.

46:51.98 – Brian David Crane

It’s hard. Yeah, it’s hard to do. Yeah.

46:55.98 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah especially once you’re in like a different country with a different legal environment, people are nervous about bringing their money outside the country. Now you’re operating these jurisdictions where bureaucracy and process and it’s, you know, it’s a lot.

47:10.99 – Brian David Crane

Let me, so if I can play devil’s advocate for a moment, then if you, it sounds like, you know, I imagine this morning you woke up with the howler monkeys as your alarm clock. You and I start swapping voice notes pretty early in the morning for you. I imagine, um, if you went to the beach today, five o’clock, you’re going to run into a couple of friends or some people that you know, go off of the sunset surf, go to dinner. Do you already have the community in the SARA?

47:40.52 – Brian David Crane

That you are trying to build, like is this, like, would would it be easier for, for, for Garrett as the individual to build the house that he would like there and not try to do a real estate development to include others and just say like, Missouri has enough of the community that I’m looking for.

47:58.83 – Gareth Hermann

The answer is yes, if that’s enough for you. For example, that’s what we have right now. Everyone has their own little home. You meet at the outpost, the coworking space.

48:07.87 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

48:09.78 – Gareth Hermann

You meet at the beach. you know Literally, what you just said is my day. like Literally, this evening, my parents are visiting. We’re going to meet at the beach for sunset. I have a friend from out of town. We’re going to meet at the beach for sunset. My other friend already invited us to dinner afterwards.

48:21.67 – Gareth Hermann

It’s this is literally my day right now. It’s great.

48:24.59 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, but most people listening here to go that sounds that sounds amazing.

48:25.25 – Gareth Hermann

However, there’s a next level.

48:28.15 – Brian David Crane

Like I would just like that 99% of people. Yeah.

48:31.27 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s great. That’s why there’s homes available here in Nassara. People come down, they build their dream home, they live here. And for someone like me, there are enough freaks like me out there in the world that want to go one level deeper and be able to walk to their best friends. They wouldn’t be able you know walked they want to be able to live intergenerationally.

48:50.64 – Gareth Hermann

They want to be able to have their parents next door in an ADU as opposed to trying to put them in a retirement home. They want their kids to be running around and being friends with all of their friends’ kids and for one adult to be able to scoop up all the kids taken to the pool so all the other adults get a break and to share the you know share the load of of of ah child child rearing amongst the community.

49:05.98 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

49:11.58 – Gareth Hermann

They want to be able to have a community meal together. They want to be able to you know bring in a DJ or sing around the fire or do a sweat launch together and just have that all be on the same property. That’s next level. That’s true wealth and abundance in all the things that matter to me.

Why This Model is a Middle Ground Between Traditional and Modern Living

49:28.24 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, it’s interesting because having lived in Bali for a number of years, you see the pendulum swing in the opposite direction, which is they have multiple generations of the same family living under the same roof. They’re not necessarily close by, they’re literally, and then they just keep adding rooms onto the houses in order to accommodate you know births or family members who need to move in. To me, it that model doesn’t look like doesn’t look copacetic, doesn’t look like it would lead me to feel super at peace with the, if I had, well, let’s just say like, I don’t want to say no, I don’t want that. Having parents close by, having friends close by, being able to walk over there, even just being able to bike over there and shared community as far as child rearing, getting away from the

50:22.38 – Brian David Crane

The car culture that’s so prevalent in the US, I think, is is super appealing. So this is like a middle ground. You don’t want to be, let’s call it Southeast Asian style of every multi-generation underneath one roof, but you want the roofs to be closed.

50:35.97 – Gareth Hermann

Right on top of each other. Yeah.

50:40.47 – Brian David Crane

You can see one roof from the other, let’s say, when you’re standing on your front porch.

50:45.82 – Gareth Hermann

Transcend and include, we want privacy and individualism, but we want to be part of a community.

50:49.39 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

50:51.07 – Gareth Hermann

So how do we, you know, how do we do both?

Addendum: Ethical Cult Building

50:56.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, so this is an addendum to the podcast on ethical cult building as we’re talking about a documentary that looks at Osho when he moves to Oregon and attempts to set up an intentional living space in rural Oregon and the pushback that they got from the local community and the problems that they had internally. And we’re talking about, is it possible? How do you do it in terms of being able to attract the people that you want to live with and also make sure that everybody, yeah, gets along reasonably well together. So I’m skeptical of it. Gareth is in a camp where he thinks it’s possible. Why am I wrong?

51:57.00 – Gareth Hermann

Okay. Well, I would say that you’re right. First and foremost, the way that most communities develop is that sort of guru model. And I think that’s part of the problem. And so the paradigm shift there is going away from the guru model, where you have the strong leader, the spiritual leader, and everyone’s following that person. That is dangerous and in my opinion.

51:58.00 – Gareth Hermann

And so the paradigm shift there is again, going back from that model to communalism is that the new guru will be the Sangha. There’s a quote that says pretty much that there’s not going to be like this one figurehead in the 21st century. It’s going to be the community, the group. So in order to make that happen, we actually need to upgrade our central nervous systems and our ability to communicate, to actually be in a group together.

52:28.00 – Gareth Hermann

So what I mean by that is normal for humans to get into conflict and for that to disrupt companies, marriages, countries, whatever. Our default ah programming as humans is based off of survival at its root and that leads to conflict and tensions and breakdowns. And that’s why teams, marriages, countries fail is they just do human the normal way.

52:57.00 – Gareth Hermann

So in order to to participate in the paradigm of communalism, we actually need to upgrade our central nervous system and our communication in order to interact in a new way. And so a requirement to be part of this project is that people actually go through training.

53:13.00 – Gareth Hermann

Because in times of challenge, we either go back to what we were trained on and by our parents or what’s familiar to us, or we fall back on our training. So we do training and where we’ve already, I used to live in Boulder, Colorado and we used to do a lot of this practice there. I started doing community homes in Boulder and practicing this stuff because I knew that if I could get seven people under one roof to be able to work things out, that if we were just neighbors and we could go back to our own homes and like,

53:39.18 – Gareth Hermann

Not talking to each other for a couple of days and circling back would be table stakes. And so what I’ve developed is like a very rigorous process around how to communicate, how to resolve conflict, and how to regulate your central nervous system so that you can actually do community effectively together.

53:47.12 – Brian David Crane

Okay.

53:58.00 – Gareth Hermann

And what’s required for that is the training to do that well. So let me give you an example. In a traditional argument, let’s say someone gets upset and then we go back to our programming, they get into conflict, whether that’s about a pay raise, what to do with the client, you know what who should be president, something political, and then suddenly people get triggered. They go into a fight or flight response, which means they’re either going to fight, they’re going to run away, they’re going to freeze, or they’re going to fawn.

54:31.00 – Gareth Hermann

And none of those things is authentic and it degrades the relationship leading to an outcome that doesn’t work for either party. So in the new way to do it, the first step is to raise self-awareness to know when are we getting triggered, when are we getting defensive.

54:48.00 – Gareth Hermann

And then when we are to have a process to both verbalize that in a safe way and to make sure that gets met well so that emotional safety is reestablished. Because once that happened, then you can go back to being a high functioning adult.

55:04.10 – Gareth Hermann

But until that happens, you’re going to be a wounded animal out on the Savanna looking for survival. So that’s there’s the process is getting out of survival responses, getting back into executive functioning. And we have tools to do that. And then once you’re back into executive functioning, there’s ways that you can communicate.

55:23.14 – Gareth Hermann

That have been around for a while, like non-violent communication, like using I statements, for example, is everyone could just own their experience and say that, hey, listen, I’m noticing I’m starting to feel a little anxiety or frustration and not even going into the story like around the political topic or whatever, and just having that level of self-awareness and that ability to name what’s happening, then it actually creates more connection and that creates more vulnerability, creates more intimacy.

55:47.50 – Gareth Hermann

And then you have, again, more of that Serotonin, more of that Oxytocin. You feel that connection. Where and sometimes blowups do happen. Someone starts yelling. And you know we lost control. OK, great. Let’s acknowledge that happens too. No one’s going to do this perfectly. We’re all human. Well, we do have a repair process where we’re going to set period of time. Those two parties come back together. They do the same process you know when they’re more resourced. And if they can’t do that, then someone else in the community holds that and structure for them.

56:17.50 – Gareth Hermann

And so it it’s acknowledging the human experience. We are going to go into survival mode. We are going to hate each other for a moment. ah But through our process, we’re going to be led to coming back together into connection.

56:30.00 – Gareth Hermann

And that’s how we can actually live in a community versus just using isolation and distance as our only control mechanism for relationships.

56:44.00 – Brian David Crane

Super interesting. Okay. Thanks. Thank you for clarifying that.

56:48.00 – Gareth Hermann

Any comments, pushback? I’m curious.

56:51.00 – Brian David Crane

Well, I think as a statewide yeah, they’re playing devil’s advocate as somebody comes to you with the money that they need to invest, in new paradigm and they need to go through this training first, or they like, what’s the order in which they can get involved with the community?

57:11.00 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah, exactly. If they want to live and be part of the project, like if they want to buy a lot, that means you have to go through this training.

57:24.30 – Brian David Crane

Okay, as a prerequisite, like they can’t buy and until they’ve done the training.

57:27.00 – Gareth Hermann

Yes.

57:27.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah

57:27.00 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah. Alright..

57:30.00 – Brian David Crane

Mm hmm

06:37.75 – Gareth Hermann

So yeah, I have a village charter…

57:34.00 – Brian David Crane

And then as well, like if they wantto sell to somebody else, they got to say like, okay, cool.

57:36.00 – Brian David Crane

I’ve got a buyer, but we need to, like the buyer has to, well, he has to be accepted by the community group.

57:37.00 – Gareth Hermann

Exactly.

57:39.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

57:40.00 – Gareth Hermann

The way I’ve structured this is to..

57:43.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah..

57:44.00 – Gareth Hermann

Exactly. There’s a village charter which outlines all of this, which means that, yes, in order to become a member, then you have to do this training and only members have the right to purchase land. It’s almost like a club, we probably know from the South, like a gentleman’s club of sorts or the golf course. or it’s like you have to be part of the club in order to access the benefit of being able to buy the land. And so members you know only members can transact real estate. You want to sell your lot..

You’re going to have to wait until a new member is accepted into the club that, goes to the training that can then…

58:19.00 – Brian David Crane

Has the funds.

58:21.00 – Gareth Hermann

Yeah.

58:22.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, but they gotta be part of the club first in order for them to be able to even be considered in the buyer pool.

58:28.00 – Gareth Hermann

Exactly. But my goal with this project is going to be so cool that there’s going to be a list of people that are dying to get into the club. And so if you need to sell, um it’s not going to be a problem.

58:42.00 – Brian David Crane

Okay. That’s cool man.

How to Get Involved with New Paradigm Village and CEO Coaching

58:46.00 – Brian David Crane

For people who want to get involved who want either they’re coming to Nosara or they want to get involved they’re interested in investing in Costa Rica and they want to learn more about new paradigm or they want your help inside you or your team’s help inside of their organizations, like what do they do to reach out to you or where do they go to learn more..

59:05.00 – Gareth Hermann

Great, so if they’re interested in the New Paradigm Village, they can email me at [email protected]. You can probably send that to me and put the link in the notes. And you know, that Garethhermann.com is my personal website. They can read a little bit more about, the origins of the project and get some updates there. I can send out the investor deck or the residence deck, depending on their interest.

59:33.00 – Gareth Hermann

So that’s the best way to get in touch with me over there. On the other side, the best email is [email protected], and that’s where we can jam on liberating CEOs and create self-managing teams.

59:49.00 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, because your goal, I think for 2025 is you want to liberate 10 CEOs, right? Like that’s ah from their low-performing teams.

59:58.00 – Gareth Hermann

Yes. That’s right. Save them from themselves.

1:00:01 – Brian David Crane

Save them from themselves. Good place to end. Okay, cool. Thanks so much for coming on Gareth. Folks, if you’re listening, reach out to him for either one of those two things.

1:00:10 – Gareth Hermann

So fun to jam with you and excited to see you soon.