763 A Spiritual Path for Success with Erwin McManus

Episode number 763 with Irwin McManus. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Charles Dickens said, Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. And Eckhart Tolle said, Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. Welcome to a special episode of the School of Greatness Podcast, where we have Erwin McManus, who is an artist, a cultural thought leader known for his integration of creativity and spirituality. He is the founder and lead pastor of Mosaic, which is a thriving church based in Los Angeles, recognized as one of America's most influential and innovative churches. and in this episode, we talk about how Mosaic came to be and Irwin's up and down relationship with religion. The difference between just surviving and truly being alive and thriving and how you can tap into that thriving mentality in a moment. The power of gratitude and how it benefits your attitude and thinking. The big three beliefs that we all share and so much more. This one, I did not want to end. Guys, I'm telling you, I was captivated the entire time. I didn't look any notes. I was just so excited to dive into this. For whatever reason, when I have these types of conversations on spirituality, the meaning of life, why are we here? What is the reason for our life? What is our purpose, our mission? I just go down a rabbit hole and love the discoveries that I find. And I think you're gonna love this as well. Make sure to share this with your friends. LouisHowes.com/763 with Erwin McManus. I'm telling you guys, this is a game changer. Tag me on Instagram @LouisHowes. Tag Erwin McManus as as well. Let us know what you liked about this. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Big thank you again to our sponsor. And I am so excited about this interview, guys. This is someone that I didn't know about before until about a few weeks prior to interviewing him. And now I want to interview him all the time. I want to meet with them. I want to hang out with him. I'm telling you, you're gonna love this. Without further Ado, the one and only Erwin McManus.

Welcome everyone to the School of Greatness Podcast. We've got Erwin McManus in the house. My man.

Good to see you.

It's so good to be with you. It's great to meet you in person. I've heard about Mosaic, the church that you are the founder of here in Hollywood. Since I moved here, because I would go buy it and there's a beautiful church on the corner over in Hollywood and there was always people outside doing things and they're always the most attractive looking people. They're always smiling. They're always very like fashion forward young and I was like, there's some energy you belong there. Right, yeah, I belong there. And I've had a lot of friends go there who love it and rave about it. And a friend of mine, Joel Marion, is like, you,'ve got to interview this guy.

And I didn't even know who you.

Were, but I knew the reputation of the church. And as I started doing research about you, I really said, okay, this is someone I got to interview. Even though I've never heard about you.

Personally, I've heard about your work. that actually makes me really happy. no, the fact that you knew about the church, but you didn't know about.

Me, 'cause really the church should never be about a person. It's true. that's true. And you grew up in El Salvador.

I was born there, and I was. I went back and forth.

I was around 10 years old. So you're 10 years old.

You were a filmmaker as well, right?

You got a lot of things. Fashion, which means I couldn't hold a job.

Exactly. Same here. Same here. But I love your fashion. But you walked in here, I was like, I need you to be styled me. You know, I wear the same, like, black shirt every day, just simple. But I was like, man, this guy's got style, and it seems, like, interesting. All these, like, I guess pastors now of churches, they have like this style. It seems like there's a trend of a lot of guys and ladies who are like leading a message or a messenger, but they're leading with a fashion forward, innovative approach. You've done that with the music at your church, with the aesthetic, the design. It's not just like your 1990s church anymore, right?

Yeah, I would say one of the differences is that I'm 60 years old. And so I was, doing this 40 years ago. I think some of it is a lot of pastors grew up in church and they grew up in really conservative environments and they grew up with almost like a narrative that you should be against culture. And so they really were not connected to the world around them. I grew up irreligious. I had never walked into a church in my life. And so when people were asking, well, how did you become more whatever fashion forward, had you become more creative, more edgy, I'm going, no, you don't understand. I was actually normal. This is what normal looks like if you haven't been told you shouldn't express yourself and be creative and be imaginative. Yeah.

Why do most, I guess, traditional conservative churches tell people to hold back from expressing themselves? Or maybe they don't say it, but it feels that way. You kind of feel that judgment, like walking in if you have something nice.

On, it's kind of like looked down upon. I think if you just objective look at historically, religions tend to attract people who are late adopters, people who are afraid of change, people who really hold on to the past. And so whether it's a synagogue or a mosque or a church or a temple, they tend to reflect the past rather than to create the future.

Really, why is that?

I think people are oftentimes driven by fear. For me, it was the opposite. See, I grew up very religious. I didn't have any of this framework. And so when I became a person of faith, I felt I was liberated to create a future, to imagine and to dream and to risk. And that if there was a God, he is the most creative being in the universe since he created the universe. So how in the world would I hold onto the past when he's the one who's supposed to be creating the future? And so it's just a very different view of reality for me. Like I always tell people at Mosaic, the church should be the epicenter of human creativity. It should be the epicenter of imagination and beauty and wonder. And so yeah, I love film, I love art, I love fashion. I feel as alive when I'm directing a film than I did when I was, you know, when I'm speaking on Sunday. And I think we've created this unnecessary divide between what happens on Sunday or on Saturday, on Friday, depending on the person's faith, what happens every day in life. To me, everything is sacred and everything is beautiful and it's all an expression.

Sure.

Yeah. Wow.

So did you grow up believing in God?

I was an off and on kind of person.

Some days you were like, okay. Yeah.

The best way I can describe it is my grandfather was an atheist who believed in reincarnation. Interesting. So I remember him driving us to a house, telling us a little boy had died and that was him. And so he believed he was reincarnated from that young boy that died. But a lot of times people don't realize that Buddhism is actually a form of atheism. It's spiritual, but it's atheistic. And so my grandfather was like that. My grandmother was Roman Catholic, but we.

Never went to mass.

So it was like so many people were- Christmas maybe or something. Yeah, that's right. And then my mom, she was always on a spiritual journey and so I remember one time she brought home a Buddha and, you know, and so my mind, we became Buddhist and then she was reading the writings of Rabbi Kushner on why bad things happen to good people. And so then I go, okay, now we're Jewish, you know, I could tell she was always like processing and trying to figure things out. And my stepdad, he was just a good solid like pagan. You know, he, I don't think he ever had a belief system in his life. He worked in what we would call like, creative underground economies. And so he had an alias and he had many different aliases and many different families.

And creative underground economies. We're talking drugs, we're talking guns, we're.

Talking a lot of non-traditional forms of economic development.

Sure, sure.

And so that was the world I grew up in. And so I started reading two things that really affected me. I read every mythology book in the library before I was in sixth grade.

Wow.

And I'm not sure why, but I thought maybe in mythology I could figure out who I was and why we were here. Because I was really young when I began to feel a sense of disconnection and angst from probably the age of nine or ten. And so I ended up in a psychiatric chair when I was a kid. I was in and out of a hospital. I remember hearing my mom said, Dad said we need to send him to a psychiatrist. We don't know what's wrong with him. I had nightmares for years and years and years. just some, you know, some of the stuff everybody goes through that leaves you broken and shattered and disconnected from the world. And I found these writers, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton, and they're all science fiction writers who are physicists. And I found these imaginary worlds and dimensions you could travel to and worlds you'd go to and species you could find. And in my own heart, I began hoping that I was from another world and that this was an accident. And I know it sounds really bizarre, but probably by the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I'd convinced myself that I must be like a social experiment from another species.

Oh my gosh.

And so I was a really troubled kid, but you know what I've discovered is, I don't know who said this, it's almost like every story is true, but they're not all real. I had to create a story inside of myself just to try to survive. and a huge part of it for me has been this realization that even when people search for God, they're really just trying to search for themselves.

Interesting.

You know, they're trying to find who they are, if their life matters, if they have significance, if their existence has meaning. And so I never deluded myself. I was never really trying to find some abstract reality. I was trying to make sense of me.

I think a lot of us try to do that at times.

Yeah. Right? I think that's the search we're all on.

Yeah.

And that became a part of the mix of it all. So when I became a person of faith, I didn't, everybody talks about things like heaven and hell. That was so irrelevant to me. Why even think about anything after this life when you can't even survive this life? You know, I wasn't looking for something that helped me after I took my last breath. I was trying to figure out how to live a life that would leave me breathless.

Ooh.

You know?

Wow. So what do you think is the reason we're all here?

I know this is the School of Greatness. I actually do believe that there's greatness inside of every single person. I think that every human being is created in the image of God, and because that every human being has intrinsic value, and that we're created to create. I wrote a book years ago called the Artist and the Soul, and it's an anthropology. And what I argue in that book is what makes humans different than every other species is that we can actually materialize the invisible. There's no other species that can imagine a reality designed to exist and create it. And we don't even realize it's what humans do because silk worms just create silk. They don't wake up in the morning and decide what they're gonna do. You know, honey bees just create honey. It's just intrinsic to who they are. And I think that humans create futures and that we're intrinsically created to create the good and the beautiful and the true. And I look at it, I think human ideals are the best evidence of this. Like for me, one of the best evidences of God our human ideals. Because there's this phenomenon called phantom pain, where if you lose an arm, you feel the pain of the arm for years and years and years. And you have the psychological memory, not of that arm, but that arm is still there. But you cannot have phantom pain if you don't lose something that wasn't once there. If it wasn't there, you cannot have phantom pain. And I look at the world and I think we struggle for human ideals like peace. We've never known peace. Human history has never known peace. But we have the ideal of peace. We have the human ideal of a world without poverty, a world where no one is hungry, a world where every child is loved, a world without violence, a world without abuse. We have these ideals, but we've never known that reality. And a lot of people say, I can't believe in God. And it's like this ideal. And I'm like, you believe in ideals every second of your life. And so every time you do a school of greatness, you're actually experiencing phantom pain. You're saying there's something inside of you that there's no physical evidence of, but I believe it's there. We have to pull it out of you. You have to awaken it. I'm convinced that human ideals are our souls phantom pain. That somehow we remember what it's supposed to feel like to be like to be human. I think humans were created for love. We're created for beauty. We're created for goodness. We're created for community. We're created for intimacy. Otherwise, why would we long for these things that are so difficult to attain and sometimes seem almost unattainable?

Why do we suffer so much though? If love is what we want, intimacy, connection, why does it seem like a lot of times people are going through so much anxiety, depression, disconnection, uncertainty, lack of focus, lack of mission, and they're not experiencing love on the deepest levels they could.

Yeah, I think that's probably the most fundamental human question. It's how is it possible the thing we need most is the thing that's most elusive. We long for intimacy, but we fear it. Yeah. And we sabotage it.

We mess it up.

I think love is one of the reasons I have a hard time believing in a pure evolutionary theory, because if we were Just the outcome of evolution, we would have eliminated love a long time ago because love makes you vulnerable. Love is what gets you killed because a sabertooth is gonna eat this woman that you care about more than yourself. If you're just interested in her, you're run.

You're not trying to protect it.

You know who gets the girl, the girl who doesn't love her, the guy who's still alive. That's true. You missed your life. I'm going, how many times have you failed at love? been damaged by love, have been betrayed by love, then you wake up in the next morning and you're going, I need to find love. I need to be loved. For me, it is probably the most powerful driving intrinsic proof that there's more going on than meets the eye, because we can't seem to extricate love from us. You remember Star Trek, right? The Vulcans were supposed to be like the evolution of human development, where we're finally emotionless, And yet somehow we know that that's not life. That's just existence. Because if humans are at their core longing to be fully alive, what I know is that you feel most fully alive when you're most fully loved.

That's the truth.

And if you have all the success that the world measures and you feel as if you've not found someone to love and someone to love you, you'll feel as if your life is a failure.

Wow.

So now I'll wrap it all back to this little statement that Jesus says that God is love. And so I think that a lot of us aren't searching for God, we're searching for love, and we crash into God.

I say it one more time.

I say, we're not searching for God, we're searching for love. But while we're searching for love, we crash into God. Wow. I think that's what happened to me. I wasn't searching for Jesus. I wasn't searching for a relationship to some guy who lived 2000 years ago who died on a cross. It wasn't on my radar in any way. I was searching for love. I was searching for meaning. I was searching for intention. And in that journey, I found myself in an encounter that I would have never imagined. I still get on the platform at Mosaic and a lot of times I'll get up and I'll go, I still can't believe I'm up here.

Really?

I just had these moments where I just go, Do you guys know how unexpected it is for me that I believe?

Because you didn't believe.

No, I'm like that person who, you have a lot of voices in your head, I know you do. And I have so many voices in my head that you have to figure out which one's you. Yeah.

Right?

And I think that when we're at our worst, all the negative voices, become our identity?

Loud.

Yeah, and-- and-- but a huge part for me was, like, I have these voices in my head, they're always questioning. I've never been a person human today. Oh, which is why I think my message works on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. This is not a conversation from someone who doesn't wake up in the morning asking questions about everything. I wake up every day and I'm haunted with endless number of questions. I'm never under the illusion that I found all the answers. But what I do know is that in some odd way, without all the right answers or without all the complete answers, I experience what it means to be alive. And that matters more than being right.

Wow. What's it mean to be alive?

You know, when you're alive, okay, when you're in love, Sorry, this excites me. You know how when you're in love, everything gets heightened?

Yeah.

This is what it means to be alive. 'Cause one time this secular journalist asked me, what does it feel like to believe in God? I go, you, know, have you ever had that moment in your life where like the food tastes better and the aromas are more clear and distinct and the colors are just brighter? And I remember when I was driving when I was younger I didn't know I needed glasses. My friend and I were playing this game where you're doing this alphabet thing. You have to find the letter A, B, C, and words. And he kept winning and I thought he was cheating. And then as we're driving, he goes, Wait a minute. Okay, tell me as soon as you can read that sign. And he could read it way before me. That's how I only discovered I needed glasses. I only discovered I couldn't see clearly when I was with someone who could see clearly. And the first time I put on glasses, I realized leaves were distinct. individual pieces on a tree.

Not just blurred shadows. It looked like...

I always thought they were beautiful. I didn't know that they were astonishing. That's the difference between surviving and being alive. When you're alive, you see the details and the beauty and the wonder. You know, a person who's just existing, every day they struggle with depression and fear and anxiety. They see everything that's missing. They are haunted by all their disappointments. and they have not one more disappointment than the person that's fully alive. And not one more challenge or struggle or hardship, but the person who's alive somehow sees beauty in everything, sees wonder in everything. And that's what I know I'm alive. When I'm going, man, you cannot bring enough difficulty in my life to steal from me the wonder of taking this next breath. Wow.

When someone's going through this feeling of not feeling alive, just surviving, depression, anxiety, seems like the world's against them, whatever. What's the first question they should ask themselves to help move them out of that position?

Yeah, I think when you're in that space, one of the most difficult things to do is to actually get perspective. Because when you're already depressed, when you're feeling anxiety, when you're overwhelmed with fear, that means that you've been in there so long that your world is now being consumed by every negative factor around you. So I would say is pick one. that you can identify that's worth living for. Just pick one thing that you can be grateful for. It probably was over 20 years ago, I actually wrote about gratitude, which seemed to be almost like, I don't know, Q philosophy or, you know, you know, light-hearted anthropology. But now, and neuroscience is, and I actually have this phrase from a neuro clinic, that gratitude is the oil to the brain. It's a lubricant to the brain. That now neuroscience is finding that gratitude has this uncanny ability to keep our brain pliable, adaptable, and we are able to imagine and create when we're grateful. When we're ungrateful, we actually lose our capacity to think creatively and we lose our genius, we lose our brilliance, we lose our greatness. We don't usually connect gratitude, greatness. So when a person is struggling with fear, anxiety or panic attacks, whatever, I would say the first thing you have to do is you have to find something to be grateful for and then step into that gratitude. And if it's a person, go thank them. Whatever it is, find somebody to express that gratitude. It'll begin to lubricate your brain. I remember one time years ago, my son Aaron, he's 30 now, but my wife was an orphan and I never knew my dad and, you know, grew up in that kind of combustible kind of family system. And so we knew our first kid was like an experiment. Yeah. We're like, he's a social experiment. Let's see if we can create a functioning human being. And one time we were in New York years and years ago, we went up to East Chester, and we were going back to Manhattan. And when we got into the taxi, I didn't have a lot of money. I realized I left my wallet. My son said, Dad, I got you covered. He was like being a man, you know? He's like, I got you covered. You don't need to get your wallet. My wife was going to bring it later. So we took this taxi to Manhattan. He paid for the taxi, and then he left his wallet in the taxi.

Oh, man.

So we're in Manhattan, like, one in the morning, and with no money, no ID, no credit cards, no phones. We have nothing. Oh, I think we. He might have had his cell phone. And. And he started panicking because we were like, Probably 45 minutes walk to our hotel, maybe an hour. And as we're walking, he was getting a little panicky, a little nervous. And he goes, I'm so sorry. He was so upset that he made this mistake. I'm like, it's okay, but don't worry about it, you know? And I said, okay, you're being fearful right now, you know, because it was a little, it looked intense where we were. Yeah, yeah. You know? And I said, all right, buddy, you have this like part of your brain, it's kind of like the reptilian part of your brain. and right now it's on. You're afraid, you're angry, you're protective, you have almost like this acute sense of danger, you're hypervigilant. And I said, you can't solve the problems right now because that part of your brain is taking over. And if you can't let go of the fear and let go of the anxiety and let go of the stress, you can't access the part of your brain that unleashes imagination and creativity. So as we walked for this hour, we spent the time talking about how to solve problems. Who do you know anywhere in the country that could help us? Who do you know? What are the unforeseen materials that we have of human relationships, our resource that we have? What can't you see? What can't you see? It's funny, as we're walking, he goes, Is there really such a thing as a reptilian brain? He goes, Because I'm going to use this, and I want to make sure you're not just making this up. But I think there's this kind of dynamic when a person is under duress, the part of I don't even want to use brain, the part of your essence that you activate is the part that leaves you paralyzed. And if you can actually step away from that fear and that anxiety and begin to see that there's wonder and beauty and opportunity all around, it begins to activate the part of your brain that's full of imagination and creativity and beauty. And I made a decision when I was around 12. 'Cause I could feel myself disappearing into my internal world. 'Cause I created an imaginary world inside of me that I felt was safer than the world outside of me. And I created a world inside of me that was much more interesting and a world that I fit in better. And I felt like I was having a hard time coming out. Of that world. Of that world. Yeah. Stepping back out. So I would go to school and I would disappear and the class would be gone. The teacher would just give up on getting my attention. 'Cause you were in another world. I was just literally in another world. And every year I'd go to school and go, this is the year I'm gonna make A's, this is the year I'm gonna do well. And by the third or fourth day, I couldn't remember my classes. I just really couldn't connect to the outside world. And so I was a straight D student first through 12th grade. And I lived in this internal world and I couldn't explain it. And I tell my wife, and to this day, I was so comfortable in that world that the characters in that world are as real to me as the characters that you interact with every day. But I made a decision that I was either going to get lost in this internal world. If I was going to use my imagination to hide from the world, or I could use my imagination to create a better world. And that's a part of what shifted in my life. Because everything that you have is really your resource to either try to be self-protective or to create something more beautiful for other people.

Wow, man, that's powerful. I feel like a lot of people can relate to that, maybe not as deep into a world that you were in, but I remember being like, you know, people have like imaginary friends, they like have dolls that they like want to hang out with more than real people. You know, I used to have played games all the time with myself because I felt very insecure and alone as a kid and struggled in school as well. I couldn't really read and write. It was just like a struggle my whole my whole schooling, I was just like, I always played games with myself to try to keep myself happy. Try to find some sense of meaning and purpose. I remember I used to get in trouble a lot in school and I would go to the principal's office and I would just say over and over, I wish I were dead. I would just say it to the principal over and over, I just wish I were dead. I never felt like I had a meaning or purpose. I think a lot of people struggle with this sense of meaning and purpose and I'm curious, you know, you've been through so much in your life and you said that there's these questions that haunt you still today. What are those three big things that haunt you every day or on a consistent basis, those questions that you're constantly like seeking the information towards?

Yeah, I mean, I think as human beings, we ask an endless number of questions that are rooted in some very core fundamental issues. Years ago, I wrote in a book called Soul Cravings that every human being has three intrinsic cravings that unite us all together. And a lot of it's because, you know, I was studying Freud and Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis and, you know, I was watching, interviewing Young and Adler and all these guys and going, okay, wait a minute. Everyone's trying to understand what motivates human action. And everyone had different answers, but I thought the question's really important. And so when I became a person of faith, I was really not, most people study the Bible for theology. I studied the Bible for anthropology and sociology. People want to understand all this stuff about God, and I'm like, I really want to understand all this stuff about us. And I think what I came to is that there are three intrinsic drives. Every human being has intrinsic need for love, for intimacy, and there's an endless number of words around it, intimacy, connection, belonging, you know, all that. Every human being has an intrinsic need, not only just to be loved, but for hope. And every human being has to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. The moment you stop believing that tomorrow can be better than today, you actually move to despair. So it's odd if you look at it, okay, every one of us have this need for intimacy, to connect, to have human contact, to be known, and to know someone. See, I think these are proofs of God. See, I think this is because you're designed in a certain way, just like you're designed to drink water, to eat food, and to breathe air. But we just happen to, you know, because some mathematical probability, we just happen to need exactly the air that we have.

Exactly.

You know, we just happen to actually need the liquid that this earth is full of that comes from the sky. I mean, it sounds like magic, right? You know?

The alchemist.

Yeah, that's right. The aqueduct gets filled because the heavens open up and drop water on us. No wonder people dance to rain gods, you know? And we just happen to be able to eat the food that's on this planet. And I think it's the same way with love, that every human being is driven for love. And I think almost all of human history can be understood through love and hate, and the way that we interact with each other. And so the great wars in history are not by people who are different from each other, but people almost exactly the same. And so you have the Hutus and Tutsis, you have the Protestants and the Catholics in Ireland, you know. And I mean you have the North and the South and the Civil War. You would think that we would be so fundamentally different. That's why we couldn't get along.

It's because we were fundamentally the same.

So if we're the same, why can't we get along? See, those are the questions we have to deal with. That's the question I wake up with every day. And then we have this also this intrinsic drive for progress. Like every human being has to believe they can become more. I mean, think about this. Your school of Greatness is a declaration of a human intrinsic. Because you can't pull out of people anything that isn't in them. And I think this was for me a fundamental problem with faith. A lot of faith was trying to shove something down people's throats, to cram something into people. And I'm pretty much, no, if I can't pull it out of a person, then I shouldn't be trying to put it into them. And because to me, that's coercion, that's manipulation. You want to pull out of a person what they're longing for, what they're searching for. And because then you don't have to worry, there's a difference between giving a person something to drink and drowning a person in water.

Right, right. Forcing it.

Trying to control the- A lot of religion feels like waterboarding, not being given a cold drink.

And that's one of the reasons why a lot of people have stepped away from religion.

But think about this for a moment. When you talk about like faith, hope only exists in the future. Because a person is- Something that's better.

A potential better than what I have now.

Yeah, because if hope is in the past, it's called regret. Because you can't change the past. And oddly enough, like this guy named Paul in the Bible actually says that when something gives you hope, once you attain it, it's no longer a source of hope, which is a really profound anthropological insight. And so hope actually causes humans to be connected to the future. And this is one of the things that was so odd for me when I became a person of faith, the way that Christians especially thought about the future. Like it was so fatalistic, so deterministic that might as well have been atheists. You know, because if you look at deterministic atheism, it says that the future is already set through mathematical probability. And I'm like, that's the same thing that a lot of Christians say. The future is already set. And when Christians and atheists have this in common, they feel like they have no creative power to affect the future. See, I would never accept that level of powerlessness.

Yeah.

In my life. And I think the future is dynamic and we affect the future. And so when I look at hope, it means that humans are designed to be connected to the future. And if you are connected to the past and disconnected future, you actually lose all hope. And one of the reasons I know these are intrinsics is that humans function best when they're loved. They function best when they have hope. And then there's this other dynamic, we function best when we have meaning. And it's a human intrinsic. It doesn't matter if you come up with a different conclusion than me. We all have different answers to all life's problems and life's situations and reality and our worldview, but we're all the same in that we're all trying to answer the question why, which I think is so interesting that children ask the question why when it's the least relevant question for survival. The questions that matter for survival, the evolutionary questions, are what, when, where, how. Like, okay, how did you get away when he got eaten?

How do I build a fire when I'm like freezing today?

Yeah, and the question why is not an evolutionary question.

Then why do we ask it so much?

See, I think it's because you're created with eternity. inside of you, just like there's an electrical circuit that's catalyzing your heart to beat, and it sounds like magic that your electricity being formed into flesh and blood. I think that your spirit, and your spirit's telling you you need your why. You need to know why you exist. You need to know why you're here. Because really, if all we have is these 80 years, why would why matter? at all. And then I look at humans and I think we are meaning machines. We not only give meaning to meaningless things, we make meaningful things meaningless. I think a huge part of your podcast is trying to align meaning for people. Stop wasting your life in the things that are meaningless and start spending your life on things that are meaningful. Think about this. It's like right now we're communicating This is what we call it, right? We're transmitting meaning, but all we're actually doing is creating sounds. And we, as a species, learned how to create sounds that we're able to transmit complex and detailed images into another person's brain.

Crazy. And I have a feeling, an emotion.

Yeah. And all this is seeping through us and we're actually transmitting something real. I mean, what's more real? We're passing to each other or me handing you a book or passing you a fork or giving you a thousand dollars. Because if I give you ten thousand dollars, that's always outside of you. But when I speak into your life, it goes into the essence of your soul. When you affect me, it changes me and it becomes a part of who I am. So something really powerful going on here. And we humans are meaning machines. I mean, think about it. There are tribes in Africa. They talk by clicking. I hope I didn't say anything profane or anything like that, you know? Because the moment I change my language, it no longer transits meaning to you. And we humans have this incredible way of creating meaning in everything, so colors have meaning. I mean, behind me, you write love, but it's not just that it's the word love, it's how love is written. Isn't it interesting that love tends to always have soft, round edges?

Yeah, feeling, yeah, yeah.

Because you're not gonna write love with hard angles, with triangular images. You're gonna write love because it has this kind of feel because we give meaning to everything. And then you have all these different colors and the colors have meaning. We humans create meaning every second of our lives. And that for me is the fundamental question. Not okay, not what you're doing to try to get love, not what you actually believe is bringing you hope. Because you know, it's odd, a person who has false hope is actually doing better than a person who has no hope. Right. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, they have something they're looking for.

I'm going, are you out of your mind? You actually believe that's going to happen? And they do, and it drives them forward, and it gets them up at 4:00.

It gives them purpose, they work harder, they're more happy.

See, in this, I'm really pragmatic and going, wow, This is how powerful hope is. Even false hope works. Then you can actually find something you should be hopeful for. It changes everything. And then all of us have this drive to find meaning or to create meaning or to make our lives meaningful.

Why do we care so much about meaning?

See that again, it's an intrinsic proof that you are not time dated, that you have something eternal within you. 'Cause meaning is an eternal question. It's not a temporal question. It's not a question that survival demands. And I think this is a part of what makes us fundamentally unique as human beings. And I think it's part of what drives us almost to madness too. Because I've thought things were meaningful that were not.

Like what?

You know, when you're young, right? I mean, I played sports, right? You know, and I'm from El Salvador. I should have been playing soccer, but my stepdad insisted I play football. I'm not physically really creative for football, but I thought football was the most meaningful thing in my life. And when I stopped playing football, my mom actually called the college to make sure I was not so depressed that I wouldn't do something harmful because it was the most meaningful thing in my life. And I mean, I broke a bunch of bones in the back of my hand. I played four more games while those bones broke without going to the doctor.

Because I thought football was It was life.

It was life.

What position did you play?

I played running back.

Where did you go to school?

I didn't play in college. I just played in high school. Gotcha, gotcha. But I thought it was the most meaningful thing in the world, right? And then all of a sudden one day I realized, why am I doing this? There's no meaning in this. In fact, it's almost tragic to think that I thought it was so meaningful when it wasn't that significant. I was coaching my son. He was playing hockey when he was like 10 years old. I know nothing about hockey, but I was his coach, you know? But he was the best player on our team. He really wanted to be a good teammate, and the other kids started getting upset because he was scoring all the goals. And he's very empathetic in that way. So one game, he said, Hey, Dad, I'm just gonna pass the puck. You know, I'm just gonna pass, I'm not gonna score. 'Cause I want other parents to like me. So we're playing, and he's passing the puck, passing the puck, we're getting killed. 'Cause our kids just couldn't score. And I brought him over. I said, Aaron, I need you to score. He goes, no, Dad, team game. It's the other way around, you know? And he goes, yeah, team game, when they pass you the puck, score. That's your role. And I said, Aaron, take the puck and score. It got a little tense. And he looked at me, he was 10, and he said, Dad, in 20.

Years, this game isn't gonna matter.

That's crazy that a 10-year-old had that perspective. He's been listening to the wrong Messaging.

Wow.

He's been listening to what I say to adults, not what I say to children. And I remember looking at him, said, well, could you go out there and pretend it matters? He goes, oh, I could do that. Yeah, he said, right? You know, and he goes out there and pretends, but he knew intrinsically that this wouldn't matter. But that was a gift in that moment. But most of us, we give ourselves like wealth and fame and power. I mean, how many times have people just given their whole life to be famous rather than to build their life to be not known, but be worth knowing, right? And how many times have people mistaken greatness for fame and fame for greatness? And I think in this book I actually talk about how fame is what you do for yourself, but greatness is what you do for others. It's powerful. And so when you ask like, how do you give yourself sometimes the wrong thing, and think about it. Have you ever made a mistake in your life and you just felt like your life is over?

Yes.

See, I've had moments like, even I remember in high school, junior high thinking, I don't want to wake up tomorrow. I just want to die. Of course. And I would have to tell myself then, in 20 years, this isn't going to matter.

I never had that perspective. I was just like so deep in the pain and suffering that I was like, what am I going to do tomorrow to survive? You know, it wasn't until much later In the last 10 years of my life where I started to learn like, this is gonna matter, this is gonna pass, everything's gonna be okay in six months, a month, whatever. But most people, I think, struggle with perspective and finding something to be grateful for what you talked about. For me, gratitude is one of the cornerstones of my life, especially when things are wrong or seeming wrong. When a lot of it is just an illusion or the story we give it, the meaning we give this experience. and I've started to look at more and more challenges in my life as beautiful experiences, as lessons to make me stronger for the future. And they actually give me more hope. I'm like, okay, this is happening for a reason, for me to learn something so that when someone wants to commit suicide in 10 years, I have the courage to be able to know how to stand in it in that fear with peace and grace and love and not freak out or whatever it is, just probably what you've been through, you've been able to stand on your church or any stage and connect through experiences of pain and struggle and the crazy world that you were living in as opposed to everything has been perfect.

Yeah, it is an ironic, kind of almost like a psychological dynamic of putting all your eggs in one basket. And we don't oftentimes realize that we may be the basket we put all the eggs in. See, if our whole life is about us being loved, and our whole life is about us having a future and a hope and our whole life is about us having meaning for us. Then all the eggs are in one basket. But when you say, no, my focus is going to be loving people and just the love that I need is going to come my way. But I'm just going to focus my life on loving people. I'm going to focus my life on giving other people hope. I'm going to focus my life on helping other people find meaning. I'm going to find my meaning in serving others, not in having others serve me, then you've actually diversified. So if you're looking at it from an economic perspective, you know, a lot of us don't have a psychological diversified portfolio.

Interesting.

Our whole lives are about ourselves. And the way I look at it is that every day of my life, someone I love is doing well. Every day of my life, someone I love is moving forward. Every day of my life, someone I love is doing something awesome. And so there isn't a day in my life there isn't something to celebrate, 'cause it's not all about me.

Wow. It's interesting when I'm going through hard times, it's really hard to have the perspective to not think of like, I need help right now. I need to get out of this feeling, this experience, like someone throw me a bone, right? That's the time I think when you feel the most challenged, the most insecure, the most doubt, anxiety, overwhelm, the best thing you can do is call three or five friends that you care about, just like you said, like call five people that day and tell them what you appreciate and acknowledge about them. Be a listening person to them. Give them love, hope, inspiration. Tell them they're doing a good job. Get out of yourself and serve other people and you're gonna feel a thousand times better.

That's such a good nuance that you have there because a lot of people would call three to five friends to tell them what they're going through.

Give me help. Give me support.

Rather than calling them to give them support. I love that.

We still wanna talk about challenges we're going through because that makes us human and allows us to process and express certain things. I don't think you should just mask all your feelings and emotions, but I don't think you should sit them for too long and focus out. Like the more you can just give to other people, smile at strangers, the more you can just help people. I think it was Zig Ziglar or someone like that in the personal development space says, if you want to achieve all your goals, help everyone else achieve their goals. And it's like, just focus out as much as you can and you'll attract the love. You'll attract the meaning.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what's the biggest question then that you wrestle with the most? Is it, you know, because you connect with me when I said, if we're so similar, why do we always fight in the world? Is that one of the biggest questions you wrestle with or.

I mean, sometimes it's very practical. It's just the everyday stuff of how do I help people I love move from a deep sense of inadequacy to a place where they have this internal straining to know that they have everything they need to live the life they're created to live. I wish every day I was just trying to answer the big questions of life, but a lot of times I'm just trying to help people I care about.

How do you help people you care about who maybe always seem to be a victim or are struggling or that never seem to get a hold of like their purpose or their mission and you just want to see them thrive, but they continue to suffer year after year?

I think one of the things that you have to realize is when a person is in a perpetual pattern, negative pattern, that they almost can't hear you right away. Like wherever you and I agree, communication happens easily and naturally. If we disagree, we have a more difficult time understanding each other. If we violently disagree, you will distort what I have said and I will distort what you've said. and turn it into a more violating response. Does that make sense?

Of course.

So when a person's in a really bad place, you can make the mistake of thinking they're unteachable because they don't respond well to what you're speaking into their life. And you have to realize that a lot of it is that they're in a really, almost in a distortion zone, where they're reinterpreting everything in the negative. and it takes a little, you have to be patient with people and help them through. And there's this interesting place in the Old Testament with this guy named Elijah, I think it was, and he has a great moment, then he has a horrible moment, and he goes running for his life, and he goes out into the wilderness, and he hides under a bush, and he just like, just wants to die. And it says the first thing that happens is that an angel came and brought him food and drank, and said, just eat and sleep. Yeah. and I think sometimes we just are too hard on each other.

Yeah, we demand a lot from each other.

Yeah, you know, and I'm like, hey, just get some food, get some sleep, because you're inside of this body and if your body's not doing well, you're not gonna do well.

You're not gonna think clearly.

So a lot of times I ask people, look, just realize that you have to stop and take care of yourself. Just eat and sleep. And like I'm a person who doesn't sleep hardly at all. I mean, I don't sleep very much. I've never slept. I mean, my whole life I've been like that. And so I have to like work at sleeping.

Practice every day. Yeah.

You know, and getting to sleep and things. And a lot of it is because I process so much stuff and I do all my work in my head, so it's hard to not be at work. And you're running all that stuff down. So I know what it's like to be in the space. And my wife says to me, It's too loud in bed. I can hear your brain. Wow. and she was just turn it off. I can't just turn it off. So I think I'm empathetic going, I know that I can't just go boom, it's all shut down. I'm not worried anymore. I'm not stressed out anymore. I'm not anxious anymore. I realize there's a process that I have to go through. And some of it is really almost like a praxis where you have to go, okay, I just need 30 minutes or I'm just quiet. I'm just alone. I just decompress and I just get into my own space. and I do think this is why historically things like prayer, meditation are so important. Whatever you choose to do, you just got to find some way to block out the outside world and get in touch with what's going on inside of you. Because I think some of it is when you're not paying attention to your inner world, it's almost like it's Parliament out of control. Everyone's screaming and yelling. You have to step in and say you're in charge. Yeah. This conversation is a conversation that I am the head of. and I'm gonna take on this conversation.

Yeah, and I think when you're not in control of your inner world, every little thing in the outer world becomes amplified, like you said. Everyone who's stopped at a green light, you get mad at and you react to. Everyone that honks at you, you want to flip off and fight. Everyone that says something to you, you respond with a sense of fear and anxiety.

And by the way, that is actually why I wrote the Way of the Warrior, was that, I don't write books going, what will sell? I write books based on what are the real things that we're grappling with. And I found it even in my own life with a 27 year old daughter, a 30 year old son, me being 60, and knowing that they are struggling through some of the same stuff that I struggled through. They face crises and challenges and, you know, they have moments of deep internal angst and My kids are really thoughtful and intelligent, and sometimes I envy people who don't seem to spend time thinking about life.

They're peaceful.

But if you are at all introspective or reflective about life, you're gonna find yourself sometimes tormented and in turmoil. And a huge part of the process of moving toward peace is slowing yourself down. Yeah. And allowing your inner world to be organized the way that you want to express it in your outer world, you know? And it's funny because my kids always tell me, like, I'm. I'm like Zen because I just don't lose my temper. I just, you know, I mean, it's probably been 60, 40 years since I've lost my temper. But I was a kid. I had a violent temper.

All the time.

I was a guy who punched the walls.

Me, too. Okay. Every moment, I felt, like, defensive.

Yeah. Wanted to fight or scream or. Yeah, I was that guy. And what I realized was that anger, rage was me proving I was powerless.

So powerful.

That powerful people are never out of control. It's powerless people who are out of control. So when you see that person being physically violent or expressing a rage or cussing that person out, I mean, I see people stop their cars in the streets and get out.

Oh my gosh.

All right, here's a person.

That guy before.

They're not just out of control. They're powerless. Yeah. And that's their powerlessness manifests.

Wow.

And what I decided in my life was that I would not allow any circumstance to be more powerful than my internal world. And I will not allow the external world to be more powerful than my internal world. And if my internal world is stronger than the world around me, then nothing in the outside world can affect me. That's why people say, I don't know what got into me. I said, nothing got into you. It got out of you. Wow. And just the circumstance, it pierced into your soul and it let out what was really there. I think Viktor Frankl talked about that.

In his book about, you know, when he was in concentration camps, you know, people would do all these horrible things to him and he just kept a sense of peace and focused on his reactions.

That's Man's Search for Meaning. Man's Search for Meaning, which originally was called Death Camps and Existentialism.

Wow, interesting. But that's not a selling title. That's not. It's not. And then, I heard stories about Mandela where he was just treated horribly in prison and yet, from what I understand, always responded with a sense of peace and love. And in fact, after he got out, welcomed those guards into his home and dinners and things like that. So for me, and then Martin Luther King talks about never getting angry at someone's hate towards you because you lose your power around that. You give someone else the power when you react. something around that he said.

So you're creating a human meta-narrative. Yeah. Whether you realize it or not.

Yeah, yeah.

Talking about Mandela and Richard Frankel. Richard Frankel. And you probably could have. Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King and Gandhi. All right. And you're just naturally painting a picture of human ideals. Yeah. This is what Humanity's supposed to look like.

All right. Or that's what's possible.

Right? Yeah. But if there is. nothing beyond the material world, then they're not in any way different than Mussolini and Genghis Khan and Hitler. But yet nothing in your soul tells you that those are the aspirations of what it means to be human. Think about this just from going back to this earlier conversation, because I thought about it Have you ever seen some act and you thought that was inhumane? But the only species that can commit an inhumane act is a human. When you look at a tiger eating a gazelle, you don't think it's in animal, you know, or a killer whale, right? Eating a seal, you just like, that's just life. But when a human does something that an animal does in the wild, we intrinsically know it's inhumane. How is it possible for a human being to be so self-aware that something a human does seemingly naturally would be, oh, unnatural? And that's why, Louis, I think there's a divine narrative in us. That our souls actually keep whispering to us, There's more inside of you than you know.

Just gosh.

Point that out. You just don't realize you're preaching the gospel.

I know. You gotta meet people where they're at, to the masses.

No, you believe this.

Of course.

You've made it your whole life. Of course. Yeah. And what I would say is you're exactly right. You are aspiring for the great, not just your greatness. You're aspiring to follow the greatness in all people.

That's my mission.

So then you believe there's this, this thread throughout the human spirit that interconnects us all together.

Yeah.

That it's more than math.

Yeah. You talked about ideals and beliefs in the beginning, like this belief system and these ideals. What would you say is like a core ideals that you think is the most aspirational ideals and beliefs? And how often do your beliefs evolve? over time?

That's a good question because I think.

That... Because when you were 10, you had a belief system and then it evolved. I think when you were 20 or 30, maybe you're like, oh, I thought this was the truth, but maybe there's something else here.

Yeah, I think a part of it is so oftentimes we put data and truth in the same category or information and truth. I think I had the other, I'm the opposite. I was a person who didn't find it easy to commit to truth. So I was never a dogmatic person. So a lot of people who are highly dogmatic, they go through dramatic shifts of, I believe this, now I believe this, now I believe this. I was always more fluid. I was like, I don't know. I can see value in everything. Again, studying Norse and Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythology. never read them with any level of judgment. I never thought to myself, this is less valuable than this and less valuable than this and less valuable than this. I always was just looking for where's the story that I'm in and what makes sense to me. And it's kind of odd, like every mythology seems to have the good guy, the bad guy, and the dad who's trying to work between them, right?

Sure.

And isn't that what seems to be going on inside of us? There's that part of us that aspires to be great and good and the part of us that just wants to consume and take. And then there's this almost this other voice trying to call us to who we were created to be. And I don't think my beliefs changed in terms of, in a dogmatic way. I think my beliefs were always growing and evolving and changing. I think some of my beliefs were hopes. you know, like I didn't have a lot of proof growing up that the world was good, but I believed the world was good. That there could be goodness to be found out there. In fact, a lot of it, before I ever had any belief in Jesus Christ, I had this aspiration to end poverty in the world. I had an aspiration to do something truly humane in the world. that's why it was odd for me when I would hear Christians say, oh, no, no, there's nothing good in you unless you give your life to Jesus. I'm like, I don't think you got that one right. I think that every human being aspires to do something good, unless they've been so broken and corrupt. I don't think it's the way humans are intended to be. I think that's the deviation. I actually think we're created for good, and that good just feels right.

-Yeah.

-It feels good. -It does. healthy when you're there. I mean, obviously coming to faith in Jesus was a huge, both psychological and worldview shift for me. I remember studying philosophy in college. I was one of those guys who had no reason to be in school, because I was just studying philosophy, right? And we studied Christianity for like five minutes. My professor would get up there, I mean, we spent so much time on Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Locke, Hume, Descartes, I mean, everybody got a lot of time. But Christianity got like three minutes. The guy said, this is the book that says that God is love. And he read this passage about war in the Old Testament. He said, Isn't that ridiculous how in the world could this be the God of love? And he laughed and I laughed. And in my mind, I thought, yeah, that's not a viable option. You know, so it took me about two or three minutes to decide Christianity was not a viable option for my life. And so when I began to encounter more this message of Jesus, it was disruptive. and I would argue with people who believed in God, and they were terrible at arguing.

Bad at it.

Just so bad, you know?

And it just kept justifying why you were right.

Yeah, no, it's exactly right. So in college, I would just go, okay, if they believe in God, I'm gonna argue that there is no God. And if they don't believe in God, I'm gonna argue there's a God. I'm just gonna like work this thing through. And really a lot of it for me was, I keep losing the argument. I mean, I keep winning the argument. but I like them better than I like myself. You like the Christians, the ones that are good ones? I did. It just happened to meet some good ones.

Yeah, yeah.

You know? They seemed like they were kind and filled with joy. And so I wish I could say it was intellectual and rational and all academic, but a lot of it wasn't. A lot of it was essential. I thought, what kind of human do I want to be? And at that point, I was pretty much a, gosh, I would rather believe the wrong thing and be the right kind of person than believe the right thing and become the wrong kind of person. Because I met a lot of people who believe in God who are so judgmental dogmatic and condemning. But then I knew a lot of my atheist friends who were like arrogant and judgmental and condemning and it was just both. And that was a huge shift for me. But I don't know why, but I didn't feel like a shift in belief because I always wanted to believe that humans had intrinsic value. I wanted to believe that we mattered. I wanted to believe that we're not specks of dust. So maybe I was predisposed to believe. if you could look at it like that, because when I would study scientific determinism, I'd go, all right, wait a minute, this means that there's no creativity, there's no free will, that the future's completely set, that choice is an illusion. They go, yeah, if that's right, I'd rather be wrong. And so some of it's really pragmatic for me. I look and go, what's the view of reality that makes me most fully alive? and allows me to do the most good in the world.

The most beautiful and creative and expressive.

You know, and then when I believe that you've been imagined to imagine and created to create, that you're both a work of art and an artist at work. It has changed my whole view of reality. And that's why I started Mosaic. I mean, Mosaic, the name is just an art form. It's an art form of broken and fragmented pieces that are brought together to create something beautiful. especially when light strikes through it. So I said, Hey, look, we're gonna be straight up. We're all broken and fragmented. We're the irregular pieces of the world. And we're gonna come together and we're gonna believe that God's gonna create something beautiful, especially when He strikes His light through us. I just kind of chills. You know? That's beautiful. That was why I started Mosaic. And I said, Look, if you need to pretend you're perfect, this is not the place for you. If you need to pretend, you got it all together. You're just gonna feel really uncomfortable here. If you need to follow someone who pretends they're perfect, this is not the place for you.

You're not the guy.

My wife would always say, Could you quit telling people that you don't know what you're doing or you don't know where you're going? And I go, no, I'm always going to tell them the truth. That way, when I actually know where I'm going, they'll know I'm telling the truth. And I think it's really helped because all the brokenness that my life came out of gives people hope. I don't write about ideals that I've never experienced. I write out of the essence and struggle and reality of my own life. You know, and I've needed peace in my life. And then I'm so angry about the condition of our culture right now and how people just attack each other and they just destroy each other. And social media has become such a negative space.

Bullying.

We want to find everyone in their worst moment. We got to change the narrative here. We have to be for each other. And I think it's funny, there's this woman in the Bible called Rahab, and she's a prostitute, and she makes one choice that changes her life. And there are four women in the genealogy of Jesus, and one of them's a prostitute.

Wow.

People don't talk about that. And that's why I tell people, you're just one choice away from the life you've always longed for. Don't let anybody tell you that you've trashed it for 40 years, It's too late for you. All you need right now is just one good choice. And that one good choice is going to get momentum in your life and just keep moving forward. So I'm a straight D student, first to 12th grade, I couldn't get into college. My English teacher, my last day of high school, said, you, will never make it.

Wow. Million copies later of the books.

I just want to be a metaphor that it's never too late. and everyone has something of value inside of them.

Yeah, I love that. I feel like I can connect with you a lot on your story and your life and your experiences. And you've got this book. I have a few questions final for you, but this book is called the Way of the Warrior: An Ancient Path to Inner Peace. And the reason I'm attracted to this, when Joel told me about it, I said, okay, I gotta read this and interview Irwin. Is because for my whole life, I was focused on success and accomplishment and achievement. to gain love, right? Because when I would win in sports, I would get acknowledgement. Friends would like me, you know, parents, everything. So I just said, I have to win at all costs. Everything I do that translated into relationships, and that's never a good thing. Yeah, business, everything. I came from a very loving, compassionate place until something was on the line, and I really needed to win. Then it was just like nothing else matters. We are winning at all costs, right? And up until I hit about 30, I'm 35 now, almost 36, I was so accomplished but never felt a sense of inner peace. And then I went on a journey for the last five, six years of like reinventing myself and rediscovering what is greatness, what is success. And I told Maria Shriver when I had her on, I was like, you know, for me, you can't achieve greatness without inner peace. It doesn't matter all the money and the success and accomplishments. If you feel a lack of inner peace, I don't think you're living a great life. And if you're not living a life of service, if your mission isn't attached to helping other people, I don't feel like you can find that inner peace as well. I'm not saying you need to save the world and hunger in the world, but there's got to be a part of your life that is on a mission to help the people around you. I think that helps you bring more inner peace. So for me, greatness is really around cultivating the gifts that we have within us, bringing them out to pursue our dreams, and in that pursuit, making the maximum impact we can on people around us, but also finding that inner peace. And so I love that you talk about being a warrior is finding inner peace. And in the back of your book here, just everything you talk about resonates with me. So, I'm excited about this and I want everyone to go get a copy because I think it's going to be very powerful for you. And this, so the book's out now. You guys can go get it at bookstores. Also, where online?

What's your website for this? You go to earlmcmanus.com or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

It's up everywhere. I want to make sure you guys go get this book. Get one for a friend as well. And I love this at the top. It says, In order to be ready for a battle, you must first know peace. And I think that's the thing we are seeking the most. you know, we're facing daily wars around us, whether it be trying to find a new job or career, build our business, the relationship struggles we're in, and we're always gonna be struggling if we don't know how to find peace within us first. Would you agree or no? Absolutely.

Yeah. No, I just gotta say on a personal level, Louis, one, you're really both a really fascinating person and just like almost incredibly, immediately likable. It's really beautiful. By the way, when I wrote the book, It's Crazy, I was driving down Hollywood, down Vine and I was with my wife. I have a vivid imagination. I heard this voice and I heard this, the first line of the book, it was, the warrior is not ready for battle until they have come to no peace.

Ooh.

This is the way of the warrior. And I looked over at my wife and said, I have my next book. And I love Japanese culture. I used to go to Japan a lot and love all the Japanese films.

And it was, Last Samurai.

Oh my God. I got a Last Samurai poster in my house. No way. Oh, that's cool. of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon signed by Ang Lee.

Oh my gosh.

You know, and I wrote this book as if it was an old samurai writing to a young samurai. Wow. Passing on the wisdom. And I think that the problem is that we have people who are at war, but they're not at peace. And so I want to answer an individual and a global question, because the world will never know peace until we have inner peace. War rages across the world because war rages within our hearts. and the only way we're gonna have world peace is through inner peace. And so this is a battle for world peace, one life at a time.

Amazing. I love this, man. I'm so excited for this. I didn't even get to any of the questions I had here.

I'm sorry about that.

It's all good. I was just so fascinated by everything. It's actually good when I never have to read a question off of here, 'cause it means I'm just so enamored by the message. We didn't even get to like, you just had cancer a couple of years ago, you went through surgery, now you're cancer free. I'd love to know what cancer has taught you about life. And I don't know if we have time for this now. I don't know if you have to.

Run or I'll give you my quick answer. Because when people say to me, are you cancer free? I always tell them I was always free of cancer. Because it never owned me.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

That's great. Real quick answer then. What has that experience, the illusion of having cancer, taught you about?

Not an illusion. It was a reality. But we're all dying. But some of us are gripped by the fear of death. And I think the only reason we're afraid of death is because we're actually afraid to live. And what I discovered when I was told I had cancer and I didn't know how long I would live, was this beautiful realization that I was not overwhelmed with regret. Because I felt like I'd lived every day of my life as fully as I knew how. And I could tell you that my family confirmed this to you. I never felt afraid. I never felt angry and never felt bitter. And I gave myself permission to feel all of it. Because to me it's like to be human is permissible. I don't need to pretend, you know, being a pastor or starting mosaic, they don't need me to pretend. They need to be real. And so I took them through the process with me and I started wondering, why am I not afraid? I thought maybe there's something broken inside of me, right? I could, now some people can't feel love or empathy or whatever I thought, is there something broken? And I realized, There's a difference between being sad because you might lose something. Like, I want to see my kids grow up, get married, have kids. I want to see the world become a better place. I still believe humanity's best days are ahead of them. There's so much I want to experience and do, but I didn't feel fear because I didn't wake up one day going, oh no, I don't have time to live the life I was created to live. And I think most of us are actually afraid of death because we realize we've only existed.

We haven't truly lived.

Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. So these are, this is called the three truths. Imagine you get to pick the day when it's the last day for you on Earth. Let's just say there has to be a day and you have to leave the body and move on to whatever's next. And it could be 100 years from now. It could be whenever you want it to be. And let's say you've accomplished everything in your imagination is one to create in the world. you've done everything good you want to do, you've seen your kids do everything, you've had the life. But for whatever reason, time's to go. It's time to go and you've got to take all of your work with you. So all of your writings, your books, your content, video, any content you put out there, you've got to take it with you. So no one has access to that information anymore. But they give you a piece of paper before you take your last breaths and you get to write down three things you know to be true. from your whole life experience, from all the crazy worlds you were living in, all the questioning, all the experience and the lessons, you get to write down three final lessons or truths that you would share with the world. What would you say are your three truths?

I would say that the motto of all things is love and that people are the only true value. that exists in the world. And that when everyone else thinks you're gone, you've just gotten started.

Wow. Interesting. That's a good third one. Okay. Make sure you guys get this book, the Way of the Warrior: An Ancient Path to Inner Peace. It's gonna change your life, I already know. How can we connect with you online personally? Where do you hang out the most on social media?

I love Instagram, because I love taking photographs and And of course, right now, my son and his little media team are helping me get the book word out, but we're going to put a lot of video content on irwinmcmanus.com so we've gone through and we've shot like 10 to 15 minutes for every chapter of the book to carry people through. And it's all content that's not in the book. Because in a book, I might have 10% of my content. 90% of the content doesn't make it into the book. And so the best place to go is irwinmcmanus.com or go to the Mosaic app because our church, all my talks are there. So I guess you guys have like 2 million people on your podcast. Incredible. We have a podcast. I have two. One, it's my talks every Sunday at Mosaic. And my son and I have a podcast called Battle Ready. And that came out of when I had cancer. And yeah, so that became our theme was Battle Ready when I had cancer. Because I did it, when I told them I had cancer, I said, Hey, look, It just, you just need to be battle ready. Wow. So we've been doing that podcast and it's so raw and honest and I'd love for people to join us there.

That's cool. Okay. I want to acknowledge you, Erwin, for being a, just a fresh breath of air, for bringing so much love into this moment and so much soul and spirit and giving people a sense of hope who maybe don't feel it right now. Because there's a lot of people listening that are succeeding, but I still feel like are missing that moment of inner peace and hope of like, is there going to be a better tomorrow even though I'm succeeding?

Yeah.

Is there gonna, am I gonna feel something better? I'm gonna have that love. I'm gonna be able to get out of this toxic relationship. So I acknowledge you for being battle ready and for continuing to have a positive attitude through life threatening experiences and constantly being in service to humanity. I feel like that's the greatest measure of a human is how much they continue to want to serve. So I acknowledge you for all that and for just showing up today, man. This is powerful for me and I'm very excited. I hope to play basketball with you one day. I hope to hang out more and I'm going to come check out Mosaic.

Hey, this is a bucket list. I've wanted to get on your podcast. When I first heard about the School of Greatness, I thought one day I would just love to have a conversation with you. So I want to thank you so much.

You've made my year. I appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. This is the final question. It's what's your definition of greatness?

Well, I have a whole chapter in the book on greatness, and I would say that the definition of greatness is what you've done for others.

Erwin, thanks, man. Appreciate you. Thank you, brother.

There you have it, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this one, All About Love, Spiritual progress and the way of the warrior with Irwin McManus. If you enjoyed it, share with your friends. Tag me on Instagram @lewis howse and@Irwin McManus over there as well, because this needs to go far and wide. Do yourself a favor and help someone today. Send them this podcast, send them a message, send them a text, copy this link from the podcast app or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this and send this to friend who you think it could inspire. Tell them to listen to this. Tell them to ask you what you got out of this the most. And you guys have a conversation about this. This is all about progressing together. Don't do it alone. Share it to a friend, a spouse, a partner, a family member. Send this to someone that you want to see grow in their life as well. We are just getting started, guys. This is episode number 763. I'm so excited about everything we have going on. We had an amazing interview the previous week, the previous two interviews with Terry Crews talking about toxic masculinity, his rise to success and everything else he's been able to create. We have Bubba Watson, two-time Masters champion on. Go check out those last week's interviews. We've got so many great interviews as well in the past and coming up. I'm so excited for who we have and I can't wait for you to see that. so this is your first time here. Subscribe to the podcast. Leave a review over on Apple podcast. Let me know what you think, what you got out of this. And yeah, leave us a review. Leave us a rating. Let me know what you think. Follow on Instagram, follow on the website, all the good things, guys. And as we started out at the beginning, Eckhart Tolle said, acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance. If you fixate on what you lack, you will continue to create more lack in your life. If you focus on what you are grateful for, you will attract more good things in your life to be grateful for. Remember these simple principles and apply them to your daily life. As always, guys, I love you so very much. You matter to so many people in the world. It's time for you to step up and start mattering to yourself. And as always, you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.