How To Use Spirituality To Achieve Your Highest Potential w/Erwin McManus EP 1165

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This is episode number 1165 with Pastor 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. Welcome back everyone.

Today's guest is Erwin McManus. He's a best selling author, entrepreneur, fashion designer, filmmaker and founder of Mosaic, a church movement based in the heart of Hollywood with a community that spans the globe. He has committed his life to study the genius and the pursuit of God, never knowing that the two worlds would one day collide. And he's written a new book called the Genius of Jesus the man who Changed Everything. And this episode was so powerful for me that I wanted to share it within two different episodes. So part two will be out later this week. In this episode we discuss how we are all born geniuses, but most of us grow out of it in adulthood, how to cultivate our fullest potential in life, why empathy is the highest form of intelligence, how to fully love ourselves unconditionally, the difference between faith and belief, and so much more. If you're enjoying this at any moment.

Make sure to share this with a.

Friend, text someone or post it over on social media, as well as click the subscribe button here on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere that you're listening to podcasts. And make sure to leave us a review with feedback of the part you enjoyed the most over on Apple Podcast. And I want to give a shout out from our review of the week from a fan on Apple Podcast. This is from Tintin, who said the podcast offers quality knowledge that feeds my brain on a wide variety of topics. The host is genuine and kind and his voice is very easy to listen to. I often feel inspired and motivated after listening. Well, Tin Tin, I appreciate it. I'm glad my voice is smooth and inspiring and I'm glad you're getting a lot of knowledge from the guests we bring on here. And again, if you want a chance to be shouted out as a fan of the week, then just go to Apple Podcast right now. Leave us a review for your chance to be shouted out in the future. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Irwin McManus.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I've got my good friend Irwin McManus in the house. Good to see you, sir.

Oh, it's so good to be with you.

It's great to be with you. And I'm excited about this because we had you on the show two and a half years ago and it blew up. People loved it. We talked about a lot of things. All my curiosity, all my questions about the world and is this real? And spirituality and religion and all these different things. And you've got a new book called the Genius of Jesus, the man who Changed Everything, where you break down the genius of Jesus and how he wasn't really known as a genius, at least in our modern times. He's not talked about as a genius, but he's probably one of the most genius people that there's ever been around. And I want to talk, I want to get back to Jesus, but I feel like there's a thing of potential that we want to reach. A lot of people want to reach their potential or they feel like I have this untapped potential, see potential in other people that don't tap into it fully. And it seems like Jesus was someone who was Able to tap into his potential and beyond. But it seems like a lot of us never fully tap into that. It's like, yeah, like everyone dies with like so much potential still inside of us. Even if they accomplish the greatest, you know, scientific discoveries or art or athletics or music, there's still so much left within us. How should we view and think about our own potential? And how can we get the most out of our potential as human beings?

Well, that's a big question, right? And it sounds almost incredibly, I guess, discouraging that we all die with potential. But I actually think it's encouraging. Okay, see, because if you had limited potential, then you could die having used all your potential.

Okay?

But if you have unlimited potential, then you will die with some of that potential being never actualized.

Isn't that sad though? Or is that a good thing?

No, it's a good thing because you see, if you have a limited resource mentality, then you'll think to yourself, well, I only have so much potential. But if you have an abundance mentality and you realize, no, no, there's a limitlessness to human capacity. I'm going to die with some things I could have done undone. I have to live with that.

Oh man.

And you're going to die with some of your potential never being actualized because you have limitless potential. You have capacity that you're not even aware of. And the more you grow, the more you develop, the more you mature, the more you understand who you are as a human being, the more you'll access that potential. So really the question isn't will you die with potential that you've never actualized? The question is, how much of that potential are you going to use during your life?

So how do we tap into the maximum amount that we could utilize and not regret the things that we're going to leave behind? Because there's going to be so much in us still. So how do we make sure we get the most out of us?

Right? And so I would say it's really a matter of focus. Don't focus on your potential because that becomes incredibly self centered. If you're just focusing on, I want to make sure I use all my potential, that I don't leave my potential unused. Rather than asking, I want to make sure I do the most good in the world, I want to make sure that I've accomplished the most good for others. And so I think sometimes, even though we're talking about human development, it can become incredibly narcissistic. It's not really about how much potential you have. It really is about how much good you do.

Okay.

And what if someone's feeling lost or trapped or hopeless, and they don't know where to go with their potential and they're trying to figure out what their purpose is? How can they start to discover that? What are some ways they can at least start tapping into that?

Well, it's, to me, fascinating how you get different advice from different people. Some people say, follow your passions, right? And that doesn't always work for me because I'm passionate about everything. So people say, do what you're passionate about going, then I'm going to do everything. Because I think some people actually are just passionate. Then they pick an object and. And they're passionate and they pick a career. But they can be passionate about 10 different things. And then some people say, well, do what you're good at, what you're talented to do. But there's some people who are really talented at multiple things, or people feel like, well, I'm not talented at anything. It has the same effect. If you're a 10 out of 10 in 10 things, you're still confused, just like if you're 1 out of 10 on 10 things. So it's not even about how much talent you have. It is an intersection of passion, because passion gives you energy and it fuels you. Has to be something you love. But I also think it's an intersection also of natural talent and ability and the things that you seem to be predisposed to be good at. I do think there's a genetic element to this that just some things I'm not born to do. That adage that if you can dream it, you can do it. It's just not true. Maybe if you could dream it, someone can do it. But there are so many things I can dream that I can't do. There are some things I can dream that you can actually do.

Right.

And I think sometimes we have to realize is that it's a combination of things. It's a combination of how you're designed, what you're actually good at doing, and what you're passionate, what you love to do. My brother was really good at playing football, but he didn't love it. And so he had a lower ceiling. And other people, I think, were more passionate about a sport and had a lower ceiling that accomplished more. And then it's also, I think, the. What's behind the curtain? What do you love to grow in? What do you love to learn? What do you love to develop? When people say to me, oh, I really Want to become a pro athlete or I want to become an actor. But then I would ask them questions like, okay, how many hours a day are you in the gym or are you paying for acting lessons in la? I can't tell you how many young actors tell me I can't afford acting lessons. And I say, oh, then you can't afford to become an actor. And my daughter is really a world class singer. And what would drive her crazy is that she would talk to lesser talented singers who worked with her and she would say, you need to get voice lessons. And they would take it as an insult. Mariah's been taking voice lessons as long as she could virtually breathe. She never saw her level of talent as the reason to not develop discipline.

That's interesting.

And I think a lot of times what happens is that we want the outcome, but not the process. We love the idea of the outcome, but we don't love the reality of the process. You can usually identify the dream that you were in a sense created to live out because you actually love the struggle, not just the success. And when you fall in love with the struggle of something. And as a writer, I mean, I love the outcome, you love the finished book. But what people don't realize is that I actually love the outcome less than I love the process.

That's interesting.

I love the process. I love the struggle of trying to understand a concept or to have clarity about a particular theme or idea. I love the struggle of going into my inner world and figuring out how to this connects to who I really am and how to bring information and experience together. And I love the struggle of can this actually be something worth publishing?

Yes.

And if I didn't love that struggle, I would not feel really that connected to the outcome. And that's why appreciating the journey, appreciating.

And enjoying the experience of the pain.

Right. And that's why there's a difference. Some people are authors, but they're not writers. Yeah, they wanted to get a book published and maybe they're great at branding and marketing and the book sells great, which is wonderful. But being a writer is different. Being a writer is this deep need to struggle through an idea, an experience, and to translate that into this art form of a book. And I think it's true for everything in life. It's like being a cook or a chef. Right. I, I'm not a great chef, but I love cooking. And I, and I, but I've learned to love the process of it. I learned, I love, I have a smoke My backyard looks like I'm a wannabe chef. Right? You know, I have a smoker, and I have a hibachi grill, and I have a, you know, a regular barbecue grill. And, you know, and. And because I love Japanese cooking and I love, you know, good Southern smoking, and. And. And I love learning the process. And I made brisket so bad that I literally threw it out. I wouldn't even feed it to my dog. It just. It came out so hard. And I could have given up, but I just wanted to keep going back and keep going back. And I realized that if I'm going to ever have an outcome I'm proud of, I have to be committed to the process. I have to be willing to fail. I have to be willing to struggle. And I think that's a part of it, is when you find something you love so much that the struggle gives you a sense of significance. That's when you're on the right path.

Yes.

My friend Jay Shetty says, you can't be anything you want. He's like, people tell us, you can be anything you want. He says, you can't be anything you want, but you can be everything you are. I think that's the line. But it's something around that.

I love him. He's so insightful.

You can't be anything you want, but you can be everything you actually are.

That's right. And, you know, and. And I've seen certain cliches or adages that are out there. Like in Nike, it says, if you have a body, you're an athlete. And when I look at that, I go, yes and no. Okay. And if you have a body, you have the potential of being athletic.

Yes.

But we translate that to say, if you have a body, you're an Olympian. But not everyone can be an Olympian. And not everyone can be, in the truest sense, an athlete, but everyone can move toward physical health. And so when I look at things like that, I go. Those statements can actually be incredibly misleading. I have a body. My body is deteriorating. I'm 63 now. I don't have the same body I had at 23 or even at 33, but I can still be athletic. I can still compete. I can still have fun and enjoy myself, but I need to realize that I have a body, but it doesn't make me an Olympian. And maybe it barely makes me an athlete. I was in Florida at a hotel working out, and I saw this sign that said, if it's humanly possible, I can do it. And I read that, and I Thought I wish that was true, but it's not true. Again, if it's humanly possible, there is a human that can do it. Not you, though, not necessarily me. I would say it's the same thing with genius that when you, when I write about genius, I was just in a conversation with the guy who the TV show Scorpion was inspired by. Walter has the highest recorded IQ in the world. Yes. And we started having a conversation about genius. And, and he completely disagrees with me, which I thought was wonderful. The guy with the highest IQ in the world completely disagrees with me. Because we start talking, well, how do you define genius? And he goes, well, you know, the facts are against you. Because only 1 to 2% of the world population ever graph out as a genius. And so, and so the facts are against me. 98% of people express no visible genius at all. So when I write about not just the genius of Jesus, but the capacity of human beings to carry a unique genius in every single person, I understand the facts are against me. But the future is for me. Because the facts are always for the past. The facts are rarely for the future. The facts were not for air travel. The facts were not submarines. The facts were not for airplanes. The facts were not for cell phones.

Breaking the four minute mile.

The facts are never for the future. The facts are always for the past. Here I'm having conversation with the guy with the highest IQ in the world and I'm realizing he's right. The facts are against me. And he's in a rare category of that 2% of geniuses in the world. But it doesn't mean that human beings do not carry within them an inherent genius, which is a very different thing. Because in the same way that not everyone's going to be Olympian, everyone can actually increase their capacity, their physical capacity, in the same way that not everyone is going to be Einstein or Bobby Fischer or Picasso or Mozart. It doesn't mean that there isn't a unique capacity within every human being. And that's what I'm really writing about. Twenty years ago, when I first started writing, I made an anthropological statement that every human being is an artist, every human being is a creative. Back then it was seen as absurd. And yet when you stop and think about this, because I've been a part of ted for like 20 years and I listened to the TED talks and I've been a part of that community. And there's always someone who's an expert on a species and they highlight why that species has so much value. And one of the questions I kept asking myself is, well, who's up there advocating for the human species? And what makes humans unique? What makes us different than every other species? And one of the things that really struck me was the one thing that human beings can do that no other species can do is that human beings can materialize the invisible. That human beings can actually take the imagination and translate into reality. There is no other species that can do that. Now, other species may be able to imagine, but they can't translate that imagination into reality. And so here's what I think is fascinating. If you looked at species from a purely objective level, from a naturalistic perspective, what human beings can do is, you know what? Bees create honey, silkworms create silk, like ants create colonies, beavers create dams. Humans create futures. We're the only species that can create future. If the planet was left to every other species, the planet would stay in its present, it would never change, and it would evolve in a natural way. But humans have an ability to imagine a future that does not exist and create it.

Right.

We have this table, we have this book, we have this beautiful studio. It was all in someone's imagination first. And so before there were all these bulbs, before there was the school of greatness, it was inside of your imagination. And so when I walked into the studio, what I realized I was doing, I wasn't just walking inside of a room. I was walking inside of the imagination.

Of Lou's house from years ago.

That's right. Yeah. I've stepped into your imagination here. You've invited me into your imagination, and now it's a part of my reality. All of us are living inside of someone else's imagination right now.

That's interesting.

This nation exists because it was in the imagination of Jefferson and Washington and Franklin and Hamilton, and with all of its imperfections, we're living inside of the imagination of these people. MLK Jr said, I have a dream that one day a man will be measured by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. When Barack Obama took the oath of office and became the president of the United States, he was literally walking inside of the dream of a man who no longer lived because he had been killed, but his dream could not be killed.

Wow.

And we were now living in the imagination of MLK Jr. We were living inside of the imagination of others who fought for a better world. And so when I look at the human species and I go, what humans can do is we create futures, then I go, okay, that is an intrinsic genius. Whether we recognize it or not.

So we all have genius within us.

I am absolutely convinced of that now. It doesn't mean we all actualize that genius. And it also doesn't mean that we all have genius at the level of an Olympian. And so we have to recognize that there are individuals who are an unexpected iteration of human capacity. Mozart changes the game for composition. Einstein changes the game. In the world of physics, Bobby Fischer changes the game. In the world of chess, Tiger woods changes the game. In the world of golf, Michael Jordan changes the game. The world of basketball, you have individuals who change the game. Picasso changes the game.

Why are some people more genius level than others then why are they the anointed or chosen ones or did they choose themselves?

Well, I think it's a combination of things. There's a. There's a man named George Land who worked for NASA and he was asked, I think around 1968 to develop an assessment so they could find geniuses to work for NASA. Interesting. And so George Land developed what was a genius assessment, and they gave that assessment to 5 year olds. 98% of 5 year olds were identified as geniuses. They did a longitudinal study, followed these kids for the next 10 years. When they were 10 years old, only 30% of them still tested as geniuses. By the time they were 15 years old, only 12% of them were identified as geniuses. I think it was 128,000 people then were graphed and average age 31. Only 2% could be identified as geniuses. So the question doesn't seem to be, is there genius inside of everyone? The question really needs to be what happened to the genius that was inside of everyone?

What happened?

98% of us are born geniuses. 2% of us live out that genius. Interesting. I think it's the same with human creativity. It's the same with human imagination. A part of the mistake of adulthood is that we see maturity as equivalent to standardization. If I can make you the same as everyone else and you're now an.

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To be standardized and to conform, you are now an adult.

Right.

And I think neuroscience tells us that by the age of 12, our brain has decided who we are. So whatever you focus on before the age of 12, that becomes your mental capacity.

It's harder to break out of that later.

Yeah, it's very, very difficult. How many languages do you speak?

Almost one.

I know you're trying to learn Spanish.

English. Yeah.

I'm learning Spanish. Yes.

And for you, Spanish is a love language.

Yeah. I love listening to salsa music and Latin music, but, yeah, I don't always fully understand it, but I feel it, but I don't comprehend it.

So if I asked you if you were a linguistic savant, you would probably say no. No. In fact, you'd probably say you're bad at languages. Yes.

At this point. Yes.

How old do you think you were when you learned English?

I mean, one two, I mean, you're starting to pick it up, I guess, right away.

Right. So you're 12 years old.

Yeah.

And you're learning one of the most difficult, complex languages in the world. When you were two years old, Louis, you were a linguistic savant, Right?

That's true.

If they'd moved you to Tokyo, you'd have learned Japanese without any difficulty.

That's true.

They'd moved you to Manila, you would have learned Tagalo. And if they moved you to England, you would have finally learned real English. Exactly. Yes. And if you go on to Buenos Aires, you learned Spanish. And the crazy thing about it is, at the age of two, you had all the attributes of genius, of a linguistic genius. Wow. And if you'd had the benefit of moving to four or five places from the age of one to ten, you might have learned two, three, four different languages. The reason Americans only speak one language is because their brain knew they only needed one language to survive. Thrive. Your brain will only learn and hold the capacity for what it needs to survive.

Wow.

And so Spanish was my first language. I came to the States when I was young. I learned English right away. I remember early on my report card said, transitional period, learning English. But the truth was, I could read that. I just didn't tell them because I knew I wouldn't get grades for a while. And it was. And I say this without any sense of accomplishment, it was easy. Learning English was easy. And you know why? Because when I was 3, 4, I was a linguistic savant. And now that I'm 63, a lot of that's diminished. And so I still try to study languages and learn languages and I've studied German and Hebrew and Greek and of course English and Spanish. And I've spent some time studying Mandarin and Korean and Portuguese. And I just try to keep my brain pliable and adaptable. But I don't have the same capacity now that I did then because I didn't nurture that capacity. I wonder how many different aspects of human genius were simply left unnurtured. And so we lost them along the way.

So how do we recultivate them at later stages in life?

Well, I would step back and go, what's the most important aspect of genius to recultivate? Because the likelihood that I'm going to be Mozart is not going to be really high or to be Picasso or to be Bobby Fischer. And here's the crazy thing about genius, it's really irritating because it's not transferable. I could spend my life at Mozart and I would never become a world class composer.

You can get better, you're not gonna be world class.

If anything, I might just become bitter or more frustrated.

Exactly.

Because you see, what genius does is it makes greatness look ordinary.

Yeah.

Effortless.

Yeah. And so that's why a lot of people, when they become an expression of genius, they're actually despised by their peers. I could spend my life at Picasso and never paint like Picasso, or, you know, I could spend my life with Bobby Fischer and never learn how to become a master in chess. But the genius of Jesus, which is why I wrote about it, is the singular genius that's transferable.

What is that?

It's how to be fully human. And as I was studying genius for the last 40 years, I was always struck that there wasn't a single list that had Jesus on it of geniuses. And that list would be, I mean, the greatest, probably the most renowned genius in history is probably Leonardo da Vinci. And he's sort of like iconic genius. In fact, a lot of my life was shaped around the aspiration of Leonardo. And I would study da Vinci, I would study his thinking, I would study some of his practices, and I tried to emulate them and take them on in my life, which is why I worked at becoming ambidextrous. It's why I would do so many things right handed and as opposed to left handed. Left handed, right handed, tried to use both sides of my brain and try to develop practices of da Vinci just trying to become more creative and more adaptive, more pliable mentally. But if I spend my life in Da Vinci, I'm not going to become da Vinci. And so what you realize is that genius is not transferable. But there is one exception. It's the genius of Jesus. If I could, I just wanted to go back to like where the idea of the book came from. I was in my back house during quarantine and I was by myself having a conversation with myself. And I'm sure you do this too, Louis. You ever have conversations, there's almost like two or three people in your head.

Sure.

Which is why, you know, we're never lonely. Right. Or alone. And. And so I'm having this conversation with myself and this thought just comes crashing through my head. How weird that my entire life revolves around a person who lived 2,000 years ago. As you know, I'm a follower of Christ.

Yes.

And I believe deeply in Jesus. And I thought, this is so bizarre that I live my life studying the teachings of Jesus. I live my life teaching others about Jesus. I live my life trying to emulate the principles of Jesus. I live my life believing I had this relationship with Jesus. And I thought, this is so weird that my whole life revolves around this person of Jesus. And then I had this follow up thought with the other person in my brain. What if Jesus isn't real? How do you explain this? And so then I had a counter thought and the other person in my head said, well, even if Jesus isn't real, the change in me is real. So how do I explain that? I thought, okay, so I could say, all right, Jesus really isn't God, but I can't say I haven't been changed by Jesus. So then I had this follow up thought, well, then I've been changed by the idea of Jesus, which okay, so there's two options. This is the way my brain kind of works. I've either been changed by the reality of Jesus, that he really is who he says he was, or I've been changed by the idea of Jesus, which is to me, almost more extraordinary. So I began this process where I extricated all my belief in Jesus and I said, all right, Jesus, I'm gonna put all your miracles and everything in the mythology category. And now I want to know as.

An idea, it didn't happen, but it was a myth.

Yeah.

So then you know, or he was a real person, but there's a lot of mythology around him. Right. So the teachings were real, but the mythology was added to the teachings. So I just went from that perspective. And then I thought, all right, why isn't Jesus on any list of geniuses? Does he qualify as a genius? What is his genius if he was one? And why would that genius be so overlooked for 2000 years? And one of the first things I did is chapter one is all about what genius is. It goes all the way back to the etymology of genius coming from the word genie, that the ancient Greeks actually believed that you were not a genius, you had a genius, that genius was given to you by the gods, and it wasn't really for you, it was for others. You were a steward of that genius. And so I thought, this is interesting because from the very beginning, the observation of genius is connected to divinity. And then I started wondering, why are so many geniuses just accepted in their madness or in their lack of humanity? And then I realized it's almost like this. This tension of genius seems to be an expression of both madness and of the divine. And so then I started breaking it down, going, okay, does Jesus qualify as a genius? And then I started asking, well, why is this genius not identified? I realized it's about the canvas. See, when you're a genius, you have a canvas in which your genius is expressed, whether it's physics or mathematics, whether it's science or botany, whether it's sports or music or art. But Jesus canvas was the human spirit. And so when you realize, oh, the reason Jesus genius is not easily observable or identifiable at first is because he wasn't trying to change art or music. He was changing us. And what his genius did is it actually changed people. I mean, think about this. Two thousand years later, there are people who actually want to do good in the world because of Jesus, who want to live lives of generosity and sacrifice because of Jesus, that. That I became a part of that canvas. Two thousand years later, I'm a part of the art form of the genius of Jesus. And then it exploded in my brain. Whatever you believe about Jesus, his genius is transferable. Because what you find is all over the world, from every generation and every culture, every level of education or economic status, that when a person is genuinely affected by Jesus, they actually want to live for the good and the beautiful and the true. And so I began to identify what were some of the basic principles. I wish this book was all encompassing, but it's not. I just narrowed down to around six different characteristics of Jesus where his genius can be revealed and where his genius is transferable to our lives.

What are those six?

Well, I'm not going to give you all six, but maybe I'll give you one or two.

Sounds good.

Let me. Like one is the genius of power.

Okay, power in what sense?

Just even the understanding of power. Okay, like think about it. Right now, we live in a time and during the, during the quarantine, during COVID we had the protests with black lives matters, with racial equality, with social justice. And there have been conversations for the past several years around reparations about, you know, how do you, how do nations deal with the fact that they've wiped out or damaged so many peoples in history? Whether it's the Maoris in New Zealand or they're aboriginal in Australia, or the Native American Indians here in the United States. And we think this is a natural conversation. But historically, nations never felt they needed to repay what they took. See the Greek empire, the Roman empire, the Egyptian empire, the Norse Vikings, they would have never, they would have laughed you out of the room if you said you owe something to the people that you conquered and wiped out. See, the concept that nations have a responsibility with power is actually a concept that is transformed by the genius of Jesus. See, Jesus changed the view of power. He actually taught us that power should be used to empower, not to overpower. And in fact, in the Bible it says that when Jesus knew that all authority and all power had been given to him, entrusted to him, the next thing he does is he ties a towel around his waist and he washes his disciples feet. What Jesus does with power is he serves. And this idea that we should actually care about our history, the idea that now that we understand slavery is evil, not just unethical, that we should actually care about the damage we've done backwards. That's not an evolutionary concept. The evolutionary concept said, it says we were more powerful and you got to live with it. We're the conquerors, you're the conquered. Well, I guess I'm the conquered and you're the conquerors, right? And the reality is that evolutionary thinking, a deterministic view of the universe, a view that there's no God, then there is no foundation for social justice, there's no foundation for political morality, there's no foundation for governments being for the people. And Jesus changed the view of power. And how does one man affect every emerging developing nation in the world for the next 2000 years where it becomes the common thinking? And there's so many different places where Jesus revolutionizes our way of thinking. There's that old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but it's actually not true. Absolute Power does not corrupt. Absolutely. Absolute power reveals absolutely.

Tell me more.

Power doesn't corrupt you. What power does is it empowers you.

To be yourself, to be more of.

Who you are, more of who you are.

It's kind of like they say about people who start making money. It kind of reveals more of who they are.

Yeah, money doesn't make you evil. Money allows you to express whatever's in you more. And what Jesus actually teaches us is that God has absolute power, but he's absolute good. And so God actually can be trusted with power because he's good. What happens is that humans are not always motivated by the good, and so that power actually reveals what we're motivated by. I mean, I'm from El Salvador, and, you know, my region of the world has two forms of government, revolution and dictatorship. Right. And what happens is the revolutionaries, when they gain power, become the dictators. Because what ends up happening is that there's not a change in values and not a change in essence. And one of the most powerful things in the world is when you have power and you realize, I only want to use this power to do good in the world.

Yes.

That, by the way, comes from the genius of Jesus. I think another aspect of the genius of Jesus, and I open up chapter three with this is empathy. And there's a different definition of empathy. I tried to divide between pity and sympathy and compassion empathy, because we've kind of lumped them all into one category. And right now it's interesting. I've worked with an endless number of assessments for personality and psychological frameworks and worked with three neuro clinics across the country and some assessments. When they test you on empathy, it's all about how much your emotions are involved in the decision, how much it affects you. That's actually not empathy, and that's emotional bias. And empathy is when you actually factor in how your choices, your words, your actions affect other people. Empathy is about being able to see the world from the vantage point of another person's soul.

Yes.

And in the book, I argue that empathy is the highest form of intelligence. Because even in my conversation with Walter about genius, genius is usually limited to the category of iq. Only now are you becoming more aware of the importance of eq, or relational intelligence, or emotional intelligence. And I look back and I realize that when I was young, I lived in a complex kind of environment, as I know you did, too. And when you're in a family system that's not healthy, you develop survival skills. And early on, I began to develop the ability to feel people's emotions even when they were hiding them. And I find that a lot of times when people are the children of people who are drug addicted or alcoholics or in an abusive situation, they develop almost a high awareness of potential danger. And because of that, they're able to sense danger coming before anybody else sees it. And they can develop hyper vigilance where they can see danger everywhere, even when there's not danger everywhere. And one of the things that happened for me is my emotional intelligence elevated at a much faster rate than maybe my iq, my intelligent quotient. And I was flunking out of school, but I could read a room, I could feel what people were feeling. And I remember when I was younger, I remember saying that I could see emotions the way people see furniture. And it was, for me, debilitating. It was paralyzing. It was almost overload for me. And now I look back and I realize I was developing a superpower. And when I speak, I can actually feel the room. I can't explain, doesn't matter. I mean, I've spoken to audiences of 40, 50,000, 30,000, 20,000, and no matter what the size of the room is, I can feel what's going on in the room. And sometimes I can't explain it. It's almost as if this person is now closer to me. They're 10,000 people away and now they're only a foot away from me. I can feel what's going on inside of them. And there's this dynamic connection to people that's highly empathetic. And what I see in Jesus is that Jesus emotional intelligence was at such a different level that he didn't even answer the questions people were asking because they were not asking him from the right frequency. And so you look at Jesus, I mean, if you think about a work of art, In John chapter 8, these religious leaders catch a woman committing adultery, rip her out of the bed, leave the man, probably a friend, drag this woman naked down the street, throw her at Jesus feet at the temple, and then say to Jesus, the law says that she should be stoned. What do you say?

Wow.

And they all have stones in their hands ready to stone this woman in front of Jesus. And it says that Jesus bends down, writes on the sand. It doesn't tell us what he writes. And then he says, whoever is without sin casts the first stone. Just one phrase. And then it tells us one by one, to begin dropping their stones from the oldest to the youngest. In one stroke, in one elegant stroke, Jesus is able to defend this woman. And reveal the hypocrisy in those men. And then after they're all gone, he.

Doesn'T answer the question that's asked them.

It's like it's a whole different frequency of conversation. And then when they're all gone, Jesus looks at her and says, woman who condemns you? And she looks around, she goes, no one. Neither do I condemn you. Now go and sin no more. Two statements revolutionized a moment. It's the elegance of emotional genius. And a lot of the conversations between Jesus and the religious leaders of that time, they were all about facts and Jesus was all about essence, which I have a chapter on the good. And I think this is. Sometimes when I'm writing, I'll start writing and I'll pause and realize I'm writing about something I didn't even know I knew. And this chapter is one of those chapters on the good because it was one of those moments where I realized, oh my gosh, I understand what has been informing me all my life, even though I didn't understand it. Because when I became a person of faith, they talked to me a lot about right and wrong, good and evil. And it always seemed to me, to me, to be almost like a lower level of thinking. Yes, and, you know, and I cared about right and wrong, you know, and good and evil. But I felt like it was flatlining, a deeper conversation.

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Wasn'T waking up in the morning going, do I rob a bank or do I help the homeless? You know, so I wasn't really choosing between good and evil, you know, and most of the time I wasn't even choosing between right and wrong. I wasn't even choosing between do I cheat on this test or, you know, or do I study harder, right? You know, most of the time I was choosing between, between good and good or what good should I do? And then one day I realized, oh, Jesus moves us from thinking from the right to the good.

What's the difference between right and good?

So they come to Jesus and they say, hey, the scriptures say that you should not work on the Sabbath. You should keep the Sabbath holy. But here's this man, and he needs to be healed. So Jesus, are you going to heal on the Sabbath and violate the law? See, they're talking about right and wrong. And then Jesus says, is it right to do good? And they can't answer that question because they're about right and wrong. And Jesus is about good. And the good always supersedes the right. And in fact, the person who's living their life between right and wrong, they're probably avoiding the deeper conversation of the good. And it's just lower level thinking. You know, how paralyzing it is to spend your whole life going, is this right or wrong? Rather than going, am I doing the most good that I'm capable of?

What questions should we be asking ourselves in order to get to a higher level of thinking?

Is this motivated by love? I mean, that's the most important question to ask. Is this motivated by love?

What are most of us motivated by in the world?

So many different things. We're both simple and complex creatures.

Right.

I do think there's some driving intrinsics in all of us. All of us have a longing to be loved. Yes, to be connected, for intimacy. And that can be, that can have a light and a darkness to it, you know, and so when we're motivated. Right. I know that feeling, you know, and, and so we need to realize we're always going to have this intrinsic craving for intimacy, for connection, for love, for relationship. And, and we have a whole universal language for it. Family, friendships, community, church, all that's the language of relationship, connection, of intimacy. And intimacy is the thing we long for most and fear the most. And so it becomes for so many.

Of us, why are we so afraid of intimacy?

Because we don't know if anyone can love us for our true self.

Oh man, that's true.

Right?

For all the darkness, all the bad, the shame, the guilt, the insecurity, all that.

Right.

By the way, Louis, this is going to be my one Jesus moment in the middle of this whole conversation. This is why Jesus is so unique. He knows you completely and loves you completely.

All your flaws, all the bad parts, everything.

Yeah, it's only a self delusion that you're revealing yourself to God piece by piece. If there is a God, he knows you completely.

Right.

And here to me, what is so mind blowing, the one person who knows you completely loves you unconditionally. Every other relationship is sort of a dance. It's a salsa.

Yes.

You're revealing the part of yourself that you feel is most lovable and slowly disclosing the part of you that you don't know can't be loved. And hiding the part of you that you're certain cannot ever be loved because you can't even love yourself in that. And so we try to find intimacy without letting a person to our deepest selves. Because how can you believe someone can love you at your deepest self when you can't even love yourself?

Oh, snap. So how do we learn how to love ourselves fully with all the darkness that we feel inside of us?

See, in my life, the only solution I found was Jesus was when I found, when I came to a conviction that I was loved without condition and that God had stepped into human history, taken on flesh and blood, died for me, rose from the dead and seized me completely and held none of it against me. And loves me without reservation. It's the most liberating space in the world. Because I'm realistic. I know there are things I could do that could cost me my wife's love.

Right, right.

I've been married 38 years. Yeah, yeah.

You do something that's out of integrity with your agreement to the marriage.

And I don't think. I think her love is deep and profound. You know, I have two kids and I imagine they would always love me, but I imagine there's an aspect of that love that could be devastated if I did certain things.

Yeah. Maybe they want to like you as much.

Yeah. Or they won't respect me. Or they. Or maybe they kind of love. We love you, but we can't be with you.

Right. Yeah. We love you from afar.

Yeah. But the thing about who Jesus is is I'm going to love you and I'm going to stick with you and I'm going to see you through this and I'm going to help you become a different person. And for me, that became a life defining relationship where I now have a relationship with someone who does not define me by my worst moments, but defines me in a sense by my best moments, even moments I have not yet had. And I think that the motivation of that is love. And I would like to think there's nothing my wife could ever do that could cost me loving her. But I know that I have my human limitations probably. But I do think that the more I love like Jesus loved, the more all encompassing that love is. So if I can love the way Jesus loves, I can love my wife through anything she ever does.

Wow.

I can love my children through anything ever do. I can love you through anything you ever do. And doesn't mean that you always trust because trust has to be earned. But love is supposed to be a gift. And it's not a gift that we seem that readily capable of giving, you know, trust or love. Love. I think that trust takes us a long time.

You know, why don't we give love abundantly?

Well, you know, maybe it's source material and maybe we've never experienced love unconditionally and we're not actually the principal source of love, that God is the principal source of love. And that when we then connect to the principal love source of love, then that love becomes limitless.

Is it possible to love ourselves unconditionally even if we keep doing things that we know are hurting to other people or hurtful to ourselves or breaking our agreements. Is it possible to say, well, I still love myself unconditionally, even though, yeah, I did this bad and wrong?

It's funny, because I was just at this event where everyone paid $100,000 to.

Be there with Joel and Dan, right?

Yes, 100 million mastermind. Everybody's company has to make minimally $100 million and everything. So I'm in a conversation with this guy during one of the breaks, and he said, no, I. We need to realize that we're all gods.

We're all gods.

We're all gods. And he said, and that our principal responsibility is to love ourselves unconditionally. And I looked at him, and he was a really, like, good looking, you know, guy, probably six, four, two, three, jacked, handsome, you know, if anybody should love themselves unconditionally, it probably would be him, right? You know, making 100 million a year, you know. And I looked at him, I said, you, principal responsibility is to love yourself unconditionally because you're a God? He said, yes. I said, how's that going? He said, not well. And this is the reality is no one knows you in this space of the human experience better than you. So to love yourself unconditionally becomes an impossibility because, you know, the turmoil inside of yourself. But once you understand your value isn't based on yourself, it's based on God's initiation of you, that you're designed in the image and likeness of God. You're created by God's intention. You are designed by love for love. Then now you're not the source of that unconditional love. And so in that sense, Louis, what I'd say is that you can love yourself unconditionally when you realize that you didn't decide that value, that God decided that value.

Interesting.

Because we're too fickle. You know, on Tuesday, I love myself. On Wednesday, I hate myself. You know, on Thursday, I'm awesome. On Friday, I'm a failure. And I do not want the basis of my own unconditional love being based upon me. And I want it based on someone who sees me completely and still loves me unconditionally.

It sounds like intimacy is one of the ultimate gifts then, because it's hard for us to do the unconditional love thing for ourselves. But if we can do it with another person that we're building a life with and relationship with even when they fall down, that's a beautiful gift. To give to someone, too.

That's right. The greatest gift you give someone is that kind of unconditional love and seeing that as the greatest expression of your humanity. And it's not just to be loved, but to love someone else. And I remember one time when we were young, my wife looked at me, kim. And she said, honey, why do you love me? And I was trying to be my higher self. And I said, for no reason at all. She goes, what? Wrong use of language.

Tell me all the reasons why you love me now.

And she goes, what? And I said, I don't love you for any reason. I just love you. Then she said, oh, so there's no reason to love me? And I realized it was not going well.

That's not what I mean.

And she just went on, she goes, well, it's good to know that there's no reason to love me. And I remember looking, I said, oh, you want me to love you conditionally, not unconditionally. See, there's an aspect of us, we just desperately want conditional love. We want to believe that if you really know me, you would just think I'm awesome and you will love me rather than to be loved unconditionally. If you really know me, you're going to see that there's parts of me that are still broken, and then you'll still love me. I think our ego wants conditional love, but our souls want unconditional love. And there's an aspect of me I want to be loved because I'm awesome.

Right? Right. I did this cool thing, and I'm talented and I'm smart and I'm.

Don't you love me? And. But then there's a part of me that knows that that conditional love is flawed and it's limited and it doesn't reach the deepest part of me.

Yeah.

You know, and I think that's the. Lewis. It's astonishing to me that I've lived my entire life based on the reality of this person, Jesus Christ, and that. But a huge part of that is that moment where I just accepted this as a possibility, that God created us with intention and that God's motive was love, and that I don't have to spend my life searching for love and running from God, because that's insanity, that when you run from God, you're actually running from love. Now a lot of people will say to me, hey, I ran from God, because that was a disastrous space. Now, you ran from people who used God's name. And if you were running from really dark or broken or hypocritical religion. I want you to realize you actually weren't running from God. You're running to God, because that's not where God is either. Jesus actually opposed that. And that helped me realize, oh, when I'm running from all those things that don't express love, I'm not running from God. I'm actually running to God, because God is where there's unconditional love. God is where there is compassion and kindness, where there's hope and grace. And by the way, one of the last chapters is on grace. And I had this great conversation with Ben Affleck, and one of the things that really struck me about Ben was how he was mesmerized by the concept of grace. And I thought, I'm seeing grace through such a beautiful lens because his life is so public and his highs are so public and his lows are so public, and his successes and his failures. And it's so easy when you're in the public limelight for people to want to always define you by the worst aspects of who you are. And I don't know why, but in that conversation, I just had a fresh appreciation for grace and for the genius of grace, the idea that you should forgive your enemies. What an idea.

That's crazy.

It's just absurd. In fact, there's. If I could just highlight one place where Jesus says some things that are so counterintuitive because we forget the Jews were slaves. Jesus was born into slavery, the Romans had conquered them. Israel was not free.

Right.

We always read the Bible and Jesus think, oh, they were free and everything like that. No, even when Paul writes about slaves and masters, he's writing to a people who have accepted the reality that they're slaves of the Roman Empire and they are not ultimately free. And so Jesus addresses three things that they have to deal with. He says, look, if someone takes your coat, give them your coat, too. Because the Romans could come if they were cold and take your coat from you. And you could feel the powerlessness of someone coming, taking what you worked so hard to take. And Jesus goes, now let me show you how to turn this upside down. When they take your coat, you look at them and go, you're so cold, and I really want to take care of you. So I'm going to give you my shirt too, because I'm more resilient than you. I could take your coat. And he says, look, when they come to slap you on the face, like if you. They did that because they knew if they slapped that Jewish young Man, if he retaliated with a sense of honor. Because you're being humiliated, you're going to get killed. Because the moment you touch the Roman soldier, you've given them a reason to kill you, because they can humiliate you, but they can't kill you. And so they'd slap you, and then you felt powerless and humiliated. Jesus goes, no, no, turn the other cheek. You clearly have an issue, so I'm just going to let you take it out on me, because I can take this. Wow. And then he says to them, if they make you carry their pack for one mile. See, because there was a law back then that the Roman could wrest his horse by taking the pack off the horse and putting it on a Hebrew.

Oh, my gosh.

And he said, so if they make you carry that pack for a mile, he said, you carry it two miles. Can you imagine having to carry this pack for a mile? That Roman soldier thinking that he has power over you.

Wow.

And then at the end of the mile, he goes, all right, you know, you Hebrew dog, you can put it down now and go back home. Because the mile walking in his direction was humiliating enough. The mile back, you just.

The walk of shame.

Imagine being a young Hebrew man and carrying that shame, you know, because you couldn't do anything. And at the end of the mile, you go, no, your horse clearly needs rest. I'm going to carry the second mile.

Wow.

You don't have the power to do that. The law doesn't allow you to do that. Not even those. Those Roman emblems can. Can force me to take it a second mile. The second mile is on me.

Wow.

And Jesus just starts flipping upside down power. He starts flipping upside down forgiveness. He starts flipping upside down the good. And. And they didn't know what to do with him. They didn't know what to do with him. And you might say, that's absurd. You can't live that. Look at Nelson Mandela. He did do that. Look at Gandhi. He did do that. Look at Mother Teresa. She did do that. Throughout history. Look at MLK Jr. He did do that. And you have these people who are informed by the teachings of Jesus, and they see power and grace, they see forgiveness from an entirely different vantage point, and they have a power that we cannot understand. A genius that is undeniable throughout human history. And this is what I would say, see, Jesus, Genius wasn't just visible in him. It became visible in every person who began to live by his principles and chose to emulate what it meant to be human.

Yeah. It Spread that message. I'm curious about, is it possible to be a genius in your own town and in your own community? Because I was hearing this message actually the other day by Wayne Dyer, talking about tribes and communities and how they can support you in certain ways, but sometimes they want to conform you and hold your genius down and pull you back. You know, like the bucket of crabs, of crab trying to get out the other crabs trying to pull you down. Is it possible to be genius in your own family, in your own city, in your own state or communities? Or is part of being a genius leaving at some point or going on a journey not leaving them for good, but just going beyond to explore the genius inside of you in a way that's not conformed to the community that you're in?

I think you have to decide whether acceptance or uniqueness is a higher value for you.

Oh, man.

And, You know, when I. When I became a person of faith, I wanted so badly to fit into Christianity. Really, I did. I wanted to fit into the church. I wanted to fit into this faith community, and I never did. Why not? Because I accidentally saw the world differently. And I cannot tell you how many times over the last 40 years I was identified as a heretic. I was. You know, they wouldn't sell my books in the Christian bookstores. And, you know, thank God for Borders and Barnes and Nobles because they kept me alive. And Amazon. Yeah, Amazon now. Yeah. But I'm older than you. Amazon did not exist. And I realized, in fact, this week, I just did a TV interview, and the person said, I heard you 16 years ago on a panel. And she said there were seven people on the panel. And we all answered the questions exactly from the same box. And then whenever you talked, it would be from a completely different box. And as she spoke and told me about what she experienced for me 15, 16 years ago, I actually left with the sadness. And I told my wife, I said I felt sad because I spent so much of my life wanting to be accepted. And in that acceptance, I always felt like I had to sacrifice my uniqueness.

Oh, man.

And what set me free along the way was one day I decided I'm no longer going to live a life of obligation. I'm going to live a life of intention. And even if being uniquely me means that I walk alone, I would rather do that.

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To me that has carried me over a decade ago, I think it was, I learned about a whale that communicates at 52 hertz. I think now there's a movie that came out this year on it, and I read this about a decade ago, where this whale is called the loneliest whale in the world because whales communicate through frequency. And all other whales communicate at around 40 hertz. I think it is 30 or 40 hertz. And so whales find each other through that. That frequency. This one whale, for some reason, only hears and speaks at 52 hertz. And so it cannot hear any other whale, and it cannot be heard. And so years and years ago, I did this talk on 52hz and I said that the great dilemma is that we will spend our lives being told we need to conform to 40Hz if we're going to find a place to belong. But our genius, our uniqueness, is in that 52 hertz. It's in that frequency that no one else can hear. And maybe they can't even hear us. And we have to decide to not sacrifice our uniqueness and choose conformity for acceptance.

How do we live with that? If you don't have friends, family doesn't accept you, your communities think you're weird. How do you learn to live with the loneliness of being unique over being accepted?

For me, it was really challenging. My kids have actually told me, and when they were growing up, they said, dad, we love you. And being your kids was really hard. We had no place to belong. Wow. And my son would have, when he went to college, would spend almost every day having to defend being my son to people. And because of my lack of orthodoxy or, you know, or my heresy or. And so it is, in a sense, a burden that you choose to carry, and everyone related to you does carry it with you. And I cannot tell you how many times in the living room, I would say something and my wife would say, please don't say that outside of this living room.

Oh, man.

And I'd say, why? She goes, I just. I want you to be accepted by people. And it doesn't seem like much, but 40 years ago in the living room, I said to my Wife. Solomon says there's nothing new under the sun. But he was wrong. And you have to understand that I live in a world where people believe in the Bible. I believe in the Bible and its teachings. I respect it. But I don't accept things without thought. And when Solomon said, there's nothing new under the sun, I told her, I said, this is Christianity's culture. But the truth is that Solomon was having a really bad day because he begins that chapter by saying, everything is meaningless. Everything is meaningless. You shouldn't get your ideology from a man who says, everything is meaningless. In fact, in another passage in Isaiah, Isaiah says, put away the former things. Do not dwell in the past. It says, behold, I'm doing a new thing. Even now it springs up, but will you even see it? So I'm going, even in the Bible, God says, I'm doing a new thing. But Solomon says, there's nothing new under the sun. So who are you going to believe? It seems to me that human beings become nihilistic. We think there's no tomorrow, there's no hope, there's no future. But God's always saying, I'm doing a new thing. And I think a huge part of it is. When we talked earlier about how your brain forms by the age of 12. Well, I was so dysfunctional. I mean, not just neurotic. I was so psychotic, I think. And I was a straight D student. I was flunking out of school. I lived inside of my imagination. I was nine years old, probably, when I found Robert Heinlein and started reading Glory Road and Stranger in a Strange Land and all the Isaac Eisenhower and Andre Norton and all these physicists who wrote science fiction. And I stumbled on Tolkien and all these different writers. And so I'm reading all these books, books from Salinger. You know, I'm 9, 10, 11 years old, but it's contraband for me. No one knows I'm reading it. I'm flunking out of school and reading all these thinkers and writers and living in my imagination. And I began to create an imaginary world that I got lost in. And that was part of my problem, is that by the time I was 13 or 14, I realized I wasn't coming out of this world. I would be in school and the whole class would be gone. The teacher couldn't get my attention. I'd be lost in my inner world, and I'd be completely oblivious to what was going on around me. Every year I'd say, I'm going to make straight A's. And by the Third or fourth day, I wouldn't even remember what classes I was in. And people thought I was being rebellious, and I wasn't. I was so detached from the outside world. And then I look back now I realize the one function I had up to the age of 12, for me wasn't math or science or geology or geometry. It was imagination. I lived in my imagination. And my brain knew that without my imagination, I couldn't survive. And so now I look at it. 63. My imagination is my greatest tool. It's my greatest gift. And I was at a lecture at Columbia University. It wasn't really a lecture, it was a debate. I didn't know it was a debate till I got there. 5, 600 people there. I finally got to go to Ivy League school. And there was a senior scientist from Columbia, the head of the department of humanities and me. And the topic was what can be known? And the senior scientist said, what can be known is what can be empirically proven. And he was supposed to be an atheist. And the director of humanities, she was a Kantian philosopher, and she said, what can be known is what is human action Ethics. And they read their opening statements. I didn't know it was going to be this kind of debate. So I opened it by saying, well, what can be known is I should be better prepared. And I said, because I'm not an expert at what can be known. I'm more of an expert of what is unknown, of uncertainty, of mystery. I said, because I think the unknown is far more important than the known. Because science doesn't advance without the unknown, because that's what drives scientific exploration. Because once we knew the world was flat and if we didn't pursue the unknown, we wouldn't know that it's spherical. And really, I agree with you that what can be empirical, but it's not enough. And I agree with you that what can be human action, but it's not enough. Because what we really want, understand is human motive. We want to know why we do what we do. That's really the study of humanities. It's not what humans have done. It's why did humans do this? What drives us, what motivates us, what shapes us? And at the end of the lecture, we had a Q and a 3 by 5 cards, a stack this high, like one for the scientists, one for the humanist, and then a stack for the guy who actually believes in God, because they thought it was sort of a phenomenon, right? You know, and I got this question I'll never forget, best question I've Ever gotten other than yours? And when you were a child, you had imaginary friends?

Yeah.

Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and God. Why did you get rid of your other imaginary friends and keep God? Isn't that a great question?

Interesting.

Yeah. And I said, I still remember my answer. I said, first of all, you clearly don't know me if you think I had given up my imaginary friends. And they're the longest standing friends I have and they stay with me. And what's kind of to me is interesting is in my dreams I have this neurological condition where I wake up and I'm still in my dreams. And my family's found me in different places and I'm still awake, but I can't get out of the dreams. And so I have a place that I've gone to since I was a child in my dreams where I know the people, I know the place, and it feels as real to me. When I come back out, I feel this huge sense of loss and separation. I've always had this tension of this multi dimensional kind of experience. And so I said, you know, I haven't given up my imaginary friends. And I said, but you're right. I gave up, you know, Santa Claus and you know, Tooth Fairy, but I didn't know God. See, I didn't grow up with God, so God wasn't one of my imaginary friends. Interestingly enough, I remember having one conversation with God around 10. I yelled at God because he was so worthless he couldn't help me in my life. And so what was the point of God even existing? And I said, but here's the thing. When My son was 3, 4 years old, he would not eat vegetables. But we put him in the backyard. He would eat dirt and rocks. I remember one time saying to Kim, honey, do you realize that our son won't eat your cooking, but he will eat dirt and rocks? What are you trying to say? And I said, I have an idea. I said, let's just throw the food in the backyard and see if he eats it. And she said, you should not be a parent. But we didn't give up on the eating just because he didn't know what was healthy to eat and what wasn't good to eat. Just like with my imagination when I was a child. Yes, I had imaginary friends, but I didn't give up on my imagination. Because just because we have imaginary friends doesn't mean there isn't a friend that created the imagination. See, because if there is a God, then the human imagination is the only dimension in which God could actually Meet us, because our imagination is the one place where we are unlimited. There are no boundaries in our imagination. There are no limitations in our imagination. And I think the imagination is the playground of God where God joins us and dreams with us and helps us see a future we could not see alone and us that we could not see by ourselves and a life we could not even imagine without him. And so, as an adult now, I'm going, no, go back to your childlike imagination. Jesus said, unless you're like a little child, you cannot enter my kingdom. What Jesus is telling us is like what I gave you in the beginning and what you gave up and treated as if it was not valuable. Your genius, your creativity, your imagination, your capacity to create the future. This is how I designed you, and you needed to go back to that, because the future is literally not in your hands, it's in your soul. The future humanity desperately needs exists in the imagination of a child. Right.

Now, didn't Einstein talking about imagination, he had a famous quote about imagination knowledge.

You know, imagination is intelligence at play. Right. And. And I think this is exactly right, that imagination is the true iteration of human intelligence.

Interesting.

Without imagination, intelligence is just data. It's imagination that translates knowledge into genius.

Yes.

For those who have experienced a lot of doubt in their belief in God or their faith or their belief in humans or the world or all this stuff in the last couple of years, what is your advice for people that have lost faith? And also, when was the moment in your life where you doubted your faith the most?

What I'd say is when you feel like you've lost faith in God, you need to realize what you've actually lost is faith in humanity. Because, Louis, if there is no God, then what has caused. You're disillusioned by people.

Yeah, people's actions or lack of actions.

Right?

Yeah. So when people go, no, I used to believe in God, but I now know there's no God, what you're actually saying is I actually have lost my faith in people because human beings are either the best proof that there is no God or the best proof that there is a God. In the same way, when people say, well, I can't believe in God because he's unseen, he's not noble. And I'm going, well, how do you believe in love? Love is unseen if God's transcendent love is certainly transcendent. So even if there's no God, we do believe in transcendent things. I believe in love even when I've been betrayed by what I Thought was love. I believe in love even when love seemed to died. I believe in love even when my love was inadequate. I love people. And then I stopped loving them. Are you willing to admit that? Right. You know, see, what does that say about me? I've loved people and I thought it was all the love I had. And then I didn't. I mean, I went through a time of mourning, but eventually it was a memory. Barely even a memory.

Right.

And what we need to realize is that our. Our disillusionment in God is actually disillusionment in humanity. But I actually do believe that human ideals are like the phantom pain of the soul. The fact that we believe that there could be peace on earth, or the fact that we believe that humans can be good, or the fact that believe there could be no suffering or no war. When Walter from Scorpion says, the facts are against me, the facts are against all that. We've never had a history of peace. We do not have a human history without war. We do not have a human history without poverty. We do not have a human history without injustice. The fact that we have these ideals, the facts are against us. But the future might be for us. And what we need to realize is that these human ideals are actually transcendent. And I think they're the proof of God. They're the phantom pain of the soul letting us know this is what humans are supposed to look like. And I've talked to you about pantomime in the past, and I think that this is a part of it. And so what I would say to someone is, first of all, if you've lost your faith in God, you're around the wrong people because you've lost your faith in people. And the best way to start, because when people would say to me, there are no good people in the world, I would hear people say that there's no one you can trust. And you may even know people who actually live like that. And the way I resolve that is I can either spend my whole life searching for a good person, or spend my whole life searching for someone who could be trusted, or spend my whole life someone who is a true friend. Or I can become that. So my journey ends with me. I'm going to be that friend. I'm going to be that person you can trust. I'm going to be the person that dashly tries to live a life of integrity. I'm going to live my life with compassion and kindness. And then I know that if I can be that, there's another one and another one so instead of searching for that and always being disappointed, become that and let others end their disappointment because they met you.

Right?

So you can be the end of everyone else's disillusionment and even in your imperfection, which I think is actually more powerful because then you're authentic and you're real. And, you know, and so I realized, like, when people say, look at human history, religion, there are a lot of atheists I know from TED and other places that say, well, religion is the cause of all human evil. Wait a minute, how's that possible? See, because again, if there's no God, then religion is just a human construct, just like government, just like education. So within every human construct is the source of human evil. And what we need to realize is every time we try to blame God, we're just actually trying to diffuse and to displace the blame that is ours. Because the best way to grapple with that is there's no God. So who's responsible when people say to me, I can't believe in God because of suffering in the world? Okay, there's no God. Is there still suffering? Well, yes. Well, then who's responsible now?

Right, right.

It's us. And then I look at it on the flip side and I go, wait a minute. But there always seems to be this thread throughout history. It's always the minority, and it seems to always be at a disadvantage. Because isn't good at a disadvantage to evil? Because good can only do good things, but evil can do anything it wants? Isn't kindness at a disadvantage to meanness? Because kindness always has to do with the kind thing, but meanness can act kind or be mean. I mean, isn't forgiveness always at a deficit to bitterness? And yet throughout history, these other human ideals that are always at a deficit, they always carry their theme through. Maybe that's the proof of God. See, maybe the fact that in spite of all the evidence, we still believe in peace, we still want to be kind, we still want to be loving. Maybe in spite of the fact that we've been hurt, we still want love, we still want to be intimate, we're still willing to risk. Maybe that's the proof of God. Maybe God is the sub narrative in human history and we're the narrative. And we keep blaming God for the narrative and act like we're the sub narrative.

Yeah, that's interesting. And is there a time where you almost lost your faith or doubted your faith?

Yeah, many, many times. It's odd. There's a difference between belief and faith for me.

Okay, what's the difference?

And belief is usually rooted in things that you based on facts. And faith is usually more abstract, based sometimes on experience or intuition. Like I don't know where my wife is right now, so I don't have any facts that let me know where she's at. But I know my wife is being faithful to me, right? So the facts aren't with me, but I have great faith in her. I don't have the facts for belief in that sense, but I have the intuition and essence for faith. And there's a dynamic. Like there's this thing called the strength finder. My wife's number one strength, or number two is called belief. She has like two or three held beliefs and she holds onto it forever. My number two is called something called ideation. It's a thousand ideas a second. I don't have two or three firmly held beliefs. And there's a difference. And so I've struggled faith because I refuse to not ask myself the hard questions, like when? Well, because I'm always growing and maturing, right. You know, and so the faith you have when you're five isn't the faith you should have at 15. And you know, when people say I lost my faith, I go, no, no, no, your faith just didn't grow. It didn't match up to your maturity or to your growth. And so the mind and the thinking of a 10 year old is different than the thinking of a 20 year old thinking of a 30 year old. I'm 63 years old now. I mean, I'm processing years and years of experience and life and journey and relationships and you know, if you only grew up, let's say, in the deep south, and you only know Christians all your life, you see the world differently. You can actually see a world of Christians, of the good guys and everybody else is bad, or, you know, but when you travel the world and you meet a person who's a Buddhist, who's the kindest person in the world, or you meet a Muslim who loves his family and his children, he's a gracious father, and you know, all of a sudden all the categories that are just so easy to fill in are no longer boxes. There's adaptability and pliability. And you realize, oh, wow, this person doesn't believe in God, but they're actually moving toward good with a lot more sincerity. This person does believe in God, but they're not moving toward, toward God. And I think a lot of times we want a faith that makes everything black and white. And I look at and go, it's not really about even who I am. It's who I'm becoming. When people say I need to know who I am, I don't even know who I am, because who I am is fluid. I want to know who I'm becoming. Yeah, I was driving to San Diego one day and my wife called me and she goes, hey, where are you? And I said, I can't tell you where I am. I can tell you where I've been. I can tell you where I'm going. But because I'm in motion, where I am isn't a reality.

She's like, just tell me the answer.

Exactly what she said.

Just tell me where you're in the road.

She goes, just shut up and tell me where you are.

Don't be a philosopher right now.

Nana said, I'm on the five in Orange County. But the truth is, when people go, you know, I'm searching to know who I am as a person. That's why people never actually find their identity, because we think it's static. And I don't want to know who I am. I want to know who I'm becoming because I'm in constant motion. And so I question my faith because I'm always growing. You know, I mean, I just came back from ted. I listened to all the speakers. I. I listen to people who have contrasting views of reality, and I take them seriously, and I listen with respect, and I absorb that. And then I start processing through how does this affect what I believe? I mean, yesterday I'm reading and processing about multiple black holes converging and asking myself, how does this relate to my view of reality, of an ever expanding universe, of, you know, whether there's multi dimensionality and whether, you know, you know, whether, you know, there'll ever be the existence of time travel? And those are things I think that I'm always going to be like, processing. And as I learn new things and as I grow as a human being, every time I meet someone else, they change the information inside of my soul. And, you know. And so I would say my faith is, yes, I've had crises of faith because there were times I thought I was right and I was wrong, you know. But the one thing Lewis said has always been constant for me is the week I turned 20 years old, I had an unexplainable, and I understand it's not scientifically provable encounter with Jesus Christ. And if I were just going to be an objective person, looking back 40 years ago, it must have happened because everything Changed. And my wife's married to me 38 years, and she looks at me and she said this many times, what happened to you? Like, you've changed, like you've grown. And I feel as if throughout my life, limitations were erased. Boundaries that were there somehow got destroyed. I just feel like somehow I got smarter, I got deeper. I found that I could go to different levels of the profound and the thoughtful. But the deepest, deepest thoughts I've ever had were about love, were about hope, were about kindness. And now I realize, oh, you know, I used to want to be smart, but I realized that path has a limitation. You know, to me, the deepest thing is when you connect to another human being and you understand each other, and, you know, you. You have a level of connection that makes you feel as if there's nothing that separates you. And. And I'm still growing, that I'm still learning what it means to be profoundly spiritual. I'm still learning how to make being spirit more central to who I am than being flesh. You know, I told you, I love the material world. I'm not one of those people that thinks that the physical world is evil and the material world is spiritual. I think it's all beautiful. I think it's all spiritual. I think that the material universe is extraordinary. It's exquisite, and it's to be enjoyed and to be protected. But I also realize that I'm growing and developing as a human being. My level of consciousness has changed over 60 years of life. I want to be connected to the transcendent. And sometimes I'm experimenting in my life. I'm going, how can I be so connected to the transcendent where this moment can't hold me captive? How can I get past emotions like fear and jealousy or bitterness or doubt, but not see them as my enemy? You know, because I see those emotions as negative emotions that push me toward the light.

Yes.

You know, and without them, how would I know that I still have somewhere to go? I don't know if that answers the question. For sure. For sure. But, yeah, I just think there's genius inside of all of us. And if we believe that, then the journey never ends. Yeah, we've never arrived.

Yeah, we're always traveling.

Thank you so much for listening.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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