You're NOT UNLOCKING Your Potential! (Manifest The SUCCESS You Deserve) | Erwin McManus

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.

Right.

And because I'm in constant motion. And so I question my faith because.

I think you got to have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

I feel like There's a thing of potential that we want to reach. A lot of people want to reach their potential. They feel like I have this untapped potential. We 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 so much potential still inside of us, even if they accomplish the greatest 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.

Is that.

Isn't that sad, though, or is that. Is that a good thing?

You know, it's a good thing because, you see, if you have a limited resource mentality, then you'll. 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 gonna die with some things I.

Could have done undone.

I have to live with that.

Oh man.

And you're gonna 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. See, 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. And so people say do what you're passionate about, I'm going then I'm going to do everything. I think some people actually are just passionate. Then they pick an object and they're passionate and they pick a career, but they could 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 and/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 a one out of 10 on 10 things. And 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. It 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 there are just some things I'm not bored to do. You know that adage that if you can dream it, you can do it. It's just not true. Maybe if you can 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. 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, 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? And 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 has 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 it 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 inner world and figuring out how 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 it's appreciating the journey.

It'S 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. 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?

And.

I'm not a great chef, but I love cooking. But I've learned to love the process of it. 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, because I love Japanese cooking and I love, you know, good Southern smoking. 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.

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

That's right. 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. And if you have a body, you have the potential of being athletic. 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 true sense. 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. 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. And we started having a conversation about genius, and he completely disagrees with me, which I thought was wonderful. The guy with the highest IQ in the world completely disagrees with me. And because we started talking, how do you define genius? And he goes, well, you know, the facts are against you, because only 1-2% of the world population ever graph out as a genius. And so the facts are against me. 98% of people express no visible genius at all. So when I write about the 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.

Ooh, okay.

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.

So breaking the four minute mile. Yeah, yeah.

The facts were never for the future. The facts were always for the past.

Interesting.

And so here I'm having a 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. 20 years ago when I first started writing, I made an anthropological statement that every human being is an artist, that 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 listen 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, right? Silk worms create silk. 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. 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.

Right.

From years ago.

That's right. I stepped into your imagination here. You've invited me into your imagination. 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 in 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 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 five-year-olds. 98% of five-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, you are now an adult. If I can teach you to be standardized and to conform, you are now an adult. I think neuroscience tells us that by the age of 12, our brain has decided who we are. 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. 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 one, two years old, 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 Tagalog, and if they'd moved you to England, you would have finally learned real English. Exactly, yes. And if you'd gone to Buenos Aires, you'd have 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. And if you 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 and thrive. Your brain will only learn and hold the capacity for what it needs to survive. 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 better. Yeah, you're not gonna be world-class.

If anything, I might just become bitter.

Or more frustrated. Exactly.

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. And I could spend my life at Picasso and never paint like Picasso. 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 the 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 an amphidextrous. It's why I would do so many things right-handed, as opposed to left-handed or left-handed, so it was right-handed. I 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 spent my life with.

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 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, which is why we're never lonely, right? Or alone. 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 2000 years ago. As you know, I'm a follower of Christ.

Yes.

And I believe deeply in Jesus and I just 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 lived my life believing I had this relationship with Jesus. And I thought, this is so weird that my whole life revolves around this person, 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 really 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 going to 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.

Yes, yes, yes. 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 2,000 years? And one of the first things I did is that 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 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. 2,000 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 I became a part of that canvas. 2,000 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.

Think about it right now. We live in a time and 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 how do how did 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 their Aboriginal in Australia or the Native American Indians here in 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, it's 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 and trusted 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 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 is no foundation for political morality. There is 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 2,000 years? Where it becomes the common thinking. There are so many different places where Jesus revolutionizes our way of thinking. There is that old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it is actually not true. Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. Absolute power reveals absolutely.

Tell me more.

Power does not 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, well, people who start making money, it kind of reveals more of who they are.

Yeah, yeah. Money doesn't make you evil. Right. Yeah. 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 my region of the world has two forms of government, revolution and dictatorship. 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. 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. and 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, you know? 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. 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. And 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 abusive situation, they develop almost a high awareness of potential danger.

Yes.

And it's, and because of that, they're able to sense danger coming before anybody else sees it, you know, and, and they can develop hyper vigilance where they, they could 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, my IQ, you know, 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 over, it was 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 it. It doesn't matter. I've spoken to audiences of 40,000, 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, right? You know, 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? 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 cast the first stone. Just one phrase. And then it tells us one by one they begin dropping their stones from the oldest to the youngest. And one stroke, one elegant stroke, Jesus is able to defend this woman and reveal the hypocrisy in those men. And then after they're all gone, the.

Woman- It doesn't answer the question that's asked to 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 an elegance, the elegance of emotional genius. And a lot of the conversations between Jesus and the religious leaders of that time were, 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 just, 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 all seemed to me to be almost like a lower level of thinking. And I cared about right and wrong, and good and evil, but I felt like it was flatlining a deeper conversation. Because I wasn't waking up in the morning going, Do I rob a bank? 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, do I study harder?

Right?

You know, most of the time I was choosing between good and good. And, or, you know, 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?

Right.

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.

Yes.

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? Yeah. and you know, the, what are most.

Of us motivated by in the world?

So many different things. We're, you know, we're both simple and complex creatures, right?

Yeah.

You know, I do think there's some driving intrinsics in all of us. All of us have a longing to be loved, 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.

I know that feeling.

Right, you know, and so, we need to realize we're always going to have this intrinsic craving for intimacy, for connection, for love, for relationship. And we have a whole universe of language for it. Family, friendships, community, church, all that's 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 possible.

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

By the way, Louis, this is gonna 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. 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 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. 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 sees me completely and holds 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 integrity with your agreement to the marriage then.

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 wouldn't like you as much.

Yeah.

Or they won't respect me or they, or maybe they, 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 gonna love you and I'm gonna stick with you, and I'm gonna see you through this, and I'm gonna 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. I can love my children through anything they ever do. I can love you through anything you ever do. And it 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, are hurtful to ourselves, or Breaking our agreements, is it possible to say, well, I still love myself unconditionally even though 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?

Yeah, 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, 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 good looking guy, probably 6'4, 230, jacked, handsome. If anybody should love themselves unconditionally, it probably would be him, right? Making $100 million a year. And I looked at him, I said, your 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.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, on Tuesday I love myself. On Wednesday, I hate myself. 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 on me. Sure. 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 we can if we can do it with another person that we're building a life with and a 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. Yeah. 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. And then she said, oh, so there's no reason to love me. And I realized it was not going well.

No, that's not what they signed up for.

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 at her and I said, oh, you want me to love you conditionally?

Oh.

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'll just think I'm awesome and you will love me rather than to be loved unconditionally. If you really know me, you're gonna see that there's parts of me that are still broken and. And then you'll still love me. And. And I 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 get this cool thing, and I'm talented and I'm smart and I'm.

Yeah. Don't you love me? 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. And I think that's the... It's astonishing to me that I've lived my entire life based on the reality of this person, Jesus Christ. 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. You run from God, you are 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 use God's name. And if you were running from really dark or broken or hypocritical religion, I want you to realize you actually were not running from God, you were running to God, because that is 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 absurd.

In fact, 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. 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, then you're sure giving 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, ah, you're so cold. 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 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 52 Hertz. And I said, the great dilemma is that we will spend our lives being told we need to conform to 40 Hertz 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. And my son, when he went to college, would spend almost every day having to defend being my son to people. Because of my lack of orthodoxy or my heresy.

And.

So it is in a sense, A burden that you choose to carry and everyone's 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, and 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. And 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, well, 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? You see, 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, you know, when we're talking earlier about how your brain forms around 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. and a strange land and all the Isaac Asimov 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 from Salinger. 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 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 gonna 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 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 lectures. debate. I didn't know it was a debate till I got there. 500, 600 people there. I finally got to go to an 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 human action. ethics. And they read their opening statements. I didn't know it was going to be this kind of debate. So I open up 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. And because that's what drives scientific exploration. And 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 in is empirical, but it's not enough.

And I agree with you that what.

Can be in is human action, but it's not enough because what we really want to 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&A, three by five cards, a stack this high, like one for the scientists, one for the humanists, and then a stack for the guy who actually believes in God. Because they thought it was sort of a phenomenon, right? And I got this question I'll never forget. Best question I've ever gotten, other than yours. When you were a child, you had imaginary friends. 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.

And I said, I still remember my answer. I said, First of all, you clearly don't know me if you think I have given up my imaginary friends.

Yeah.

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 multidimensional 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 Santa Claus and 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 a God even existing? And I said, but here's the thing. When my son was three or four 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? That's what he's trying to say. 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. See, maybe 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 need 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 talk about imagination? Yeah, he had a famous quote about imagination.

He said, Imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is intelligence at play. And I think this is exactly right, that imagination is the true iteration of human intelligence.

Interesting.

With that 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 the 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?

Yeah.

What I'd say is that 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 your disillusionment? People.

Yeah, people's actions or lack of actions, right?

Yeah.

So when people go, you know, no, I used to believe in God, but you know, 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. And it just, in the same way, when people say, well, you know, I can't believe in God because he's unseen. You can't, 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 is no God, we do believe in transcendent things. and 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 have died. I believe in love even when my love was inadequate. I've loved people and then I stopped loving them. Are you willing to admit that?

Right?

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. And what we need to realize is that 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. The fact that I 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 phantom pain 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 desperately 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.

Yeah.

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. All 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 so I realize, when people say, Look at human history. There are a lot of atheists I know from TED and other places that say, well, religion is the cause of all human evil. How's that possible? 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 defuse 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? 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, they always had to 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 the kind thing, but meanness can act kind or be 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. See, 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. There's a difference between belief and faith for me.

Okay, what's the difference?

And belief is usually rooted in.

Things.

That you base on facts. And faith is usually more abstract. It's based sometimes on experience or intuition. I don't know where my wife is right now. I don't have any facts that let me know where she's at, but I know my wife is being faithful to me. 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 on to them 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 with faith because I refuse to not ask myself the hard questions.

Like what?

Well, because I'm always growing and maturing, right? And so the faith you have when you're five isn't the faith you should have at 15. And when people say, I lost my faith, I go, no, no, no. Your faith just 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. 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 are the good guys and everybody else is bad. But when you travel the world and you meet a person who's a Buddhist, who's the kindest person in the world, you meet a Muslim who loves his family and his children, he's a gracious father, and all of a sudden, all the categories that are just so easy to fill and 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 good. And I think a lot of times we want a faith that makes everything black and white. And I look at it and go, it's not really about even who I am, it's who I'm becoming. You know, 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. 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.

Are you in the road?

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

Don't be a philosopher right now.

And I said, I'm on the five. You know, in Arm 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. And 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 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? you know, so I mean yesterday I'm reading and processing about, you know, multiple black holes converging and asking himself, how does this relate to my view of reality of an ever-expanding universe of, you know, whether there's multidimensionality and whether, 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 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. But the one thing Louis 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 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. we're about hope, we're about kindness. And now I realize, oh, you know, I used to want to be smart, but I realize that path has a limitation.

Yeah.

You know, to me, the deepest thing is when you connect to another human being and you understand each other.

Yes.

You know, you have a level of connection that makes you feel as if there's nothing that separates you. 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. I told you, I love the material world. I'm not one of those people who 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. Because I see those emotions, those negative emotions that push me toward the light.

Yes.

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. We've never arrived. We're always traveling.

If you enjoyed that interview, then I know you'll love what we have coming up right now. And you grew up in El Salvador.

I was born there and I went back to Fortaleza around 10 years old.

So you were 10 years old.

You.

Were a filmmaker as well, right? You got into fashion.

Which means I couldn't hold a job. Exactly, same here.

But I love your fashion, man. You walked in here, I was like, I need you to be style me. I wear the same black shirt every day. Simple. But I was like, man, this guy's got style. And it seems interesting, all these, I guess, pastors now of churches, they have this style. It seems like there's a trend of a lot of guys and ladies who are 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, 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, 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, how did 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.

Yeah, 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. And for me, it was the opposite. See, I grew up irreligious. I didn't have any of this framework. And so when I became a person of faith, I felt like 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 you're- yeah, that's right. And then my mother, My mom, she was always on a spiritual journey. And so I remember one time she brought home a Buddha. And so my mind, we became Buddhists. 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. So I could tell she was always like processing and trying to figure things out. And my stepdad, he was just a good solid pagan. I don't think he ever had a belief system in his life. He worked in what we would call creative underground economies. And so he had an alias and he had many different aliases and many different families.

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.

So that was the world I grew up in. I started reading two things that really affected me. I read every mythology book in the library before I was in sixth grade. 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. And from probably age nine or 10, 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 say, 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, and 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. They're all science fiction writers who are physicists. I found these imaginary worlds and dimensions you could travel to, worlds you'd go to, and species you could find. In my own heart, I began hoping that I was from another world and that this was an accident. I know it sounds really bizarre, but probably by the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I 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, but it's almost like every story is true, but they're not all real. And 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, 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.

You know, and then that became a part of the mix of it all. When I became a person of faith, I didn't, you know, everybody talks about things like heaven and hell. That was so irrelevant to me, you know? I mean, why even think about anything after this life when you can't even survive this life?

You know?

And 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, yeah.

Wow.

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

Well, I mean, 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 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 that is not existent 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. 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 are 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. And 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. And 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?

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

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 the sabertooth is going to eat this woman that you care about more than yourself. If you're just interested in her, then.

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 risked your life for her.

How many times have you failed at love, been damaged by love, 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. And 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. If humans are at their core longing to be fully alive, what I know is that you feel most fully alive when you are most fully loved.

That is the truth.

And if you have all the success that the world measures, and you feel as if you have not found someone to love and someone to love you, you will feel as if your life is a failure. Wow. So now I will 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 want to say one more time.

Say we're not searching for God, we're searching for love. But while we're searching for love, we crash into God. 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 2,000 years ago I 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 feel like 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?

Yeah, I just have these moments where I just, do you guys know how unexpected it is for me that I believe?

Because you didn't believe.

No, no, and 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, you have to figure out which one's you.

Yeah. Right?

You know, and I think that, When we're at our worst, all the negative voices become our identity.

Loud.

Yeah, loud. 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- Even today. Oh, which is why I think my message works on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea. It's because 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. And 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.

Mm.

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. When you're in love, everything gets heightened. Yeah. And I think this is what it means to be alive. Because 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 the food tastes better and the aromas are more clear and distinct and the colors are just brighter? I remember when I was driving when I was younger, I didn't know I needed glasses. But my friend and I were playing this game where you do 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 blur, shadows. It looked like leaves.

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're struggling 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 is fully alive. They're 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.

Yeah.

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 get 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 ready to press, when you're feeling anxiety, when you're overall 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 thing 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, lighthearted, you know, 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 someone 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 you know, my wife and I, my wife was an orphan. and I never knew my dad and grew up in that kind of combustible kind of family system. So we knew our first kid was like an experiment.

We'll see, yeah.

We're like, he's a social experiment.

Let's see if we can create a.

Whole new 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 or anything like that, you know, and I realized I left my wallet. My son said, Dad, I got you covered. He was like being a man, you know? And 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 had nothing. Oh, I think he might have had his cell phone. 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. And I said, all right, but you have this like part of your brain, you know, 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 hyper vigilant. 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, let go of the anxiety, 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. Like 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?

Resources.

A resource that we have. what can't you see? What can't you see? And 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 because I could feel myself disappearing into my internal world. Because I created an imagined 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 fit in better. And I felt like I was having a hard time coming out. Of that world. Of that world.

Yeah.

And 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. Because you were in another world. I was just literally in another world. 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 wifey 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. 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. And is that I, 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. It's where 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 the 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 fear, 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 I was studying Freud and Gestalt therapy and transactional analysis and I was watching you reading Jung 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 is 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. You know, 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 that. Yeah. Intimacy, connection, 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. Why is that? 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.

-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.

The alchemist.

The aqueduct gets filled because the heavens open up and drop water on us. No wonder people dance to rain gods. 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 to 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, you know, if I can't pull it out of a person, then I shouldn't be trying to put it into them. Yeah, 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.

You know, forcing it.

Yeah, trying to control 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, and because if hope is in the past, it's called regret. Because you can't change the past. and oddly enough, 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 atheist. You know, because like if you look.

At.

You know, deterministic atheism, it says that the future is already set through mathematical, you know, 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 put a fire when I'm like freezing to death?

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 be, and it sounds like magic that you are 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 and you know why you're here. 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 it. It's like right now we're communicating, this is what we call it, right? We're transmitting meaning. Yes. 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.

It's crazy. And I have a feeling, an emotion.

And all this is seeping through us and we're actually transmitting something real. I mean, what's more real? What 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 $10,000, 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.

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. And interesting that love tends to always always have soft, round.

Feeling.

Yeah, because you're not going to write.

Love with hard angles, with triangular, you know, images. You're going to 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 it.

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.

Gives them purpose. They work harder. They're more happy.

See, I'm really pragmatic, I'm 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. Because 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?

When you're young, right? I mean, I played sports, right? You know, and I'm from Los Altos.

Where I should have been playing soccer.

But my stepdad insisted I play football. You know, 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.

Right.

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.

I've done the same thing, man.

Because I thought football was so important.

It was life.

What position did you play?

I played running back.

Yeah.

Where'd you go to school? Well, 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. I'm not gonna score. Because I want other parents to like me. So we're playing and he's passing the puck, we're getting killed.

Because our kids just couldn't score.

And I brought him over and I said, Aaron, I need you to score. He goes, no, Dad, team game.

It's the other way around.

And he goes, yeah, team game, when they pass you the puck, Score.

Yeah, that's your role.

And I said, Aaron, take the puck and score. I got a little tense. And he looked at me, he was 10, and he said, Dad, in 20 years, this game isn't going to matter.

Wow.

That's crazy that a 10-year-old had that perspective.

He's been listening to the wrong messaging.

He's been listening to what I say.

To adults, not what I say to children. And I remember looking at him and saying, well, could you go out there and pretend it mattered? 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.

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, not known, but be worth knowing, right? You know, and. 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. You know, 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, in 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 is going to matter.

I never had that perspective. I was just so deep in the pain and suffering that I was like, what am I going to do tomorrow to survive? It wasn't until much later, in the last 10 years of my life, where I started to learn, this is going to matter. This is going to pass. Everything's going to 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. 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 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 in the crazy world that you were living in as opposed to everything has been perfect.

Yeah, it was 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. And then all the eggs are in one basket, but when you say, no, my focus would 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 gonna 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, right? 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 awesome. And so there isn't a day in my life there isn't something to celebrate because 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. 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.

Call three to five friends to tell them what they're going through.

To give me help. Give me support.

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

And I mean, listen, I think you could, we still want to talk about challenges we're going through because that makes us human and allows us to like process and express certain things. So, 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, because you connected 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 think, 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 strength to know that they have everything they need to live the life they're created to live. And so 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 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?

Yeah.

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 and 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 want to die. And it says the first thing that happens is an angel came and brought him food and drank and said just eat and sleep. 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 going to do well. You're not going to think clearly. So a lot of times as people look, just realize that you have to stop and take care of yourself. Just eat and sleep. I'm a person who doesn't sleep hardly at all. I've never slept. I mean, my whole life I've been like that. But, And so I have to like work at sleeping.

Practice every day. Yeah.

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 it's like to be in this space. And my wife says to me, It's too loud in bed. I can hear your brain. And she says, 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 and 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. You know, this conversation is a conversation that I am the head of and I'm going to 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 red, 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 everyone. Fear and anxiety.

Yeah. Yeah.

And by the way, that is actually why I wrote the Way of the Warrior was that, like, I don't write books going, what will sell? You know, I am, I write books based on what are the real things that we're grappling with, you know, and I found even in my own life with a 27 year old daughter, a 30 year old son, me being 60, and knowing that they're struggling through some of the same stuff that I've 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 going to 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. 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 punches the walls.

Me too.

Okay.

Every moment I felt like defensive.

Yeah.

When to fight or scream or.

Yeah, I was that guy.

Wow.

You know, 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. 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.

I've been that guy before.

They're not just out of control, they're powerless. And that's their powerlessness being made manifest. And what I decided in my life was that I would not allow any circumstance to be more powerful than my internal world. 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 when he was in concentration camps. 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. Yeah, it's not simple. And then, you know, 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 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, you know, never getting angry at someone's hate towards you, you know, 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.

You're talking about Mandela and... -Uh huh.

-Richard Frankel.

-Uh huh. You probably could have... Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

-Uh huh.

All right. And you're just naturally painting a picture of human ideals.

Yeah.

This is what humanity is supposed to look like.

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 like, have you ever seen some act and you thought that it 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 that 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 gotta point that out. What's the ideals?

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 Paul's greatness in all things.

Absolutely, that's my mission.

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

Yeah. What would you say are your, 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. And then 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. And 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. I was again studying Norse and Greek and Roman and Egyptian mythology and 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 what 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, you know, work between them, right? 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 almost this other voice trying to call us to who we were created to be. And so I don't think my beliefs changed in terms of, in the dogmatic way. I think my beliefs were always growing and evolving and changing. I think some of my beliefs were hopes. 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.

And 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 know, 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. But 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, in that good just feels right.

Yeah. Good feels good.

It does. And you're 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.

Go to study philosophy, right?

You know, and we studied Christianity for like five minutes. My professor got up there, I mean, we spent so much time on Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Locke, Hume, Descartes, 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. 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.

So bad.

You 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 who- I did.

It just happened to me. They seemed nice once. 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 were so judgmental and dogmatic and condemning. But then I knew a lot of my atheist friends who were arrogant and judgmental and condemning. And it was just both. And so 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. And 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 future is 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, 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, 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. Wow. So I said, hey, look, we're going to be straight up. We're all broken and fragmented. We're the irregular pieces.

Of the world.

And we're going to come together and we're going to believe that God's going to 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 want, 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 going to 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. Yeah, my wife and I 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 and bullying. We want to find everyone in their worst moment. And we gotta 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 was a prostitute.

Wow.

People don't talk about that. 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 and 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. And so I 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.

And.

A million copies later of the books.

So I'm going to make it. 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, 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 in interview. Irwin is because for my whole life, I was focused on success and accomplishment and achievement to gain love. 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.

Yeah.

And until you have, and it doesn't matter all the money and the success and accomplishments, if you feel a lack of inner peace, you're, 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, you know, being a warrior is finding inner peace in the back of your, 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, this episode has already gone. almost an hour and a half and the time has flown because I've just been so captivated by your message and your essence and your creativity in the way you think. So, the book's out now. You guys can go get it at bookstores, also where online? What's your website for this?

You can go to EarlMcManus.com or Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

It's up everywhere. And 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. I think that's the thing we are seeking the most. You know, where 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 going to 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, one, you're really both a really fascinating person and just like almost incredibly immediately likable. It's really beautiful. So, I feel like there's dissonance between your brain and your soul because your soul believes as profoundly as mine.

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

I think I'm always just questioning things.

By the way, when I wrote the book, it's crazy, I was driving down Hollywood, down Vine, and I was with my wife and I heard this, 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 know peace. Oh, 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 have a Last Samurai poster in my house.

Oh, that's cool.

Of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, signed by Ang Lee.

Oh my gosh.

You know, and And I wrote this book as if it was an old samurai writing to a young samurai, 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 going to have world peace is winter 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 because it means I'm just so enamored by the message. Okay. Couple final questions. This one's called the Three Truths.

Oh, wow.

So you sold million copies, million copies. We didn't even get to like, you know, you just had cancer a couple 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 maybe I'll give you my quick answer. Because when people say to me, 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?

Well, not an illusion, it was a reality.

But we're all dying. Yeah. 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 can confirm 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 me 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, there's 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 it was created to live. Yeah. And I think most of us are actually afraid of death because we realize we've only existed.

And we haven't truly lived.

Yeah.

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 nice. 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 imaginations. Want 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, the time is 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, 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 have, they give you a piece of paper before you take your last breath. 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. 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 going to 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 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 erwinmcmanus.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.

Great.

Because in a book, I might have 10% of my content.

Wow.

90% of the content doesn't make it into the book.

So that's the best place to go.

Is erwinmcmanus.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. That's cool. Yeah, so that became our theme was Battle Ready when I had cancer because when I told them I had cancer, I said, Hey, look, you just need to be battle ready. 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. Cause 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? Am I gonna have that love? I'm going to 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, for just showing up today, man, this was 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.

There you go.

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?

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

Irwin, thanks man.

Appreciate you.

Thank you brother.

Thank you. There's gotta be some pain. There's gotta be discomfort. There's gotta be, do I gotta do this again? Are we still talking about this? And I really do believe in our society today that we rush into things because we know how easy we can.

Get out of them instead of taking the time.

That's honestly why.