Mathew Kelly:
Hi, I'm Matthew Kelly and welcome to Profoundly Human today. I'm sitting down with Matthew Warner, great to be with you.
Mathew Warner:
It's fantastic to be here, Matthew.
Mathew Kelly:
Welcome to Cincinnati.
Mathew Warner:
Thank you. Yeah, it's good to be here.
Mathew Kelly:
Important questions to start with, are you coffee drinker?
Mathew Warner:
I am a coffee drinker. I didn't grow up a coffee drinker, it actually wasn't until I was an adult that I started drinking coffee and that was mostly because of my wife. So I'm not your normal coffee drinker that has to have coffee or a certain amount of coffee every day. I'm usually fine if I don't have it but for me it's more of a ritual now so it's part of sitting down with my wife and we usually, every morning, sit down and have a cup of coffee together and it's a great way to start the day together. And so yeah, for me, it's more that ritual of slowing down and enjoying something or company or something else. Yeah.
Mathew Kelly:
So that sounds like a very ideally peaceful thing sitting down with your wife in the morning to have a cup of coffee but I know that you have six children under the age of 13 and you run a business with 40 employees. So, how's that work?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, good question. Not very often but well, I say it works just doesn't maybe work as peacefully as it sounded when I said it but we pretty much every day do that. If we're in a good routine and we're up early before the kids get up then that's the best way to do it where we can greet them as they start the day. But more often than not probably they're the ones waking us up or they're up early running around the house so it's a little more hectic but we still manage to do it. We try to have breakfast as a family. Now that the kids are a little older, some of them can make their own breakfast and so that's nice.
Mathew Kelly:
Awesome.
Mathew Warner:
And you can sit down and enjoy yours and a cup of coffee.
Mathew Kelly:
What about food? What is your favorite food?
Mathew Warner:
Favorite food? I like a lot of different kinds of foods. I think the food I love the best is the stuff when you prepare it yourself so, whatever that is. And especially if you've grown it yourself or raised it yourself which we try to do a little bit in our house and there's just a different level of gratitude and enjoyment. It always tastes better if you grow it yourself and you put the work in, of course. And I think the cultural dimension of food is always really interesting to me. I think there's a tendency today to reduce it to just the nutrition into my body or the calories I need or something that makes my mouth happy but I think including the cultural dimension of it and the occasion you might be having it for, the preparation that goes into it inspires a really healthy gratitude and appreciation for it that I love so that's the food I love best.
Mathew Kelly:
Now you mentioned growing it yourself and I was re-reading your book last night and one of the things in your bio, your bio ends with Matthew, his wife and their children hang their hats in Texas where they aspire to be simple farmers and good neighbors. What is the extent of the farming?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, aspires is a key word there. It's a journey for sure. We've made quite a bit of progress since then actually. So we've got lots of chickens which we'll raise for meat and for eggs. We've got ducks, we've got pigs now, we've got beehives, we're putting in a fish pond and stocking that with fish right now which is really exciting. We do a lot of vegetable gardening as well so it fits and starts sometimes like getting it going and there's seasons where it's great and there's seasons where life gets busy with the kids or work and things like that. So we're trying to gradually transition to where it's more consistent part of our life but we're doing a pretty good job now and really enjoy it.
Mathew Kelly:
What attracted you to that or what is the ethos or philosophy behind that for you?
Mathew Warner:
I guess I'm an idealist and, to me, farming is such an ideal way to work. It provides for so many needs but it's also a work that is physically healthy, done in certain ways. So you're not sitting in a desk all day and doing unhealthy activities. So it takes care of your physical activity, being healthy, you're raising healthy food, it inspires that gratitude. It's work that you can do with your family which I love. So much of what I do now, my work, is at a computer and an office. And I love getting to work with my kids and with my wife and doing that together and so farming and gardening is a really fun way to do that. You can do it across all different ages, our one year old's out toddling around chasing a chicken and the 13 year old's feeding pigs and we're digging weeds in the garden or whatever and it's something you can all do together so I love that part of it.
Mathew Warner:
And I think I love being out in nature, there's something about... I love cities, I love technology, I have a technology company but when you're surrounded by it all the time, you have this tendency to say, "Look how clever we are as humans." And when you're out in nature, it's a different response, it's one of just gratitude and awe and wonder at God, at the creator, that's something I could never do and so it's a wonderful place to be. And I feel like spending more time out there has just been really good for our family, really good for our kids, keeps us active, use your hands to make things and do things. And so it's such a good balance, I think, to so many other parts for our lives, mine included, that you spent a lot of time on a computer or in an office or at a screen or things like that.
Mathew Kelly:
Got it. What about favorite movie?
Mathew Warner:
Gladiator.
Mathew Kelly:
Gladiator?
Mathew Warner:
Yes sir. Gladiator.
Mathew Kelly:
Russell Crowe, great Australian.
Mathew Warner:
Yeah. I still think it's the best epic style film and it's just got so many good themes to it. Of course, what we do here echoes in eternity, what we do in life echos in eternity is just a great central message to it. But it's also a story of a farmer which most people don't think about. It was the farmer who became a general and a general who became a slave and a slave who became a gladiator and a gladiator who defied an emperor. But it starts with him already in battle as a general but he was a farmer who left his life, his comfortable life, Bilbo leaving in The Hobbit where he is called out of his comfortable Shire and called to some great adventure that providence has him on.
Mathew Warner:
And it was similar here in, of course, a man of virtue and he grows in virtue throughout the movie. But just so many good themes and I like the power dynamics of government and the mob and the mob rule and you just see that full on display there but it applies to every social group, government, whatever it is, of the influence of the mob but then the power to control the mob being how you're able to gain power in so many different ways. So yeah, so many good elements of it, still my favorite.
Mathew Kelly:
Great movie. What is happening in your life at the moment that you're excited about?
Mathew Warner:
Well, Flocknote is continuing to grow really quickly so that's our software that we build for parishes and churches around the world to communicate better and manage their relationships with their members and grow their flock and evangelize and do all these meaningful things. So that continues to be a really meaningful part of my life and a challenge that God's called me to figure out how to manage the growth of that and do it continually better. But certainly right now, my kids are at those ages where you feel like time's just flying by and they're growing up so fast so continually I'm just trying to focus on being present and just not missing a moment and not wasting it. So there's a lot of emphasis on that, spending time with the family, doing projects together, doing work together with the kids during these really precious years.
Matthew Kelly:
So the children are obviously a big part of your life at this moment, how is fatherhood different to what you expected?
Mathew Warner:
That's a good question. I don't know how much I thought about it beforehand, it's so different. It's certainly hard, but I think I've grown to appreciate just how helpful marriage and children are to just becoming more virtuous, how important they are to that. As humans without it, I admire people that can do it without having those kind of challenges in your life that are just demands that you can't choose not to take care of. So in that sense, it makes it less virtuous, I guess, because I have to do it but growing and virtue through just serving your kids and taking care of them and their needs has been a great blessing.
Mathew Warner:
Very difficult and it continually forces you to reprioritize your life. You can't do everything you want to do and you realize your limits really quickly and so you have to really discern what's important and say no to the rest and that's a difficult thing.
Mathew Kelly:
What was your childhood like?
Mathew Warner:
I had a great childhood. Wonderful family, amazing parents, hardest workers I know. I remember growing up with a lot of imaginative play, imagining I was a ninja in the woods and all those things kids do. I feel like I had a really good childhood in that sense. I love music, we always had lots of music playing in the house. My parents were very musical so that was a big part of my life too and I really got into that later on. We were big, do-it-yourself family so my mom's very, very good at anything crafty. So she's always doing artistic things and making things, different crafts, and we got to do those with her and my dad always preferred do things himself and build things himself and so we were always working on some big project as a family building an addition to the house or a garage or fences or whatever the case may be.
Mathew Warner:
I really appreciated that in retrospect, the time we got to spend working together on those things and learning how to work hard, learning to appreciate the effort that goes into things.
Mathew Kelly:
When you're parenting on a day to day basis, how do your parents influence that? How do you see them in your parenting?
Mathew Warner:
My dad is I think a great example of what I want to be as a man in terms of being strong and tough but having such a soft, gentle heart. So that's something I think about a lot is trying to be both gentle and strong as a man and he's a great example of that. And my mom, the word that comes to mind most is just service. She's just such a servant, she's just always taking care of other people and volunteering. She's very active now that she doesn't have to take care of her kids directly anymore. She's taking care of nuns and elderly in the retirement homes or wherever that are lonely and don't get to get out as much and things like that, that's just how she spends her day and when they see her, they just light up.
Mathew Warner:
And so seeing the value and gift that is to people when you can be that person, I definitely learn that from her and always inspired by that.
Mathew Kelly:
Obviously, you're a pioneer of technology for churches. When you started Flocknote, you first started going to churches and saying, "Hey, we've got this idea, you should do this." What do you remember about that?
Mathew Warner:
Well, when I first started doing this and it was something that started before Flocknote then turned into Flocknote but I was still an engineer at Lockheed Martin at the time but had gotten really passionate about my faith and entrepreneurially minded and so I was wanting to do something and started coming up with tools that I could use to help parishes better reach their people and communicate what they need to communicate. And certainly when you first approach them, this was the time, 2007, 2008, 2009. Facebook groups had just started but My Space was probably still slightly more popular than Facebook was when we first started. So it was that kind of era but everything was free so the new model was advertising based free software.
Mathew Warner:
And so the expectation too for them was that everything would be free so getting them to pay anything was very difficult. They didn't have really a software budget in those days. They might have had some database tool they used in the back end but for the most part, they spent way more on donuts each week than they do on software tools that would help them in these ways. So it was really creating a new market in a sense especially the software as a service model. It was very early and so it took a lot of work at first to just convince them that this was valuable. That it's something that is worth paying for, that you're going to get more value out of it than you're going to pay into it. And it took years to work on that and create the market almost but it was worth it and it was a problem I was really passionate about solving so I stuck with it.
Mathew Kelly:
At what point did you realize this is going to work?
Mathew Warner:
Well, there's something about the moment somebody first pays you to do something and then they keep paying you and you go, "Okay, we did something that works." Which is an important lesson for entrepreneurs. It's an important moment, I think, when you create something that's really valuable and people agreed it was valuable, it wasn't just something you thought was a good idea. So that moment and then it's just a matter of multiplying it which is another problem to solve but it's possible. So that happened very early on but for many years, we were so small that I always assumed that some big player, some big company, would come in and just copy what we were doing and then steal all the business and we wouldn't make it because we were boot strapped all the way through really and just grew at the pace we could grow based on the clients we were getting.
Mathew Warner:
And that was very slow at first and it snowballs over the years and gets more and more and more which was fantastic. But early on, we were very limited in resources. I was by myself for the first three years and my wife was still working at the time at her job. She's a writer at a marketing agency and we had had two kids. I was at home with two babies and trying to run the company and I was the programmer and the support and the sales all by myself. And it definitely was in question all those years of whether this would really work or not. But I knew that it was a problem that needed solving and I knew it was worth solving and so I figured if I stuck at it long enough that it would work and turned out that it worked, it was just a lot slower than you think.
Mathew Warner:
You expect it to go a lot faster and it's just grinding it out, year after year, a little bit more, a little bit more. Until again, 10 years later you're looking at it and it's like, "Wow, okay. We made it." It took four or five years before I was like, "Okay, I feel really good about this." But we were still very tight, we were always spending money as soon as we got it or if we knew we were going to get it next month, we were spending it now but it wasn't until probably eight, nine, 10 years into it where it was like, "Okay, this was all worth it." This was worth not saving as much money as I should have for a long time and quitting my job and not making anything for many years and all those kinds of things. It was finally worth it in that and mostly because it was really helping churches do something really significant in the world.
Mathew Kelly:
So when you decide to quit your job at Lockheed Martin, what did the people around you, what did the people in your life think about that life choice?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, I think it was something none of them would've done, not many of them would've done. It was really good job, great company, great people I was working with and I really enjoyed the people I worked with there and even a lot of the work I did was really interesting stuff and very challenging. But yeah, at the time, the idea that you would quit your job when you have that great of a job, we're just taught that that's not something you do until you got the next thing lined up or you do the responsible thing so it was definitely a leap of faith in that sense. And it was also right after I got married so that was another dynamic that was interesting because essentially I was working 50 hour a week at Lockheed Martin and then I'd come home and I'd work 30 hours a week on this other project.
Mathew Warner:
And once I got married, my wife was like, "I want to actually spend time with you so why don't you quit your job?" And luckily she was such a blessing and very supportive and she's the one that told me to do it. She's like, "You need to just do this full time and give it a shot." But it was a good lesson to think through and a lot of times I think we don't take risks because we don't define them very well and they remain these ambiguous things you just never do or that's too risky. But when you find out, "Well, what's the worst that really happened?" And when I told the people I was leaving Lockheed, they were like, "Well, if you want to come back, just let us know." I'm like, "Okay, it's good to know." Right? You can get another job one day.
Mathew Warner:
But what's the worst that happens? It fails and I got to find another job. Luckily, I'd saved a lot of money up to that point and been smart financially and all that and didn't have any debt and my wife was working at the time. So, all those things came together as a huge blessing for us to make it possible. But when you add all that up, you go, "It's really not that risky. It seems crazy to a lot of people but it's not." And there's a bias built into what you're already doing that you think there's no risk to it just because it's the status quo. But people get laid off from jobs all the time, there's risk staying where you're at and so you got to remember that too. It's not a choice between no risk and risk, it's two different types of risks and making those decisions. It was a little challenging but I had a lot of support.
Mathew Kelly:
Some great insights there. So today Flocknote serves 10,000 churches about 40 employees. What is the most satisfying part of that?
Mathew Warner:
The people I get to work with, for sure. Definitely the core passion for me was to help the church get the message out. I mean, that was something that I realized in my generation, people falling away from the church and they didn't know what they were leaving and it hadn't been communicated to them what they were leaving. And so for me, that was just at the heart of this thing but then it was also just practical things. I was getting more and more involved at my own parish and they just couldn't tell people that stuff was happening. They were doing a lot of great things but they just weren't telling anybody about or they didn't have a means to just get the message directly to their people like they needed to. So, that seemed like a pretty straightforward problem to try to solve and that's where we tackled it from and so certainly that core passion of solving the church's problem, that continues to be very satisfying and we're continuing to make a huge impact, a bigger and bigger impact in the church, inside the Catholic church and outside the Catholic church and just helping people build their flocks, build relationships in their communities and spread the gospel and go after that lost sheep which is core to our mission at Flocknote. But secondarily to that, over time, my passion for building a great company has equaled that at least. I just get to work with the most amazing people and I think God's blessed us with this amazing mission together. And just the friendships that we build as a team, to see these people blossom into just what their potential is I think, which is just so great is just so rewarding.
Mathew Warner:
And we've continued something I got very passionate about was employee ownership. And within our market, as most software as a service markets are right now, there's a lot of investment and acquisitions and all that stuff. And there's good parts of that and there's been some negative effects to that I think too in the church space but it was just something I became more and more passionate about, I love Chesterton, I love distributism. I love the idea that society works better when property is more widely distributed in general and I love Catholic social teaching on this. The Encyclicals by Pope Leo the 13th, rerum novarum speaks a lot about the rights of labor and workers and this relationship between capital and labor, between the owners and the workers and that there's this ideal and again, I'm an idealist.
Mathew Warner:
That when the worker is the owner that all of these other synergies start to happen, that all these interests align and they're not competitive anymore. Of course you see that in the extremes where unions have served a necessary purpose in a lot of cases but you also see the worst of that when you have a body divided against itself, you have the owners fighting at the expense of employees and employees doing things sometimes that even harm the company itself to try to look out for their own interests. And that's just such an unfortunate situation, I think. And so when you bring those things together, which I'd love to just see more in general in industry, beautiful things happen. So that was one of my favorite things we've done so far at Flocknote was launch our ESOP, our Employee Stock Ownership Plan and everyone in our team becomes a part owner of the company.
Mathew Warner:
My favorite award, we give awards out in our company every year, and the team got me my favorite award yet which was co-owner of the year award. And so I went from being the full owner to being a co-owner and it is my favorite word I've gotten yet because this whole journey we've been on just to be able to go on it fully together where we're sharing the burden of this... It's a burden too, it's a responsibility that comes with ownership but of course you get the benefit of the fruits of all of that as well as you develop it. And so it's been really amazing to see our team just light up at that opportunity to become an owner, a part owner, a co-owner of the company. But the way they treat it now, it's theirs and we're doing this together and it's just an amazing thing so I'm super excited about that and where that's taken us.
Mathew Kelly:
Some of your team have one of the most innovative titles I've heard in a long time and that is, they are happiness engineers.
Mathew Warner:
That's right. Happiness engineers.
Mathew Kelly:
What is a happiness engineer?
Mathew Warner:
So our happiness engineer is our version of customer support but we see it as a role much bigger than just solving some technical problem that somebody's having or a support question to fix an issue that a customer's having. We really see ourselves and have become great partners with all the churches that we work with. And so a happiness engineer is there to look beyond just the technical problem they might be helping a customer with and really try to understand their goals, what they're trying to achieve, to look for ways that maybe there's things they're not taking advantage of that we could help them do better just through our experience working with 10,000 churches. There's a lot of accumulated wisdom and best practices we've been able to share and so just taking that opportunity to go deeper in the relationship with each person. So that just deserved a title more than just customer service, this was a bigger vision for that relationship.
Mathew Kelly:
When you have a job as a happiness engineer, I mean, the title itself creates an expectation, right? And do you have trouble sometimes? The customers have an expectation of the happiness engineers that is unrealistic or impossible to meet?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, every once in a while, you get really grumpy people that you just can't make happy. But I don't know, our happiness engineers are amazing. I mean, they're the kind of people that they're really special people but they take that, you get someone that's just having a terrible day, maybe they're really angry... You get a lot of people in customer service that think the only way to get attention is to complain or escalate the issue or make threats or you'll be angry. And so they're just used to that and so I love... Our happiness engineers take that as a chance to completely disarm them, I think, and be something very different than what they're used to hearing and they find somebody. I mean, 99.9% of the time that person is won over by the end and we have incredible ratings in terms of our customer service because of that. But yeah, they're very special people in that but it takes a certain personality that enjoys that and has the energy to do that and do it all day long.
Mathew Kelly:
So, when you think about this mission you have around communication, you think about the church whose primary mission is communication, why are we so bad at it?
Mathew Warner:
That's a good question. So, you're right, communication is intimately tied up to communion, to community. You can't have communion and community without communication and I think that's at the heart of the crisis in the church today is a breakdown in communication. Like I mentioned already, I think that there's so many people leaving the church. Many times, maybe most of the time, it just has not been communicated to them what they're leaving and that's on us. I think that we need to figure out why that's not happening. I think some of the things at the core is we've forgotten what's at stake and there's something big at stake but it doesn't always feel that way.
Mathew Warner:
When you walk into a church and the kinds of things we send out don't always feel like there's a lot at stake. And so I think people's commitment level, I think there's something human in us. We want to be challenged, people engage with all kinds of things, we see it everywhere. When there's something big at stake, I mean, politics is your perfect example of it. You see how engaged people get when they believe something important is at stake. They will spend hours a day watching videos, forwarding things with their friends, showing up and protesting, getting out to the ballot boxes, giving their money, all those things when they think something important is at stake. And we have something huge at stake, way more at stake than what's at politics.
Mathew Warner:
But we haven't managed to convey that and I think that's at the heart of it, we have to get back to reminding people that something big is at stake and I think we've gotten scared of it because we think it's going to push people away and along with that, you stop talking about the demands of the faith and what it costs because you can't communicate the cost if there's nothing big at stake, it's not worth it. So I'm not going to give up or sacrifice a lot if there's nothing really that big at stake. And so it really starts with understanding that there's something really meaningful in our work in the church. It's the most important thing in the world and I think the other lesson that the church really needs to learn is that it is our actions that communicate way more than what we say.
Mathew Warner:
And when you look at someone who's a Christian, what we communicate through our actions is way more powerful than what we're going to say to somebody, the right answer to a question, any of those kind of things. And I think that what's missing so often is the willingness to completely reorder our life around this important thing. Because when you see people who do that, that inspires people. When you see someone who's willing to reorder their whole life around it, not just an hour on Sunday, not just some classes here or there, not just a prayer here or there out of tradition or habit. But that your whole life is reordered around that thing, that communicates something that gets people's attention. That communicates there's something big at stake, that communicates there's something worth sacrificing for.
Mathew Warner:
That gets my attention to say, "You're strange, tell me why you're acting so strangely?" And I think we're missing that a lot. Not that we don't have inspiring individuals in the church, I feel like somehow we've lost that posture as an institution. And I think partially because we've gotten scared, we've gotten insecure. We feel like we don't want to share stuff as confidently because we don't want to scare people off. We don't want to talk about the demands because we feel like it's going to scare people off. And what we've ended up doing is just making it, "I guess there's nothing that big at stake right there."
Mathew Kelly:
It's great insight also. Let's talk about the book, Messy & Foolish. I read it when you first released it, I read it again over the last week. Incredibly impactful, what does it mean to be messy and foolish?
Mathew Warner:
Well, for me, I wrote the book at a time in my life where I was very passionate about the church. A lot of my friends, my peers, leaving the church and just feeling like the maintenance mode of everything going on and was not going to change anybody's mind, the status quo was not changing anybody's mind. And then all of the energy that was spent toward it, I felt like, was very insular. It was within this group of people that all believed and thought alike and was not really breaking outside of that bubble very successfully. And so it was just in a lot of my work, a lot of my blogging at the time and things like that was very much that. It was within this audience and it's my people and I love them. But when it comes to these efforts to reach outside that, I just was really motivated to figure out, how do we do that?
Mathew Warner:
And how do we fix some of these bigger problems in the church? And it was a pep talk to myself, the book, to remind myself that some of the things I've been saying. That we need to be doing something worthy of dropping your nets and going, we should look more like people in love. I think the Elvis song that says, "Wise men say only fools rush in but I can help falling in love with you." I feel like we should look more like fools rushing in and we're not. And St. Paul says the foolishness of God is wiser than men. There's a logic that transcends the world, the wisdom of the world, that we don't understand and that is about something much bigger than anything in this world and in this life and our lives need to reflect that. And so I think the mess part is we need to rethink how we're doing things now, that the status quo is not working.
Mathew Warner:
It's in many ways working against us and so we need to be willing to rethink it. And the foolishness is really tapping back into that, just deeper, wisdom that God gives us that the stuff that doesn't make sense to the world, that death is a doorway to the next world not something that we're supposed to just avoid at all costs forever. That we're supposed to love our enemies, that we forgive people over and over and over and over again, that we care for the least among us, the most vulnerable, the tiniest people. I mean, all of those things that I think are the things that are most attractive about the church and that offer really the most appealing, valuable thing. This way out of this world that Jesus has overcome death, it just felt like it was missing from so much of what we talked about.
Mathew Warner:
But again, I think a lot of what I realized through that work because I came in my adulthood as I claimed the faith as my own was very... Being an engineer, I love the apologetics. I love the reasoning of the faith, it's beautiful and deep and rich. And so that was very attractive to me and at that time, that's what I thought the answer was. I just need to go explain this to everybody because if you explain it, it just makes sense, right? And that works for me at that point in my life, the way it all came together, that was what I needed. But we all talk past each other and nobody seems to agree that it's that straightforward when you look at it. Well, why is that? And so much of it is that the way we communicate things is so much more than just those words I'm saying.
Mathew Warner:
It's, have I earned their attention yet? Have I earned their respect yet? Have I earned their trust yet? Have I established myself as a stable and worthy place of getting important information from? Do I have a relationship with you where you even care to listen to me? I think that first step of even giving you the time of day starts with just loving people and not to some end so that you can tell them something but just because you love them. And I think that emphasis on that part of it, I know for me, was lacking and needed a pep talk.
Mathew Kelly:
What are we afraid of? What is the fear that stops us from sharing the good news do you think?
Mathew Warner:
I think sometimes we feel like we need to have all the answers and if we don't that we can't engage in some of those topics which I think is one of the wonderful things about our faith is that it's true. You don't have to know it all, I just need to show it to you. I don't need to fully understand it, I can just share my experience of it. So we shouldn't feel like we need to know all the answers or fully understand because we never will. But that's what's great about something true and good and beautiful, you just show it to somebody, you share your experience of it and hopefully it moves them closer to it. But I think definitely a fear of looking silly, not knowing the answers. I think a lot of us too, and this was the case for me, is really focusing on me first and not in a selfish way but fixing what's wrong with me.
Mathew Warner:
Because I think when we start to do that, a lot of other things start to take care of themselves. We start to live a life that's more compelling. That was a Chesterton's famous letter that they asked, what's wrong with the world? And he wrote in and said, "Dear sirs, I am. Sincerely, GK Chesterton." And I think that's a great reminder for all of us and I think it was easy. I became very zealous and I was like, "I know all the right answers. I just need to tell everybody the right answers." And what I needed to do was become a saint myself. I needed to work on myself, I needed to sanctify myself. I needed to grow a lot in how I was loving people and what that meant. And so I think if we realize that, that's one of the main ways we're going to share the faith is filling ourselves up first and then we overflow from that. It's the overflowing of our own hearts, I think, that are going to change the world.
Mathew Kelly:
Yeah. In the book you quote CS Lewis, we are halfhearted creatures fooling about with drink and sex and ambition. When infinite joy is offered us like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea, we are far too easily pleased. When you feel yourself becoming half-hearted in something, what do you do with that?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah. I love that quote because I think it's so relatable. When you read that, if you've ever struggled in the spiritual life, I think that resonates hugely because there's always this immediate gratification or this thing I know I can do now or my plan. And deep down, we know that it's not as good as what God wants to give us but we just can't let go of it. But we have to let go of it in order to go on that holiday at the sea. For me personally, I have to find inspiration in places because otherwise your mind will just continually forget. It fades, that impression when you have that retreat experience, you read that great book, you have that great conversation. You're very fired up and you can see the long term vision, the benefit, the value of that holiday at the sea that you're going toward and you're motivated for that moment.
Mathew Warner:
But then, 10 steps down the path, you're back in the mud, playing in the sand again because you forget. And so you really have to find habits that are going to continually renew that and keep you inspired and continually form you in that way because certainly the world is going to continually try to keep grabbing you and pulling you down for that immediate gratification.
Mathew Kelly:
It's interesting because our culture talks about settling and very often people are loud and aggressive about, you shouldn't settle for that or you shouldn't settle for that. But one of the things that comes across in the book is that we settle in the thing that matters most and we settle for half measures or quarter measures but one millionth of what God wants to give to us. And then I think about your earlier comments about risk and the idea that it's never a choice between some risk and no risk. How do you think that people think about risk in relation to their faith? How do you think about people? Do you think people even think about settling in these ways?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, I think that's a really great question because I think today one of the biggest values the culture puts on there is options. It's that you want to have as many options as you can and you want to always be able to choose a different option. And you end up in this life that is completely anxiety inducing because how do you choose? And I think that the point of life is not to endlessly have options or to never settle because if you never settle, what are you doing? You're always looking for the next thing and after a while you learn that never ends. And I think that there's so much and it's very alluring because there's so much in the world today. So many good things, you can go and consume media, you can check out things you can do, experiences, people you can meet, relationships you can build, there's endless good things and you can't do all of them but we want to and we want to think we can.
Mathew Warner:
And I think what that keeps you at this surface where you're sitting in front of all these doors and you're just going to stay in the hallway and I want to have all my options open but that's not how you live life and you'll never live life that way, you'll be completely unsatisfied standing in the hallway forever. So it's good to have a few options but at some point, you have to decide and you got to go and you got to pick somewhere to go or pick somewhere to start digging. And I think what I think about a lot is going deep into life, in all the different aspects of life. And we think we need lots of experiences or we need to meet lots of people but I think you learn more going deep with one relationship with a person than you'll learn meeting a thousand different people on the surface.
Mathew Warner:
And I think that's what we miss so much in life today. We think we need to be out there, we need to have lots of followers or friends or fans or attention or be recognized by lots of people, all those substitutes for God that we pursue but it's all right in front of us already. I think that certainly God calls us on adventures in our life and we need to be open to that but mostly it's all right in front of us. The person sitting next to you is an infinitely deep place to go explore and digging for treasure. And I think we miss all that because we're too afraid of missing out on something up on the surface and what we need to do is start digging. And whether it's in our marriage or it's in our children or it's in a particular setting or it's one neighbor or it's a neighborhood, at some point you got to make a home and go deep in all those different ways.
Mathew Kelly:
But the endless options are the enemy of commitment, right? And without commitment, there's no wholeheartedness and so people are living halfhearted lives or living halfheartedly in many, many aspects of their lives but looking for the satisfaction, the fulfillment, that can only come from living wholeheartedly, it's fascinating. When we talk about evangelization or when people hear the word evangelization, they have many different thoughts that come through their minds but most people don't think of their children. In the book you write, this is especially true in raising our children. We're not just equipping them to become faithful cogs in the industrial machine, safely navigating life's pitfalls. We're not just helping them to survive this life or even ultimately to succeed. We are here to teach our children to see the world differently. To discover a loving God who made us all to live big, beautiful, meaningful lives.
Mathew Kelly:
It's a very powerful statement. How do you see that manifesting in your daily interaction with your children and what is the push and pull or the challenges of that?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, I think for me, one of the big holes in the bucket in the church is that generational transmission of the faith. And I think if that's all we did and we did that well, the church would be doing amazing. And too often we kind of look past them and say, "I need to go save this person or change this person's mind or evangelize this group." But if all we did was that, we would be doing amazing. And those are the ones we're most responsible for. And they're the ones we've most been put in a place to impact and the ones that God said, "Here, I need you to do this for me." ln the most direct, possible way he could. So I take that very seriously and I'm willing to do whatever it takes, anything if it meant changing careers, changing places we live, changing whatever, if it means that it increases the likelihood that my children will receive the faith genuinely.
Mathew Warner:
And so, yeah, it's really, I think prioritizing it and then reordering your life all the way around it which as it happens, that's one of the key things to passing it on them. When they see that you, as their parents, the people that are responsible for their existence and who hopefully have a good relationship with them have reordered your entire life around living the faith then they tend to do that too. It's one of the most consistent factors there of whether or not the faith gets passed on and I think that we have to be willing to do that in order for them.
Mathew Kelly:
In the book, and you mentioned it there in that quote, you talked significantly about seeing the world differently. What do you mean and why does it matter?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, I think at that time especially, that was helpful for me to capture what was I trying to do in these different interactions with people? And I think why we talked past each other so much is because if you just see the world two totally different ways then you just kind of have a non starting point and I think there's lots of ways you can analyze Christianity, it makes no sense and seems absurd. But if you are open to seeing it from its own perspective, why it teaches these things and why this happened this way and why we believe what we believe, all of a sudden it makes perfect sense. So much of it, I think, is a shift and it's not winning these individual battles on particular doctrinal points.
Mathew Warner:
It's really helping them shift and see the world very differently. And so I think some of the things that inspire us, that's a little about what I talk about in the book of things that inspire people to go, "Maybe I should think about life differently." Is when you meet someone that's different, that's radically different, that's doing something that gets your attention and shocks you out of your normal, that person's not like other people. Why is that? They seem happy. Whatever it is, that's attractive but there's something different and that opens you up. And I think that's a fundamental first step I think in our culture, we need to figure out how we're seeing things differently, find common ground beyond that and then work back or I think in most cases, earn the right to ask them to look at it differently.
Mathew Warner:
Because right now, you ask them and they say, "I'm not interested in looking at it that way. I already know the answer, I know you're wrong." The way you win that over is through friendship, through relationships, through loving each other, through sacrificing for each other, through radically loving them. And those things shock people out of their complacency or assumptions about you or life or the way they see life and opens them up to maybe look at it a little differently because once you make that shift, everything can fall in line. But in our culture now where it's such a focus on self determination of my life and I decide who I am and what I am and what's important to me and what's true and what's valuable in life. I mean, that's a totally different way of looking at the world than the Christian point of view and I think that's a lot of the reasons we talk past each other.
Mathew Kelly:
Yeah, I'm struck by the phrase, earn the right. I mean, the phrase itself is radically counter cultural. And I have heard you speak previously in answer to a question, if you have an email list, how often should you email the list? And I've heard you speak in that context also about earning the right to email the list, talk a little bit about that.
Mathew Warner:
Sure, yeah. I mean, that's a lesson we learned very directly at Flocknote, helping churches manage email lists and text message lists. And we try to help them improve open rates and especially something like texting, sending someone a text message. At first churches were very, and they should be, careful with it because they said, well, that seems intrusive, that seems disruptive. They're not expecting to get texts from me, all those things and that's true maybe. So much of what we get and again, this comes from the question of how often should I send something? Well, what have you earned the right to send them? A spammer has earned zero right to send me anything, right? But my mom, she can call me every five minutes if she wants, she's earned that right and everything in between.
Mathew Warner:
And so I think that it depends on the context of what's happening in your relationship with that person. As I apply that to evangelization, it was a helpful concept for me because you have a friend or you know somebody and you know maybe they're living their life in a way that's not good, not consistent with the faith, whatever and your immediate instinct is, I need to tell this person that they're wrong and I've seen it be so ineffective so many times. You've got to step back and say, "Well when is it okay to do this? When is it not?" And I know people that are like, "No, you just tell them and you've done your job and that's it." And I just think, "Okay, maybe." But if you really want to help the person I think there's a journey you go on with that person where you earn the right to talk to them about that issue.
Mathew Warner:
And so certain friendships, you'll have earned that right to have that conversation and some, maybe you haven't yet and I think people understand that concept when your... Whatever your relationship is, you earn the right to talk to people or address certain issues at certain levels and I think that's an really important evangelization lesson if we want to be effective.
Mathew Kelly:
So that requires patience, it requires persistence. It requires real intentionality around friendship, relationships. All of these virtues seem in short supply in our modern culture. How do we encourage people to grow in virtue even if maybe they're not that interested in their faith?
Mathew Warner:
I love the focus on virtues. It's a beautiful way to think about becoming a saint, right? Just being the ultimate virtuous person as a saint. And we talk about that a lot within our culture at Flocknote, we have a culture of growing in virtue and helping each other grow in virtue. And Virtue's just a habit, it's a good habit, a disposition to do something good. So it's a wonderful in, I think, with people. That you're not speaking religiously, it is a shared experience of something that is an objective good that they may not recognize it as an objective good. But we would say, is it better to be patient or impatient? And they'll say, "It was better to be patient." Well, if you help someone become more patient, you've helped them become more Catholic, more Christian.
Mathew Warner:
And so I think there's lots of ways of looking at evangelization along all those other layers, where if you're helping people grow in virtue, they're taking steps in the right direction. And it can be a wonderful way in with people if it's something that's... All these things are also very practical, right? So people see the value of being more patient, right? As an example. They see the value of being truthful. So most people can agree on that part, it can be a good starting point especially in a culture where we don't often agree on some of those starting points.
Mathew Kelly:
So we live in an age where we have more possibility of communicating than ever before. And the church's mission to evangelize obviously can be enhanced by these modern technologies and communication. How do you see them being used well to evangelize and how do you see them being used poorly to evangelize?
Mathew Warner:
So I think the ones that are using it well have something, a big vision. They have something meaningful that they're doing and it really is. I stress this a lot with folks, because you can get distracted by a lot of the marketing techniques. Well, if you send it at this time of day or you do it this way or you put an image here or you do this and those things can be helpful and they'll magnify what you're doing, they can definitely help. But if at the end of the day you're not doing something meaningful, it doesn't matter and I think that's what we see in a lot of churches. You can have people put together very professional looking newsletters, emails and beautiful communications. It's branded perfectly, it's written well, all those things and still nobody cares because they're not doing something meaningful.
Mathew Warner:
And then on the other side you can see people that have almost no skill at doing those things but yet people are flocking to them and saying, "I want to go where you're going." And so that is a really important distinction, I think, that we can help them with some of those technical skills and that's going to make you better at what you're doing but it's in the noise if you don't have something meaningful that you're trying to do and that's the big difference I see with a lot of churches communicating. When you have something big and exciting and meaningful that people want to get behind and they have a leader that they believe can take them there. I mean, everything else is just going to magnify that you can do in terms of improving your communication techniques.
Mathew Kelly:
In the book, you talk about generational shifts. We are seeing them play out in the church now, younger generations leaving sooner and sooner and a big part of the faithful population are leaving this earth and going into their next adventure. In the book you wrote my parents' generation left the church without leaving the pews, talk a little bit about that.
Mathew Warner:
Yeah. I think if I looked at a lot of my peers who were leaving the church, it was apparent that they didn't have lives where their family had reordered things around the faith. I'm not going to say they didn't believe but it wasn't as important as a lot of other things. And I think when you look at the studies too of a lot of those people that are in the pews that I say left the church in the sense that they didn't really believe what the church is anymore in a lot of ways. Some of the core beliefs of the church, they just don't hold. And they've co-opted the church to be something else for them. Whether it's just part of their tradition or cultural thing or a vehicle for some social justice or whatever that they believe in, it aligned with that. But the rest of it, they kind of said, "No, I don't need that anymore." and I think their kids knew that, I think that was obvious.
Mathew Warner:
I think it was obvious to their kids, that this wasn't something that you re-ordered your whole life around and for its own sake, not to achieve some other end in the culture. I think also that generation wasn't catechized that well. They didn't necessarily know a lot of the good responses to the questions the culture was asking and so they felt ill-equipped, I think, to be able to help their children through those things and they ended up just going with the culture as well, with a lot of those challenges, and I think it just slowly eroded their confidence in their faith. And so their kids grow up to be adults and they're like, "What's at stake here? Why should I bother with all of this especially when it's really culturally unpopular?" So, I mean, I think that was already happening when they were in the pews as a kid.
Mathew Kelly:
For someone who's watching and hearing you talk about the idea of re-ordering your life around the faith but they don't know what to do or where to start, what sort of starting point would you recommend for them?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, the church gives us some good tools for that, I think. Certainly Sunday mass, that's a good start if you're not that, that's a good minimal weekly rhythm but that Sunday mass needs to be a priority, it's not something you try to squeeze in before your favorite NFL game or the big party we're really going to for the day. It's the highlight of the day and so if you don't feel that excited about it, that's okay but you probably need to learn more about it and understand what's going on there and why it's important, why it should be central so that it can be a big part of your day. I think a lot of it naturally happens when you really internalize it yourself. So again, I think it goes back to really looking at yourself and saying, "Do I really believe this stuff?"
Mathew Warner:
If I really believe this, what does that mean for my life? But I think then it overflows into other places because now you're starting your day with the reading. We homeschool as well which we really love, the flexibility it gives us to reorder our life around the faith. So their education is ordered around the faith. Our daily rhythm and schedule is ordered around the faith. We can start the day together and do the daily readings together as a family, we can dictate that schedule ourselves. Certainly getting involved in other kinds of things around the parish that are important that it's not just a place you go every Sunday. Going to confession regularly as a family, just being up there whether it's adoration or participating in other things, that's more important than my baseball game.
Mathew Warner:
That's more important than some work project I really want to work on. So I think if we look at our lives and we're not willing to choose something that's important to the faith versus a baseball game being on TV then we need to look at ourselves and maybe re-order that.
Mathew Kelly:
You also say in the book, we've fallen in love with knowing we are right and called it loving our neighbor, incredibly powerful line, there's just so many of them in the book. Talk to us about that one.
Mathew Warner:
Yeah. Primarily whenever I see people, they call it tough love. That, "No, it's just tough love. They need tough love. They need to hear that they're wrong about something." And to me, that's not tough love just telling people they're wrong and winning an argument. I can prove that I'm right because I've done my study and I know the right answer. I'm more concerned and again, this is speaking to myself at that time too where you have a tendency. You want to be right, you want to win the debate. You want to be the one that knew the right answer but that's not really what it's about. This is a journey we're on together as brothers or sisters and I think tough love is being willing to get in the trenches with that person and take on their burdens and troubles as your own.
Mathew Warner:
To me, when God says, love your neighbor as yourself, it's not just having good feeling towards them when you see them and wishing them well. It's, you find out your neighbor has a problem and you're like, "I could help with that. It means I can't make my poker night, but this is more important." That I'm going to go over there and spend my Saturday there instead. I'm taking on my neighbor's burden as myself, their troubles become mine. And when you have that approach, that's going alongside somebody and saying, I'm in this with you, I'm not here to defeat you in a debate. I'm in this thing with you, I want to come alongside you. I want to understand why you believe what you believe so that we can get to the truth together sot so I can prove that I'm right.
Mathew Kelly:
Talk about making this journey together and you mentioned earlier that when you're at Lockheed Martin and you had this vision of serving the church in this way, your wife encouraged you to leave your job and she's your partner in this journey. How important is that decision? And what advice would you have for single people about who they choose to journey with in that way?
Mathew Warner:
That's a good question. I think for us, we were able to talk about a lot of important things before we got married which was great. I think one of the most important skill sets today that a lot of people never really learn is how to make a good home. And I think that's a great place to start with somebody before you get married is what kind of home do you want? And this goes into even choosing what career you want. Is your career compatible with the home that you want to have? Is your skillset that you're trying to go get so you can support your family compatible with the kind of home and lifestyle that you want to have with your family and your children? But getting on the same page with your spouse about those things is really important before you get married.
Mathew Warner:
And of course, it's an evolving journey you go on together and it's part of the adventure. I think I was really fortunate with my wife too... So she was not Catholic when we met and over time she became interested in it and she ended up becoming Catholic before we got married because that was something really important to me and for us to share that faith. Before we got married, to make sure that was something we shared in common for our family because it was so essential to reordering our life around it so pretty important for us to agree on it. So we were fortunate to go on that journey before we got married and she went through the RCAA process and we were able to go through that together which was a great blessing. We had a great RCAA teacher and it wasn't me teaching her the faith or telling her what I think but for us to go on that journey together and hear someone else explain it and teach it to us was really helpful.
Mathew Warner:
So I would recommend doing some of things like that where you get to explore your faith and your beliefs especially if you differ in some of those things. Doing something like that together where there's a third party sharing something with you and you can both reflect on it and grow through it was a really helpful process for us and a beautiful journey. So it created a really powerful, strong foundation for our marriage because we had already thought through a lot of those things, we had wrestled with a lot of those questions and knew what we wanted generally as much as you could at that time when we got married.
Mathew Kelly:
What was something that you thought you wanted back then that you realized you didn't want? Or what is something you thought was important back then that isn't important anymore? Or how has your perception changed through the years of marriage and having six children and growing this business and serving the church in this way?
Mathew Warner:
I think I've grown in desire for simplicity and realizing that you don't have to do a lot of things to have a really full life. That if you are willing to go deep in the few things that you have, there's a lot of treasure there, more than can ever discover. And there's a temptation, I struggled with this for a long time and it's the whole social media struggle as well, where there's this fear of missing out. There's all these things going on. But that ability to say no to something so that you can fully say yes to something else is a really important distinction. Because you feel like you can say yes to everything and you don't want to say no to anything but every, yes you say to something here is a no to something else, you just won't face it, you won't admit it.
Mathew Warner:
And what happens is you don't get around to it or you don't appreciate it or do it as deeply as you could but you are saying no to something else and we just don't have the courage to admit it sometimes. And I think recognizing that you don't have to have everything, everyone doesn't have to know who you are, you don't have to have this huge impact. Which again, I think for my generation too, coming of age as social media became so popular, there was such an emphasis on people knowing about what you're doing. If people didn't know that it happened then it didn't happen. If it's not documented somewhere where people could like it and share it or whatever then it doesn't exist which is such an unhealthy way to live but I think it's just normal for us now.
Mathew Warner:
Even if we don't think we think that way, I think when we look at our behaviors, a lot of times that's how we actually are valuing things. It's based on whether they can be shared or whether somebody else knows about it and so that's what I've loved about completely getting off of all the social media stuff because you realize that you can breathe again and life isn't nearly as overwhelming as it may feel sometimes. God's given you enough time and energy and everything you need to do exactly what he wants you to do today and you don't have to worry about all that. You just need to discern what it is and do it.
Mathew Kelly:
Yeah. One of my favorite passages in the scriptures is after Joseph and Mary take Jesus to the temple and Simeon prophesies about Jesus and who he is and what he will mean to humanity and to the world. And then the passage just ends with this phrase, it's just there, the phrase is and Mary pondered all these things in her heart. And I think about how different our approach is to things like that in a social media world, there are very few things that we ponder in our heart and we hold for ourselves before we release them into the world. And so does the social media world present unique challenges to the gospel and how do we need to think about that?
Mathew Warner:
Yeah, I think it certainly does. I think what you said, that immediate instead of pondering something ourselves is what the comment section does on every place, right? I'm going to scroll to the comment and let them tell me what this means. Is this a big deal? Is it not a big deal? Is this person right or are they totally wrong? Right? I'm going to go and find out what other people think first before I go through the process of making my own mind up which is okay to get other people's opinions but I think we skip past that really quickly. We can't even avoid it, you don't even have a chance to ponder it in your heart before somebody else is telling you what to think about it. And with the way it's presented, it's usually already telling you what to think about it so I think it's terrible for that.
Mathew Warner:
I think in general social media and the news media in general are just a very terrible lens to try to figure out what's real and important and what matters in life. I think if you spend a lot of time there, you will not have a very good grip on what is real and what's important. Because the things that they tell you are important and the things that they tell you are real and the things that they tell you matter and that you need to think about and have an opinion about, most of it's completely garbage, completely bonkers. I mean, it's just because some celebrity comes out and says that this is the way something is now, we have to all agree that this is a big deal or that I need to have a position on this issue or that I need to have an opinion about this thing, it's such a complete waste of our minds.
Mathew Warner:
And instead they should be focusing on the things right around us and our families and what am I going to do to surprise my wife tonight? And what am I going to do to engage my son about his day when I get home? Or whatever the case may be. But instead we're thinking about all this other garbage that completely doesn't matter. And something about getting off of social media that I've learned over time is, you get enough distance from it and you can see how much, 99% of it doesn't matter the next day, much less a week or a month or a year later. We want to know what's happening now but it should be a much smaller percentage, I think, of the type of information we're consuming and really we should be spending much more time in things that transcend the news of today or what matters this week.
Mathew Kelly:
There's a saying in journalism, opinions are cheap, truth is expensive. We see this in our hyper opinionated society. As a result of that, social media now is competing with legitimate news or vice versa, legitimate news outlets are being forced to compete with entertainment outlets and opinion outlets. What does that mean for the future of truth and objectivity in journalism, do you think?
Mathew Warner:
I mean, I think it means we shouldn't trust a lot of it. I don't know what that means long term. I mean, of course there's always been bias in whatever the history is being written or whatever but you would think that now you'd have more access to more information that we would have a better, clearer, picture of something but that's not always the case. That more data doesn't mean a clearer picture and I think what it lends itself to is people manipulating it to create the narrative that they want. And I think what's important with all this media is to remember that the system that it's operating within, what is it designed to do because it's going to have its own bias. And so the system that it's operating in right now is to sell ads, almost all of it, news media, social media, it's to sell advertisements.
Mathew Warner:
And so to do that, they need you to stay longer. They need you to care more about it. They need you to be more emotional about it and they need you to scroll and need to find out the next thing. So, that's just built into it, it's designed to do exactly that and that's what it does. So when you approach it, it is what it is. I mean, in some element, we need the news to know what's going on but you have to view it through the right lens and understand that's what it's designed to do. That it's going to make things more sensational than they really are. It's going to make the world seem a lot more divided than it probably really is. It's going to exaggerate extremes, that's what it does. It's going to put us at odds with each other and I think again, why some of the social media dynamics are so unhealthy is because you immediately go and dehumanize the other side to the point that they're just somebody that's obviously evil.
Mathew Warner:
And when you get to that point, you know this isn't reality, this isn't real. So I think we have to be very careful with how much we put into that, how much we think it really matters really in the course of things. I think it's important to be informed but to what extent? How much can I help it? If it's a particular cause that you're really passionate about and you've been called to work in that cause, this gets back to gladiator even, so much of it is mob rule. We feel like we have to participate because we want our vote as one of the members of the mob. So if I'm not out there being representative of one of the opinions in the mob then I don't get my voice. And I think that's a bit of an illusion, although there is some real power to that but I think the way you take that power back is by opting out of the mob, not by participating in it further.
Mathew Warner:
But certainly voting, certainly getting active and doing something about it is important. I think sitting back on your keyboard and hash tagging and sharing it should be a much smaller percentage of what we see as our activism.
Mathew Kelly:
You say in the book, saints spread the faith like wildfire because they're willing to catch themselves on fire first. What do you mean?
Mathew Warner:
It goes back to what we were saying, that you have to evangelize from the overflowing of your own heart that when you catch yourself on fire, you look crazy, it looks foolish. Not literally here obviously but you've done something in your life to the extent that people are like, "What are you doing?" And you look at someone like Mother Teresa, right? I mean, she goes to the slums of India and that's something that gets people's attention. And she lived the life and she didn't know how to get her brand marketed properly or get her logo right or write an email or all those kinds of things but it spread like wildfire because it was real and authentic and it was actually a fire.
Mathew Warner:
And so if it's actually on fire then it spreads. So I think that too often we're trying to push and we're trying to catch things on fire with stuff that's not even on fire itself yet and we wonder why it's not working.
Mathew Kelly:
Who are some of your heroes?
Mathew Warner:
I love books so authors are always some of the first I go to. I'm a big Peter fan, I could read every one of his books although it's going to take me a while. because he has over 80 of them but I've read a lot of them. G. K. Chesterton, Lewis, all those guys, I love. I'm a big fan of Bishop Baron, big fan of Matthew Kelly, I've read a few of his books. Definitely changed my life in a lot of ways throughout the years both in my faith, in my business, in my work at Flocknote, all those things so thank you for that.
Mathew Kelly:
You're welcome.
Mathew Warner:
So yeah, I love books. Those are all my favorites. In terms of real life or not real life but people I know, my wife for sure. She inspires me every day with her love and devotion to our family and her radical sacrifices for us. And my parents, my grandfather was always inspiring to me. He actually became a Catholic priest after having a bunch of children. But after his wife died, he was a late vocation. New Zealander, really had a heart for the Maori people there and spoke Maori fluently. And so he was called to vocation, to be a priest, for a Maori parish there. That was always really inspiring to me. He was always kind of a spiritual guru I looked up to, he always loved reading and quotes and poetry and all of those good things.
Mathew Kelly:
Wow, that's a rich collection. You close out the book talking about freedom and raising the question, are we really free? In a society where people seem so adamant about their freedom and so loud about their freedoms, we seem not to ask the question that you raise in the book and that is, are we really free? What are your reflections on that?
Mathew Warner:
I think what most people think of freedom is not really freedom. I think most people think freedom is, I can do what I want. But of course, if only you can do what you want then you're actually just a slave to your wants. And so freedom is not being able to do what you want, it's being able to say no to what you want. So if you can say no to what you want it, now you're free to say yes to what you should. And it's funny, it's something I've learned a lot with parenting too because kids, it's just a natural human thing. It's like, "Well, I don't want to do that." "Hey, I need you to clean up those toys." "I don't want to do that." And so they're constantly learning. It's like a foreign concept to them that if I don't want to do it, I can't do it.
Mathew Warner:
And I tell them all the time, I'm saying, "Well, you don't have to want to do it. You just have to do it." You're making this too confusing. You're putting too much pressure on yourself to think that you have to want to do it, you just have to do it. But it is a challenge, they don't get it at first. It's a hard concept but it's one of the things for me and my kids. I focused on a lot. I'm like, "One of the things I really want you to learn before leave our house is how to say no to what you want because it would be the worst thing for me as a parent to send you out in the world and all how to do is what you want because you will get into all kinds of trouble and your life will not be happy." And I just think that's so core, it's just such a starting principle for doing the right thing in the world.
Mathew Warner:
It's that ability to say no to what you want so that you can do what you should. But yet all of our emphasis on personal freedoms is totally opposite that so I think that's a real problem.
Mathew Kelly:
And probably why we live more and more in an age of slavery? It's a great conclusion. Thank you so much for the conversation. Thanks for coming to visit us. I hope we can do it again soon.
Mathew Warner:
I'd love to. Thanks for having me, Matthew.
Mathew Kelly:
You're very welcome.
Matthew Kelly
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