The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Soul Winners: The Ascent of America’s Evangelical Entrepreneurs by David Clary

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

Soul Winners: The Ascent of America's Evangelical Entrepreneurs by David Clary American evangelicals have always been innovators. They reimagined what a church could be, whether it was a humble tent in a rural field or a high-tech urban megachurch. They embraced new forms of media to spread their message to the masses. They thrived in a fiercely competitive religious marketplace. In Soul Winners, journalist David Clary argues that this entrepreneurial spirit has indelibly shaped evangelical ministries and their worldview. For generations, evangelical leaders have partnered with tycoons to pay for their churches, crusades, and campuses. In turn, evangelicals adopted the pro-business, anti-government values of their conservative benefactors. White evangelicals evolved into the Republican Party’s most loyal voting bloc. The close relationship between business and evangelicals has produced the growth-oriented megachurches that dot the nation’s landscape. Pastors such as Rick Warren used market research and management theory to create their “seeker-sensitive” churches. Televangelists and “prosperity gospel” preachers, most notably Joel Osteen, tell their audiences that faith will be rewarded in this world as well as in the kingdom to come. Clary’s narrative approach brings to life colorful characters such as the ballplayer-turned-preacher Billy Sunday, who condemned the “godless social service nonsense” of liberal churches, and Billy Graham, who brought evangelicalism into the highest precincts of business and politics. Soul Winners offers a fresh, balanced perspective on evangelicals and the consequences of their enduring influence on American life.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, certainly, have I ever told you, we were just sat down and promised to say, I really love the fact that you guys all listen to the show. I've never told you that from the deepest part of my heart. Don't make me cry. Don't make me cry, but I love you, man. Anyway, guys, we love you.

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days as well. As always, we're probably in for some more brain bleeding we had a another guest on earlier this morning and and and she was like do you do people really blame the brain brain bleed from your show clearly i am because i can't even pronounce it and we have an amazing new author on the show as always we have these brilliant gentlemen we put them and people gentlemen and people and women too is aren't those people i don't know it's all those three all the above We have these brilliant gentlemen. We put them. And people. Gentlemen and people. And women, too. Aren't those people? I don't know. It's all those three, all of the above.

And we put them in the Google machine, and out they come. He's the author of the newest book, September 15, 2022. Just came out hot off the presses. Soul Winners, The Ascent of America's Evangelical Entrepreneurs by David Clary. He's on the show with us talking about his amazing book. You're going to learn a lot today about how the world works and what's been going on in it. David Clary is an award-winning author and news editor at the San Diego Union Tribune. Clary's latest book is Soul Winners, as we mentioned before. It explores how America's entrepreneurial spirit has shaped evangelical ministries and

influenced their worldview. Before joining the Union Tribune in 2002, he worked in a variety of editing and design roles at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Clary, a native of central New York, is a graduate of Syracuse University with degrees in newspaper journalism and political science. Welcome to the show, David. How are you? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it as well. So give us your dot coms, any place on the interwebs you want people to check you out. Oh, thank you. I have an author website. That's davidclaryauthor.com. And on that site, I've got an excerpt from the book. I blog occasionally about things I see in the news.

So there's lots of interesting stuff to check out there. Awesome. davidclaryauthor.com. There you go. And so what motivated you to want to write this book? Well, yeah, I've always been fascinated by why people believe in what they believe in, and then I became very interested in how those private religious beliefs have an effect on the public arena. And so I've just always been fascinated with religion and its intersection with politics. And I found evangelicalism to be such a useful way to study

that because they're so, as I say in the book, they're so good at attracting audiences. You really need to understand the evangelicals to understand America and understand American politics. They're such a cohesive group. They're a large group. And so I just found that to be endlessly fascinating. And I looked at them as entrepreneurs, you know, because a lot of people look at them as the prisons of gender and race. And those are all really good ways to study them. But looking at them as entrepreneurs and really they're really they're startup people. You know, they look for a market and they try to find a market, they define a market, and then they go after it. And that makes them really very American and very unusual in the religious climate.

There you go. I don't think anybody's really keyed into the entrepreneurs behind American evangelical ministries, I suppose, per se. There's been a lot of discussion about them. So why did you pick the title Soul Winners? That's an old expression that goes back centuries. It's been seen as the job of pastors is to win people to Christ, to win people to Jesus. And you go back 200 years and you go back 200 years,

you go back 50 years, and even today, it's, it's, it's such a constant theme. And I think that also the idea of winning, you know, that's,

that's, that's a very, it's a very business idea. You win a market and you win share. And, and that, so it just seemed to me that it's an old phrase, but it's,

it also has sort of a double meaning of you're, you win over people and win over and win at politics, win at business, and win at growing your church. That makes sense. My family that's very religious calls me the soulless loser. But I seem to be winning. I don't know. I could, no matter perspective or whether or not I'm saved or not or whatever all that means. So let's get into the book. What what did you find in your discovery as you went into it? Was is this segmented to a certain amount of time or is this over, you know, 100 years or how does it how did you build this out? Largely, I focus on the period after World War II. I do start out with the way that America was founded and that America was not founded with an official religion, which is the first. America was the first country in history not to have a state-sponsored official religion.

And that's one thing that's so interesting that you hear people say, you know, America's a Christian nation. And it's not true. It was not. America was explicitly not founded as a Christian nation. It was founded as, you know, the founding fathers, most of them were not even Christian. They weren't practicing Christians. They believed religion was important, and they thought it was a good, cohesive thing for the people. But they didn't think that America should be an Episcopal or Presbyterian or a certain denomination. They saw how that worked in Europe, and they didn't like to see the church have too much power. So I did start with that, and I went into some of the later figures. But I decided to concentrate more on World War II and after, because that's where you really see the intermingling of business and politics and evangelicalism is the Billy Graham period, and then Gerald Roberts and Jerry Falwell and his

activities in politics. And then the more modern folks like Joel Osteen and rick warren i spent quite a lot of time writing about him so i just thought you know i think for the reader it's it's good to have some background but i think if you give too much background it becomes like well how to disconnect it today and so i so i really wanted to focus on sort of the last 70 75 years or so yeah billy graham i don't know was he the first to really take religion to, you know, stadium level? I mean, he was holding stadiums and talking to presidents. And correct me if I'm wrong, you're the historian here, but he kind of seemed to have started that whole thing where, you know, ever since then, we've seen evangelical top entrepreneurs mingling with presidents, White Houses and stuff. Yeah, there were large scale evangelical leaders like Dwight L. Moody. And around the turn of the century, he drew a really large audience. There's Billy Sunday in the 1910s, 1920s.

But yeah, I think you're right. I think Billy Graham is really the first in the sort of the modern age, the modern media age, the television age, he was someone who used television very effectively from very early on. And Oral Roberts also, he and Graham were born the same year, and they really moved on parallel tracks. So it's interesting to look at both their careers. They had some different theologies, but they both used television. They drew large audiences in crusades, but also on TV. And you're right. Graham was very explicitly involved in politics.

I think that evangelicals have had a conservative bent going back more than 100 years. But he was a very close counselor to Dwight Eisenhower. Dwight Eisenhower leaned on him for advice about civil rights since Graham was a southerner. He really listened to what Graham had to say. And Graham was very involved with Richard Nixon to his detriment. He regretted becoming so close to a president. And he was a defender of Nixon's until the very end. And then later tapes came out.

White House tapes came out with Grahamham having anti-semitic slurs and i apologize for that later in life but yeah now and then with it with trump his trump's main advisor religious advisor is a woman named paula white who founded a mega church in florida yeah and she's a prosperity gospel person someone who believed who says that if you pray hard enough and you donate money, then you will get tangible financial benefits. And that's a very alluring idea. And Trump actually was flipping around one night and saw her on TV because she had a talk show. She was sitting at a talk show house, like an Oprah-style show. And he was just like, oh, she's really great on TV. She's blonde. She's attractive.

And so he contacted her and they became very close. And then when Trump became president, she was very close to Trump. She was in the White House quite a lot. She was probably the closest religious figure to a president since Billy Graham and Nixon in terms of the number of times in the White House, the impact on policy. And so, yeah, that's why I thought if I could focus on the last 75 years, it brings a lot of what's happening now into sharper perspective. You can just see how you can see some of these patterns repeating. So what did you find in the book?

Did you find that that has influenced, you know, their interest in politics, values of the government. What factors that have had, you know, entrepreneurs, and I'm sorry, I'll object before that on that question. You know, as an entrepreneur, I think from a specialty kind of brain that most people don't think from. I think of making a widget, finding something that will sell, that will make profits, and then exploiting that to the highest thing that I possibly can in a good character way when I say the word exploit. But basically taking in KFC, you take a piece of chicken and a great recipe and you're worldwide. And so you think from a very money-oriented, very business-oriented, very very expansive oriented, how can I make more money

doing this? You innovate, you're constantly going, how can we make more money? How can we do this? How can we do better? You know, ideally the beauty of being an entrepreneur is you're, if you serve others and provide a better product and improve their quality of life, you're usually paid directly in proportion to that, to the value. Usually. You know, a person who is a doctor, you know, obviously gets paid a whole lot more money than say somebody else because of, you know, they saved your life. So because of that, we're a little bit more money geared than most people and generating more money and doing whatever the hell we want. In fact, a lot of, you know, our type of oligarchs, you know, they influence government to not have, they have as less regulation as possible so they can do whatever they want.

Because once you reach pan-globalist level, you don't really care about democracy that much. You do business with anybody who'll do business with you. So what did you find how that entrepreneur sort of mindset fed into the last, what, 60, 70 years since World War II? Yeah, I think that the breakthrough that evangelicals made is that the biggest market of people, if you're selling a product, the biggest market are people that don't own your product, right?

So their idea was you go after the unchurched, so the people who do not belong to a church, people who never belong to a church or don't care about church. Because before, the mindset was always like, okay, I'm going to start, I'm the pastor of a Catholic church and I'm going to go after all the Catholics in this area. And I'm going to give them what

I believe they want. And what someone like Rick Warren, who's a really good example of a startup businessman, he was influenced by Peter Drucker, who was the founder of Modern Management Theory. That was one of his main mentors. And Drucker taught him that a customer decides what a business is.

And you need to go after, you have to give customers value. And so Warren was from, he was in seminary in Texas and he didn't want to start, he was a Southern Baptist. He didn't want to start a church in Texas. A Baptist church in Texas, there's so it. He was a Southern Baptist. He didn't want to start a church in Texas. There's a Baptist church in Texas.

There are so many. So he did market research. He looked at, okay, where are the fastest growing areas? And this is the 70s, the late 70s. And he decided, he found out the fastest growing places, Settleback Valley in Orange County, California. So he moved. He literally, he and his wife packed up their truck and moved to Orange County. He didn't know anybody.

And he started out with, there was no church. I mean, he just found a church in his living room. And the church congregation met at schools, theaters, and anywhere he could find. They didn't have an actual building. But, you know, when he went there, he went door to door and asked people, what do you want in the church? I mean, hundreds and hundreds of people, houses for weeks. And he just knocked on doors, what do you want in the church?

And then he, basically people said, you know, church is boring. And I don't like that there's no childcare. You know, I have my kids, and they're not paying attention. And also, I feel like the church isn't relevant to what I want, and they're unfriendly. And when you go to a church, you feel like, oh, everybody knows each other, and I'm an outsider. So he designed Saddleback, his church is Saddleback Church. He designed his church around what people want. You know, he didn't dream up, you know, an idea.

Here's what a church should be, and I'm going to give it to people. And then if it'll want it, then tough. You know, he really designed his church around the needs of the community. So when he started his church, you know, they had a high-quality program for kids, child care. He dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, and he just talked about things that were relevant to people, and he understood the community. The community at that time was an upwardly mobile community, and people that maybe went to church when they were kids but stopped going. So when he started his church, there's no crosses, there's no statuary, there's no symbolism. It was just, we want to welcome everybody. We want people to feel comfortable. We want people to feel like they don't belong.

And so the church ended up being the largest in the country. It was 30,000 members, and he had a whole blueprint of growth. His whole thing is about growth. You know, companies need to grow and if companies are static and they just hold on to yesterday, they won't evolve. So he was not afraid to throw away things that didn't work. You know, and even he found a consultancy for thousands of other churches that followed

him. And then there's other pastors that call them pastorepreneurs, you know, where they do the same thing, where they have templates that follow them. And then there's other pastors that call them pastorpreneurs. They do the same thing where they have templates that you follow. And I visited nine different churches for this book. And I went to a broad range of them. And there's some similarities. They're very welcoming

to newcomers. There's a welcome desk and they give you a cooler and a t-shirt and a hat and pens shit i'm i'm gonna go join i know they get you i get you there but you go with me a lot of starbucks starbucks style copy bar wait you know yeah they get free copy i'm now i'm converting damn it i don't get any coffee. So then you go in there, and it's just very comfortable seating.

It's like going into a theater. You know, it's like going to a Broadway show. It's stadium seating, and there's no kneelers, and you walk in, and there's big video boards, and there's usually a big band, you know, a 12-piece band, very high energy, and you're not lost in the service you know there's no there's no like oh this is where i'm supposed to stand up this is where i'm supposed to be oh these guys are these people are praying this prayer i don't know

what this prayer is and they want to make it as welcoming as they can and they and that's why they succeed they really give people what they want and And just like any entrepreneur, I mean, you have to, you have to give people what you have to fill a need. You know, that's marketing 101 is filling it, filling a need and understanding what that need is. And they do that very well. People, something to communicate. The gentleman you're talking about earlier, is he the one who built the big, I forget

it's the crystal of the big glass church, that giant. Oh, that's also in Orange County. That's Robert Shuler who did that. That's a little further up the road in Orange County. But yeah, he's also in the book, too, because he was very active on TV. He had The Hour of Power. You might remember that on Syndication. He was a very popular preacher.

And I actually talked to his son, who was a very interesting interview, because the whole ministry collapsed because the old man hung on too long. And that's something you see a lot with any family business. The old man doesn't want to leave, and he stays around. And he actually had dementia,

and he was at these meetings, and these meetings would go on for hours and nothing would be decided. And he also stuck to what worked 20 years ago, but it wasn't working today. So then I think the other problem a lot of these churches have is like a lot of, there's a lot of husband and wife teams that operate these churches, a lot of families and in-laws, and it sort of becomes, there's no financial controls and there's a lot of families and in-laws, and it sort of becomes, there's no financial controls, and there's a lot of self-feeling that goes on,

and a lot of people have jobs they shouldn't have, and they make money they shouldn't have. So, yeah, Robert Shuler is, so the church is actually, the Glass Church is still there, but it was because the Crystal Cathedral went into bankruptcy. They sold it to the Catholic Church in Orange County. So now it's the cathedral for the Orange County's Catholic Church, which is sort of a funny irony because it actually went in there.

It was interesting to see how it's been outfitted to be a Catholic church. An old guy hanging on too long, running his business like the old days. Are you talking about my Raiders and Al Davids? Sorry, I'm a little angry over this. That's interesting, too, where it's like, you know, I don't want to veer off too far, but you have his son, you know, assigning somebody who should run a large corporation or a large company? Probably not.

Yeah, but he only got it because he inherited it. So, I mean, you see that in football. You see it in baseball where you have, like, the son has it and he doesn't really know what he's doing. And, you know. He probably had a partner with that haircut. But, no, I mean, really what you're mentioning is these are what entrepreneurs and owners and these guys are really business people. They're there when you peel back the layers. You know, it's funny you're talking about coffee and all the free stuff you can get at going to churches.

You might have me converted. I mean, I've been an atheist for years. I don't get free coffee when I go to Spirit Rhino on Sundays to pray. Sorry, I had to put that joke in there. So but let's talk about do you cover Pat Robertson and the 700 Club? And you talked, we kind of led into the mega churches and the big broadcasting sort of thing. I think you talk about that in your book as well. Yeah, Pat Robertson, he started CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and that was, he was a real visionary. He was ahead of his time. He could see where cable was going, and he was very early to recognize,

if I can buy the time or buy the satellite time, that will disseminate to millions of homes. And so he was really ahead of his time. He ran for president in 1988, so he didn't get too far. But he did better than I think most people thought. And then from the ashes of that came the Christian Coalition, which was Robertson and Ralph Reed, who I interviewed for the book. And it was interesting talking to Reed about his mentality. He was very young when he started with Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition.

And Reed was really a political organizer. You know, he's not a pastor, but he knows how to organize. And he did a very effective job kind of elevating those issues. Because you compare that to the moral majority, a lot of people talk about that. And that was in the 80s with Cherry Falwell. But a lot of the people that were running the moral majority were pastors, and they weren't political types.

And Jerry Falwell was very, very blunt about things he would say, and he would often, you know, he would often be his own worst enemy, you know, with his comments. Reed is very smooth and very, and he's very PR aware, and he, so that's where the family

values language comes in. Where Jerry Fallow would rail against abortionists and it used very harsh language or Reed would use very comforting language. We want to defend the rights of the family and family values and things that

are school choice was another one. We want to have school choice. another one you know like we want to have school choice well that just that means that they don't want to have as much money to go to our public schools the more money going to in school that's that's what school choice really means but um yeah so he was a he's a very effective effective organizer pat robertson yeah he's he's he's also had you know he also steps in it quite a lot with his comments after 9-11. He and Falwell were blaming the abortionists for the attack on September 11th. He apologized for that, and they railed up and escaped people as well. But he never had a church.

He only had a TV ministry. So it's interesting how these people, like I talked about Rick Warren before, he never had a TV ministry. He only, he never, you know, he just never wanted that. They look at Robert Shuler, he had a TV ministry and a large church. You look at Joel Lundstein and it pretty much is just a TV show and it is a church as well. But the emphasis is definitely on the TV for him. So what did you surmise in your book, or do you surmise anything in your book, or do you just kind of profile these guys, talk about this land of entrepreneurship and what they do and what they built?

Is there any sort of thing that you say, well, you know, because of this, here we are? Yeah, I think, you know, the hardest part of the book was deciding who to leave out because there's so many interesting characters that I really wish I could have spent more time on, but it would have been a 500-page book, and I don't really have the time to write a book that long. But the people I looked at, I think you just I came away with understanding the mentality of an entrepreneur and how many times over these ministries were supported by big business, supported by wealthy people.

I mean, going back more than 100 years, you know, I write about Billy Sunday, who was a really well-known professional baseball player. And then he became a pastor and then he was a traveling, then he was a traveling crusader and he would draw 20,000 people in New York City for weeks and weeks and he was so popular there was no church that could actually hold the number of people who wanted to see him so they had to actually build

a tabernacle out of nothing that would cover the size of a football field and so how do you build a tabernacle out of nothing? Well, John D. Rockefeller Jr. would be on his finance board, and he would tap all of his rich friends to build this huge tabernacle for Billy Sunday because they liked what Sunday had to say. Sunday was against slavery against.

He was very pro. He didn't think that there should be a social service. He didn't like, he didn't, he didn't like the idea of, you know, of we need to help the poor and have the government has to get involved. His attitude is,

it's all, we live in an individualist society and it's all about soul winning. It's all about converting people to Jesus. It's not about laying soup kitchens and, and, and helping, helping people. And those are,

those are messages that, that really, if you go down the decades, that's very consistent where it's these, these people have this mentality. If we get help from really rich people, we get help from, from businesses to fund our ministries. And then in turn, you know, we say the things we share a lot of the same ideas that, that these, that our ideas that our benefactors have. And now in the last 40 years, we've seen it interwoven so closely with politics to the point where the Republican Party is the most important element of the Republican Party,

our evangelicals, white evangelicals, I should say. And that is, they are the definers of what that party will do. And you could not win the nomination for president and not have a supported evangelical. It's not possible. And they turn out, they vote, they donate, they organize in a way that's larger than their numbers. You know, that really makes sense. You know, one of the problems I've always had, because I read the Bible when I was young,

I grew up in religion. You know, to me, when Jesus throws the money changers out of the temple, that's been one of the biggest dichotomies that I've felt. And I think other people have seen it too, where you see these ultra-rich Joelstein guys, you know, you see who's the one guy who's like, you know, lately there's been a whole bunch of them. They're like, you need to make me rich. You need to buy me a jet.

You know, I need a Gulfstream, whatever, 50 million. We need y'all to, you know, fork up. I remember we used to have a business that I worked with when I was young where we would get all the newsletters from the Southern Baptists, not just Southern Baptists, but all the churches around the nation. And I was always surprised when I would see the ads in it that would say, make sure that you sign over your will to give your estate to the church. Screw your kids or something. I didn't say that, but basically that was it. I'm like, why would you give your, why don't you give all your crap to your church? Give it to your kids. But I don't know. I've seen kids and I could probably understand why some kids, but no, I, you know, the biggest dichotomy is you look at that, but it's interesting to me, you've,

you've tapped onto something that for years, the Republican party has been anti-union. Of course, if you understand, you know, a lot of history, we've talked about great authors like yourself on the show, going back to the Southern, the great Southern strategy of Nixon, why they did that, the changeover unions from Republicans to Democrats. And, you know, the whole funding and all that money thing. But that explains why they are pro-business and they think from that entrepreneur slant as opposed to hey you guys are the money changers in the temple that makes sense to me now yeah and one of the real summing blocks a lot you know when i talk about this book to friends or family or it your colleagues you know i think one thing they always say is why are these you know these people these pastors have all this money and they've got private planes and mansions, and that's not right.

And you mentioned Joel Osteen. I mean, he and his wife, they're co-pastors at Lakewood Church in Houston. They own a $12 million mansion in Houston, and I think their net worth is about $50 million. And I think that people have a real problem with that. And why aren't they giving money to the poor? Why are they taking such large sums of money? And I think what I found out is that I think America is an aspirational culture. We all think we can be rich someday.

And I think when you're told by these pastors and you look at these pastors and they have some of the younger pastors have thousand dollar sneakers and they have, you know, they've got fancy cars. And I think they look at that as something to aspire to, that this person came from poverty or and that could be me. You know, this person is a success. And that could be me. If I pray hard enough and if I continue, if I give donations and I listen to what this person has to say, if I buy the books and I go to listen to the podcast and I go to church, go to this person's church, then I can be successful too. That's a really powerful, very powerful American idea is this aspirational culture. And evangelicals tap into that very effectively. And, I mean, you mentioned the private plane and there's, I forget if there's a part of a guy named Kenneth Copeland,

he's been on TV for decades, he has his own private airplane or his own private airport outside of Fort Worth, Texas. And he has several private planes and he actually tells his followers, I need to upgrade. I have to upgrade

to a gulfstream 5 and people give him the money like yeah and he brags he's like you bought this you bought this is 20 million dollar aircraft and he posted a video uh bragging about it and and it to me that is extraordinary that that that people would give money to somebody who obviously is extremely wealthy. But I think if you think of the mentality that some people have, they see hope. You know, they see like, oh, this person, if I follow this person, I can be like him. And maybe I think I have success, financial success in life and turn around my financial ruin, go from ruin to riches. I mean, it's a very powerful idea.

Yeah. Kenneth Copeland, yeah. I think he was one of the guys I was thinking of. There was a famous video of him being confronted by a reporter. Yes, yeah. Being really kind of a crazy reply, and I see it all the time everywhere. But, yeah, America is kind of a weird place with our whole capitalism system like no one there seems to i've read studies or or at least

suggestions of studies that the people we all believe you know there's still a line that i love from fight club we all we're all raised being told that we're getting millionaires or rock stars and we're slowly finding out that we won't be. And we're very pissed off about it. If I can go with that right, forgive me if I get it wrong. Don't sue me, Brad Pitt. Just keep calling me for beauty advice. But I gave him horrible marriage advice, though, so that didn't work out. Anyway, I would never tell him to do that.

But segues aside, you know, they say that that's one of the reasons with capitalism why we don't want to, why people are kind of like, well, we shouldn't give the oligarchs or rich people rules because I plan on being rich someday. And it's kind of this delusion that we have in this country. And it's interesting that still that plays into the religion aspect of our country. It's really interesting. Yeah, it's done that for many years. I mean, you go done that for many years. You know, I mean, you go back to Oral Roberts.

I mean, you would have, his whole philosophy was called seed fate. And so it was the idea that you have to, just like if you want to grow a plant, you have to start with a seed. So you plant a seed and then the plant will grow. Well, the same is true with church. So if you plant a seed, which means a donation, you pray over it, and then it'll grow, it'll blossom into financial riches. And that was something he taught, and it's still taught today. I mean, I turn on TV, and they talk about seed faith, planting a seed. And if it doesn't work, then you've got to plant another seed.

Maybe you need to donate more. You need to, you need to pray harder. And it does get to the point. I know it is sad because there are people that they don't have the money to give to this. They don't have, they don't have the wherewithal to, to spend, you know, even if it's $50 a month, like that's a lot of money for someone who's older and is on a fixed income. But if they think that, well, that could turn into something, that could turn into a great fortune, why not me? Why can't it happen to me, I believe. But it is sort of sad because you think of like, well, if it's not happening for you,

then, oh, there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not praying hard enough or I don't deserve it or I'm not faithful enough. And I am troubled with that because I do feel like now you're going into exploitation of people's feelings. And their money. Yeah, there's people that'll be broke. I had a relative that came to me one time and said, I need to refinance my house because I can't afford to live right now and I need to

take some cash out of my equity because I can't afford to live. I'm going broke. And I'm like, okay, well, let's do that. I own a mortgage company for 20 years. So I sent out their finances and they were outputting $250 a month to their church. And I'm like, you contribute to a billion dollar church. It's one of the 12th largest landholders. I think it's eight now, largest landholders in America. I'm pretty sure God will give you a break

for a little while if you want to skip that $250 a month because that would actually really do well for you. But no, we couldn't give that up. And it's really interesting. You see these, like there was the preacher recently and I think in New York,

who was mugged wearing a million dollars on stage. That's right. Who would do that, number one? But number two, who would do it without security? Or maybe they were out of security. I don't know. I think I jumped. But, you know, it's just insane.

But you've helped explain a lot of things as to why, you know, I've always kind of looked at church from the Jesus, you know, give and whatever. And I've kind of wondered why these guys have that sort of thing, but explains a lot to me, explains a lot. And those of you who'd like to give to the Chris Voss show, you can go to iTunes, give us a five-star review over there. And I promise you, you will have prosperity of a great feeling when you do might last five seconds or something, but you will have it or something. You'll have something. I don't know what it is. So this has been very insightful. Anything more you want to tease out in the book before we go? No, I really appreciate the time, Chris, and the discussion. And I really appreciate being

able to talk about all this. Yeah. Thank you for coming on. One thing I did want to mention, I'm a big i've lived in vegas for 20 years and your book gangsters to governors which yeah plug into yeah that that was look that was my first book so it came out five years ago and yeah that was it's kind of interesting that i wrote about gangsters and then i wrote about pastors i see you but. But there are some similarities. Those casino operators, they were entrepreneurs too. People like Steve Wynn. They took a risk. They got involved in a business.

And I also like the mentality of the people. There's a lot of gamblers that should not be spending money sitting on a slot machine. And, you know, I mean, you've been in Vegas and you've seen, you know, you go through the casino and you see somebody on an oxygen tank and they got two money going. And it's like, oh, it's so sad because they don't have the money for this. And they're just losing money. They're losing money twice as fast as they would have at one machine. You've seen the little ladies playing those,

those, the, the spinning machines. Yeah. With the oxygen shake. And you're like, honey, you,

you're on 15. You need to go home. Why not me? Why can't I, I could win the jackpot. And then that's similar to the seed faith. It was like, well,

why can't I, I could turn my life around. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, every, every, when you live in vegas everybody you meet that's a that addicted gambler they always have a system and the system always wins but they're always broken they just need to borrow money from you and then they always have a

pocket full of their loser receipts and they always tell you they'll tell you about their losses from most times but usually because they need to borrow money but then they always tell you, they'll tell you about their losses from most times, but usually because they need to borrow money. But then they'll tell you, I just won $4,000 on the Royal or whatever at the bar. And you're like, yeah, but you've lost 20,000 this month. So like, who cares? They're like, no, you don't understand. It's their, their version of math is, but the Goodmans, the gangster lawyers, lawyers for the gangsters. Right. He's a really nice guy. But the Goodmans, the gangster lawyers, lawyers for the gangsters.

Right. Oscar Goodman. Oscar Goodman. I mean, he's a really nice guy. I think he was a pretty good mayor for us. I think he was a pretty good mayor for us. I don't know. Vegas is kind of a town like we're all drunk here.

Like, what do we know what's good? I don't know. But I loved how he would always show up with, you know, the girls. Oh, yeah. The girl girls. The martini glass in hand. But, you know, I mean, he defended a lot of the big mobsters, the riots, right? In the movie Casino, and I think probably a few others were good fellows or whatever. But, yeah, and then he goes to be, you know, he goes to be the big guy in the thing.

So, great book there. Last question I have for you, since you're a san diego editor the san diego union tribune and we mentioned we kind of forayed into football how are you guys doing down there losing the chargers so yeah that was a very traumatic very dramatic it was me yeah yeah it was yeah we yeah it's interesting because i think there's still some residual chargers love here, especially when Rivers and Gates were still on the team. I was a fan of those players. So as long as they, even though they were in LA, actually they were in Carson during that time, I still supported them. But now that they're retired, it's hard to root for them. And, you know, so we talked about, like, you know, Dean Spanos. Like, this is a guy who was a son, you know, Alex Spanos was the owner of Patriarch and he was the guy, well, he made his fortune, he was an immigrant, and then

his son inherits it and his son couldn't run a two-car parade. I mean, it's just he just doesn't know what he's doing and he's not smart. And, like, he should have taken the Las Vegas deal like he could have had he could have had Las Vegas sold him a stadium and he could have had that market all to himself

so instead he's sharing a stadium with the Rams you know he's a we call them the LA Lodgers you know because they're paying rent to us you know to Stan Kroenke and nobody cares about the charges chargers in los

angeles i mean people in los angeles care about the lusc and high school football and the chargers i mean there's no interest in them so it's yeah it's sad and you know easily it's i do take some you know some pleasure when they when they you know very typically give up a game at the end and stumble all over themselves. Was that with Rivers or after Rivers? Yeah, that's true. I don't

mind when they stumble and they don't take the playoffs. I get a little thrill out of that. I'm a Raiders fan. We just give it the season right away, so there's that. It's weird that Rivers should have at least, I think he should have at least got a Super Bowl. I don't know.

I mean, I never did like him, but that's because I'm a Raiders fan. Yeah, I've never even played in one. Yeah, he didn't. He went to the playoffs, right? Went to the playoffs, yeah. He had a little banning For most of his career. But the older man, Peyton. But yeah, I mean,

he always seemed like a great quarterback who should have. That's the business. Anyway, it's wonderful to have you on, David. Oh, great to be here. Covered the whole gambit from... What a great conversation. Something to everybody. There you go. Something for everybody.

So give us your plugs one more time. Your.com so people can find you on the internet. Yeah. So it's davidclaryauthor.com. So there you can find an excerpt of the book and my blog. And then the book Soul Winners is available now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere that sells books. So please pick it up.

There you go. And then you can, if you want to do a second book called Soulless Losers, what my friend calls me, I think Satan or Black Sheep is the other terms that they use for me, but that's okay. I pray for them every time I go to the Spear Marino. Okay, Bill, do another book about gambling.

You know, Soulless. Yeah, there you go. Soulless. I got some stories for you from living in Vegas. Okay, Bill, do another book about gambling. Solve it. Yeah. There you go. Solve it. I got some stories for you from living in Vegas. Yeah. No kidding. There's certain people that when you meet them in this town, you're just like, we can't be friends because you have a problem.

Yeah. You're going to drag me down with you. Yeah. Can I borrow some money? Where's my MacBook? I don't know. I can't find it. Why is the bank yeah

anyway thank you very much david for being on the show thank you chris thank you so much thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com for chest chris voss go to youtube.com for chest chris voss go to linkedin all those crazy places all the kids are playing be sure to order the book wherever fine books are sold stay away those alley bookstores soul winners the ascent of america's evangelical entrepreneurs came out september 15 2022 be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time