The Daily Signal - Israeli Author Offers Ancient Wisdom of Genesis for Modern Problems

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

The Bible and the Torah have served as sources of inspiration and guidance throughout the ages. Accounts in the Book of Genesis of the Tower of Babel and the Garden of Eden are among those that have helped people from ancient times to understand God and to navigate personal issues. Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist and author of the upcoming book “The Tree of Life and Prosperity: 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis,” says he believes these stories contain nuggets of wisdom just as applicable today as they were back then. "Wow, this is super-relevant for modern times and modern challenges, this kind of timeless wisdom," Eisenberg says about the Torah, which encompasses the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. "It has a modern feel to it, despite its nature as an ancient text." Eisenberg joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to talk about his book and some of the lessons we can take from the Book of Genesis. We also cover these news stories: At a Pentagon briefing, Army Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor says the U.S. military expects that one flight per hour will leave Afghanistan's Kabul airport as the evacuation continues. The Biden administration will recommend Americans get a COVID-19 booster shot eight months after they were fully vaccinated, government sources tell CBS News. A California city councilman and five others are charged with election fraud. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, August 18th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. The Bible and the Torah have offered guidance to the faithful throughout history. Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist and author of the upcoming book, The Tree of Life and Prosperity, 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis, finds that the wisdom contained in these ancient texts is just as applicable to modern problems as it was to those in antiquity. Eisenberg joins the podcast to talk about his book.

and what lessons we can take from the stories in the Old Testament. And don't forget, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, please be sure to leave us a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Flights are ramping up out of the Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. At a Pentagon briefing Tuesday, Major General Hank Taylor of the joint staff said that the U.S. military plans to have one flight leave the Kabul

airport every hour. One flight an hour will mean the evacuations of up to 5,000 or even 9,000 people per day. The Major General said, I want to reinforce that we are focused on the present mission to facilitate the safe evacuation of U.S. citizens, special immigrant visa applicants, and Afghans at risk to get these personnel out of Afghanistan as quickly and as safely as possible. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday that any attack by the Taliban on our people or our operations at the airport will be met with a swift and forceful, unambiguous response. An additional 1,000 U.S. troops have arrived at the airport to help with the operation, bringing the total to 3,500 troops helping with the airport operation. As of Tuesday, there were still between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans. Americans that needed to be evacuated. The Department of Defense said Monday that they plan to

house as many as 30,000 Afghan refugees on military bases, including Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. According to government sources per CBS, the Biden administration will recommend that Americans get a booster shot against COVID-19 eight months after their second vaccine dose. The formal rollout of this new guidance is expected to be release sometime this week. The upcoming guidance comes as infection rates from the newer, more contagious delta variant of the coronavirus continues to spread across the nation, and as data from Israel indicates vaccine efficacy wanes over time. While the announcement itself is expected in upcoming days, the actual process of administering booster shots

will most likely occur in September at the earliest to line up with full FDA and CDC approval. While the vaccines currently available in the U.S. are of a very important. available as a result of emergency use authorization, research conducted by Heritage Foundation scholars Kevin Diorotna and Norbert Michelle indicates that vaccines provide significant protection against serious illness or death from the virus, including the Delta variant. The CDC announced new COVID-19 guidelines for the vaccinated, based on data that allegedly imply that vaccines offer little protection against the Delta variant, write Diorotna and Michelle. The new data simply do not support such evidence, and the CDC's latest move to reimpose mask mandates runs the risk of

increasing vaccine hesitancy. It is estimated that around 50% of the U.S. adult population has received two doses of a COVID vaccine. California City Councilman Isaac Galvin and five others have been charged with election fraud. Galvin is the city councilman for Compton City in southern Los Angeles. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon announced in a press release at the end of last week that Galvin and former Compton City Council candidate Jace Dawson colluded together to ensure that Galvin retained his seat. It was reported that Galvin won the race by just one vote with the total coming to 855 to 854 against his opponent, Andre Spicer. Dawson, who allegedly helped Calvin secure his seat, has been charged with trying to bribe a registrar employee

as they were counting ballots on election night. Four others have been charged with voting illegally in the election. Galvin and Dawson have pled not guilty. Mayor Emma Sharif says, while we do not have all the details regarding the charges brought against Councilman Galvin, the city takes any charges of elections fraud extremely seriously. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Michael Eisenberg on using ancient wisdom to solve modern problems.

If you're tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger and bigger government, it's time to partner with the most impactful conservative organization in America. We're the Heritage Foundation, and we're committed to solving the issues America faces. Together, we'll fight back against the rising tide of homegrown socialism, and we'll fight for conservative solutions that are making families more free and more prosperous. But we can't do it without you. Please join us at heritage.org. Joining us live from Jerusalem, our guest today is Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist,

creator of the six kids and a full-time job blog, and author of the upcoming book, The Tree of Life and Prosperity, 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis, which releases August 24th. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Great to be joining. It's definitely a pleasure to talk with you.

So I want to start off with your book. Such an interesting concept. How did you get the idea to use ancient wisdom from the Torah and apply it to the modern business world? What inspired you specifically to write this book? It actually came out of conversations I had with my children around the table as the weekly biblical portion was recited. And everybody views any text you read, or certainly a biblical text through the lens of your life. And my daily life is investing venture capital, investing in startup companies. And that became the lens to which I talked about these.

timeless texts with my children, started writing some notes, notes evolved into posts, posts evolved into dispatches, dispatchedes that evolved into a book when a friend of mine said, hey, you really put this together into a book. And that's what happened. I wrote it first in Hebrew, which is not my native tongue. You climbed the bestseller list here, and then we translated it and adapted it in English. So it's a bit of a different book in English that is in Hebrew. And the one thing I'd add is the feedback to the kind of dispatches was, wow, this is super relevant for modern times and modern challenges, this kind of timeless wisdom. It has a modern feel to it, despite its, you know, nature as an ancient text. So, no, I think that's very interesting that you're taking something that's so old and so, you know, something that people have studied for such a long time and using those principles to apply them to modern problems.

One of the things that you've actually described the book as a framework that uses the words and actions of the Hebrew patriarchs to lay the foundations for a modern growth economy based on timeless business principles and values. I'm curious, would you be able to give our listeners an example of some of these timeless principles and how they might apply today? Sure. Let's take the story of Jacob. It's not that well-known story, but we'll find some more well-known ones in a second, where he sent from his home in Canaan to go search for a wife in. the homeland of Abraham Haran or Aram Naharayim, as it's called. And he comes there, and there's a giant rock on the well. And all the shepherds are around the well, kind of filling around and waiting for all of the shepherds to arrive to take the rock off the well so that they can give their flocks to drink.

And Jacob walks up to the rock and takes it off right away, and you say, well, what's going on here? Well, what's going on is that water is a scarce resource. and with a scarcity mentality, people put regulations in place. That rock is regulation. How do I prevent one shepherd from taking the water from all the other shepherds? And it also reflects the lack of trust in society. Jacob would come from a trusting home, a trusting economy, back home in Canaan, where his parents were,

walks up and says, this regulation, this lack of trust is destructive economically. And so you're all wasting a lot of time waiting for, everyone who arrived to agree to remove the rock, and he brings his trust in the system and removes it, and he feeds his cousin's flock. And I think one of the lessons of that story is that excess regulation hurts productivity. Excess regulation is there to cover up for distrust when what we're really after is a trusting society. I'll give you a different example from the story of Abraham. So the Bible is scarce with Abraham's biographical facts. We know he leaves his ancestral homeland and comes to the land of Canaan, and he arrives there.

And what the Bible tells us is that he comes with the wealth that he had accumulated there, which was mobile wealth because he was an immigrant. And he comes with 70 people and his nephew, Lot, the one thing we know about Lot is that he's an orphan. And the story that the Bible is trying to tell us because it reiterates how many, so many times that Abraham is wealthy is what is the purpose of wealth. Much like Andrew Carnegie wrote many thousands of years later is treat this on wealth. But in a different way, Abraham is teaching us that the values of wealth are, one, private property is important because Abraham is the first patriarch or first person in the Bible to own private property. But number two, when you accumulate that private property, you must take care of the orphan, you must take care of the other 70 souls, the immigrant. in order to be able to have a sustainable society.

Definitely. And it seems as if, extrapolating a little bit, these principles aren't just exclusively tied to business. Do you feel that these principles can be tied to other realms, like politics or other social issues? No question. In one of the appendices of one of the pieces in the book,

I talk about the politics of Sodom and Gomorrah versus Abraham's politics. and lots of politics. And unquestionably, part of what goes wrong here is we don't have a economy for, you know, just have an economy. We have an economy to spread our values. And one of the irreconcilable differences between Lot and Abraham was they were both wealthy people, but they had very different values around that wealth. And Sodom and Gaborah were very wealthy cities of the plains, but they had very negative values. around that wealth and autocratic leaders also who inflicted a lot of pain on their, on their inhabitants of those areas.

And so I think what the Bible is after is the society built on these values. It's fundamentally a capitalist society that believes in private wealth, but in the usage of that to promote values and to promote good leadership and politics. When it becomes abusive, as in the case of Sodom Gamora, or somewhat corrupt as in the case of lot, it unfortunately meets a bitter end. Now, in addition to your book, you've also written some commentaries, and I love the titles on some of these things. One of them is, big tech is a modern tower of babble that must be scattered. And then another one is guaranteed income has been a bad idea since the Garden of Eden.

I think that's so evocative that you take these stories from the Torah and the Bible, and you kind of connect them to these modern issues. I'm curious, why do you think these stories from antiquity make for such effective comparison points to modern issues? So we kind of are like amazed by Facebook that it has three and a half billion users. But you know, the Bible has probably had billions of users, tend to billions of users. Over time, it's really stood the test of time and has more users than Facebook or Google, which is a modern invention. So things that stand in test of time tend to be relevant than the modern generation. We just, we need to interpret them. And I think really critically, like in the case of universal basic income,

We have a story in the Garden of Eden that's been told over as some sort of paradise. However in this paradise, man gets thrown out and woman gets thrown out. Not just that, they have no children in the Garden of Eden. Please note in the Garden of Eden there are no children until man begins to work, meaning he doesn't have basic sustenance provided by the gardener by universal basic income. He's not productive and he has no children. He's not productive work-wise and he's not productive procreating the next generation because he has no project with which to collaborate around and pass on to the next generation.

I think we just read these stories carefully with both an ancient and modern lens. We find these things. In a book, I talk a bunch about Noah. Noah is a fascinating guy, and he reminds me of Alfred Nobel. Noah invents two things in the Bible. One is the plow, and the second is chemistry or fermentation around wine. And in each case, there's like a destructive element. to it where after they mention the plow in an era of abundance, Noah, you know, the world

kind of destroys itself. It becomes lewd, licentious. It becomes overwrought and greedy. And people begin to cheat each other and trust degrades. And after he plants the vineyard and becomes drunk, his son abuses him ultimately. And I think the notion is that innovation is really good and really important. That's what moves society forward. But if we don't put an ethical framework around it, it can go really sideways.

I think that's true for AI. I think that's true for cloning and synthetic biology. And there's a lot of timeless lessons in that. And only until Abraham comes around later do we get the ethical framework. So these two first sections of the Bible, the Garden of Eden, the story of Noah, are really warnings of what happens if we don't have the basics of society. We don't cause people to work and find ennobling work. And two, if we have innovation, that kind of runs amok.

I think that's such a fascinating point. And speaking of all of these stories, you know, we were talking about the Garden of Eden, the story of Noah. You had mentioned Saddam and Gomorra at the very beginning. Do you feel as if there's a particular story from the Torah that resonates with this moment in time? There's so much going on right now. Obviously, over the weekend, we heard stuff about Afghanistan. Is there anything that kind of resonates with you from the Torah that kind of connects us to now? I talk about right now, Afghanistan over the weekend. I woke up this morning. I had a hard time sleeping last night after watching the images out of Afghanistan, a really hard time. And not to be too political, but, you know, Nancy Pelosi's

tweets troubled me greatly. I'm looking for in a story where I don't know if we should have been in that war to begin with or not. We should have gotten out after six months, like I heard people say, or we should be get out now or stay in. I don't know. I don't feel like I have enough knowledge. But there's a way to treat allies, and there's a way to treat people that you've been shoulder her shoulder with. And the person I was looking for in this discussion was Abraham. So Sodom and Gomororra to go back to it was a corrupt society. God decides he's going to destroy this very deeply corrupt society. And there comes Abraham out of the shadows. And first of all, he doesn't hide behind Twitter. He gets right to the precipice above Sodom and Gamor. He's in the

game and says, God, I know you're God, but come on. We have to save these people. And there may be some righteous people there. We don't remember, but a few chapters earlier, Abraham had fought shoulder to shoulder with the king of Sodom against the former imperialist king to Darla Omar who had enslaved a lot of people. They had fought together. And even though society corrupted something, it was difficult, et cetera, the moral voice of Abraham stood up to the leader. God in this case and said, hey, wait a minute, what are we doing? And I neither heard Secretary Blinken, nor did I hear Speaker Pelosi or anybody else stand up and say, hey, wait a minute. These are people we fought shoulder to shoulder with. There's a lot of righteous people in Afghanistan.

even if it's a tough place, what are we doing? Everybody said, you know, how to be done. We got out of and watch out for the girls. That's not enough. I think that's a very unique take and a very good way to sort of connect the modern issues with some of these past ones. Moving on to a different topic right now, we mentioned at the top that you have a blog where you talk about a variety of different topics.

And one of these articles that you wrote recently for the blog, I found absolutely fascinating. It's called What Digital Games Can Teach Us About? building a national economy. The top line in the article was that national economy should be expressions of culture. Can you please dive into that idea a little more for our listeners? I just thought that was so great. Yeah, so just a word about games. In general, game economies are different and are differently successful depending on geography. The economy that works to generate a lot of revenue in China is not the same as the one that works in Korea. It's not the same that works in the United

States, some places you have free to play, some places you have pay to play, and on and on and on. And so one of the things we can take away from that is that national cultures impact how economies work. And we see it very clearly in game economies because we can iterate those a lot quicker. And I think that the Chinese economy, now going to kind of a national level, is not the same as the American economy, is not the same as the Israeli economy. The Israeli economy, which emerged from socialism and is now much more capitalistic and super-innovation. It still has elements of what I would call high levels of social solidarity.

We have a single-payer health system here, but competition among the HMOs. We have other large parts of the economy that are run by not-for-profit organizations here. In the U.S., it's a much more what I'm called freewheeling capitalist society, which is, I think, reflective also of the founding fathers and the founding of the states. And that's appropriate. The U.S. economy should not be like the Swedish economy. should be like the Israeli economy. The Israeli economy should not be like the U.S. economy, the Swedish economy,

and certainly none of them should be like the Chinese economy. I think it's really important to ask ourselves, what are the foundations? For Israel, I think freedom is a core foundation like the United States. For here, I think solidarity, because everybody serves in the military here right now, I think is super important to keep society together. And I think that puts extra social structures on society and explain why so many NGOs take up a large part of the economy. And by the same token, I think that over time we've shown as the world is set up and reached

kind of the speed of games that big hunking institutions or hucking institutions cannot solve a lot of modern problems. And so probably in all places, we need a reduction of government involvement in them. In Israel, I know it's an imperative and they're trying to get to it in this current government. And I think in the U.S. you're looking at a similar thing where, you're doing it. just things are moving too slowly at the government level to keep up with the pace of technology and the economy. So given what we've discussed today, we've obviously taken stuff from the Bible. We've taken things from kind of ancient stories and ancient wisdom to a more modern perspective of, you know, digital games.

What is your advice to listeners who are looking for guidance in these troubling economic times? Number one, the technology is taking over every part of the economy. We need to be aware of that digitization is accelerating. You know, at the same time in the U.S., there's unemployment in large sectors, and there's, you know, lack of employable people in other sectors. I think the technology economy in the U.S. and in Israel can absorb hundreds of thousands and millions more people. So we're in a giant era which needs a lot of reskilling, and we need people to take that upon themselves, and we need society as a whole to take that upon itself. I think it's a civic responsibility to help educate four or five other people. and take them into the 21st century economy.

And so I think acquiring digital skills is like reading, writing, and arithmetic right now. And it's really important to be employable in the future economy. I think the second point is it's going to be rough out there for a while, for a variety of reasons, whether it's COVID and the post-COVID economy, international issues, et cetera, and some divisive domestic political issues. And so we really need to reach out as citizens to help empower other people through, through this time. And then the last thing I would say is we need timeless principles to guide us through these times. And timeless principles cause you to stand up for yourself and for what you

think is right when there's a lot of canceling going on out there where it's easy to get it caught up in a zeitgeist and a quick reaction. We need time to think about things, respond appropriately and do the right thing at the same time. And the last thing I would say is dig in. which is, you know, get involved in the technology economy, get involved in the future economy. The jobs of yesteryear will be digitized. And so, you know, jump forward, get out of your comfort zone, take risk, go into the uncertainty, it will pay off. I think that's solid advice. Now, Michael, we are running a little low on time, but I wanted to give you the opportunity.

If listeners wanted to check out some of your other work, where should they go? So the book is coming out on August 24th. It's called The Tree of Life and Prosperity. I write this blog called Six Kids in a Full-Time Job, although it was terrible branding. I actually had eight kids, but it wasn't very scalable. And so I have a lot of writing on the blog. I've got a fair amount of podcasts, and you can find links to a lot of them on Aleph.v.V.V.C. And in general, if you Google me, I'm not that hard to find.

Type in Michael Eisenberg, Israel, or venture capital, and it's generally the first result. I look forward to more conversations like this. I think it's how we learn from each other and how we can help society go forward. Absolutely, completely agree. So from Jerusalem, that was Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist, creator of the six kids in a full-time job blog,

and author of the new book, The Tree of Life and Prosperity, 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis. Again, that book releases on August 24th. Michael, it was a pleasure. Thank you very, very much. I wish everybody much success and a lot of health during this time.

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