The Daily Signal - Top 5 of 2021 Day 4: Author Offers Ancient Wisdom of Genesis for Modern Problem (Repeat)

Episode Date: December 30, 2021

Top 5 of 2021 Day 4: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays. 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. Enjoy the show! 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 Thursday, December 30th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Doug Blair. As we continue sharing your favorite podcast interviews of 2021, we're excited to revisit my conversation with Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist and author of the book, The Tree of Life and Prosperity, 21st Century Business Principles from the Book of Genesis.

We talked about the richness of the stories from the Bible and the Torah and how they have served as sources of inspiration and guidance to people throughout the ages. We here at the Daily Signal podcast hope that you too can gain some inspiration from these ancient words this holiday season. We aren't sharing headlines this week because of the Christmas holiday, but we hope you enjoy this conversation with Michael Eisenberg. Joining us live from Jerusalem, our guest today is Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli venture capitalist, creator of the six kids in 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. fourth. 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 but certainly 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 involved into dispatches dispatches and evolved into a book when a front 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 moderate 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, modern problems.

One of the things that you've actually described the book as 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 to? 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 Aramna Arrayim, 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. for what 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, Lott, who the one thing we know about Lott 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. Because what is the purpose of wealth? Much like Andrew Carnegie wrote many thousands of years later, he has treated us 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 patronage. 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 immigrants, in order to be able to have a sustainable society.

Definitely. And it seems as if extrapolating a little bit that 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 Lott's 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 Lott 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 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.

And 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 amazed by Facebook that it has three and a half billion users. But, you know, the Bible has probably had billions of users, 10 to billions of users over time. It's really stood the test of time as more users than Facebook or Google, which is a much. modern inventions. 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. You know, 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. 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 round 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, 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. And 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 to we get the ethical framework. So these two first sections of the Bible, the garden, of Eden and the story of Noah are really warnings of what happens if we don't have the basics in 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 Gomor 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 to 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 or shoulder with. And the person I was looking for in this discussion was Abraham. So Sodom and Gomorororra 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 Gomorri is 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 himself and 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've 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, had to be done. We got out 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 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 innovative, 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 capital of 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. It 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 it's 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 has set up and reached kind of the speed of games, that big hunking institutions, or Hoking 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 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 re-skilling, and we need people to take that upon themselves, and we need society as a whole to take that upon itself. I say to, I think it's a civic responsibility to help educate four or five other

people and take them in 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 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 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, 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.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. And 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 and 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. We all know the legacy media isn't reporting the real news.

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