Chris: Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life, and discover that business is what you do, not who you are. Welcome to the show, folks. I am so excited about today's interview. You have heard me talk about Rabbi Daniel Lapin before. For those of you that have been with me for a long time, you've heard the interviews that I've had with Rabbi. He's just not only of my favorite people to interview, but also a huge influence in my life. I am so glad to have him on. Rabbi is known worldwide as America's Rabbi. He's got a great saying that "Everybody needs a Rabbi, even you Christians." He's noted as a rabbinic scholar, bestselling author, phenomenal books. Thou Shall Prosper is just incredible. He's got the Rabbi Daniel Lapin Show. In 2007, Newsweek Magazine included him in its list of America's 50 Most Influential Rabbis.
Before he came to the US in 1973, Rabbi Lapin studied the Torah, physics, economics, and mathematics in Johannesburg, London and Jerusalem. I know this seems like, "Wow! What a crazy group of things to be studying," but this formed the bedrock of his conviction that no conflict exists between the physical and spiritual, virtue and strength, or faith and wealth. We're going to be diving into a lot of that stuff today as we talk about is brand new book. If you would do me a huge favor, welcome to the show, Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Rabbi, thank you so much for coming on.
Daniel: I'd be looking forward to it, Chris.
Chris: It has always been an honor for me to hang out with you and just talk about stuff.
Daniel: Likewise. Great.
Chris: Our interviews are always fantastic, great, long, wonderful. I got so many questions, as I've been working through this, I had to delete questions down to 20, which there's no way we're going to be able to get that today, so I'm going to pick and choose as we go through, because your new book, Business Secrets from the Bible, is just phenomenal. No surprise. Before we get into that, I do have to say I believe you're taking a very nice trip here starting very soon.
Daniel: That's right.
Chris: The spoils of working hard and being successful.
Daniel: Thank you. Yes, indeed.
Chris: That is so much of what you teach us. Before we dig in, I would love for you to tell us why did you decide to write this book.
Daniel: It was interesting. The first book was Thou Shall Prosper: The Ten Commandments for Making Money. That was the result of many years of research, doing something that nobody but an authorized Jewish rabbi could have done without being accused of bigotry, which was basically ask the question of why do Jews prosper, so does proportionately financially, which is not to say there are no poor Jews. Of course there are, but, overwhelmingly, Jews do well, so much so that the famous list of the 400 Wealthiest Americans that Forbes Magazine publishes every year never has fewer than 60 Jews on it. Nearly every year, it has about 100 Jews on it, which is really remarkable, but if you measure the demographic proportion of the country, there really ought to be about 8 or 9 Jews on it max. Yet it's like usually 10 times that. It's really unmistakable. We're a much smaller population than Sri Lankans are, and yet you don't find this amongst Sri Lankans or any other group at all.
My big question was I needed to find out what was it that was responsible for Jewish financial success? Number two, just as importantly, did it depend on religion, did it depend on being circumcised - not to be frivolous about it - or was it instead a vast body of strategy, of tips, of tools and techniques derived from ancient Jewish wisdom that anybody could employ? After I had diligently researched and also exploring unpleasant options such as maybe Jews just routinely rip everybody off and they're just dishonest in business, and that gives them a certain advantage, which it does, of course, because, honesty is only the best policy if you're in it for the long term. If you're a hit and run businessman then total moral flexibility is by far and away the best thing. I was quite relieved to discover that Jews are not more dishonest than anybody else.
We've got our bad apples, just like everybody else does, but, overwhelmingly, the hundreds and hundreds of Christians I interviewed who had years and years and years and, in some cases, a lifetime of partnerships with Jewish associates could not speak more highly. In fact, many of them spoke about apprenticing their children - sons and daughters - to Jewish colleagues because they want them to pick up some of these things. I knew I was on to something. Years and years later, I'd finished my work, which was identifying the places in the Hebrew scriptures that taught the key things one needs to know to financially prosper. I presented it to the publishers and they really were uneasy about so much biblical stuff about so much stuff about God. They wanted a lot of that expurgated and excised from the book, which I did.
Chris: Which would mean there'd be no book.
Daniel: There was, and it was a very successful book, Thou Shall Prosper. Very successful. They came to me afterwards and said, "We had no idea we had a bestseller on our hands. Your book just keeps selling and selling and selling. The word of mouth spreads. It just keeps selling more. It's been out for a few years now. What we'd like to do is talk to you about doing a second book, where you could put in all the stuff we stupidly had you take out in the first place."
Chris: Oh, Lord.
Daniel: That became Business Secrets from the Bible. It's very, very close to my heart. It spells out 40 spiritual strategies that literally have as their primary focus financial abundance. I say financial abundance because sometimes people say, "I'm rich. I've got a lovely family and I enjoy my life." Yeah, okay. That's all wonderful and God bless you, but we're actually now talking about money in the bank. We're not talking about reducing debt because there are people out there like Dave Ramsey, and nobody does it better. We're not talking about how to invest the money you've got. There are plenty of books for that, but that presupposes that you have enough discretionary money in order to do those investment. We're talking about increasing your revenue. Then, later on, you invest at something else. All we're focused on is increasing the amount of income that you generate every year.
Chris: The reason why I love this so much, the last time we talked, the last time we interviewed, you pointed out something that, for me, I was trying to say, "Okay, I need you to help explain to people the importance of tithing in business." My whole life growing up in Christian churches, the thing that I always heard is when you tithe, God is going to bless you, but it doesn't mean that he's going to bless you financially. It means that he's going to give you what he has for you. You said, "No, Chris. That's not correct," that actually the word has double meaning, and one of the meanings is he will bless you financially. In that moment, it was so funny because I remember sitting in the studio just going, "Dang it." How is it that we have been telling people forever ... And I've heard it in 20 different churches. I've heard it in so many different times, people preaching that, saying, in not knowing the secret, the translation of, no, it is a double meaning.
Daniel: Look, to be perfectly candid, I find it depressing the number of times I speak ... You know I speak at 30, 40 churches every year.
Chris: Oh, yeah. Christian churches.
Daniel: Yeah, Christian churches. I find it depressing how many of them I come to and I can tell the minute I arrive that the church believes that making money is somehow antithetical to being godly because I see deferred maintenance and light bulbs not replaced, a paint needed here and there, and I see stress lines on the pastor's wife's face because I know she's not managing to pay the bills. It hurts me. That really is where I see my ministry is trying my best to correct biblical misimpressions when it comes to God's plan for human economic interaction.
Chris: I love the way you just said that because, truthfully, if we take those people that are leading that church that way or the church is believing that, it's a misimpression. It's not a correct understanding. That's, again, why I love this is because these are secrets. There are things that we, the common person, just hasn't understood. Starting with that, I want to get into secret number one, which is a mantra for us here, me and my business here. It's a huge part of what we do. It's a huge part because of your influence in my life, personally. My team here, it's big for us. If you would talk about secret number one and its importance.
Daniel: This is it. In a nutshell, we've got to ask ourselves what is God's intention for the relationship between us and money. At the same time, we know that the love of money is not a good thing, it's not a healthy thing. What exactly is going on here? The answer is shocking in its breathtaking simplicity. That is you're not supposed to focus on money; you're supposed to focus on doing everything you can to fulfill the needs and desires of God's other children, the money will follow in itself. That shouldn't surprise you, that a good and loving God wants to reward you for taking care of his other children. You'll never find a Jewish concept, you won't find any Jewish writing or Jewish literature or Jewish conduct where people say, "Please, God, send me another thousand dollars." Come on. "Give me the law of attraction. I want to attract another thousand dollars," or some other type of nonsense. That's not how it works. It's, "God, open my eyes to ways in which I can serve more of your other children," period. The money follows by itself.
Chris: Two things in there. One, you said a loving God. So many people are not coming from a place of understanding that there is nobody who's going to love them any more than God, that we do have a great, loving God, because, again, they're coming from bad backgrounds and not really understanding that. It's a very distinct God, it's an angry, hurtful God, but the truth is he is a phenomenally loving God. That's important. The second thing is - you have a term for this - become obsessively preoccupied with the needs of others.
Daniel: Yes.
Chris: How did you arrive at that term?
Daniel: I didn't arrive at anything. Frankly, all I'm doing is translating 2,000 years of ancient Jewish wisdom and probably about 5,000 pages of densely-packed Hebrew text, this formulation we just hear again and again and again, which is just focus on the needs and desires of God's other children.
Chris: In order to do this, correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the biggest things that has to do with this in my mind is dependence on other people. It's not an interdependence on other people, but there is so much out there today that is going against that concept - be independent, do it yourself. How much greater advantage do you have not being dependent but interdependent on people?
Daniel: Right. Let me just say something which I was weighing up whether it's okay to say on your show or not. I decided that, at the risk of offending, which I hope I won't do, but I know that your dedication is to your audience getting the truth, your audience getting information that is transformational, that literally has the ability to help them to transform their lives, I'm going to tell the truth, and that is you have to ask yourself a big question, which is who has done more for more of God's children? Mother Theresa or Bill Gates? It sounds like a provocative question. On the surface of it, your instincts are to answer, "Mother Theresa a saintly lady, but Bill Gates is just a greedy richest man in the world." That's not how I phrase it because only God peers into the souls of human beings. We only have the capacity to judge actions not thoughts. We don't know one another's thoughts. Half the time I'm not sure of my own motivations. I certainly don't know yours. It's just sheer arrogance for me to presume that I know someone else's motivations, but I do know other people's actions.
Who has done more for more people? Mother Theresa or Bill Gates? God bless the Saint of Calcutta, but the number of people she could have helped in her life, I don't know the exact number, but it's not hard to figure out a range. She helped a thousand people in the slums of Calcutta? Yeah, most likely. Has she helped a million? That's pushing it, but maybe. How about 10 million? I think we can all agree there was no way. If she would have lived another hundred years, she still wouldn't have helped 10 million people. It's not possible. Somewhere in the range of she helped a thousand people to 10 million people, I'm willing to say. How many people has Bill Gates helped? At a minimum, the half a billion people, the 500 million people who have bought Windows. Now they did that voluntarily because if they didn't want to, they could have bought Linux or Apple or any other operating systems. They bought Windows because it improves their lives. That's what they did. They felt the exchange was fair, the amount of money they gave Bill Gates in exchange for Windows was worth it because they made more money or found their lives more satisfying by using the computer than not. Bill Gates has helped at least 50 times more people. Not surprisingly, he's made a lot of money. That is the definition.
That's why one of the most destructive phrases that we employ is when we tell people find a career doing what you love doing. What a selfish way of doing it. I don't think God blesses that one little bit. Find out what you want to do and then try and make a living at it? All I know is I love boating and I've yet to find anyone to pay me to go boating. It doesn't work that way. No. The right thing to do is to find what people in your community, in your neighborhood, in your circle, in your social media, or whatever it is, find out what people need, find out ways in which you can improve their lives, and then learn to love doing that because that will be rewarding in the utmost. God measures what you do for other people, not what you feel like doing.