Episode 124 - The Tree of Life and Prosperity with Michael Eisenberg
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Michael Eisenberg is a General Partner at Aleph, an equal partnership and early stage venture capital fund that has invested in more than 50 companies and has $850M under management. Michael is also an avid writer. Since 2006, he has been writing the blog “Six Kids and a Full Time Job” on topics ranging from politics to technology, Judaism and macroeconomics. We’re excited to have Michael on the Faith Driven Investor Podcast to talk to him about how he balances investing, writing, and life as a husband and father of eight.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I'm here as always, or most of the time, at least with Luke. Luke. Good morning. How's Nashville?
Luke Roush: Nashville's beautiful, beautiful spring morning. Tulips are coming out.
Henry Kaestner: That's awesome. We're taking the show on the road today. We're going to the amazing, amazing, amazing country of Israel. And it pains me that I've only been there once. Most of our listeners probably will have been there if you haven't. It's just amazing. It's great culture. The weather's great, the food is awesome, scenery really great. And then to walk in the footsteps of all of our biblical heroes is just it's amazing. It's otherworldly, almost literally. And our program today is taking us to Israel, to Michael Eisenberg, who is a crazy, successful investor coming out benchmark time on the Midas list, made lots and lots of great investments over the years. Maybe the most impressive thing that he's done is the fact that he has written a blog called Six Kids and a full time Job, even though he has eight kids. So now under selling, under promising overdelivering. And I think that's what he does as an investor as well.
Luke Roush: He's got to make it more approachable. You know, eight is just completely unattainable for most individuals. Six makes it at least kind of within spitting distance.
Henry Kaestner: That's right. You know, if it's eight, then they think it's a work of fiction. Six kids will bring people in. And then, you know, with time, he says, yes, eight. Michael, you do have eight kids, correct?
Michael Eisenberg: I do have eight kids, yeah. In fact, when our eighth was born and, you know, and the blog didn't have a scalable name, one of my partners from Benchmark wrote Maybe you should rename it. Eight is enough. Those people are old enough to get the idea. Yeah.
Henry Kaestner: I'm a child of the seventies. That was a great show. I remember that.
Michael Eisenberg: Me too.
Henry Kaestner: Very cool. So, Michael, thank you for joining the program.
Michael Eisenberg: Thank you so much for having me. Henry, Luke, appreciate it.
Henry Kaestner: So give us we'd like to do this with all of our guests, of course, but give us an autobiographical flyover. You haven't spent your entire life in Israel, but you're doing some incredible things there and do the autobiographical flyover. As we're doing this, I'll just tell our listeners why Luke and I are so fired up about having you on the program. We're talking about a guy who serves on the board of an organization in Israel called Yeshivat Har Etzion. It's a Bible study. He's fascinated by the Word of God and what it means for his life, but what it means also for his professional life. And the fact that we've gone this far along and Faith Driven Investor and having connected with Michael through our great friend Evan Baer a long time ago, I'm embarrassed that it's taken this long. But we're going to learn from Michael about what he's heard from God and how it informs his investing. Before we do that, give us a fly over who is Michael?
Michael Eisenberg: Yes. As you hear from my accent I am not originally from Israel, I was born and bred and raised in New York. I'm fond of saying on the island of Manhattan, I was born in Manhattan. I went to elementary and high school and college in Manhattan, but I took a detour after my first year of college, and I went to study at that same Yeshivat Har Etzion when I was 18 years old, after my freshman year of college and one year turned into two years of Bible and Talmud study in those amazing halls and under the tutelage of the two heads of the Yeshivat, this house of Torah and Scripture study and I had a transformative experience right about this time here today may actually even be the anniversary of when it happened, because it happened a week after the Jewish holiday of Purim, which fell last week. And it was the year of the first Gulf War in 1991. And the war ended on Purim Day. And Scud missiles had rained down for like two months in Israel. And I found myself in a room with the head of the Yeshivat, a rabbi who was a Holocaust survivor. And I asked him a following religious question. And your listeners will appreciate this, because as religious people, we want to follow the laws, the religious laws. And so I asked him if he thought there was a greater religious fulfillment of commandments, if I moved to Israel and settled in an unpopulated place, the Negev, the Galilee, or if I settled in a very populated place like Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or city, would it be the same fulfillment of the biblical commandment to move to Israel? Now, mind you, I had no intention of moving to Israel at this point in time. And the Rabbi answered me. He said, Your question is nonsense. It's total nonsense in a very charming way. He said it. He said, What you really need to do is move to Israel and open a factory to employ 10,000 people who will earn an honest and decent living. And I've been going to kind of orthodox Jewish religious education my entire life. And never once I heard a rabbi talk about the economy or business and not just as a spiritual imperative, but as a religious imperative and a business imperative, and that it's good business to empower other people to earn an honest and decent living and thereby grow the pie. And so at that moment, I decide to move to Israel and try to employ 10,000 people. And I came back to the States, finished college in two years. I graduated college on May 31st, 1993. I got married on June 13th and moved to Israel on August 11th in pursuit of trying to employ 10,000 people, [...] and decent living. And that's what I've been trying to do ever since. That's been like my life goal to keep doing that.
Henry Kaestner: So tell us how you got involved in investing. Did you have an operating background first when you first moved to Israel or did you right into the world of investing?
Michael Eisenberg: I got bad news for your listeners. I don't have a background in much of anything. You'll be disappointed to find out that I have a degree in political science, which I think I got good grades, but I don't remember going to class that much.
Henry Kaestner: That's right. I do too, and Luke is public policy guy.
Michael Eisenberg: Maybe there's something there right, maybe there's something there. And so the kind of background is I actually got started in political consulting. That's where I got started. And political consulting, I discovered, didn't create that many jobs due to politics, for what it's worth. But, you know, to be perfectly honest, I was fired. No one told me I was fired, but I was and I was unemployed in my twenties with one child. And I couldn't find a job here in Israel. And I was an immigrant and I started something that became a tech merchant bank. I didn't know anything about tech or banking, for what it's worth. So it was like classic imposter syndrome. But I was driven. I had to create jobs. That's like that's what I had to do. And so that's what I did. And we started as merchant bank in the first bubble came. The bubble came in the late nineties and we all looked like geniuses, you know, that's how I started my career. And then I got recruited by a bunch of venture funds and ended up going to one and ended up at Benchmark and then started my own together with my partners. And so, you know, that's my story. I still don't know anything about technology, by the way, and I struggle to read a balance sheet and an income statement, but it's been okay. That's the truth, by the way. That's not like some false humility that is the truth.
Henry Kaestner: So you sound a lot like me, except you've got twice as many kids. But on the income statement and the balance sheet side. But Luke does know how to read balance sheets and income statement. So I surround myself by a lot of smart people. I know. And my presumption is you've done the same.
Michael Eisenberg: That is the secret to success. And by the way, it's the secret to a happy marriage. Married people who are better than you and you'll do much better. And they all like a mirror up to you all the time and challenge you and keep you humble and make sure you're doing the right thing and you aspire to other men. Same thing is true in partnership. I've been in partnerships my entire life. My partners are all way smarter and more capable than me. They've proven that.
Luke Roush: So how have you seen just kind of the entrepreneurial environment and experience change in Israel over the last number of years? What's most different today than it was when you got started?
Michael Eisenberg: That's a great question. And we started by selling our good companies young because it was a young ecosystem. You know, we forget Silicon Valley is like 60 years old. And so it's had enough time to kind of germinate management teams and financial sophistication and growth capital and all those things. We just were only around for 25 years, and so that 25 years feels like a long time, but it isn't. And so now we're building full stack companies and that's a massive change. We said when we started all of my current fund that what we really want to do is build $10 billion companies out of Israel and they should have an Israeli flag in the front of the building. And that wasn't obvious when I got started that you could even do that.
Henry Kaestner: I remember coming up to Haifa maybe about ten years ago and just being incredibly impressed. I well, it felt like Silicon Valley. It felt like every single major technology, you know, as Apple, as Google, Facebook, everything as you're going up. And I remember back when I was on Wall Street, I remember a checkpoint being a big Israeli company, but it is out of nothing in 25 years. It's incredible. Taught us a little bit for those who don't understand what we're talking about and haven't heard about what has happened in Israel. Give us a sense of the size and the scope and just the depth of what's coming out of Israel maybe. And it started out of the Israeli defense industry, correct? First.
Michael Eisenberg: Yeah. And even still, you know, in most American places, we have a technology center. What you have is a great university, Stanford, MIT, whatever it is, it produces technology people. Most of Israeli technology economy comes out of the military here, [...] 200. Another one starts with 81 and some others. And so you build an esprit de corps in these places and mutual responsibility, and then they go out as teams and start these companies. They tend to have kind of less business exposure than your average American college graduate. But, you know, it's a different kind of ecosystem in that way, by the way, it's a far more loyal ecosystem in that way. People stay companies a lot longer.
Henry Kaestner: Got you.
Michael Eisenberg: Out here.
Henry Kaestner: Okay. So I want to get right into the meat of what we want to talk about with you, because you've written extensively on what the Bible says about investing. You've written about what the Bible says about a lot of things. So you've got two really interesting books. One want to touch on The Vanishing Jew, because that's fascinating. And the other one, of course, that really brings us to today is the tree of Life and Prosperity. Before we get into each of those, give us an overview of your journey and learning from God's Word. Since you first met the rabbi who encouraged you to look at the marketplace, how would you summarize what the Torah says about business and investing and what guide you through that?
Michael Eisenberg: So the most important insight is do we think that scripture is some sort of parable, or do we think it's a blueprint for how you live a life in an ethical nation and ethical and moral life in service of something greater than yourself? And that's a critical part of the way I approach the Torah scriptures, which is these are real things. In fact, when I launched my first book on Genesis in Hebrew, I did like an evening with a rabbi named Rabbi Loud, and someone asked him, What did you learn from reading Michael's book? And he said, I learned that people haven't changed in three and 4000 years. People are people. Families are families. Issues are issues. Wealth is wealth. And morals and ethics, you know, are relevant today like they were then. And so I thought that was just a great encapsulation. And so if you think this is a blueprint, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, as the case may be and on you look for how to apply it. And what we've lost I think is a way to interpret it to our modern society. Somehow we think when we read about, you know, Abraham and his flocks or Isaac and his flocks and his agricultural enterprise, so we say, Oh, that was then. But now we're like in technology and computers and manufacturing. But I think that's interpretable, not only interpretable in a way of parables, but fundamentally interpretable. It's not an accident that Abraham was a shepherd and Isaac had an agricultural empire, and Jacob goes back to being a shepherd and Joseph becomes the secretary of the Treasury of Egypt. These are evolutionary behaviors that we see in family, generational businesses and in other areas like that. And so I think it's a blueprint.
Henry Kaestner: One of the things that we've looked at a bunch, both were Faith Driven Entrepreneur Faith Driven Investor is the creation mandate and this kind of call to create be fruitful, multiply, take dominion over all things. And I'm curious, as you've looked into this with a number of rabbis and these yeshivats, etc., about some of the passages that you grasp on. And I'm wondering if they're the same. Presumably many of them are. But in terms of the emphasis, you know, like, you know, you go back and say, see, God has told us to be able to be out in the marketplace in the Christian worldview. Of course, a lot of times we'll go to the Book of Acts and talk about the fact that 39 of the 40 miracles in acts took place in the marketplace. What is it in Israel and the Jewish tradition? What is it you look back to specifically? I mean, you may mention some of that that what Abraham and Isaac did and Joseph being in the Treasury, etc.. But do you see anything, for instance, in the Genesis story, the Exodus story, or they're kind of these rallying points that you say, see, this is why we need to do this, etc..
Michael Eisenberg: By the way, parallel to some of the Christian teachings. So we have rabbinic literature from similar time periods. And in fact, there's a lot in rabbinic literature that takes place in the marketplace as well. And I don't think that's an accident because those are the same time periods. Right. Marketplaces evolved primarily after the Romans came into our part of town here in Israel in the call it first century B.C.. Right. So we have those parallels also. My focus in the books, although I do bring from some of the rabbinic literature, is really what Christian listeners would call the Old Testament. We call the Hebrew Bible. And so in the creation mandate, there's a few parts of this. One is everybody works and everybody creates. If you read through the Book of Genesis, you can't not notice that Noah invents the plow. I'll come back to Adam in a second, but Noah invented the plow. Abraham is a wealthy man. The word wealth or possessions is what's called a [...] In German, which is a leading word in all the stories about Abraham and Isaac creates an agricultural enterprise, and Jacob and Esau fight over inheritance. Basically. Why they're fighting over inheritance because there's what to inherit and there's different views of what that businesses and, you know, Jacob and his sons are in a family business and they're fighting over that. Right. They go to shepherd the flocks farther away. And the whole story of the economy of Egypt is told at the end of Genesis. And I think a lot of this goes back to the beginning of Genesis. And there's different interpretations, both in Hebrew commentaries and in Christian commentaries, to the best of my knowledge of the story of the Garden of Eden. And, you know, man is told, go forth, be fruitful and multiply. And to exercise dominion over the land, I would take a jump for them to the Middle Ages for a second. [...] the great scholar of the Middle Ages and Jewish philosopher, doctor and scholar of Middle Ages has this line that he brings from the Book of Psalms, where he says, that man is just a little bit less than God. In Hebrew, it's about [....] and he's a little more limited than God. That's a very aspirational comment. It says that, like, God created the world. We need to continue creation. And in fact, one of my arguments in the book is that in the Garden of Eden, man created nothing because he was fed everything kind of equated to universal basic income today. We got all your basic needs taken care of you'll be indolent. And Adam in the Garden of Eden was indolent. And so he sinned, by the way, he never talked to his wife in the Garden of Eden? We only find her talking to the serpent. She had no conversations with Adam in the Garden of Eden. Because when we're not productive. We get bored and we sin, we get bored and we don't do the right thing and we create nothing in God's world. And so man is expelled from the Garden of Eden. And for the first time he creates something which is a person. And if you read the Scripture carefully, only once man is expelled from the Garden of Eden does he have children, which is the ultimate creative act at the end of the day, the ultimate most godlike act. At the end of the day, in Talmudic studies, we talk about that there are three partners in the creation of a child, man, wife and God. Right. And so it's the ultimate kind of joint creative act. And then man begins to work for a living. Now we view it as a curse, right? That the thorns and thistles come forth and by the sweat of his brow, managed to till the earth and create his bread. At the same time he creates something and that begins the creativity of humanity.
Luke Roush: So I will do just on that called to create, which is the title of the book that we'll read here in the US that speaks to kind of why do we create? There's a great podcast that Henry and I oftentimes point entrepreneurs to and our own teammates too. That's done by Simon Sinek on Start With Your Why and just curious to kind of get your take on why do we exist? We exist to love God and love our neighbor. How does that manifest in and through the way we invest, the way we build products and services, etc? I'm curious to just have you unpack that in terms of actually, let's make it personal. Why do you do what you do Michael?
Michael Eisenberg: I go back to being super motivated by creating 10,000 jobs, and I want to explain this for a second. It's not just creating jobs. The economy grows and enables other people to flourish when we don't think of it as a zero sum game. And I think the biblical view of the economy is I can be successful and I should make you successful as well. That's good for me and good for you. And so why do I do what I do? Because I think a more prosperous society, economically prosperous society, creates better families, creates better marriages, creates better belief system, the more cohesive communities, and enables people to get through tough times. It builds resilience in society. And there's a level above that, which is I see something a little radical right now, so I hope you'll excuse me. You know, there's a lot of people talking about capitalism being broken today and that there's a problem with capitalism. I think it's a little different. I think if we look at capitalism, we'll say that it's created more prosperity, more progress, more greatness for humanity than any other economic system before. But when Adam Smith talked about the invisible hand of the market, he lived at a time and lived in existence that was predicated on a religious community and society that existed where he was. So a lot of the mutual responsibility and mutual empowerment was an understood prerequisite for Adam Smith capitalism. What's happened over time is that the capitalism has gone awry, but that the underlying religious assumptions of community responsibility, of empowering the other, of loving thy neighbor as thyself, of saying I'm going to succeed and ensure that he succeeds because he's part of my community and part of my faith. And we have aspired goals and a common code and a common language that has been undermined in large parts of modern society, where people have adopted relativist ethics and morals and they've developed a significant amount of individuality and individualism, all of which is important. But it must it must live alongside the imperative to empower others and create on behalf of yourself and on behalf of others. And that underlying assumption that Adam Smith built capitalism on is what has disappeared in many parts of society and is what I hope we can reinstate this covenant among communities of men built on often religious faith, most often religious faith that brought these communities together where people eye to eye. If you go to synagogue every Sabbath or church every Sunday, you see people there on our sight and you know, they're part of your community and you can empower them. And on that you can build a very successful and empowering and mutually empowering capitalist society. When that erodes, it gets tougher.
Luke Roush: So your point really is that it's not that the animal is no longer functional or somehow evil, it's just you plop that animal into a completely different operating context. And the environment now is actually not conducive to flourishing in the way it once was, in part because of, you know, the anonymouszation of community. People no longer actually recognize who is my neighbor. Is that kind of what you're getting at or no.
Michael Eisenberg: I think it's more than that. It's not. They just don't recognize who it is. We had a common code. There was a Judeo-Christian ethic that was a common code. And I could trust that we lived by the same code. And if I can trust that we live by the same code. You're become predictable and it's easier to do business together and work together. And I think that's an important point that gets lost in a lot of the modern dialog. And I also there's an expectation of me from the community that I will exist and succeed to help you, Luke and you, Henry, succeed also and everybody else in our community. And I think we've lost some of that and we've got to get it back.
Luke Roush: So to contextualize that sort of broken state, right, it sort of once was but is not currently. And maybe like put that in the context of investing. Are there things about the relationship between investor and entrepreneur that are also concurrently broken because they've been shaped by kind of this broader societal dilemma that we find ourselves living through?
Michael Eisenberg: I've written a bunch of blog posts about investing as a transaction. Investing is a relationship, and I think a lot of what goes on is become transactional, not relationship. And one of these I love about venture capital is the opportunity to develop a long term relationship with these founders and try to build something meaningful over time and lasting. And I did some work when I switched firms to try to see where I've been successful, more successful, less successful investor. And one of these I discovered was co-investors actually mattered. I didn't think they would, but they did. And I think that's because, you know, if you get to a point or board where people are pulling in different directions because they're not predictable and they're not kind of in it for the same reasons or have the same long term perspective, it kind of comes apart at the seams. And so the way I think about investing rests on a bunch of pillars. So one is relationships are not transactions, two long term thinking versus short term thinking. Three, what I would call virtuous alignment, and I want to dig into this for a second using an example. So I'm an investor in an insurance company called Lemonade, fastest growing insurance company in the world, Lemonade, came and looked at the world of insurance and said, this is a really odd relationship because if, God forbid, Luke or Henry got into an accident, the insurance company would make your life miserable until they paid your claim. You know, they sent an adjuster and 500 questions. And the reason is obvious. It's a totally misaligned business. They make more money by making you miserable and not paying your claim. And not only that, even the broker's misaligned because he gets a fee for closing the deal and an ongoing fee. So he actually is not incentivized to provide full data to the insurance company. And so those forms are pretty light, but you move it into an app and a phone, you can gather a lot of data and you align the business, Lemonade said we're going to take a flat fee to run the pool. We're not going to make any more money by denying your claims. Not just that leftover premiums will sign what's called in game theory. Ulysses contract will tie our own hands. All leftover claims are going to charity of your choice. Charity of your choice. So if you fraudulently trump up a claim which you do against your legacy insurance company because you know they're going to screw you so you won't do it to Lemonade because congratulations, you've screwed the American Cancer Society. And it turns out that most people are good people. They really are. Most human beings are good people. But we designed systems to bring out the worst in humanity because we think of these as transactions and not relations. We don't trust people. And this goes back to the same before we've lost the code of trust and that we need to regain. We've lost a code of predictable behavior based on, in my view, predictable community and scripture behavior that once was a common code, and we've got to get that back.
Henry Kaestner: So I'm fascinated by that. That's very, very interesting. We talk on the program a lot about the concept of a redemptive business model, and I love it when you just go ahead and you illustrate through an example like lemonade. Are there other ones that come to mind as well when you think about like.
Michael Eisenberg: Oh, sure, I give you many more when I'll do another one, which is stunning. I have a company called Rise Up. Now. I'm invested in a guy named Yuval Samet, who grew up poor in a town just outside of Tel Aviv called Petah Tikva. He grew up right above the market. You know, he is opening air markets in Israel. If you've been here, open air, fruit and vegetable markets. And, you know, he says parents would go down at 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. Right. The weekend here starts Friday for the Sabbath. And, you know, before the Sabbath start, they bought all the veggies on cheap. So they're fresh fruits and vegetables. They didn't have money. And he said he grew up with a mindset of abundance, despite the fact that they had no money because his parents kind of taught him this mindset. And after he sold his first company to Klarna, which the big Swedish e-commerce payments company and lived in Sweden for three years, he said, I'm coming back to Israel to start a company that will use a day to day finance to teach self efficacy and turn that into real business and cash it so banks make money in the same way venture is going to make money. They take fees on your transactions and they want you to borrow money and ironically they actually want you to default on a payment or two because then they get fees and penalties and the best customer for a bank is someone who takes a loan and doesn't make all their payments but ultimately pays it back. That's fundamentally misaligned, came Yuval, Samet said using A.I., we can fix this A.I. and community and. You looked at Fitbit and all these people driving themselves nuts, walking upstairs in the middle of the night did their Fitbit number on their watch and say the human mind optimizes around hitting a target, one number, one target. But we've got to get that number right. And after a lot of research with single moms, widows, people at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, he discovered that the one number that mattered was how much money do I have to spend at the end of the month from now until the end of the month? And so using technology and WhatsApp and iMessage, you plug in your bank account, your credit card statement, your purchasing habits, and sent you one number once a week every two days, whatever you wanted. How much money I'd spend another month. I catch this. They've taken many, many, many, many, many thousands of people out of overdraft and out of debt into savings and even investment. These people have open investment accounts. Do alignment is not only that, these are not the high socioeconomic people in Israel, to say the least, and they're paying $15 a month subscriptions to this company rise up because they know it gets them out of debt. And then around this is coalesced, a community of 20 plus thousand people who are encouraging each other through challenges to save money and to then invest money. So much so that we did a partnership with one of the largest savings account providers in Israel. We got our clients a 50% discount on fees and they got more signups in one week and then they get in a year through our customers. And this money never existed before because these people were in overdraft super align business with deep values and a deep sense of community that drives very, very rapid growth. And it put a cherry on top of the story. The kind of spokesman for the leading bank in is the largest bank in Israel was like the host of like Jeopardy in Israel and he was our spokesman of the largest banking is on TV. And he called up and said, can I come represent you on a campaign that's like, wow. And Yuval who by the way, grew up secular, not religious. Tells the biblical story of Elkana from the Book of Samuel and in the Book of Samuel, Elkana leaves his home and goes to the Tabernacle, the mini temple in Silo, which is in Judea, just outside of the hills of Jerusalem. And he would go collect all the people from around and bring them to the tabernacle for the festivals. He was like a collector of communities to bring these people, but he led by example. That's what Yuval talks about. We can lead by example and collect communities of people for self efficacy in service of a greater goal. And it's a great business by the way and amazing business. And I just want to say is, I'm not talking about impact investing. My view is very clearly that good values and aligned businesses with the right intentionality of empowering people and helping them do better, create better, more profitable businesses. And that is a virtuous cycle that's here. Yeah.
Luke Roush: And I would actually say that 100% of what you're doing is impact investing. This is not as the world would describe it, you know what I mean? I think there's actually we've talked about this a lot internally, that all investing is impact investing. The question is sort of what impact do you want to have? And the reality of what you're doing is actually having a phenomenal impact, far more impact than what the world has probably described as like impact investing in the last decade. So I love it.
Henry Kaestner: On a personal note, I think back to the movie Chariots of Fire. So I think we're roughly about same age. I'd say you're likely to have watched the movie Chariots of Fire, have you?
Michael Eisenberg: I have. I remember it well.
Henry Kaestner: Good. So in the movie, the main character is being challenged by his sister as to whether he should go into an a missions field in China or not. And he responds back that God made him fast and when he runs, he feels God's pleasure as you work, as you invest, tell us about the times when you feel God's pleasure.
Michael Eisenberg: I have a confession to make. I have a difficult time personally both answering that question and feeling it, because it feels almost presumptuous for me to think that I would know exactly where God would find pleasure with me. We try to do the right thing and hope that God takes a favorable view of it. But I struggle with that, you know, in kind of having knowledge that I will tell you that when I grew up there, a verse in Deuteronomy which says one shouldn't say that the strength and might of my hand or arm brought me this greatness. And when I was a kid, there was a very self-effacing view of this, which is promulgated by the great Jewish scholar [...] who lived in Spain, where he says that one should never say that I succeeded or I was successful, or it's because of me that I succeeded. On the other hand, he had a student who lived a little bit after name, Rabbi Nissim of Girona, [...] lived in Barcelona and Rabbi Nissim lived, I don't know what was 50 kilometers north in Girona says, no, [...] misunderstands the verse. And really what it means is we're all given God given talents or genetics as the case may be. And we have talents like the runner in Chariots of Fire, the main character. And you have those. And you should say that I've taken my talents and maximized them with the right intentionality for the right service and the right aspiration. And so I relate more to that one, that interpretation of Rabbi Nissim, where you're given some talent, you got to work really, really, really hard and with the right intentions to do this in the service of the right goal. And I hope and pray that it finds pleasure in in God's eyes. But I have a hard time knowing and feeling it. Maybe it's a personality hangup around that or maybe it's, you know, kind of the teachings I had from my own rabbis and my parents and my grandparents over the time I have emotional story. If I can't happen today, can I can I do that for a second?
Henry Kaestner: Please, please.
Michael Eisenberg: So I spent the morning at the Israeli president's residence this morning in a ceremony with my 98 years old grandmother and my 98 years old grandmother. My grandfather of blessed memory were friendly with the president of Israel, Haim and Aurel Herzog. They were friendly before they were president. And my grandmother, who's 98, you've had a relationship with President Herzog's mother and my grandparents were over at the president's residence and sometime in the late eighties, and they saw their the booklets for grace after meals, the biblical blessing we all need to make after we eat a meal had been like collected from like weddings and bar mitzvahs, and there wasn't something kind of regal for the Israeli president. And my grandfather and grandmother said, we need to make a president's booklet for grace after meals that is respectful and respectable in the president's residence. And they did that. And I was honored 33 years ago to speak at the president's residence about this. And at the time, we talked about the importance of the blessings that we all have and in giving thanks and how it should be beautiful and an inspiration. But today, the son of that original President Herzog is now the president of Israel. President Isaac Herzog is today's president. And my 98 years old grandmother presented him with a unique booklet in his honor, ever the president's residence of Grace After Meals. And so it is now two generations. But my same grandmother with this thing and in this story deep, I was there. We were all emotional. Today, the president teared up and his wife was crying and say, My job is to cry here. And my grandmother, thank God, has hundreds of descendants. And in my view, this is like a critical piece, which is everyone talked about today that in the blessings and the grace after meals, we're thankful for all the things we have in the land and our business and our success, etc. And it helps remind us that it's not about us. And that's a generational teaching that I've learned from my parents and grandparents and I think is super important.
Luke Roush: That's great word. That's a great word. One of the things that we always finish our podcast with is just a question on what is God teaching you recently? So I'd love to stay consistent with that and and just hear from you on that Michael.
Michael Eisenberg: Yeah, the thing I'm thinking about a lot is inflation and you say, God teaching me about inflation, the answer is yes. I want to make an observation. Inflation hurts poor people and we turned on government spigots to print money and cause inflation. I want to explain what I think is the scriptural and economic misstep here. And we did this because we had to keep unemployment low. And so we picked up a point of employment, right? Maybe a point and a half. But what we did in return was impoverish more 33% of the wage labor population. And I think this comes from a radical misinterpretation of what our job is. And I think when we look at as people of faith what our job is, we need to look more broadly at humanity than the near term. We need to look more broadly at the effect of things we do then the near term and the Bible is the work of thousands of years that is still relevant today and that gives us a longer term perspective. Then let's call the next Fed press conference and the next unemployment print, and we've lost that long term ism. And I think as people of faith and people of optimism about the future, which comes hand in hand with faith, by the way, we must help others get a longer term view and an understanding of the real impact of their actions on these people. And it's a large population and unfortunately, large numbers are statistics, small numbers or like individual. And what we got to see all the human beings in this and all these people who are working, but their money is not worth as much. And that's something that's kind of keeping me awake at night. And I think, you know, the Bible. Which talks about empowering other people, whether it's through the commandment of living in a corner of your field, open for other people to collect. That's not just charity. That's empowering them to earn a decent living. They got to come work. They got to come harvest.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah.
Michael Eisenberg: And if we have an expectation that people will work and harvest and earn a decent living, we don't hand them out money and we don't kind of lower the pain for the short term. We actually increase the challenge, but forced the mutuality and mutual responsibility over the long term. And so that's what I'm thinking about a lot recently.
Luke Roush: That's a good word and it's a good word. It's a timely word and another construct of reaping what we sow we're going to reap what we have sown over the last two or three years. I'm grateful for your insights, Michael. Extraordinary. Huge blessing to me just being able to visit with you today and excited for our listeners here.
Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Thank you for being generous with your time as you get ready to go out and spend time with those Stanford MBAs, I just give you a quick blessing for all of us and all of our listeners. Heavenly Father, I just asked if you would allow us to get out there and to do the work you'd have us do that would be guided by your word and by your spirit that we'd feel your pleasure as we go about these things. And we'd see how this work matters for you, as you have instructed us, encouraged us, admonished us, and instructed us in your word since the beginning of time. And that did this book is alive and 4000 years ago. These lessons apply to the way we live and act and worship and we pray for all these things in Jesus's name. Michael, thank you for being with us. Awesome. Great gift.
Michael Eisenberg: Thank you for having me. This was amazing. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.