TRANSCRIPT
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The Rabbi Daniel Lapin Podcast
Episode: Why There Are More Utopians Than Entrepreneurs
Date: 10/20/24 Length: 35:16
Daniel Lapin 0:00
Greetings Happy Warriors, and thank you for listening to the Rabbi Daniel Lapin show and for being a part of the show. Thank you for promoting the show, and thank you for subscribing. And if that's something you haven't yet done, go ahead and take care of that right away. Subscribe, and we'll both be happy now. What is more, I have to tell you that there's a terrific sale. You know how happy I am with the resources that we've prepared. You know what I think about Scrolling through Scripture program? I mean, honestly, if you have any interest whatsoever in really getting a grasp of what the Bible actually is. If you want a glimpse into the grandeur of a book that has shaped civilization, then it's worthwhile taking a look at our online course called Scrolling through Scripture. Now, Scrolling through Scripture 1 only takes you through the first 34 chapter, 34 verses of Genesis. Unit Two goes a little bit further into the next chapter, but that's what you need. Ruth, our Scrolling through Scripture program on the Book of Ruth stand alone, really important to understand what happens to societies when the barriers get pulled down by people who are eager utopians. All of that in the book of Ruth, and also the Gathering Storm, which is a bit of an insight into how social values collapse as the socialism seeps into the culture and government becomes a driver of that kind of vision. So at any rate, over to the website RabbiDanielLapin.com and please takea look. Just go to the store and you will find a 20% reduction on Scrolling through Scripture. Unit One, Scrolling through Scripture. Unit Two, the Book of Ruth and The Gathering Storm. This is also really good, substantive relationship building stuff. And so whether is a case of a friend or a spouse or somebody that you might be considering making a spouse sit and listen together to something as substantive as this, and you will find it opening up conversations at a depth that you ordinarily don't experience, and that makes it either very clear to you that you need to go ahead and do what you're planning on doing, or alternatively, the reverse that you see, that in the context of substantive issues, you're not a good match.
Daniel Lapin 3:00
Okay, so I call today's podcast why there are more utopians than entrepreneurs. And what I mean by that is that there are all kinds of people in the United States of America. They are activists and community organizers and Democratic Party enthusiasts, and they're all utopians, and what utopians are busy trying to do is to pull down society. Everything has to be changed. We've got to destroy what is here and then rebuild it the right way. This has been the cry of revolutionaries for not centuries, but millennia. This is an old, old, old story, and as you know, my belief is that don't ever break down a fence till you at least know why they built it in the first place. And so when there are cultural fences about what should be acceptable public behavior and what shouldn't and so on, before you pull down fences, make sure you really understand why the fence was built in the first place. Now, children are particularly boys, but all children are naturally utopians. So, you know, a utopian, a person who just is going to who dreams of the future and the beginnings of new, exciting improvements. A utopian sees no restrictions, sees no value to tradition, sees little value to what is just eager to bring on this ideal world that he envisages and invariably nothing but pain and misery results for those who stand in his way. You know, I think of it this way. Utopian wants to try and fly by either banning gravity or ignoring it. An entrepreneur figures out how to overcome gravity with a dirigible balloon or an airplane or a rocket and actually gets there. And there are many, many, many more people who are utopians than there are entrepreneurs. And when I was a boy back in South Africa, 9 years old, 10 years old, 11 years old, I've got a fairly clear memory of that, because when I was 10, I was sent to school in London because my parents realized I was not, I was not growing and maturing at all. I wasbecoming a savage and and so I remember that period quite well before going to school, boarding school in London and afterwards. At any rate, I remember one occasion I was probably eight or nine, maybe I decided to dig a deep hole. The fact that I chose to do it on my front lawn got me into hot water and created a tense atmosphere between me and my parents for a good few weeks, I wanted to dig this very deep hole.
Daniel Lapin 6:33
You know, Johannesburg is essentially built on a gold reef, and that's why the gold mines spread out to the east and the west from Johannesburg. Johannesburg sort of in the middle of it, and there are gold mines right in Johannesburg. And then going either way along this reef, there are gold mines all the way I'm going. From memory, I didn't check the map, but as I recall, it may be about 60 miles long from one end to the other. In the middle of South Africa is Johannesburg. So I figured out, you know, if I dig a deep enough hole, I'll hit gold and that opened up all kinds of exciting possibilities to my eight or nine year I was probably eight when I did that. And, and so I started and and I was shocked at how incredibly hard the earth was, and I was able to to dig first, you know, about nine inches deep, less than a foot deep. And then a few days later, I went back to it, and continued digging a little bit further. And it was actually rather amazing that I actually got down to about four or five feet. So, you know, when I stood in this hole and was using the gardener's shovel and fork in order to soften the ground, you know, it probably sort of came up to my waist or my chest or something. It felt like quite an achievement. And I figured, okay, you know, I'm really well on the way. And at this point I was wondering if I was really going to be able to go deep enough. I guess somebody told me that the gold mines go down, you know, easily 1000 feet or more. In fact, most cases more than that. And so then I modified the goal, maybe, instead of finding gold, perhaps at least hit water, which in the incredibly dry area of Johannesburg, one of the few places in the world when, if you forage, where, if you fall into a river, all you have to do is climb out and dust the sand off your clothing. And so it was very unlikely that I was going to hit water, and I didn't. And eventually I lost interest, within about a week and and somewhere around about there was when my parents became aware how they didn't see it before I, you know, I get busy. They were busy people and and they weren't. They never, you know, they didn't take a walk. And it was a fairly large garden, so that, you know, they wouldn't, automatically, they'd have had to have walked in that direction to see it. Anyway, when they did, it was not good. And, you know, I was too young to to think about it or be bothered by the fact of how much time and energy I'd wasted, but I had, you know, hours and hours and hours just wasted.
Daniel Lapin 9:29
I could have read a book, and I would have been more useful. Of course. Another time I was probably a wee bit older, I decided I was going to start a zoo, because I figured it can't be that hard. You know, it's lots of wild animals in the area, not right in the city, but not far away. And so I think I would start a zoo and I would charge entrance, and that way I would solve my perennial shortage. Funds at the age of eight or nine, and so I figured the first thing to do is build a series of cages to put the animals in, and then I'll go and get the animal so I went ahead and started building cages. I dismantled a chicken coop we had at the time, we hadn't any chicken so the coop was still there. And I took a lot of the wire of the chickens coop and used it to start building, yes, a cage for some unnamed and unspecified animal. And again, a lot of energy went into it. And you know, had there been some smart, charismatic person to whom I might have listened, obviously, smarter than my parents, more charismatic than my parents, of course. But Had there been something like that, would have said, Look, Daniel, stop wasting your time. You're not going to build a zoo. You're not going to get animals. It isn't going to happen. You're going to put a lot of time and energy into it, and it's going to come to nothing, because you're eventually going to see that it can't be done again. I was, you know, I don't know. I think this one might have been 11. I decided I was going to build a boat, and I even knew what it was going to be like. Was going to be about an 18 foot sailing boat with a little cabin. It's ludicrous. It's ludicrous an 11 year old boy with with no instructor and no source of funding to to purchase the the lumber, and it's absolutely absurd. Now it so happens. In my mid 20s, I did, I actually built that boat and, and it was wonderful, and it was, it was a glorious experience, and, and the boat was wonderful. But when I was 11 years old, that wasn't going to happen. But don't think that I didn't waste money with getting drawings and and buying buying a little wood with my limited resources, it went absolutely nowhere. But I spent time and energy on it, and while I was doing these things, I would talk about nothing else. I must have come across to, particularly to adult friends of my parents who encountered me. Then I must have come across as as deficient in some important way. It was just so dumb. It was so crazy, really a hole deep enough to reach gold like, what sort of moron Are you? An eight year old moron is going to start a zoo, really at you know, nine years old, you're going to get wild animals. And it was preposterous, but there I was, day after day. I put time and energy into it. I obviously missed school quite often in order to work on these hugely valuable projects, and I was so into them. I was literally I would talk anyone's ear off, who would who would listen? And I would talk about the the finding gold, and about building a sailboat. And I really wanted to do these things. I was really into them. But it was all a big time waste. You know, I did, I did pull off a couple of things, and they were generally nothing like this. I'll give you an example. I was looking for a way of again. You know, trying to make a few dollars money is a wonderful motivator, and it's a good thing. And I've often had to counsel parents who are having trouble with a lackluster son and a son who wasn't launching a son who was showing very little to no ambition. I've often said, Look, you are facilitating this because you're preventing him from feeling any financial hunger. I remember how shocked It always made me feel when parents would talk to me about this and and I'd say, So, how did he get around? You know, if you did get a job interview for him, would he have any way of getting Oh, yeah, he has a car. Really? Who paid for the car or who's paying the car? Well, we are, of course, he needs transport. Who's paying gasoline? Well, we give him a gasoline credit card. Hello, you are eliminating completely the the role of hunger, pain and inconvenience in motivating somebody to do something. So I remember thinking to myself, you know, I really. And I don't remember if it was for the purpose of having enough money to build the boat or how connected these projects were, but I remember talking to a gardener a few doors away from where we live. He just loved his garden. He was a retired English guy and and he just loved his garden. And so I remember saying to so, you know, what's, what's, how do you do this? What makes it grow? We don't have a garden, it looks like he says, Well, you got to have manure to fertilize the ground. I said, What's manure? He said, Well, you know, it's cow dung. It's what cows make and and then that's what I need. And I said, Oh, would you like, Would you like to buy some? And he said, easily. Said, you have. And I said, No, not yet, but I'll get and and I went walking, looking for cows. And there was a small dairy farm still within, within the city. You know, the city had grown around it. The farmer hadn't sold. He'd like, I guess he liked what he was doing. And there was probably a herd of about 20 cows, maybe a few more, and and so I went and I looked in the field, the meadows where the cows hung out. And sure enough, I saw, you know, splats of cow dung all over the place. And so I was I went to the the farmer, and I was just about to open my mouth saying, Would you mind if I took some of the cow dung away? When all of a sudden, a flash of light hit me, and I didn't say that. I said to him, would you pay me to take away the cow dung? And he looks at me, and he said, How much, and I must have named a figure that seemed suitable to him, but which for me, was wonderful. And he engaged me right away. He said, Every wheelbarrow load, and he let me have a wheelbarrow of his. Every time you fill a wheelbarrow of it and take it away, I will give you and whatever the money was. So I took the first wheelbarrow of cow dung, and I took it over to the gardener. And he was delirious. He was so happy. He bought half the wheelbarrow right away. And then he said, Go next door, my house away. I don't recall. My friend is gardener there also. He'll, he'll buy the rest of your manure. And that happened, I thought to myself, this is this is great. I'm I'm serving people at both ends. I'm making money coming and going. I'm helping the farmer and I'm helping the gardener. And I was so entranced with this idea that by helping two people like this, I was getting more money that I was even planned on getting, still wasn't enough to build a boat, but there we are. There was, there was something I did and that worked well, but I wasn't, sort of, it was never a grandiose dream. It sort of, I saw an opportunity to do something, and I went ahead and did it, and I did something else as well. As a kid, I saw some of the my friends, particularly girls in my school.
Daniel Lapin 18:10
There was a craze. They were all walking around with little bunny rabbits, real ones, like little baby bunnies. And I thought, Oh, that's interesting. I should be able to do something like that. And I went and got myself a couple of rabbits again through a farmer friend and and then I started letting them breed, which they were agreeable enough to do right away. And, you know, off they went. And then I hit on another idea. I thought, okay, great, you know, because these baby rabbits were sort of pretty plain looking, gray rabbits. And so I got some food coloring from my mother's kitchen, and I dunked the rabbits into the food coloring and and for those of you gentle hearted listeners, let me assure you, no rabbits were harmed during the entrepreneurial activities I'm describing. And so then I would, I would have little green rabbits and little blue rabbits and little pink rabbits, and I've sold them. Handover, First all, the kids, not only the girls, kids in my school, bought them, but then I hit on another idea. And I thought, you know, this is, this is really interesting. And I said to all my customers who bought rabbits, that when they're no longer cute little bunny rabbits, but they're big, gray rabbits, you can bring them back to me and exchange them, and for free, I'll give you another bunny rabbit. And I did that because it dawned on me that the farmer who was raising rabbits was selling them. And again, here I don't mean to upset any of you gentle hearted listeners, but yes, he was selling the rabbits to the butcher, that's correct. And I realized. That in a way, I was letting other people pay me for the privilege of raising my rabbit till they were big enough to go off to the butcher. And so that, you know, again, it was not something I went out and you I never spoke about these things, like when I spoke about digging my gold mine, boy, you couldn't shut me up. And when I was speaking about building the boat, starting the other zoo, you could not shut me up. I spoke so much about the zoo and then the the but the the dung business, the manure business, never occurred to me to tell anybody. Never occurred to me anyone would have any interest. I wasn't even excited about it. I did it because it made sense and and, you know, I like getting paid, so I did it the rabbits again. There was some of the parents of my customers, spoke to my parents, and at one point my parents asked me what exactly I'm doing.
Daniel Lapin 20:59
But as I said, My childhood was very much a free range childhood. I was pretty much left to be able to do which I which I'm grateful for. It was certainly more useful to me than actually going to school. And so there it is. So in hindsight now I see that there were two different sets of activities. I had one utopian set of activities that was never going to come to pass. It was complete and utter craziness, digging a gold mine or starting a zoo. That's right, yeah, 10 year old in Johannesburg, yep, gonna start a zoo in his front lawn. And it wasn't as if I was gonna display some pets, you know, little cats and dogs, a beetle or two, maybe a chicken. No, you know, I wanted to. I was gonna show a rhinoceros and a hippo. You're all the animals I liked. Yeah, it was ludicrous. A complete not a waste of time. And obviously they didn't happen, and I just wasted a lot of time. That's all that happened. I started an insurance company in in my school, again, that's a grandiose term for what was simply and I'm sure there's a better word for it than insurance company. But in my school, boys used to get corporal punishment, and it was, was quite common. I guess maybe I hung out with a naughty group of boys, but you would get caned with a rhinoceros hide thing called a shambok, which is a uniquely South African sort of I wouldn't call it a weapon, really, but a bit of whip, yeah, so and so. What I realized I learned a little bit of actuarial mathematics. I mean, not really just simple arithmetic, but I realized that I could get guys in my school to pay me a certain amount every week of their allowance. And if they should get corporal punishment, then I would pay them out, depending on how many they got in. And I used to very often have to inspect their bottoms to make sure that that they telling the truth, because it would leave a wheel on on your bottom when used to get these. And I'm sure it stopped. They don't do it anymore. And it did us. Really did us no harm at all. And I actually profited from it. Because, you know, guys who got, was called the cuts. That was the term for it. And I'd pay out a certain amount, for one, for two, for three, occasionally, occasionally, somebody would get four or five or six. Was like the maximum. That was the ultimate. That was very, very, I can't imagine what you had to do to get six. Actually, I can now that I remember. But all that was, again, just, you know, I collected the premiums from people during the week, and then whenever they would get punished, they'd come back from the principal's office touching their rear ends, and I knew I'd have to pay out. And then either we'd asked to be excused, we have to go to the bathroom, whatever it was, we go there, he'd drop troves, and I'd be able to check to see that there really were two wheels. He had a claim in for two cuts, and he gets paid out for two cuts. Occasionally, people try to argue that there was really another one, but it lands on exactly the same spot as the first one, and that's why you can't see it. But they're really I soon got wise to that. Put a stop to it. But so yeah, my cow manure business, my rabbit business, my insurance business, never, never was excited about them, never told anybody about them. I just did them, and they were within my ability to do but building an 18 foot boat with a cabin. Building a zoo, digging a gold mine. You know, how dumb was I as a preteen? Really terrible.
Daniel Lapin 25:09
So, and I mentioned this just because it's such a good example, or such a good way of realizing that all of us can fall into this trap of utopianism, and it uses up not only time but psychic energy. In other words, a lot of our creative juices and the excitement at doing something gets dissipated on things that can't actually ever happen or ever work, and they won't, and then it leaves us with a lot less available for the for the really good things that that we really could do and we really could accomplish. And a person applied to become a coaching client of mine, right? I do 5f coaching clients, where we're looking at making sure that people's families and finances and their physical fitness and their social life, their friendships and their faith were in balance, and that things are moving the way they should do so. So this gentleman applied to become a client. By the way, I only accept male clients for find their coaching, not women, for some obvious reasons, and he wanted my guidance in his financial goal, which was he wanted to build an investment managing company that only invest in, quote, ethical companies. And, okay, what, you know, what? What exactly is this?
Daniel Lapin 26:55
Well, mainly, it's that he thinks that gun ownership is such a bad idea. How he came to me was, in itself, an interesting question, but, but he did, and he he realizes that he's got a way to stop the curse of gun ownership in the United States of America. And he laid out all his material even remember, he showed me a chart the five biggest, the five biggest gun manufacturers in the United States of America were block and Springfield, and then Sig Sauer was the third, and then or the fourth. And then the fourth was route, the first, second was Ruger, and the biggest gun manufacturing company was Smith and Wesson, and he had it all worked out that he was going to direct a large amount of investment money into other things, and little by little, it encouraged anyways. Look, it didn't take long for me to see that this guy was the equivalent of me digging a gold mine. This was complete nonsense, and he didn't have the resources, he didn't have the ability. It was all complete nonsense. And I just just as complementary. I just told him that the if we were to ever work together, which we not, one of the first things I would tell him, is to separate the goals there, if you are interested in making money, or you interested in social change? And then decide which one you want to do, but don't try and do them both through the same mechanism. Some other guy wanted to start a factory. To a young fellow his early 20s, wanted to start a factory to make rustic wooden furniture as a kind that is found in Massachusetts and Maine, and he wanted to do that in one of the western states. It was Oregon, as it happened anyways. And again, you know, he had very few he didn't have a big Rolodex, few friends. Had very little in the way of Family Resources. He'd had very little business experience and I said, No, don't do it. You know, it's the equivalent. I even told in the story of my gold mine, it's the equivalent, you know, you're going to put in a lot of time. You're going to put in money you don't have and you don't have the wherewithal, you don't have the basics yet to make this all happen. So, you know, so just don't do it at all and, that's really what it is that I want to do share with you today.
Daniel Lapin 29:36
I said, you know, there are many more utopians than there are entrepreneurs, and the reason is because being a utopian is easy, right? It wasn't hard for eight year old me to decide to dig a gold mine. It wasn't hard. I didn't possess the maturity. I didn't possess the the information, the data, the knowledge, the wisdom. I didn't possess anything they would have said to me, it. Yes, you're not going to do it, not going to happen. It cannot happen. Won't happen. So don't do it. Don't try a utopian all it does is daydream and imagine around the unreal, right? We're going to train people to see sex as a as a continuum, right that there's lots of different genders, there's men, there's women, this is 10 different genders. That's where we're going to get people to see that. We're going to we're going to attack them for speaking differently or thinking that, okay, this is pure utopian, pure utopianism, and in many ways far more dangerous than my utopianism of starting a zoo because I basically wasn't really going to do a lot of damage. But I never got utopian. I never got wildly imaginative. I never had fantasies about the insurance company in school or the the rabbits business or the manure business. I just did those. But I wasted so much mental and emotional energy on on these projects. Oh, in a build a boat, I dreamed day and night of what their boat would look like and what I would do with it never happened. And so what we got to get is that the the entrepreneur person's entrepreneur, he becomes good at imagining the hidden potential of the real. You know this is somebody who who looks at a product and and realizes that with a slight or maybe not slight, a change, or could do different tasks, could do something else, or he sees a task or a problem that needs solving. And all of this is real. It's practical. It can happen. It's focused on reality, but the utopian is busy imagining the unreal. And so in everything that we all do, and I'm speaking about with you, whether it's family or whether it's in your financial area, it's really worthwhile to spend a little while making sure that your fail safe utopian detector is functioning and is in good shape And it's turned on, because while you're not going to do anything as dumb as I used to do, we will. We will have things that we can sort of get carried away on. And the reality is we're not going to have any effect at all. It's not going to come about. It can't be done. And yet we will waste time and energy and sometimes credibility too. Because if you go along and talk to somebody who is bigger than you, somebody who has resources, who could if he wanted to invest in a worthwhile concept, if you waste that that relationship by talking his ear off about some nonsensical utopian scheme, you've wasted that resource. You can't go back to him now, no matter how substantive and good your idea is, he's going to be almost impossibly prejudiced against it, hell, in a totally reasonable way, because he's just going to assume that it's as dumb as the first idea you told him about. So a lot of harm comes from falling in love with your own ideas that are utopian and just aren't gonna get anywhere at all. And and so I I tell you, whether it's in building your family, you know, you I don't know what it is you that you decide you got three sons, and you decide you want them all to become world National World table tennis champions, or real tennis champions. You know, just weigh this up carefully. Is this really the way to spend your life? Is this, is this really going to happen? Is it feasible, or is it an impossible dream, thinking of Don Quixote, is it an impossible dream? Right? Yeah, it's really worthwhile spending a little while and and I hope that this little discussion helps you perhaps spot one or two maybe incipient utopian schemes in your mind that you might be on the verge of wasting a lot of time and energy and other resources on, and if so, I will have done you a service, and I will be very happy indeed. And so till next week, your rabbi, that's me, Rabbi, Daniel Lapin, onwards and upwards with your family and your finances, your friendships, your fitness and your faith. God bless you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
