The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 37 – Charles Mizrahi

Episode 37: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews Charles Mizrahi, a Wall Street investor and observant Jew, about the principles of capitalism and how they are rooted in the Torah. Mizrahi shares stories from his childhood, detailing his early entrepreneurial ventures in selling greeting cards, stickers, and seeds, which taught him fundamental business concepts. He argues that starting a business is the best way to learn about capitalism and that these principles are accessible to everyone.

The conversation contrasts this entrepreneurial, service-oriented mindset with socialism, which Mizrahi criticizes. He explains how biblical laws provided a framework for a just economy and a social welfare system, emphasizing that generosity is a matter of justice. Mizrahi concludes with an optimistic view of America’s future, attributing its success to its Judeo-Christian values.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, and wherever you get your podcasts. This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how worldview changes everything.

My guest today is a well-known Wall Street investor and observant Jew who shows us how the principles of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible lead to a just economy that respects everyone in our society. You’re going to love the stories he tells about his own life experiences, being born into a middle-class family and now as a successful investor. These principles that he’s sharing with us today are ones that everyday people can use to be blessings to everybody around us. Please welcome Charles Mizrahi to the show. Charles Mizrahi, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Charles Mizrahi (00:56):
Thank you, Jeff. It’s really a pleasure. I’m excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:01):
This is going to be a fascinating conversation because not only are you interested in how the biblical understanding reflected in the first five books of the Bible gives us the basis for capitalism and arguments against the socialist mindset that is common today. But you are also a proven investor. You’ve been the number one performing market timing investor. You’ve been the number one performing commodities investor. So we have a lot to learn about capitalism from you. I can’t wait to dig into our conversation.

Charles Mizrahi (01:35):
Okay. Same here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:37):
Listen, I’d love for people to get to know you just a little bit. How did you get into investing as a career?

Charles Mizrahi (01:46):
Well, it really started when I was a kid. I grew up in a middle class family. My father was a warehouse worker. And when I was about six or seven, I think it was six years old, 1969, he and my mom bought a house. They lived in an apartment prior, and it was just me and my brother and my mother was pregnant with what eventually was our third brother.

And when they bought the house, a big thing in New York is, especially in Brooklyn, is going to summer camp. That’s what all kids do. No one hangs out and does anything. A lot of people go to summer camp. And that year we couldn’t go to summer camp. My parents didn’t have enough money. They just bought the house and it was a really big deal and we were all excited and all. So what I did was, since I was young, really young, I always, not enjoyed. I can’t say enjoyed.

(02:34):
I just loved reading. I felt it was such a phenomenal way to learn. And I used to go to the library. I’ll talk about that later, but I used to read anything and everything. So in the back of a comic book, comic books back in the day, there used to be ads where you can get all sorts of prizes or money if you sell greeting cards. And also, do you remember that or not?

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:00):
I sold seeds one summer in my little red wagon going through the neighborhood.

Charles Mizrahi (03:04):
All right. I’ll tell you about that in a moment, how I got into that. So I was six years old. I was a big kid. In fact, I was always big. And I filled out the form. It was nothing. It was not a form. It was the bottom of the comic book page, name, address, and then you’d have to send any money. And I mailed it away. And that was it.

Two, three weeks later, the post office comes and they used to do a big thing in the those days, getting a delivery, not like today. And there’s a big box. And it was addressed to me. And my mom’s freaking out. She goes, “What is this?” I go, “Oh, the greeting cards.” She goes, “What?” I was six years old. And I told them, “Ma, if you sell these, you get prizes. I’m going to take prizes and I’m really excited about it.”

(03:50):
“Can I go?” I ordered them already. It’s 12 boxes. Each box had about, I think it was 10 or 15 greeting cards in them, and each box sold for a dollar. So she goes, “You can do it, but just stay on the block, stay on our block. And you have to take your little brother with you,” who was five, much smaller.

I said, “What should I say?” She goes, “Just go to the door, ring the bell and say, ‘Good morning. Would you like to buy my greeting cards?’” And that’s it. And just give it to them and let them look at it and do not go in anyone’s house. Just stand by the porch, stay outside. And that was it. So I carried three or four of them, boxes. My brother carried one or two, went to the first day, rang the bells.

(04:29):
“Would you like to buy my greeting cards?” The lady took them. She read through, I think, every one and gave me a dollar. And about an hour and a half or so, we went back to the house a couple of times to pick up more. We sold all 12. All 12 boxes. And I opted to get a microscope. It was, if you sell 12 boxes, you get a microscope. And that was my taste of capitalism.

I loved it, enjoyed it. I loved meeting people. I love ringing the doorbell, speaking to people and taking a box and turning it into a microscope. So I saw the way that all developed. And from then on, I always had a desire, a love of commerce, of business, of doing business, tape, making things, selling things, putting buyer and seller together. And that was a start.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:16):
That is a great story. So from there, you went on to? Give us the path from there to actually becoming an investor in the capital markets.

Charles Mizrahi (05:26):
Yeah. By the way, I just want to say right off the top, and it sounds like a shameless self-promotion, which it is. This is my book. Okay?

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:37):
Okay. So we’re going to be talking more about this book, Wall Street Profits for Main Street Investors.

Charles Mizrahi (05:40):
I have every one of these stories and every story has a point. And I wrote this book simply because so many people ask me, especially young people about socialism. I said, “Stop this. You can make money doing this and help society and it all works out.” So I wrote this book that, really, could read in one sitting.

(05:58):
And walk away with more knowledge. You have 40 years of my knowledge in there. So it’s a pretty good deal for 10 bucks. So as time went on, I was in second grade and I saw someone in my class who went to the Met Game, New York Mets the night before, and he got a sticker. It was a New York Mets logo, a sticker and he put it on his notebook.

And I said, “Holy cow.” Everyone was walking around. I remember looking around. And it’s unfortunate. Many of your viewers, because I know my kids, when I talk about these things, they have no idea what, you didn’t find it on the internet. I said, no, these were big deals. You could only get things if you went to a place and bought them. Mailing away things were four to six weeks minimum.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:42):
That’s right.

Charles Mizrahi (06:43):
So we all were standing around looking and I was in second grade and he says, “Yeah, went to the Met Game.” And we couldn’t afford going to the Met game.That was an impossibility. So he also had a yearbook and in the back of the yearbook were all the Major League Baseball teams and their addresses. So I got the idea of writing to these teams and basically saying, “Hi, my name is Charles Mizrahi. I’m your biggest fan. I really love the Cincinnati Reds. Could you please send me some stickers?” That was it.

And I sat down and I wrote these on a Sunday. I wrote them to all the baseball teams. I think it was 24 at the time. My only investment was a nickel. That’s how much a stamp was. My mother and father supplied the paper and the envelope and they gave me dollars worth of stamps, put the stamps on, went to the mailbox, mailed them all away, and I waited.

(07:44):
And then a couple of weeks later, I got one in the mail and I think it was the Seattle Pilots. I think they were the first. And it was, I think, one or two stickers. I was amazed. And then I started getting more and more. And some teams didn’t send you anything. Some teams just sent you schedules. Other teams sent you pens and letterheads and bobbleheads. It was really fascinating.

And many times I sold stickers. Now I took the stickers and I went to school and everyone was freaking out. “Wow, would you get them?” So I said, “I’ll sell them to you.” Remember, my cost was a nickel, and if I got two stickers, I could sell them for a dime each and I would make 20 cents minus my nickel. I made a 15 cent profit, which was pretty big. And I usually kept one for myself and I sold one.

(08:35):
And then I started to discover, and this really builds up on how I learned about investing, is that certain teams like the home teams, the New York Mets and New York Yankees went for more money, even though they went out harder to get than let’s say they used to Astros, because everybody wanted New York Mets or New York Yankees. So I said, “Let me try raising the price.” So I sold the Mets stickers for a quarter and I got it. And the Houston Astros, many people didn’t even know where Houston was. I sold them for a nickel.

And I kept learning that certain teams and teams that had more colorful logos, people thought they were worth more. I used to sell them for 50 cents or what have you. And I said, “Okay, why stop here?” So I got a football yearbook. And by the way, folks, for those listening in who don’t have any gray hair or still have all your hair, the thing was back in the day, you had to go to a library to find this information.

(09:30):
You didn’t search on the internet for an address and it was a lot of work. So a friend, I think it was a friend of mine, I don’t recall exactly. I wrote in the book, I think. Someone had a New York Jets yearbook. So once again, they had all the teams. And I did the same thing with the NFL. Then I copied and did the same thing with the NBA and I did with the NHL.

And I had a big inventory of 50 to 100 stickers and I was selling them, trading them and making money. And that was my second venture. So I had two big business ventures before I think I was 10. Now my third one, which I think you’re going to thoroughly enjoy, was seeds. Now you remember. Where’d you grow up, Jeff?

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:12):
Detroit, Michigan.

Charles Mizrahi (10:13):
All right. So yeah, there’s a lot of green there. So we had no green in New York. So seeds were pretty early. So one of our teachers was in fifth grade. I don’t know how old you are in fifth grade. Maybe 11 or so.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:25):
9 or 10?

Charles Mizrahi (10:27):
Somewhere about there. I don’t remember.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:28):
Yeah.

Charles Mizrahi (10:28):
And her name was Mrs. Koplinski. A really pretty, young teacher, just got married. She was really one of these new modern teachers. And in science, we didn’t have departmental then. So a teacher taught you half the day and I went to a Jewish day school. So first half of the day was Hebrew studies, second half of the day was secular studies.

So Mrs. Koplinski was my homeroom teacher, and she wanted to teach the class about botany and how seeds grow. And she had this whole great thing of, I want everyone to buy seeds and soil and plants. We’re going to plant and chart them and this and that. Mrs. Koplinski didn’t think this out. It was the middle of February. It was winter. Where the hell could you buy seeds in Brooklyn, New York during the winter? So a lot of parents, she sent home a note, please bring for Charles or whoever, seeds tomorrow, we’re going to learn about plants and stuff.

(11:23):
Teachers, the parents wrote back angry notes. Where the heck do you expect me to get them? It’s snowing. We only had landscape stores. There was no Home Depot, folks. There was nothing. We went to a landscape storage. And when I told my kids this, they thought I was from a different planet. So you couldn’t get any of this stuff.

And I remembered, because I read comic books and you know too, not only greeting cards, they also had seeds and you could check off vegetable or flour. So I told Mrs. Koplinski, I said,” Mrs. Koplinski, I could solve your problem. I can get all the seeds, but if I do go and get all the seeds, you have to tell the class they have to buy them from me.” She said, “You’re doing me a favor.” So I mailed away and I checked off flowers and seeds.

(12:10):
That was a double order. So it was 40 and 40. It was 80 packets. Each packet was a quarter. I think they let you keep 10 cents. So I mailed away and every day she would ask, did they come yet? Did they come yet? And I remember, I just popped into my head now. I remember she even let me go to the principal’s office to call the company to see when they’re going to be delivered. What do I know?

So lo and behold, they came. And Mrs. Koplinski made an announcement. She had 80 kids. It was homeroom was half and half, 40 in one section, 40, another section. She goes, “Okay, we’re doing this thing. Everyone is going to have to buy their seeds from Charles. He’s doing us a favor and he bought them all.” So I started to notice the girls, they went for the flowers.

(12:59):
The boys went for the vegetables because it seemed too prissy for boys to get flowers. So I upped the price on the flowers to 30 cents and the boys, I kept it at 25. And I learned about a monopoly because I was the only game in town and she forced everyone to buy them from me.

So every kid, I walked out that day, I think I walked out with 12 or 13 dollars in nickels and dimes. I remember I had a bag of coins and I mean a little way, my mother wrote a check, my other way to company. And I think I took money at that time. I didn’t take the gift. And I don’t know how much 10 or 15 dollars was worth back then today, but it was a considerable amount of money. It was a lot of money because my grandfather used to slip us a quarter every time we used to come over.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:42):
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the greeting of getting a birthday card with a dime or maybe two dimes or a dime in a quarter.

Charles Mizrahi (13:48):
Yeah. I had rich relatives. They used to send me a dollar, a crisp dollar. But yeah, so $15 was a lot of money. And I learned so much about that. I learned, looking back now, but even I remember then, I learned about supply and demand. I learned about monopolies, of being the only game in town. I learned, also, about how when people need to buy a product, a price is irrelevant. And everyone needed the product. There was no choice. You needed to buy the seeds. There were no seeds available. I had the seeds.

(14:22):
So by the time I was finished with eighth grade, and then I started trading baseball cards and then I started, tell you other things, I started taking bets and I ran a little pool to bet on horses. But the whole thing is that I was always interested in taking a dollar and turning it to $10. And I didn’t know this till many years later when I read about Warren Buffet and about other great investors.

It’s not so much how much knowledge you have, it’s when you start investing. And they showed that for entrepreneurs and great investors, it’s not how much knowledge they had, it’s when they all started. And many of them, like Mark Cuban, for example, you start when you were a kid. It’s not something you wake up one morning and say, “I’m going to do.” It’s like you have a natural, a kind of pull towards it.

(15:07):
And the earlier you start, and I can speak to your whole audience now, whatever you do, start a business. You learn more about starting your own business in one month, then four years of college and getting a master’s, that’s for sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:23):
You have hit on something that we’ve talked about all summer long at our Summit Ministries programs. Whatever you’re doing, start a business. You have something that you can do. You have something that you can help people with. There are needs that you can meet. And it’s been really surprising how many students have actually done that and actually done really well at a young age, because they’re thinking outside the box of, “Oh, I need to get a job.”

Charles, I was visiting yesterday with a young man. He believed that college is your only route. You have to go to college, you have to get a degree in something. And he said, “Now here I am. I have got a film degree. I have never worked in the film business. I have $120,000 in debt. What am I supposed to do?” And I thought, I can see why. When somebody like Bernie Sanders says, “We’ll pay all of your debt, college will be free,” all of that.

(16:22):
That’s what socialism is all about. I could see why it would be attractive to him. Now, he’s a hard worker and he’s found ways to develop a business where he’s doing pretty well for somebody his age. But talk to that for a minute because this is a big deal. I mean, 70% of millennials said they would vote for a socialist for presidents. Somehow they’re completely missing out on the joy and the challenge of what you’ve been talking about that you can actually find ways to serve people and make money.

Charles Mizrahi (16:52):
Yeah, great point. I want to address that in twofold. First, there is no better way, no better way to learn about capitalism, to learn about markets, to learn about business than actually starting a business. Today, it is so simple, so simple. I’d recommend, to my nieces and nephews and my kids, go on GoDaddy, buy a domain, couple dollars. They have a service where you could create your own website. They have a payment service, Stripe, I think, or Square. I’m not sure. You could connect emails for 2 or $300, you have an e-commerce site, all set up with everything.

Figure out what you’re going to sell. Who cares? Make believe you buy, don’t make believe. Try not to make money. It doesn’t matter. Go buy widgets and sell them. You learn about SEO, you learn about Google Ads. All of these things are extremely, extremely important because number one, it’s a sense of confidence. Nothing breeds success like success.

(18:01):
Later on, when I was my own money management firm and I went out selling and trying to raise money, having people say no to me, I never took these objections to heart. It never made me wilt. I was selling greeting cards at six years old, door to door. Someone said no. I looked and I said, “The next person might say yes.”

So it was all an attitude. It was all something that you could only learn by taking something from nothing and turning it into money and also filling a need. So that’s my first piece of advice. Bernie Sanders never started a business. He’s a professional zero politician. I think he was thrown off, I think Ben Shapiro said he was thrown off the community he was in. The guy was lazy. He never did anything. He’s been living off the government paycheck for the past 40, 50 years.

(18:50):
So of course, they don’t know. And number two, number two, Warren Buffet started investing in stocks at 11. So he basically said I started out a little too late. I wish I started earlier. Now, I spoke years ago to his biographer, who was Alice Schroeder. She wrote the book called The Snowball about Buffett’s Life. And, really excellent book, really excellent book about how this guy started with virtually nothing and built up to a hundred billion dollars.

Forget about the jobs and everything, but just made enormous amounts of wealth and made society a whole lot better. He’s now giving all that money back to society, which is staggering. And she said when she spoke with Buffett, what she learned was not that he was getting a better investment or anything, but the point was when he was 19 or 20, he was doing this, investing for half his life already.

(19:42):
So when he came to the game to make an investment and someone who just graduated college came, that guy was doing it for the first time. Buffalo was doing it for the zillionth ninth time. So it’s important to start young. It is extremely important to start young because when you do, you learn something you can never learn in books, you can never learn by watching someone else. You actually absorb, you are invested in it, you think about it, you see your focus.

And the last thing I just want to add to that is a few weeks ago on my podcast, I had Dave Cody. Dave Cody was the former chairman, CEO of Honeywell. He took Honeywell from a $20 billion company to $120 billion. This guy was living in New Hampshire in a small apartment that had drafts. Now he’s going to feed his family, his wife, and his baby.

(20:38):
And this guy eventually rose to become CEO. And he was on the show. We were talking and he was talking about Wall Street analysts asking all kinds of questions. And I said, stupid questions. And I said, Dave, you know my theory about that? These guys never had a business, so they have no idea what they’re talking about. They just learned about business in school. When you run a business, you understand and learn pretty quickly the importance of free cash flow. You understand what it is to make payroll and need money to make payroll. You understand the importance of good credit when you go borrow money.

So it’s all of these lessons, all of these lessons. When you learn about that, you become a much better investor. And as Buffett said, I’m a good businessman because I was an investor and I’m a great investor because I was a businessman. So to take all that, you put that all together, it is simple, cheap, and easy for anybody to do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:34):
Yeah. We’ve got to encourage a generation to be entrepreneurial. There are so many thoughts running through my mind. One is just how the idea of starting a business could be the solution in all of the issues of racial unity that we’re seeing. I understand that African Americans who’ve started businesses have 12 times the wealth of their neighbors and that half of the small businesses that have been started in the last few years in the United States were started by minorities.

Charles Mizrahi (22:04):
Oh, I’m going to throw a statistic at you, Jeff, that’ll freak you out that I saw the other day. I forgot exactly where I saw it, but it was valid. It was in Fortune Magazine, Forge Magazine. 50% of the Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or children of immigrants. Yeah. 50%. So you’re talking about the largest companies in the world started by people who are not born here or with the children of people who are not born here.

Now think about that and think about someone who has all the advantages in life. They came on the Mayflower, but it doesn’t matter. Money doesn’t care. Money doesn’t, racism, I think there is one color that everyone looks at and that’s green. I couldn’t care less and I don’t think any businessman really cares less the color of one’s skin or their ethnicity or their religion.

(22:58):
A customer is a customer is a customer. And you treat that customer with special kid gloves because they’re bringing you money. So you don’t have time. You can’t be stupid enough to discriminate. In business, you want everyone to be happy because they’ll tell other people. So I think you’re spot on. I think that if people just started businesses, whatever it might be, I don’t care, just go mow your neighbor’s lawn. If you’re at an African American’s house, do you think you care if his lawn, he’s going to pay you 20 bucks or someone else is going to pay you $22? What’s the difference? You start to see people a lot differently.

Dr. Jeff Myers (23:37):
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the heart behind that in the scriptures, God talks about loving your neighbor. Jesus talks a lot about serving. When you start a business, you learn that you serve differently when you have to serve in order to survive. You have a very different approach to loving your neighbor.

Charles Mizrahi (23:59):
Well, he’s not your neighbor anymore, right? He’s someone that you’re in a partnership with because in any type of business relationship, the most important person there is the consumer. They put you in business and put you out of business. And today especially, today especially, if you do a good turn, a business does a good turn, you’ll get good ratings, good reviews, Yelp ratings, and that’ll drive you. If you do something bad or try to chisel or cheat or do something like that, your reputation will precede you.

Back in the day, as you know before the internet and stuff, it was word of mouth. All right. If you screwed someone here, they won’t find out for months. But the world became a lot smaller. And when you, and look, Jeff Bezos is a perfect example of that. His company is basically founded on one thing, how best to serve the customer, make it easier for the customer.

(24:52):
And that’s why people are paying, like me, $129 a year to be a prime member. A hundred million people are paying more money to have a certain membership because of the value that you’re getting from that. So I never thought that what you brought up, but that’s a really great point of how society can be a whole lot better if… It’s pretty hard to see your, love your brother as yourself, or your neighbor as yourself. That might be hard. My neighbor’s blocking my driveway. I get pretty peeved at him. But if you told me that he’s one of my biggest customers, boy, oh boy, it turns the tables really quickly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:35):
Charles, as an observant Jew, you’ve looked at the Torah, what Christians think of as the first five books of the Old Testament. And you have discovered that a lot of the principles of free markets come out of those books. And I’m curious if you could describe some of what you have learned in your studies.

Charles Mizrahi (25:56):
Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I didn’t discover this. Rabbinic scholars have been talking about this for close to 2000 years. So I just stand on the shoulders of giants. And studying the Bible, studying the Jewish Bible for me is not a part-time affair. It’s a daily affair. In the book of Joshua, it says, I’ll translate it from the Hebrew, meditate, meditate, meditate talking about the Torah on it, day and night.

Meditate doesn’t mean just sit and try to think about it, but learn, observe, find out how it can make you a better person, find out how you can make society a better place by following the precepts of the Bible. So when a big part of Judaism is giving what’s called. So the Kaz translated as charity, but it’s really not charity. The word in Hebrew said the rise from the word which in Hebrew means justice.

(27:02):
Charity is derived from the Latin word which means the heart. And that’s a really big differentiation. In Judaism, you must give to help the poor and sustain your area, make sure there aren’t homeless, make sure that people are clothed, make sure that there’s a soup kitchen, make sure that kids are going to school. That’s your obligation.

It’s not something done from the heart, meaning emotionally. It’s done because the Bible says to do it. It’s. It’s just. It’s unjust to step over someone who has no food. It’s unjust to find out that someone passed away and there’s no one to bury them. That’s unjust. It’s not charity. So one does acts of kindness and goodness, not because of any type of reward, but it’s the right thing to do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:56):
Well, people who have a scarcity mindset, which would come from say a Marxist worldview that says that only the material world exists, that we don’t have minds, we can’t create ideas, there’s no such thing as inspiration or information. So if only the material world exists, there’s only so much to go around. The only way a person can do better is by taking from someone else. So if someone’s wealthy by definition, they’ve stolen it, that’s sort of the Marxist mindset. How does your understanding of scripture address that?

Charles Mizrahi (28:31):
Oh gosh, it could be simple. Our country’s the only country in the world, only country of the world that’s founded on Judeo-Christian values. If you have Christian countries, 100%, you have Muslim countries. Only one country is found under Deo Christian values, and that’s the United States of America. It’s no accident that we have the largest GDP in the world, gross domestic product in the world. We don’t have the most people in the world. We don’t have the most natural resources in the world, but we produce the most output out of any country in the world.

People are waiting online. People are running over bridges and under fences and coming here in rowboats. Why? Why? Because this country was founded on those values. We don’t see them doing that to Germany or North Korea or Iran, but they’re coming here. They’re coming here with all the problems we have, with all the problems.

(29:28):
I’m sorry to digress, but just a few weeks ago, there was a debacle, this retreat in Afghanistan. I think I saw something which just made me choke up. It’s when you had these Afghan women coming with their infants and handing them to the American Marines to get them out. Now, you know what it is for a mother? I don’t know what it is, I can’t say, but for a mother to give up an infant to a US Marine, to get your kid to safety.

This is the Satan of the world that the Muslim world calls, the Islamic fascists and terrorists call the great Satan. This is who we are. We’re not. We’re a country because we’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I had on my podcast, I love having military people on. I had General Mary Etter. And I told her, we’re talking about this.

(30:31):
She goes, “No, no, they’re doing what they were trained to be doing. That’s what we do. That’s what our country does.” So I digress from answering what you were saying, but the Bible is filled with caring for society. For example, for example, if you have a field, this is in Leviticus, you have a field, you can’t cut the corners of the field. Why? Therefore, the widow, the poor, and the stranger, the underbelly of society. Those are three groups of people that have no one to protect them.

The widow in a patriarchal society has no one to protect her. She was abused. Wouldn’t get food, wouldn’t get anything. Think of all the times in the Bible that the story takes place around a well. And the woman being molested. And the story of Moses when he runs to Mijan and he goes to the well and the daughters of Jethro tell their father, he goes, “What are you doing?”

(31:31):
I hope so quick. He goes, “Well, there was an Egyptian who came and saved us. Be molested.” It was a big deal. It was not a safe world to be a female back in the day. And the Bible said, “You have to take care of them. You have to take care of the orphan,” who has no father or mother. And the resident alien, that’s someone with no social network. They just came here. They have no connection to anyone. And what do you do when you reap your field? You got to leave the corners of the field for them. That’s it.

There’s also the law of forgotten sheaves. If you bring your sheaves in from the field and you leave a few in the field, you can’t go back and retrieve them. Once again, it’s for the underbelly of society. And for the book of Ruth, remember Ruth is in Boaz’s field and she’s standing behind the Reapers as they’re gathering as a stalk falls to the ground.

(32:19):
The reaper is not allowed to go and pick that up. Once again, that’s for the widow often and the resident alien. And that’s what Ruth is doing. She’s falling behind and she’s collecting that. So the Bible put in a social welfare system to, in an agreement society, this was the matter of meaning of life or death. If you didn’t eat, there was no Wegmans to go to. You died. People died of starvation. There was no food. Here, if you didn’t have a field and you didn’t have any of that, the Bible put in, “Hey, you own a small piece of land. It’s not only yours. You have to give it and make sure that others in society are taken care of.”

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:58):
Charles, these days people don’t have fields. They can leave the corners unharvested. What does justice, the kind of justice you’re talking about, the social welfare system that was put in place in the Old Testament, what would that look like for us today? And tie that back to the way you’ve been describing capitalism to us.

Charles Mizrahi (33:15):
Very simple. Open up a Charles Schwab charitable trust account. I don’t think you need a thousand dollars or so or a fidelity. Put some of your money in there and then you could redirect it to any charity you want. You go on, click a button, and you send money there, minimum of $36 or something.

So if you have whatever your paycheck is, put a percentage away and just give it out. If that’s the way you could do it anonymously in a sense that you don’t have to go and touch people or speak to people if you’re shy, you don’t like to get involved with people. How hard is that? Find an organization that you like. You can do all the research you want and make sure they give most of the money to the end user, who was the people they’re helping. And open up an account and click away.That’s easy.

(34:06):
At the end of the year, you don’t have to account anything because anytime you put money into the Schwab or Fidelity Trust, it’s already a tax. It’s already considered giving to a charity and they disperse it. You could do what you want with that.

Second thing, if you don’t want to do that, how hard is it to go and get, I don’t know, Chick-fil-A or Chipotle or a Target or whatever it is. Go buy $10 gift cards, buy five of them, buy three of them. And carry in your pocket. When you see someone who you feel really is down in their luck for whatever reason, give them a gift card. Give a gift card. Let them get a meal. What does it cost you? It’s not going to be a rogue, it’s going to be a speed bump on your life or your finances, but just giving that card would solve so many issues, so many problems.

(35:00):
And forget about how that person would feel. How would you feel? Those are simple things to do. They’re not hard. It’s just that we have to stop looking for them. Back in the day when you had meters, I remember back 30 years ago, someone told me this idea and I started, I used to carry around a bunch of dimes in my pocket. Then anytime I saw an expired meter in a car, I put a dime in and turned it so that person wouldn’t get a ticket.

(35:25):
It’s not hard. You just have to be in the right mindset of, you wake up in the morning and say, “How can I make this world a better place? Better than it was when I woke up this morning.” And then in Judaism is called Tikun Olam, which means repair the world.That’s our mission statement. Our mission statement is Jews is to spread ethical monotheism and make the world a better place than we found it.

So what better way is there finding people in your daily life who are walking and just giving them a gift card, buy 10 of them, buy five of them, whatever it might be. And teachers, school teachers, nurses, this and that, pat on the back’s nice, but boy, oh boy, get a 10 or 20 dollar Starbucks. It’s not so much that you’re going to change their lives, but think of what it says to them and what it says about you and how you feel.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:20):
I was thinking of during COVID, I was trying to find ways to do that. And actually I have a bunch of grocery store gift cards in my car. If I run into a situation that way, I’m not giving cash, but I’m giving a gift card where I know they can go get the provisions that they need. And I actually felt led to give one to a man in the grocery store who looked like he was struggling to figure out what he could buy for a limited amount of money.

Charles Mizrahi (36:43):
Oh, I’m telling you, I remember just watching people online and there’ve been a few times where I’ve seen people who put this back, we can’t afford it, this and that. So I’ll take all the stuff they put back, I’ll buy it and then just give them the bag on the way out and said, manager said this is on them. They had extra stuff. And they don’t ask. You don’t want a person to lose their dignity. You want to keep that intact. But just doing simple things. You know what it is? Jeff, it becomes a mindset. If you wake up in the morning and you look to try to help people, you’ll find ways. If you wake up in the morning to try to hate people, you’ll find ways as well.

Dr. Jeff Myers (37:25):
Wow. And the whole course of this conversation, Charles, I’m just picking up a sense of joy that you have with finding opportunities to earn money, finding opportunities to help other people do well and finding opportunities to serve. And it is such a contrast, Charles, to watching some of the socialist members of Congress who are always angry, always screaming, always smashed capitalism, kind of a mindset. You think that’s part of the hope for our country or maybe that is the whole hope.

Charles Mizrahi (38:03):
What’s the whole hope?

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:04):
Just that finding that kind of joy in living out a biblical worldview in a way that serves other people.

Charles Mizrahi (38:13):
Oh, we’re doing it. I’m so optimistic about our country and the next five years is going to be better than the last five, and the next 10 are going to be better than the last 10. There’s no question in my mind. And I want to tell you why. The American people are very pragmatic people. This whole socialist AOC and the squad is going to pass. It’s going to be a footnote to history.

We’ve survived worse. We survived Jimmy Carter. We survived McCarthyism. We survived Andrew Johnson who was a terrible president after reconstruction. We survived Warren G. Harding. He was a terrible president with all sorts of corruption in the White House in the 1920s. Richard Nixon was a great president, did a couple of bad things, really terrible things, which he shouldn’t have done, but it gets wiped away by a lot of people. It negates everything he did that was good.

(39:06):
But my point is, this country will continue to survive. And the reason is, is because the American people are good people. And if there’s any tragedy anywhere in the world, it’s Americans who step up and get first.

(39:23):
I used to question you, I used to look at Israel, and you think about that for a second. Israel, villainized Israel, apartheid and all that BS that they tried all those lives. Israel has a team. It’s part of the IDF, part of the military, that has doctors, engineers, a wholesaler support team that on a moment’s notice, a moment’s notice where there’s tragedy anywhere in the world, an earthquake, a flood, they send a team with all their expertise. Within 24 hours, they’re on the ground.

When Haiti had an earthquake, it was Israelis setting up field hospitals where so many of the children are saying Haiti were named Israeli names and Hebrew names in tribute. Saudi Arabia has a hell of a lot more money than Israel. So do other countries. Why was that? Why was that? Because that’s what you’re supposed to do. You care about humanity.

(40:20):
The American people have that same exact DNA. We’re always out there helping. We’re always out there in times of trouble. We’re always in every single country where there’s something you could always find a way to help. And it’s because we’re a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation that has a Judeo-Christian value, we’re our founding fathers, many of them knew Hebrew. Many of them knew the Bible, both the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible.

Well, Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the seal of the United States, the Israelites being led by Moses through the Red Sea, because they saw themselves as the Israelites leaving England, leaving Europe, and coming and starting this great land. So these weren’t lost. These values and this DNA, which is part of us all, it’s not something that we say we forgot. It’s still there. We’re just hearing a very, very vocal minority who want to destroy a system they know, unfortunately, very little about, contributed very little to, and feel that the world is a very terrible place and we’re the leaders of it. And that’s just not true.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:38):
This just gives us tremendous hope. And there are lots of takeaways from this who want to start a business, you want to begin investing, and you want to be generous with your fellow man.

Charles Mizrahi (41:51):
Jeff, by the way, I just want to have one thing, man. When you say generous, right? Generous can mean so many things to so many people. It can mean if you have only one bowl of rice sharing half your bowl with someone else, that’s pretty generous. The point is this, you don’t have to be a billionaire. You don’t have to be Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. You could start today, giving away anything. Giving away your time, going to a school and volunteering your time if you have some sort of expertise.

The point is this, we’re all in this together. We’re not in a separate rowboat. We’re all the same roadboat. So if you start drilling a hole into your seat, we’re all going to drown. So we either all hang together, as Ben Franklin said, we all hang separately. So I think that we need to see that.

(42:43):
I think that’s what’s missing in this country is we stopped seeing each other as fellow Americans and we started seeing each other as Republicans and Democrats and liberals and conservatives and right wing and left wing. And we just forgot that we’re all in this boat together. And unfortunately, unfortunately, it takes a nine eleven or something to remind us of that. And hopefully that won’t be the case and that we’ll snap out of this really, really soon.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:10):
Well, this is just a huge vitamin B12 shot of hope today, Charles. Thank you for this. And then your book, Wall Street Profits for Main Street Investors. So for those who are interested in starting and investing, they can call your 40 years of investment experience and just get started. Yeah. Thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Charles Mizrahi (43:31):
My pleasure, man. My pleasure. And you keep doing the great work that you’re doing because the important thing is to get this message out there. It’s those who are shouting the loudest that we hear the most. And we’re hearing the silent majority are good people, really good people, the kind of people you want as a brother-in-law or a son-in-law. It’s these small elements that we’re hearing a lot about.

And when you go to sleep and realize we’re in the greatest country that God has ever put on the face of the earth, doing so much good. And if you doubt that, go to the Texas border and see people clamoring from three to four different countries wanting to get into this country at any cost. The cost of their lives, sending their kids, putting themselves in jeopardy. Why is that? Why aren’t they doing this to another country? And the reason is because we are this world’s best hope, and don’t forget that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:29):
Great way to end the show. Great word. Thanks, Charles.

Charles Mizrahi (44:32):
My pleasure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (44:33):
A special thanks to my guest today, Charles Mizrahi. You can find his new book, Wall Street Profits for Main Street Investors, exclusively at charlesmizrahi.com. And the last name is spelled M-I-Z-R-A-H-I. You can follow him on Twitter @CharlesMizrahi. You can listen to the Charles Mizrahi Show wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you are blessed with financial wisdom this week about starting a business and investing and giving to others. And may God use you to be a blessing to the nations of the earth. I’ll see you next week.

Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool, and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.

(45:57):
Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place. For your listening enjoyment, you can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share this show if you have enjoyed listening to it, and leave a review, if you would, on the site where you download the show, that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I look forward to seeing you next week.