The RDL Podcast with Rabbi Daniel Lapin

The first time in human history that children knew more than their parents and how parents evade their responsibility to their children.  The 25th word in the Bible, religious holidays and modern science.  Surprising secrets of the casino’s roulette wheel. How humans got to planet earth.  If you tell me your answer to this one question, I would know how you feel about wealth & poverty, marriage, t...

A tragedy is something that causes suffering, distress and destruction. A terrible tragedy is a tragedy that could have easily been prevented. Ancient Jewish wisdom can prevent those tragedies. When people marry without knowledge of how the world REALLY works, it’s usually just as tragic as when a pilot takes off in an airplane type for which he’s had inadequate training. When people choose career...

Is everybody’s work equally valuable and important? How can you tell the difference? I respect all humans who behave consistently with being created in the image of God, but do I respect all career choices, occupations, and professions equally? No, of course not, and neither do you. There are several key things to bear in mind when choosing a career path. What attributes does sprinter Usain Bolt s...

Many of today’s problems are the result of bad choices you made yesterday. They put you in your own Egypt. Want to see the mugshot of your worst enemy? Easy — look on your driver’s license. It’s relatively easy to conceive a male baby: It only takes a minute or two. It’s a little harder to give birth to a male baby: it can take several hours. But it is a whole lot harder to turn a male baby into a...

Although riots slightly damaged Notre Dame Cathedral in the 16th century and the infamous French Revolution inflicted a little damage in the 18th, this fire was the worst damage the beautiful cathedral has ever sustained. In reporting on the Notre Dame fire, the news media ignored the many thousands of attacks, desecrations and vandalizations of European churches every year. Yes, thousands! And al...

There is a real reason why airlines have become so much more punctual in keeping to their schedules than they used to be. Has global warming expanded the American continent, pushing Los Angeles and New York further apart? Amazon and the internet are not the only culprits killing off suburban shopping malls; a far more destructive force is imperiling the very existence of your local shopping mall....

Men who marry moneyed maidens hoping to get their hands on her wealth deserve what they get, which most times won’t be good. But girls marrying guys with gold is quite different. Men who make money reveal much of their positive masculine desirability whereas a lady’s bank balance reveals nothing of her feminine desirability. Why do men in uniform fascinate females? Also, learn why, in 1970, AMC pa...

Many in the Bush family (sorry, I mean dynasty) with their long association with the Republican Party, admitted that they voted for Hillary Clinton in November 2016.  So did dozens of other well-known journalists, pundits, policy-wonks, and political-hangers-on who had long been famous as conservative Republicans.  All these intelligent people decided that Donald Trump was so terrible that Hillary...

I was wrong last week. The 737 MAX should have been promptly grounded on March 11th, 2019. Was history being written in the Ethiopian desert and off the coast of Indonesia? Sometimes history is written in just a few days. Are we witnessing the opening moves of America’s slide from #1 to #2 in commercial aviation? Why would the U.S. Justice Department launch an almost unprecedented criminal investi...

20 Questions that will help you discover if you truly know how the world REALLY works.  Letters from listeners.  Two Boeing airliners tragically crash; the real reason the 737Max was grounded.   Are we willing and eager to end the more than 30,000 traffic fatalities a year in the United States?  It can be done, you know. How would you vote?  Don’t you care about people’s lives?  The machinery of h...

How you answer the question that entitles this show will say a lot about whether you ever will have $5 Million. What produces more happiness, fun or work? Would you accept marital advice from a man who has never lived with a woman? But you might well accept car maintenance advice from a mechanic who has never owned a car. Would you take career advice from a man who has never held a job? But you mi...

A guard at the notorious San Quentin Penitentiary near San Francisco takes issue with my overly broad characterization last week. Another California corrections officer comments on my preference for fines, flogging and execution over incarceration. A Colombian family writes from Singapore, to where they moved from Malaysia, telling of how they overcame dark times and broke through to prosperity. T...

Who cares what men musicians look like? We only discuss their music. But when lady musicians are dressed a little provocatively, even a little sexily, we’ll comment on their music and also on their appearance. Is this wrong? Is this “sexism” (whatever that means)? There’s a growing group of attractive young female concert pianists who no longer perform in long gowns in muted colors. Few are more n...

For those of you who’ve been eagerly awaiting the day I criticize President Donald Trump, today is your day! Listen as I revile and repudiate the following phrase from the State of the Union: “All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before.” Well, I am not at all proud of that. And neither should you be. The President and his speechwriters were pandering to th...

Rabbi Daniel Lapin and his wife, Susan, take a lighthearted look at movies. Before World War II, about 0.3% of movies released were what we would call “horror movies”. By 1968, over 2% of movies were horror movies, by 2000 it was 4%, and by 2015 it was 12%. By then, zombies were taking over the (entertainment) world. To date, Hollywood has produced 1,000 more zombie movies than cowboy movies. The...

How to prepare your children to be able to say “No!”  What are our three main appetites, & how do they differ from one other?  Why do so many smart, accomplished, powerful men who know better, act so badly towards women?  The Torah prohibits Jews from eating pork, yet it is just as healthy as beef. So why are pigs, and other delicious dishes like crabs, lobsters, oysters, rabbits and snails prohib...

If you have a few dollars, well, you didn’t MAKE that money—you TOOK  it.  This according to  the economics professors who teach your children and help them form their worldviews.  Do you patronize companies that give some of their profit to charity?  I explain why they would be acting more morally by reducing the  price of the goods you purchase. After all, why is it the company’s job to take add...

Here’s a tough one to swallow:  Morality as we know it applies to individuals, not to nations!  The United Nations is nothing but an illusion.  An illusion promoted by some pretty horrid people, to be sure; but an illusion nonetheless.  The International Court in The Hague? Puhleez, it’s a joke.  You can ignore it. Everyone else does. If you don’t like what Russia is doing (whatever that is suppos...

Guess who’s building the Argentina-Chile tunnel in order to lock up the world’s supply of Lithium (ion batteries). Yes, I’m talking about your mobile phone—the one you love so much!  It was in 1956 that we saw one of the first movies to depict a Christian missionary negatively.  Guess who owns Kenya’s new railway. And Kenya’s port of Mombasa (which like Somalia and Yemen, was also named in Hebrew)...

If you’ve read my book, Thou Shall Prosper-The Ten Commandments for Making Money, then you already know why Jews are disproportionately good with money. You’ve probably already adopted those timeless truths into your own financial life to good effect, but none of that explains why over 80 percent of American comedians of the past 80 years are Jewish. While we’re talking laughter, why are the wicke...

What is the semi-addictive behavior in which most of us engage to our own detriment?  To what activity do most of us devote a shockingly high number of hours each week for which we get zero benefit?  What is worse, this activity not only brings no benefit but it actually causes damage to us.  If evil enemies wanted to harm the United States of America and render it weak both economically and milit...

Why did The Donna Reed Show help marriages while The Gilmore Girls hurt them? And how did boys start reneging on the social contract to become men back during the 1960s? Until then, boys sought to grow into men who would marry and who would cherish and protect their wives. Then, in what will turn out to be history’s most remarkable case of mass arrested development, little boys grew into big boys...

Culture is not the same as civilization. There are thousands of cultures but only one civilization. Banks & bathrooms in Beijing, Bombay, and Bangkok grew to resemble such institutions in Boston, Birmingham, and Berlin; not the other way around. Along with millions of others who voted with their feet, you and I also prefer civilization to any of the countless cultures we could have lived in. The p...

Numbers are your portal to progress.  What happened to England when all Jews were expelled? What happened to England when they returned?  Start devoting a few hours every week to improving your numerical literacy.  Stop telling yourself you can’t do math.  Nothing too complicated, just start on becoming more familiar with numbers than you are.  In Hebrew all five verbs for counting each also mean...

By far, the majority of people around you understand money as well as they understand magnetic resonance imaging. Which is to say, not much! As a not-very-successful fisherman in the cool, deep waters of British Columbia, I learned that you can’t possibly put salmon on your grill without understanding salmon. Similarly, you can’t put money in your bank without understanding money. And putting mone...