The Trust Factor
A daily lesson that focuses on achieving unparalleled success in life using ancient wisdom in modern times.
We will be discussing critical concepts as they are laid out in the book Sha'ar Habitachon - The Gate of Trust. Written 1000 years ago, the author reminds us of the values and wisdom that have allowed humanity to thrive throughout history.
The concept of trusting in a higher power that exists purely for our benefit, puts us in the drivers seat with absolute confidence to achieve greatness.
Eliminate: Fear, Hatred, Anxiety, Depression, Jealousy, Greed...forever!
* Note that some terminology will be in the original Hebrew or Aramaic which I will always follow with the English translation.
The Trust Factor
Episode 181 - How A Wealth CEO Practices Bitachon In Business And Family
What if your work got easier the moment you stopped treating every prospect like your last lifeline? We sit down with CEO and long-time friend Mark Halpern to explore a counterintuitive truth: trust in the Creator doesn’t dull your edge; it sharpens your presence, calms your pitch, and makes service your unfair advantage.
We start by unpacking bitachon and emunah—trust and faith—as a practical framework for modern life. Mark shares how recognizing design over randomness reframes setbacks as guidance, not judgment. From there, we get tactical: the value of having a spiritual coach, carving one focused hour a week for learning, and adopting a weekly reset like Shabbat to unplug from tech and plug into family, gratitude, and quiet. Think of it as “club med for the soul,” a rhythm that restores attention and deepens relationships.
For entrepreneurs and professionals, we dig into the anxiety-sell loop and how to break it. When you act from trust, you stop gripping outcomes and start asking, How can I help this person? The shift changes body language, listening, and results. Mark also speaks openly about balancing effort with faith, the belief that provision is set, and why panic is not a growth strategy. We close with family: raising grounded kids through three daily practices—appreciation, prayer, and visible example—so values aren’t lectures, they’re lived.
If you’re ready to trade frantic hustle for focused action, to feed your soul with “infinite food” instead of more noise, this conversation offers clear steps and honest encouragement. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review with one practice you’ll try this week.
Until next time, have a spectacular day!
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. And welcome to the second of our weekly interview series on the trust factor. This is a game changer. I've had so much great feedback from our first last week. Rabbi Hildesheim hit it out of the park. And I've got a list of leaders and influencers, the good kind, the important kind that are going to come up on a weekly basis to be able to help inspire us and lead us in the same direction, to give us the insight about trust in the relationship with their creator from their perspective. And there are so many of them, guys, it's not a cookie-cutter religion. God does not have the same relationship with every single one of us. It is so important that we figure out what our relationship with our creator is like and that we're constantly working on it and building it, making it better based on our own individual circumstances. Having said that, waiting for us to give us his experiences, his relationship with his creator, how he's developed it, and how he's succeeded at building not just a wonderful material life for him and his family in this world, but also how he's continuously building his next world. He's always thinking about what is going to come after this. This is all fine and dandy. We have to live a good life while we're here, but we have to know this is a means to an end. And nobody knows that better than Mark Halpern. Mark is just a great friend. He is somebody I've had the privilege of knowing for so, so long. I've learned so much, Torah, and practical wisdom from Mark over the years. As has my wife, as have my children, and our many visits and our many dinners together and holidays and great, great times. We've taken so much from the Halpern family, and there's really nobody better to speak to you about this concept of trust than Mark. I just want to say Mark is a CEO of wealthinsurance.com. Mark helps people, mostly high net worth individual, to figure out the best way to allocate their resources, to place their money, what they should best do with their funds to be able to be as successful with it in this world as possible. So who better to tell you about how to take your spiritual resources, the resources of you, the individual, and how to apply them in the best places possible in order to build not just this world, but also your next. And without any further ado, my friends, we're welcoming Mark Halpern to the podcast. Welcome, Mark.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Jesse.
SPEAKER_01:How are you?
SPEAKER_00:I'm amazing. It's uh it's a great day. The Toronto Blue Jays have one game to go to become World Series champions. That makes me a happy guy.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:I wish I could talk intelligently about it, but I know absolutely nothing about any major league sports at all.
SPEAKER_00:Jesse, I'm not surprised with you because you're such a deep spiritual guy changing the world with a real godly experience. I I would get it. I I'm surprised you actually eat food, but I'm sure you do some of that once in a while.
SPEAKER_01:I'm blushing. I'm blushing, Mark. Thank you. Okay, Mark, let's get into it, my friend. Um, what is in your mind? Give me a quick definition of Bitachon. What does it mean?
SPEAKER_00:So there's uh there are two things. There's Bitachon and Amuna, right? Bitachon is that that you realize that everything that's happening around you, like you look and you see the world and you, you know, and you think it's all very random, and you know, babies are just born, you know, we grew up thinking it was from a stork, but babies, how do they come about? You know, the solar system, all that. You you you see a tremendous design to this world, and and that means if there's a design and it's not some sort of like random act, that there must be a designer to it. And and we have a uh source, we have a uh history. We know that there's something called God. Whatever God is to you, but there's a creator of this world, and there's a design, and there's a set of instructions for everything, including little old Mark Alpert and Jesse Revivo. And and with that plan in place, that gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing that like somebody's in charge of this place, right? And then Amuna is just knowing that everything that happens is really for the good, like because the Almighty is is a giver and only wants the best for us. And you know, let's face it, sometimes in life, things the medicine doesn't taste so good, right, Jesse? Right. You gotta take the medicine, but it's really for your good. And I think after you've experienced this for days and weeks and months and years and decades, you you're your your eyes open up and realize, you know what, I'm in I'm in pretty good shape. Like let go and let God and just become the the person that I'm supposed to be and and trust the process.
SPEAKER_01:Is that how it happens, Mark? In other words, do we start off not having a relationship or having a tiny, almost insignificant relationship? And then time is required in order to, like you just said, build up and experience and go through life and then figure out eventually that everything is always going to work out. It always has and it always will because God's on our side. Or is there another way? Like, are there shortcuts? How can we figure out how to build that relationship quicker and better?
SPEAKER_00:Well, uh, I'd say, first of all, on your first question, you know, there's some people who go through life, they live 80, 90 years and had no connection to this at all. They never thought, they never opened their eyes, they never had the desire. You have to have the desire, right? And and then there are those people who do have the desire, and when they have the desire, it's incredible how the constellations open up and they now find themselves in situations where they can connect, right? But it's a process, it's not like instant coffee. You know, uh for a lot of people, you know, they say there are no atheists in the foxhole. The time that they're they develop a relationship with God is when, God forbid, they're in the hospital or or somebody is sick or somebody has died, or there's been a birth or a wedding, whatever. Those moments when they see the sunset, you know, or the vastness of the sea, they can they go, wow, and they have this moment. Well, it's at that point in time, it's like the window is open. You know, you can either leave it open and make it open even more, or nine times out of ten, people will just close the window and and they don't pursue anything, which is a very, very sad, sad thing because you know you gotta know what you're doing here in this world. Like, why are we here? It's like Jesse, it's like imagine you got an invitation to a wedding, you know, and you don't know who the people are, but you see there's an invitation, and you go to the wedding and you see all these waiters in food and and you see people you know, like people you're very close with, and you go up to them and say, Hey, whose wedding is this? And they go, I don't know, but let's have a good time. Like, you know, okay, have a drink, come on. And you go to somebody else and you say, like, nice to see you, but who's and they go, I don't know, but let's let's party, let's have a good time. You wouldn't s be able to eat or drink anything until you found out who made this wedding and why are you invited? And as as a thinking person, you want to know who invited you to this event and and who's it for and and why are you invited and what's the purpose of it. So I'm very fortunate that I sort of got that wake-up call. You know, I lost my dad when I was 11. Um, you know, it was very tough for us being the youngest of four boys, and he was a very religious person, but my mother was much less. We didn't really have a lot of that in our lifetime. But he planted a lot of seeds, and eventually those seeds came out to blossom, and I'm very grateful for you know the results.
SPEAKER_01:So it sounds to me like you're saying this is really an individual approach that everybody is going to build their relationship with their creator and learn to have trust in their creator in their own unique way. Now, you and I are both in business, and a lot of the people who listen are, you know, just regular people like us. They're not holding on any, you know, remarkably high level of spirituality where we've got feet in this world and we've got feet in the next world. So how do people like us, how does somebody like you, I mean, you've built a successful business, you're interacting with people who you're guiding and telling them what they should do in terms of where to spend their time and resources to be successful in this world. How do we spend our time and resources in this world to be able to build our next world? What's the best use of our time?
SPEAKER_00:Well, one of the things I think is the most important is that you need a coach, right? Like if if you want to win uh you know the World Series, you need a coach. You want to win gold in the Olympics, you win, you need a coach. You want to become a professional bodybuilder, you need a coach. And and the coach is there to really help guide you. They've either gone through the experience themselves and have worldly experience, or just have the technology and wisdom to be able to help you. So I think that's the number one thing. For me, I have different coaches, but I also have a spiritual coach. I have a rabbi, right? My my Rav is uh is very important to our family the last 20 years. Uh I learn with him for two hours a day. Like again, I'm part of a group of people who are learning, but you know, most of the time we're learning, he's also giving me tremendous insights and and and advice because I'm wandering through this, you know, not really having you know that experience, and and he provides me with a lot of insights. So number one is you need to have a coach, okay. Number two is we all have 168 hours in the week, all of us, and it's it's not that it's democratic. So we have to invest some time in that week working on this. So it could be finding a learning partner for one hour a week or reading a book or turning off the talk radio, listening to a podcast, uh, could be even a podcast on successful business people where they go ahead and tell you their story about the smashes and crashes and destruction they've gone through to get to where they go to. And you feel, wow, I I get that, and I I can relate to that. So finding an hour at least in the week. Number three, going ahead and perhaps getting involved, you know, you know, with your religion or one that you feel is important to you. For us being an Orthodox Jew, we have something called the Sabbath. That means for 25 hours a week, I get to shut off and turn on. So I get to shut off all the technology, I get to, you know, computers, the emails, the phones, and for 25 hours I get to just be with my family, my creator, and eat good food, with good friends. It's it's an oasis. It's like club med for my soul. And everyone can have that. It's there's no cost, but you know, you gotta be caring enough to go ahead and and do that. The other thing is the most important I find is that when it comes to your livelihood, it's very scary, especially it's not like when we grew up, and you know, you could buy a house for a hundred thousand dollars. Like living in the GTA, if you're earning three hundred thousand dollars a year, you're just getting by. Three hundred thousand, right? You're just getting by. So there's a lot of struggles and stresses, and you know, there's there's antidotes for that. Yeah, you can go to see a psychiatrist and or a doctor and get some sort of prescription for anxiety or depression, or you can feed your spiritual soul, but your spiritual soul requires infinite food, not like TVs and sports and music and and and clothing and all of that. That's finite. It needs infinite food. And if you're not feeding it infinite food, which is really godly food attached to your your godly soul, then it's it's gonna fight back and you're gonna be depressed and you're gonna feel sad and anxious. So therefore, don't just keep feeding it that finite stuff. You have to feed it the infinite stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So I love the club med for the soul. That's fantastic. And I think that's also part of feeding your soul, is being able to disconnect from the craziness, and there's no better time in the world to be able to disconnect and connect back to your creator and learn and grow than on the Sabbath on Shabbat. And you know it's becoming more mainstream, it seems. You know, we all know about Charlie Kirk, and we lost a very special person there, but everybody's seen the video of him circulating talking about how important Shabbat was for his family. He's not even Jewish, but the idea of disconnecting to be able to just shut out all the noise and create and connect back to your creators. It's an unbelievable idea. I want to just expand on the idea that you and I are in business and we've both built our own businesses, our respective businesses. And anybody who's built a business knows that it takes a lot of time and dedication and effort. Uh, and the question I have is how do you know when it's enough? Is there a point where you've said, okay, it's too much? I've done too much of it, I've made too much of an effort here. And now maybe my actions are telling a different story. I think I'm a guy who trusts in God. But at the end of the day, I'm burning the candle of both ends here. I'm, you know, I'm spending a lot of time at work. Maybe I'm not spending as much as I as I could or want to with my family or my community. How do you know? Is there a recipe to figure out what's enough and what's not enough and what's too much?
SPEAKER_00:Listen, it's it's it's a huge question. It's a big one because let's face it, if you're working for yourself, you're an entrepreneur, you're building something, it requires a lot of time and attention. You know, they say in uh the book Outliers, you know, if you want to be an expert or you want to be a success something, you need at least 10,000 hours, right, to invest in it. So, you know, you have to put in your effort. There's no question. And that's sweat labor. There's no question. But the question is how much do you have to put into it? How much of an effort? So, you know, in Judaism, we know that uh we just have the high holidays and on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, it's actually determined at that moment exactly what your livelihood is going to be the next year. Everything that you're gonna make the next year has been determined less whatever you're gonna spend on your children's education and less you're gonna spend on, let's say, the Sabbath and festivals, right? So of course my my kids always go, you know, when we're shopping for the Sabbath, you know, for Shabbat, you know, I always say, Oh, it's free. It's free. Let's buy, you enjoy, let's say it's it's all free because it's not included in what you make. That means whether I work really hard or I don't work hard, it's gonna be determined for me kind of what's gonna be. So, you know, you do have to put in a reasonable amount of effort, but it's not at the expense of your family and your learning and your health. Like there has to be balance. And and that's where coming back to having a coach really, really will help. You know, there are salespeople, Jesse, and I'm sure you see them as well, that you know, if they're speaking to somebody, they might come across as extremely anxious. Extremely anxious. Why? Because that person that they're speaking to represents to them a sale, which represents money for them that perhaps they need for their mortgage or food on the table or their kids' education, and that's gonna come through. That's gonna come through actually in the experience that that client has or prospect with you, and it's gonna come through in terms of what is it doing to your your your your insides, your your guts in terms of your your adrenaline and all the rest of it. But if you're sitting in front of somebody and you realize whether this person buys something from me or doesn't buy something from me, it doesn't matter because they're not responsible for my livelihood. It's coming from the Almighty. Therefore, you're gonna be much more relaxed in terms of how you speak, your body language is gonna be different, you're not gonna be leaning forward so much. You're gonna be, and people are gonna see that and they're gonna want to deal with you because they want to deal with people who are not, you know, salespeople, they're not anxious, they're people who want to help. And one of my rabbis told me every year he would give me new homework. He said, you know, one of my years' homework was anyone that you meet with, your job is to find out how can I help this person. That's it. That was one year of homework. How all you'd be thinking about is how could I help that person? And if you come across with that sort of spiritual nature, God is gonna open up the whole cosmos for you. You're gonna see beautiful things happen. We call it divine providence. And and you see it, I know Jesse, you and I have spoken about it before. Like it just happens, and it's like you just you could cry, you just go, thank you, thank you. But and then, of course, when you recognize it, Jesse, guess what? You get more of it. When you talk about it, you get more of it. When you share that with other people, you get more of it because now you're aware, you're much more sensitive to it, and the Almighty sends you even more. So that's kind of the formula.
SPEAKER_01:What a secret recipe you just gave out. Unbelievable. I want to finish with a question that gets a little bit personal. I know that you and your wonderful wife, Rhonda, have managed to build a spectacular family. Thank God. You have children that are amazing individuals, each in their own right. Me and my wife and my children are we're all big fans of the Halburn family. You guys know that. How do you and your Eshethal, your wife Rhonda, how do you guys, what is the secret sauce? He just gave one a second ago. Give us another one when it comes to children. How do you impart that bitachon, the trust, the relationship that you have with God onto your children so that to build them up to be the amazing people that they are?
SPEAKER_00:So thank you, first of all, for that. We we we don't take any credit for it, because then we have to also take credit for all the other things that are maybe not so great about them, but that's okay. But they are they are amazing. And and I look at each one as I look at my wife and go, wow, thank you, God, for that one. Thank you, God, for that one. Thank you, wow, you gave me that one. And my wife, thank you, God, for that one. It's so so I'm gonna say that part of it is really appreciation. You want to be a happy person in life. You know, most people spend all the time thinking about all the things they don't have. And it could be that you know they've got 99.9% of great stuff, but all they're focusing on is the 0.1% that they don't have. So if you can be appreciative of things, then you're gonna be a happy person. And the people around you are gonna also feed off of that, and they're gonna be happy people because they have an appreciation for their the good things they have, their health, their all that sort of stuff. So number one is having appreciation. Number two is realizing that when it comes to your children, you have to pray. You have to be somebody who prays to God. Not when that bad things happen, you're saying, oh, please hope this person feels better. You have to pray to God that that you know that your kids should turn out okay and that you should be directed properly, be able to say the right things and do the right things, and give you the divine providence to help navigate the very difficult teenage years and the difficult years as they're getting older, too, and just have the strength to do that. So, number two, I really think is is being able to pray. And there's a whole art behind that. It's a beautiful thing that you know, half the population's on medication for anxiety and depression, the other half should be. Prayer is a great way to sort of get off the medication. So the third thing I want to say, which is really the key, is this stuff is not taught in textbooks, and you can't, you know, they say the same, I do as I say, not as I do. It's the worst philosophy. Your kids have to see that you're living it. You have to be an example to them of a north on the compass with your flaws, even if you're faking it, you know, as they say, fake it till you make it, you know, like your kids have to see that this is real to you, and that you have the appreciation and you pray and you work hard, and you also spend time for your family and your work and you're putting efforts. And when they see that, that's gonna be the north on the compass for them, and that's gonna be their baseline, their template that they're gonna grow on from there. And I think if you do these things, you know, again, you it's like going to the crab tables too. You can have the dice and you don't know what the table the crabs are gonna. You you have to be very grateful for whatever you have, and we're very grateful that we have such you know wonderful children and uh and a growing family, but we're like anybody other, any other family. We're all working very hard.
SPEAKER_01:Lead by example, parent by example. So well said, Mark. Thank you so, so much for taking the time to be with us today. I know I've learned a lot. I'm sure everybody listening is going to learn a lot. Mark Halpern, CEO, wealthinsurance.com, and more importantly, a good, good friend of mine. Thank you so much, Mark.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much for having me, Jesse. And I look forward to sharing the podcast with all my people as well. Awesome. Thanks, Mark. Have an amazing day. You too. Bye-bye.
SPEAKER_01:That wraps it up for today, my friends. It's a wonderful way to segue into Shabbat. This is the Sabbath. This is the time, as Mark said, to disconnect in order to connect back to all the things that matter most. Have an amazing rest of your day and have a spectacular Shabbat. We'll pick up where we left off on Sunday.
