Paved With Good Intentions (Bitachon #7)

1:28Usually, they start off with an act of desperation. Usually, they're scared of not being able to pay the rent or the mortgage on time, or they owe somebody money, and they're facing pressure from them. And something happens — all the pressure builds up and builds up, and eventually, they think, "I've got to do something quick. If I go to work at my job, I'll make a certain amount of money, but it'll take me a hundred years to make this money back. I can't do it. I have to do something quick," and they end up doing something out of desperation. The worst thing that can happen to them is it works out. They go and they take money. They cheat somebody. They steal from somebody. They cheat the government. Or they do something like, for example, I remember years ago, there was a show that I saw called American Greed. And it showed different types of people that cheated the government. Cheated the U.S. government because the U.S. government has such a huge budget.

2:30I mean, we talk about trillions of dollars, and even in those times, in that day, maybe it was a $10 trillion economy with a $400 billion budget. To cheat them for $50,000, $100,000, $200,000, or even a few million dollars is easy. Why? Because there's so much money, and it's not their money. It's not the employees' money. No one really cares. You have to press the button in the back. It's going dead. Turn on the button. Thanks. So what ends up happening is that there's a lot of holes in the system. So there's obviously people that are desperate or just not straight people. They take advantage of it. So there's one particular company that took advantage of them by selling the government tools at obnoxiously expensive prices. Once they finally caught them, which was like five or seven years after the fact, they started reviewing and auditing the statements of all the purchases. They would see they sold them one screw you buy at Home Depot for two cents for eighty-five thousand dollars. And they got paid a hammer you could buy for three dollars, thirty-nine thousand. At obnoxiously expensive prices, they finally caught them, which was about five or seven years after the fact. They started reviewing and auditing the statements of all the purchases and noticed that they sold a screw you could buy at Home Depot for two cents for eighty-five thousand dollars. And they got paid for a hammer you could buy for three dollars, for thirty-nine thousand dollars.

3:43All types of ridiculous prices, and since everything is systematic, you know, they press the button – check, check, check, check, check – finished. Sometimes, because they have somebody on the inside. Sometimes now, but the point is that the guy who started this company, this tool company, he didn't start off by saying, "I can't wait to cheat the government," if he's normal. He started off saying, "I want to start a business so I can pay my bills, provide for my family, and hopefully I'll land a couple of big clients one day." Once he landed the government as a client, he thought, "Wow, this is great! I've landed the government as a client. It's the best client in the world: unlimited budget, and you can pretty much sell them anything forever. They buy it even if they don't need it." Greatest thing in the world. So you have the biggest customer in the world. Then one day, what happens is that the guy makes a mistake. Instead of writing $38 on three hammers, he writes $3,800 by mistake. There's the three, 38.00. He forgot the zero, and he got paid.

4:48He got paid $3,800 instead of $38. He said, "Whoa, I got $3,800. This just helped me pay my mortgage. Came right in time. What a special present from Hashem." He thinks it's a mitzvah even. And now, that's what the Satan tells him. The Satan tells him, "Look, you needed $4,000. I gave it to you. See, the government paid you $4,000. What's the problem?" And unfortunately, now he says, "Oh, you know what? Next time I get into a jam, I'll do it again." Next time, he got into a slightly bigger jam. It was a $5,000 jam. So he sold them, too. Instead of $50, it was $5,000. He got paid again, and little by little, this grew. Little by little, this is how it happened. The same thing happens with Ponzi schemes. If anyone doesn't know, Ponzi schemes are when one person collects a bunch of people's money with the intention to invest their money in something that's going to make them more money than what they have right now. But there's usually some type of gimmick to it where they tell you, "Listen, you're guaranteed to get a certain type of return within a certain time frame," which, as anyone who's an expert in the field knows, is unrealistic. However, since people's desire and obsession with money is above and beyond their common sense, they fall for it time and time again.

6:11There's still a million Ponzi schemes going on right now. There will be Ponzi schemes going on tomorrow, and there were Ponzi schemes yesterday and the day before, and there will be a month from now—there always are. I personally think that a good large portion of financial management companies are Ponzi schemes, but you only know who's naked once the market is down and... You know who’s swimming naked once the waves start going back into the ocean, right? Right now, you can't identify the Ponzi schemes so much unless they mess up big time. Because it looks like everybody's making money right now, since the market's been up for ten years in a row, twelve years in a row. As soon as the market crashes, watch — there's gonna be a slew of Ponzi schemes. A slew of them, one after another. People are gonna go to jail day after day, just like what happened in 2008. A lot of the money that's being made right now is fake. But anyway, moving on, these Ponzi schemes usually don't start as Ponzi schemes. They start off with somebody's idea to make other people money, and he gets people's money and makes unrealistic promises. People give him money, and then one day he realizes, "I can't deliver on these promises. I messed up." But his ego is too big.

7:26He goes too big to admit, listen, I can't deliver on his promises. Not only can't he deliver on promises, I lost you money instead of making you money. What happens? He says, okay, some people want their money back. Okay, I got to do something. He starts giving Peter's money to Paul, Paul's money to Steve, and Steve's money to others, and starts playing games with people's money. This goes on for as long as he's able to continuously get new money in and... as long as he's able to continue to get new investors, the money in the Ponzi scheme can go on for 50 years, like Bernie Madoff. But as soon as the well dries up, as soon as investors say no more, or they want to take the money out, the Ponzi scheme collapses in 24 hours. Now, the guy that had a Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff, for example—a big chilul Hashem, tishkot resha'im—but he didn't start off that way, and He didn't start off with, like, an intention to steal $50 billion. Maybe he wanted to do this, maybe he wanted to do a few moves, a few quick things, a few things that are not necessarily the most legit, but he didn't have this grand scheme. It just got out of hand. Usually, most thieves are like that. And the reason why is because they have no bitachon in Hashem. They have bitachon in themselves, and as soon as their own system fails them, they have nothing to fall back on because they have no Hashem. That problem manifests and causes a lot of other people to fall with them. Here we see that by simply being worried, simply being worried about things unnecessarily, you are creating problems for yourself.

8:42In Hashem, they have bitachon in themselves, and as soon as their own system fails them, they have nothing to fall back on because they have no bitachon in Hashem. That problem manifests and causes a lot of other people to fall with them. So here we see that by simply being worried, unnecessarily worrying about things, you are creating problems for yourself. How much, if you do, if you, today, if we finished here, at this point—how many of us can go home and spend a good 20 or 30 minutes thinking about all the stuff they're worried about every day for no reason? Everybody can do that. Everybody goes home and says, "You know what?" What, 20 minutes? In five minutes, I can figure out that 90% of my day is spent worrying about nothing. Worrying about all the things that I unnecessarily worry about — this, that, and worrying about worry itself. We're worried non-stop. Most people are so worried that they don't even have time to enjoy the good. So, the Baal Shem Tov is saying, if you worry, you have a serious problem.

9:53Why? Your worry is a sin. That sin deserves a punishment. That punishment is exactly what you're worried about. Midah k'neged midah, measure for measure.

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