So the question is who keeps these crooks alive? Is it really the police that keep you from getting hurt by the crooks? The police only get to wipe up the mess.
That’s always the way it is. Locks keep honest people honest. Crooks know how to pick locks.
They know how to cut them off. They know how to circumvent them. They know how to get into a safe, and they know how to get into your pocket.
Problem Solving
Well, my friends, I had one heck of an interesting day yesterday. I went to the BizRadio MoneyFair and gave my little talk to wake everybody up in the morning, and then I attended the panel discussion later in the afternoon. After that I came for a panel discussion here at Lifestyles.
I’m going to go into the Lifestyles panel discussion ‘cause I thought it was interesting—a topic that people would not want to cover. And I’m the kind of guy that’s like if you have got a scab, pick it. You have got to dig into the problem and solve the problem.
And the issue we went through is that the deals are getting so large and some of our people are partnering with groups of people. The deals are getting better and they’re moving faster, and people are starting to realize that there’s a difference between a good operator and a bad operator and someone with good intentions and someone with bad intentions.
Business
And it’s really interesting because if you step back from it and look at it for just a second, what you’ve got is this whole paradigm that we went through the other night—that you have got about 90 percent of the people that I do business with that I know through business, whatever business it is.
And I’m not just talking about real estate now; I’m talking about everything. I’m talking about every business I’ve been in, talking about all the people we meet through the radio shows and all the different businesses you meet. But in general I find that about 95 percent of the people have integrity in what they do and about 95 percent of the people have somewhat competency at what they do. But that leaves a ten-percent gap.
There are ten percent of the people out there that either do not have integrity 100 percent or do not have competency 100 percent. Now, these people are dangerous. And the interesting point that I came to the conclusion of last night was I understand how society survives. I understand how politicians survive. I understand how the world goes round, and it’s more clear to me today than yesterday.
Breaking Laws
The bottom line is this: People who can’t do it don’t want to be hurt by it and want legislation to keep people from doing it. So what happens is is that there is that minority of individuals that break the laws—the minority who break the laws either because they’re ignorant of the laws, they just don’t understand what they’re doing, or because they have no integrity.
But because the minority is breaking the laws, the majority that ended up getting affected by them are upset and want some type of control over that. So you talk about the Bernie Madoff thing. I mean there’s a perfect example. He’s just one bad apple among a whole bunch of people that are in the financial industries. But how was it that Bernie Madoff was able to survive?
And I am here to share with you something that you don’t want to hear—it’s because of your own personal greed. It’s because you were willing to believe that some guy could give unrepresentative results in a marketplace that’s almost neutral—in other words almost everybody does the same thing. Everybody gets the same prices on bonds; everybody gets about the same price with stocks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A Negative Sell
And you have a guy here that’s promising you that he can time and time and time again double those results. Now, whether or not he can or whether or not anybody can is not really the question. The real question is do you just blindly believe that? And so your friend tells you about it, and you tell your friend, and people start saying, “Hey, I’ve got this guy.”
And you know what’s funny? I’ve been to cocktail parties like this guy’s. I remember being at cocktail parties where somebody would tell me, “Hey, my advisor is the best in the world. He’s known all over the world. In fact he won’t take your account unless you have a million dollars. And it’s almost like a negative sell. “You’d be lucky for me to lose your money for you.”
But they almost always promise that this guy has broken all the records. He has stayed ahead of the average. And the other one they always tell you is he’s guessed the market—guessed it when it was high, when the market was low, guessed when to go into gold. He was always right.
Fast Cash Greed
And you know I’d like to think there are people like that. I’d like to think I’m like that. I have found out that it’s not true. I’ve made flaws in my investment career. I didn’t guess black Monday right. I did it wrong. And when it dropped precipitously I felt, “Wow! Here’s an opportunity to make some fast cash.” And my greed jumped all over me, and I went ahead and bought. In the second day it dropped again another hundred points, and so I lost a lot of money.
So the question is who keeps these crooks alive? Is it really the police that keep you from getting hurt by the crooks? The police only get to wipe up the mess. That’s always the way it is. Locks keep honest people honest. Crooks know how to pick locks. They know how to cut them off. They know how to circumvent them. They know how to get into a safe, and they know how to get into your pocket.
And when someone starts to talk to you about something that’s too good to be true that can’t be proved that has no documentation behind it whatsoever that can actually be tracked, where the documentation is filled with assumptions and filled with disclosure, then you need to ask yourself, “Am I just kidding myself? Am I the one that’s selling myself into something for nothing, instantaneous gratification diseased idea? Is that what I’m really thinking about here?”
Disagreement
It’s interesting. It really is. Because I was sitting there and I was thinking to myself everybody—it was like there were 300 people in the room— 200 people probably and 180 of them are saying, “I don’t get it.” Everybody agrees on what is the right thing to do.
No one’s really in disagreement of that except for about ten people who have had very bad experiences with about ten people and all 190 other people are going, “I don’t get it. Why is there a problem?” And the problem, my friends, is because our society is filled with “ten percenters.”
