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 168 - What if the bite we took wasn’t knowledge, but distraction?
We challenge the myth that more information equals more truth and connect an ancient story to our modern screen habits. We invite you to step out of the feed, join a living community tonight, and start a simple revolution: put the phone down and reclaim your attention.
• social media as facade and source of toxic comparison
• loneliness, shared struggles, and the need for community
• why holidays and local shuls are an easy onramp
• information addiction as a false sense of control
• Eden, the tree of knowledge, and modern distraction
• the Apple symbol as cultural mirror, not coincidence
• practical steps for a phone fast and presence at home
• reorienting attention to spouses, children, parents, and faith
Get into a community because if you ever want to have the best time of your life, it’s this new year!
Until next time, have a spectacular day!
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Trust Factor, the podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. We are continuing to address the main issues that we are dealing with. I'm kind of stopped right here in the book because there is so much to talk to you and to appeal to your head and to your heart with just where we are right now in the book. There's just so much we can talk about that it really doesn't end because at the end of the day, the reason that I'm doing this is not just to get through a book. The reason I'm doing this is to get into your heads and to get into your hearts, to deliver to you information that is good and real and true, that you can then implement, that you can then put into practice today and not delay living a spectacular life because we are all in this together. And I can tell you that a lot of the vices that we have, we share. A lot of the challenges that we go through, we share. We're not alone. A lot of us think we're alone. We think that we're in this fight alone, that nobody else is dealing with it, that we're not good enough, that everybody else has their stuff together. Why? Because that's what we see. You open up social media and you don't see the bad stories. You don't see people sharing the negative things in their lives or the challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis. What do they share? They share their experiences, their wonderful experiences that they only get to experience once in a very short while or once in a lifetime. That you get exclusive access to. But you don't get to see the behind the scenes. They never show you the difficult part. They just put the smile on for the camera to show you how wonderful and how blessed their lives are, and it's really unfair and it's wrong. People should not be doing that. And for that reason alone, social media can be very toxic. But everybody's out there showing you their vacations and their fancy meals and all of their celebrations and all of their friends and their parties and their good times and their smiles, all the wonderful things. Nobody's showing with you or sharing with you the challenges that they face, my friends. It is all a facade. It really is. Tonight is an important night. If you haven't connected with the community yet, go out. Rush out today. Go online, figure out who's the closest to you and go. If you don't have an Orthodox shul around you, take a walk, you'll find a Chabad. There's one around you, and I guarantee you, tonight, tomorrow night, specifically, wherever you are depending, you will have the best time of your life. This is the time to go. It's not the time to go on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when you haven't been all year and you haven't connected to Judaism, and you go when there's when there's a marathon of prayers and fasting and and and and not bathing and all that kind of stuff where it's just it's difficult and challenging. If that's when you're gonna go, but you don't go the rest of the year, boy, are you doing yourself a disservice. Go tonight, go tomorrow night. Your outlook will change. This will be the beginning. The same way we read Bereshit, the same way we read about the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, that new beginning can also take place in your life. Now I want to connect back because yesterday we talked about this. One of the vices that we all have in this world, I don't care who you are, is your cell phone, is your computer, your laptop. Your desire to connect back to information that is online. And wow, is there ever information? We are living in an information age. If nothing else, we have so much information available to us. And my suggestion to you, as I said yesterday, is that that is what is dragging us down. That is what is killing us, our constant desire to know what's happening. Why? Because it gives us a false sense of control, a false sense that I've got my thumb on the pulse and that we know what's going on, and therefore we have a sense of calm. But it's so wrong because the stuff that we're reading is all just designed to go against reality. You know, there's this concept that if you just tell people the opposite of truth, you will get them mad because down deep we all are striving for truth. That's why people will go online and they will call white black and black white. They will say blue is red and red is blue. Why? Because it gets a rise out of you. It gets you ignited on the inside because you can't accept the fact that somebody is so blatantly calling right, wrong and wrong right. So you go and you fight it and you'll comment on it, and you'll get upset and you'll find people who are actually espousing the truth, and then you'll try and counter the argument. It's a trap. It's a trap, my friends. And I'm talking to myself here. You guys are just listening to my conversation. And if it happens to be that you fit into this equation also, then guess what? We're in this together. And the reality is that it is designed for us to fail. Let me connect it back to Torah for you guys. And if you go to Shul this week, you will see exactly what I'm talking about. God creates the world and he creates this place called the Garden of Eden. And it's always referred to in this world. Whenever you're at a wedding or you're at an event and somebody refers to the Garden of Eden, they're talking about utopia. They're talking about a perfect world, and that's exactly what it was supposed to be. God created it in order for it to be a utopia. We were never supposed to get out of there, and we were never supposed to die, and we were never supposed to sin and err. We were supposed to be connected to God all day, every day, and live this divine, beautiful, perfect life where we could just benefit from everything that God has to give us. But we failed. We sinned. And how does the story go? God takes Adam and Eve and he puts them in the Garden of Eden. And he says, Here, this is all for you. I created the heavens and the earth, the galaxies, the universe, the four seasons, food, all this enjoyment, all the animals, the seas, the animals within the sea, everything I created for you, just for you to benefit from and to gain from and enjoy. But then something happened. God said, Whatever you see in front of you, you can partake of. You can eat from all of the trees of the field. All of the things that I have given you here, the sources of food you can eat and enjoy from. But there's one tree, there's one tree that I want you to stay away from. It's unbelievable, guys, how this connects to today. This is a 3,800-year-old story. It connects to 2025. God says, stay away from this tree, and you will be fine. And what ends up happening? We fail by eating from the tree. Why? What was that tree called? The tree of knowledge of good and bad. Knowledge of good and bad. Information, details, juicy information, gossip, news, social media, influencers, podcasters. Let's listen to everybody's opinion. Let's listen to what the flavor of the day is. Let's listen to a new piece of information that came out or see a new little bit of evidence that we have no idea whether or not it's fabricated, especially today, guys. You know which videos you're looking at, and you know that you can't discern right from wrong. You have no idea if it's real or if it's fake, if it's AI or if it's not. But today they're dragging you in to say, hey, we've got new information. How do you know if it's even true? But that's besides the point. The point is that we are driven. We are driven and we've always been driven, goes back to Adam and Eve. Our thirst for knowledge, our thirst for information, our thirst for truth drives us to do bad things, to behave in a foolish way that ends up hurting us. It hurt us back then. It was the original sin that Adam and Eve partook of. And because of that, we are still trying to fix it today. We're still trying to fix that sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad. And yet it is that very tree that is still sinking us in the year 2025. How do I know if you want all the proof in the world? The vast majority of you know that the story of Adam and Eve, especially by the other nations of the world, they consider the tree that Adam and Eve ate from as being an apple tree. If you look back at all the old painting paintings and relics and references back to Adam and Eve eating from the tree, they're clearly taking a bite from what seems to be an apple. Our religion, Judaism and the Gemara, tells a different story. But by the masses, it is an apple. And when you look at the very device that we started this podcast with, if you look at the very device that is in your hand for most of humanity, so many of us at one point or another had one, and you flip over your cell phone, you will see on the back not just an apple, but an apple with a bite taken out of it. If you think that's coincidence, my friends, I can assure you that Steve Jobs had no idea of this class that's being given over. I can assure you that Steve Jobs was not a Torah scholar. I can assure you that when he came out with Apple, it wasn't in order for him to give me something to talk about today. The reality is that there is a boss that runs this world. And he put that on the device so that when you turn it over and you think about what I just told you, you will know with absolute certainty that it is the very same desire and drive to gain access to information that sunk us then and it is sinking us now more even today than it did then. My friends, it's on your phone. Take a look at it. What's the takeaway? The takeaway is shut it out. Put it down. There needs to be a revolution, and I'd be the first to start it. Where we put our phones down. It's not the first thing that we reach for when our eyes can't even open in the morning. We can't even see, and yet we're reaching for our phones to see what? What are you looking for? Did something new happen? Did the world come to an end? Did Mashiach come? Everybody's reaching for their phone. Like somehow it's their lifeline. If they don't have it, then God forbid they're not gonna live. It's unbelievable. There needs to be a revolution, and like I said, I'd be the first to start if anybody wants to jump on that bandwagon. My friends, bottom line, it's a distraction. It is a distraction. We are being distracted every day of our lives. And that distraction is taking us away from our spouses, from our children, from our parents, from our community. It is designed to make us focus just on it and take away our focus from the things that matter most. The trick is to recognize it and put mechanisms in place to stop it and reverse course as fast and as efficiently as we possibly can. And maybe we'll talk about that again when we get out of the holiday. Wishing you guys all an amazing hug. And like again, like I said again, get into a community because if you ever want to have the best time of your life, it's over the next two days, my friends. Hugs and mech will speak again on Thursday.
