We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH061: How To Thrive No Matter What w/ Arnold Van Den Berg

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hi, folks. It's a great pleasure to be back with you on the Richer Wieser Happier podcast. My guest today is the great Arnold Vandenberg, who as many of you know is a really central figure in the final chapter, the epilogue of Richer Wiser Happier. And as I mentioned there, for me, he's really in many ways the embodiment of what a successful, happy, truly abundant life looks like. And there's nobody really in the investment world. I admire more than Arnold.

Starting point is 00:00:31 And hopefully in today's episode, you'll see why he's a really wonderful human being, a very successful, very smart, self-taught investor who's had a great record over 50 years at his firm's century management. But at the same time, he's also done an extraordinary job of building great relationships with his family, with friends, being a great philanthropist, helping countless other people. And he's done all of this despite incredible odds against him or somebody who grew up on the same street as Anne Frank in Amsterdam as a Jewish kid in 1939 at the start of World War II and spent the first couple of years of his life in hiding and then was smuggled into an orphanage

Starting point is 00:01:11 while his parents were in Auschwitz. So it's an extraordinary story. I had Arnold on the podcast a couple of times in the past and I'm thrilled to have him on again today. This wasn't an episode that we had planned to do and then we changed course because he had been a guest speaking, to my richer, wise, happier masterclass, and had been such an extraordinary guest and had talked about some things that I think are so important that he had realized over the last year or so, that I really wanted to bring these insights to you today on the podcast. So I hope you'll find this as helpful and inspiring and thought-provoking as I've found it. Speaking of the Richer Wiser Happier Masterclass, I want to just to tell you very quickly about this venture that I've got planned

Starting point is 00:01:55 that's coming up, which is, as many of you know, last year I had my first cohort of the Richer Wiser Happier Masterclass, which was a one-year course. And it was such a beautiful experience for me, and I hope for the people in the group, that I'm launching my second ever Richer Wiser Happier Masterclass, which starts in November. And this is for a group of between 10 and 20 people. So it's a very small group, and it's an opportunity to study directly with me over. over the course of a year. And they're extraordinary people. They were very extraordinary people last year.

Starting point is 00:02:33 And this year, just judging from the first people who have applied and been accepted in the group, they're equally remarkable. They tend to be fund managers or asset allocators, wealth advisors, CEOs. So these are very highly accomplished people. But at the same time, they're soulful and they're thoughtful and they're looking to figure out

Starting point is 00:02:54 how to build lives that are truly rich, wiser, and happier. And so what we do is we go through one chapter of the book per month in a Zoom call over two hours typically, where I talk about the themes in the book and really how to apply them, how to apply these insights to these lessons in your own life. So we're going deeper in many ways than the book. Or maybe it's not so much deeper. It's more figuring out how you apply it to yourself. So how you actually shift your own life. And I also draw on lessons from other books that I've read and things that I've learned from the interviews that I've done with many other investors. Then we also meet in person a couple of times.

Starting point is 00:03:32 For this last group, we met in New York. We also met in Omaha. And then the group liked each other so much that we ended up also meeting in London recently for a celebration over a weekend. And that's part of the joy of it is that you're building relationships with these remarkable people over the course of a year. And so it's not for everyone, but I think if you're somebody who's a really committed learner, you're really passionate about learning and about building a rich life in multiple dimensions,

Starting point is 00:04:01 please have a think about it. And it's expensive, partly because it's so time-consuming on my part, I mean, I put a huge amount into it. And partly because it's just a very small group of people over the course of a year. And so it's not for everyone, but if you're somebody who's really curious and who's really committed to building this kind of richer, wise, a happier life, please email Kyle. That's Kyle Greaves. So it's Kyle K-Y-L-E at the Investorspodcast.com. And Kyle interviews everyone who gets into the group.

Starting point is 00:04:35 And so it's a very carefully curated group of really first-rate people that we actually want to spend an enormous amount of time with. So anyway, sorry, I don't mean to sound like I'm in the advertising mode, but I wanted to let you know that this is something where we're very close to. finishing the application acceptance part of this process. So I hope this will be something that interests you. And in the meantime, as my friend Stig Bruterson would say, back to the show. You're listening to The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green, interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Hi, everyone. It's a huge pleasure to welcome Arnold Vandenberg back to the podcast. As many of you know, Arnold is the star of the epilogue of my book, Richer Weiser Happier. And I actually end the book with him because to me, nobody embodies better than he does what it really means to have a rich and abundant life. I've often described Arnold somewhat to his mystification as the single most successful person I've ever met in the investment world. We hadn't actually been planning to have this conversation today. But then last week, Arnold very kindly appeared as a guest speaker in my Richer Wiser-Hapier Masterclass. And it became really clear to me during that conversation that he's figured out some stuff in the last six months or so that I think has the potential to change your life and mind just as it's changed Arnold's. Specifically, as you'll hear, he's had this major breakthrough in his 50 year or so quest to figure out how to build a successful life by gaining control over your mind. So the game plan here is that I'm actually going to let Arnold speak a lot more than I usually would and I'm going to try to exercise self-restraint and not interrupt him too much, at least for the first chunk of

Starting point is 00:06:34 this conversation. And then I'm going to pepper him with a bunch of questions and hopefully to help you apply these insights in your own life. And my hope is that this discussion is actually going to help you not only in investing in business, but actually in every area of your life. So Arnold, welcome. Thanks so much for being here. It's my pleasure, William. Thank you. It's my honor. And please take us through what you've been learning in the last several months about this, this array of topics that might sound a little esoteric to people, right? It's about one-pointed attention and flow states and breathwork and hypnosis and getting into states of deep absorption.

Starting point is 00:07:13 But I hope it's going to become really clear that it applies to any of us who want to build happier and more successful lives as investors or beyond. So just tell us what you've learned and what you want to share with our audience. Well, as you well know, William, I have been studying the subconscious mind as a hobby for 50 years, and that desire came about with the conversation I had with my father, who had survived Auschwitz and who was on the death marches that they had to liquidate the Auschwitz concentration camps of the evidence of all the atrocities they did. But the thing that really got me is that I took up yoga for 20 years.

Starting point is 00:07:54 And during that time, old and every class, the teacher would mention some of the extraordinary feats, both physically and mentally, that yogis could do. And it always intrigued me because I was always interested in the mind, but I could never really find any physical evidence. I didn't have any scientific evidence. Well, fortunately, recently, I would say in the last six months, I ran across a physical study by, the Menninger Foundation and two scientists, Elmer and Alice Green, he was a physicist. And under laboratory conditions, they studied the yogis, and especially Swami Rama, who lived in the 70s. And the extraordinary things that he was able to do really convinced me that I had to pursue this even greater. And it really opened up another avenue that I never really understood.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And the thing that really got me interested is, first of all, what the yogis were able to do, which was unbelievable. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. But more importantly, what my father had been able to do when he was on a death march. And that's the thing that sparked my interest when I was about 16, 17 years old when my dad and I used to have talks about what happened in Auschwitz. And one of the things was that he was, he weighed only 85 pounds, He was very weak and barely could walk by the time that this happened. And he was telling me about the death march. It was sub-zero weather.

Starting point is 00:09:35 They got a slice of bread about the thickness of two slices of our regular bread. And the snow, you scraped off the guy in front of you and not wish to drink, the water that you got by melting the snow in your mouth. And the thing that he came to realize was the most important thing that he felt he could accomplish on the march was not to fall down. He said, when you fell down, they gave you such a beating that either you couldn't get up or you didn't want to get up. So he knew, and if you didn't get up, they shoot you. So he knew the most important thing in his mind, he couldn't allow himself to fall down. because once you fell down, you're basically finished. Very few people were able to get up after that.

Starting point is 00:10:23 Most of them were shot. So he said he started off concentrating on just moving his legs. He said it was so cold. He couldn't think how cold it was. He couldn't think about how far he had to go. He couldn't think about how tired he was. Nothing. He said he just couldn't think about anything else,

Starting point is 00:10:44 but just focusing on moving his leg. And he said, and that's what I did. And I said, well, pa, how did you manage to get? You were so weak. He said, you know, Arnold, and this thing stuck with me for the last 70 years. He said, there's one thing we don't understand about the mind, but it has a power that we don't understand. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, as I was focusing and I was so weak and I didn't think I could move my leg, I was so tired. He said, when I focused on my legs, I found out that I gained more energy. I said, pa, how could you gain more energy? You were so weak, you could barely move. He said, that's the thing we don't understand, but something happens when you focus the mind.

Starting point is 00:11:33 It was clear, I didn't think about anything else, but as I went along, I gained this strength that allowed me to continue on. And he said, I didn't understand it then. I don't understand it now. I'm not a psychologist, but there's something to this that we do not understand, and that's something is worthwhile finding out. Well, that stayed in my mind, and as I became an athlete, I thought about these things and started studying the subconscious mind. And then I went through a divorce many years ago, and I met a psychiatrist there. I went to his therapy. And I was telling him all the things that, you know, about my father and all that. And he says, oh, if you use that focus, that's what enlists the subconscious mind. So I started studying about the yogis and I came up with the

Starting point is 00:12:25 idea that the yogis had a word for it. It's called agrata in the sacred. And what it means it's one-pointedness. And what the yogis were able to do, is by using their breath, they feel that the secret to life, everything connected to life, starts with the breath. And they were able to control their breath. Now, just to give you an example, the average person breathes about 16 times a minute. You breathe in and then out 16 times per minute. They say that that is a state of anxiety. That's not a good, healthy thing to be doing, is to breathe that much because you're almost in a state of anxiety. They feel, through their breathing exercises, that they can increase their lung capacity

Starting point is 00:13:13 to where you normally only breathe five times per minute. So the average person is breathing way faster than they should, which impairs their energy, their creativity, their everything, their peace of mind, their inspiration, everything is related to the breath. So they did the work on that. Now, they had it to the point where they, only breath a minute. And they would get into a state what they call one-pointedness. When you were that focused and that relaxed, you're in a totally different state of mind. Now, they call

Starting point is 00:13:52 it one-pointedness, but modern psychology has changed that. There was a person, I can't pronounce his last name. His first name is Mihal, and he's got Z and 12 were different letters that I'm not even going to try to pronounce it. Yeah, it's Cheek Sent Mihai. This is the author of Flow, the psychology of optimal experience, which a lot of our listeners will have read. Yes, thank you. So he discovered the theory of Flow. He was a Hungarian-American scientist, and he called it the optimal experience. And when he showed what happens to people in Flow, you can see how they were able to do extraordinary things. Now, I keep talking about all the

Starting point is 00:14:35 extraordinary things that the yogis could do, but they are able to do things that Western science never even believed they could be doing. First of all, they can control their autonomic nervous system. That means when you are able to do that, it's like you have the software to your body. You can make it do almost anything you want it to do through the mental control of the breathing. So that's what they call one-pointedness. And me-haw, the scientist proved that when you get into that one-pointedness, it releases seven neurochemicals, which just enhance the body. One of them is called the bliss chemical. That means when you experience that, you experience bliss. Now, just to give you an example, there was another gentleman on the same

Starting point is 00:15:26 death march as my dad. They didn't know each other, but it was Victor Frankel who wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning, and he had the same experience my dad did. He said, he was marching along, and as he was marching along, he said, one of his friends who was next to him said, I hope our wives are doing better than we are. He said, that got him to thinking about his wife. And he said, he got so focused on thinking about her that he basically forgot where he was. He just was going along. he was carrying on conversation, and he said he didn't even know whether she was alive, but he literally felt her presence right there within. And he said, a thought transfixed me. And I'm quoting him, for the first time in my life, I realized that the single most important

Starting point is 00:16:21 thing that a human being can achieve and aspire to is love, the ability to love, to give and receive love. And he said, even in a desolate place like Auschwitz, a person can receive bliss in the contemplation of those they love. So that was the first reference that I ever heard that somebody is in a concentration camp, and I'll mention a couple of other ones, who actually experienced bliss by that state of mind. And that's what the yogis experienced. Now, we have this, one Swami Romney from the Himalayan Institute, and Elmer and Alice Green interviewed him under scientific conditions, and he did something extraordinary. There are several states of mind. You have beta, which we're in now, and that's about 18 to 30 hertz per second. That means your brain is

Starting point is 00:17:22 cycling 18 to 13 times per second. When you get into a slower state, of mind, like Alpha, which is a very good creative state to be in, you go to about 8 to 12 hertz. And when you get into theta, which is the ultimate state, where if you're a writer, you can write without any writer's block. If you're an athlete, you perform better than you've ever done in your life, and I've had many experiences with that. And then there's the delta state where you're asleep, which is only a half to three hertz per second. Now, what Swami Rami was able to do, he was able to go from alpha to delta, which is a sleep state, but he was fully conscious. So if you and I were in Delta, we would be south asleep. He was in Delta because they measured

Starting point is 00:18:17 his brain waves, but he was fully conscious. He was able to carry on. The other thing he was able to do is to prove that he could control the autonomic nervous system, he had to take a temperature in one arm, and in the other arm he had a completely different temperature much lower, sometimes as much as 10 degrees lower. So under those conditions, they verified what they were able to do. And that's the theory called one-pointedness and flow. And that's the state that I was very interested in. So just to stop you there for a moment and to make sure that I'm understanding this correctly, sort of to keep score for our listener and myself, for I let you go on. So one-pointedness is defined in this document that you gave me, summing up a lot of your studies, as this extreme

Starting point is 00:19:10 focus of mind on a single point or object. So for some people, if they're meditating, say it might be the breath or a mantra or maybe something you visualize. And so it's a way of getting your mind stable. So it's not dull or wavering. And so what we're talking about here is getting into these deep absorption states. So like samadhi would be one of the words that you reminded me is often used for this. So you're undistracted by your emotions, by your sensations. You don't get entangled in this stuff. So this thing that we've been talking about, about so far that sounds like a little bit esoteric, all about breath and flow states and stuff, is really important because what we're talking about is directing energy into a state of flow

Starting point is 00:19:57 or deep absorption, deep focus, which obviously is going to be really helpful with performance, whether you're an investor, a businessman, an athlete, a writer, or whatever. And so it has kind of spiritual connotations as well, because you use it in, say, Buddhist meditation where you're trying to get into into a state of, you know, say, calm abiding or insight meditation like Vipasna meditation. But so am I right in my explanation so far, Arnold? Oh, absolutely. And basically, there's three ways to get into it. Breath is one of the most important one, and the yogas use that.

Starting point is 00:20:35 But the other one is extreme focus. Like if somebody's meditating on a mantra or on a single word or something like that, that ability to concentrate at the exclusion of everything else. Now, there is a state that they talk about, Patanjali talked about it. If you can have, if you can concentrate on one thing, let's call it one word to make it simple. And you could do it for 12 seconds that's considered concentration. And I have the definition of it here. And basically what it means is by the time you can get into samadhi,

Starting point is 00:21:13 like what you're talking about, you have to be able to focus your mind without distraction for literally hours of a time. So he has degrees of focus as you go up the ladder, and the longer you can do it, the greater you get into those states. And the real pros, the real yogis, like Ayyengar, you wrote the book Pramayana, he was able to go into it for hours. Now, just think about the focus it takes, not to let your mind. switch on anything for just try it for one minute. It's almost impossible to do, but through Pratt, they were obviously able to do it. In addition to that, when you get into that state, it releases neurotransmitters, chemicals into the brain, which creates different states of mind.

Starting point is 00:22:06 In one of them, you can literally block out the pain. In the other one, you have bliss. But the idea is you're getting into a completely different state of mind, where whatever it is you're trying to achieve, whether it's writing a play, writing a book, or doing a physical contest as a competition as an athlete, you are in the perfect state of mind to be able to concentrate. Time slows down. Everything becomes clearer, and you have a state of feeling. Now, I'll give you example. Daskiyewski was an author, a Russian author, and my dad used to tell me that whenever I was going astray in high school, I was a pretty angry kid because of my experiences in the war and many other experiences. Whenever I went astray, I'd get kicked out of school for fighting or something like that.

Starting point is 00:23:03 He would say to me, he never lectured me. He said, you need to read, it's time for you to read the brother, Kalamazda, Kalamazda, by Daski Eski. Well, in high school, I wasn't into reading novels, so I never read it, but he'd always tell me. I said, well, what does it say? He said, no, I can't explain it to you. You need to read it and understand it. It's not just me telling you something. I said, okay, well, 30 or 40 years ago, I was in a bookstore with my wife, and she was seeking up books for the kids. And I said, oh, look around, see if I can find the books. I'm looking around. I see this wall of blue books. And they're all different titles. I thought, why would they have all these books with the

Starting point is 00:23:48 different titles and they all look same cover? Well, it turns out it was a competitor of Cliff Nodes called Spark Nodes. And I looked through and I saw the classic and all of a sudden I saw the brother Karamazeth. And I thought, oh my God, I got to read this thing. It was only 60, 70 pages. So I bought the book and I was just stunned. My knees got weak. I opened it up, and the third page that I turned to it, it said, Daski Eski's experience was this in the concentration camp. He was in a Gulag, a Russian gulark, like Solzhenitsyn. Only he was in there for four years, Zoltsin was in there for eight years. You can imagine being in a gulag for eight years. But what Dostkieski talked about was the amazing experience of the inhumanity that was going on that he observed and experienced.

Starting point is 00:24:42 And he said, a thing really got his attention is the people who were able to survive the inhumanity the best were people of the greatest character. And he said, character was the defining way, the way people dealt with it. And so he promised himself that once he got out of the Gulloch, if he was ever to get out, he would write plays. And in the play, he would depict a person who thought a certain way and acted a certain way and how his life would end up. And that's what my dad was trying to tell me is that the way I was acting, it was not

Starting point is 00:25:22 going to be a great future for me. That's what he was trying to point out. But the thing that really got my attention, it turned to one of the pages and it says, Above all, do not lie. So one of his principles that he developed is, do not lie, because when you lie, you lose the ability to discern the truth in yourself and others. Now think how profound that is, and modern neuroscience backs it up, that when you lie, it distort your mind. You start to believe something that's not real. And you keep on distorting your life that way. And eventually, you lose the consciousness of even telling a lie. And the more you do that, the bigger the lie gets

Starting point is 00:26:06 and eventually you get found out, you lose credibility. So the first thing he's had is above all, do not lie because you lose the ability to discern the truth in yourself and others. The second thing that happens is you lose respect for yourself and others. You don't treat people as well. You don't treat yourself as well. And the third thing that happens is you lose the ability to love. And all of my studies in these situations point out, as Victor Frankel said, the greatest thing a human being can aspire to is to experience love. And when you lose that ability, you lose the ability to love. You lose the ability to experience the greatest thing in the world in life. Love. Then he went further. And he said, when you lose that ability, you lose the ability,

Starting point is 00:26:54 the ability to love, you become an empty gong. You never feel fulfilled because you're lacking something that's so vital to a human experience. So you pursue the course of life, gambling, sex, drugs, you know, things of that nature. And he said, when you pursue the course pleasures of life, you become morally depraved. And it all started off with a lie. And that sentence stunned me. Because here I am, I heard about it all my life, and then I open up the book, and in the third page, it's got this statement. It was just like my dad was standing there reading this to me. But I realized by reading it myself and experiencing it, how profound that was. So just think about what character does for people. You hear about in order to be

Starting point is 00:27:49 successful, you have to be honest and credible and so forth. most people don't realize that they lose the greatest thing in life to experience is love, and they lose it by lying, a simple thing like lying. And so that had a real profound thing. And here's the other thing. Daski Eski talks about experiencing bliss in the same circumstances because he got so involved in writing his books in his mind that he experienced one pointedness.

Starting point is 00:28:21 Now, the other example is Solzhenitsyn. He was in the camp for eight years, and he was also thinking about writing his experiences. And he talks about one instance, and this guy, Mihel, who developed this theory of flow, he talks about this Solzhenitsin experience. He says Solzhenitsin was standing there with a bunch of dejected prisoners, and they were getting screamed at with the guards and whipping their, machine guns at him and everything, and he said, I was in a total state of bliss. I was both happy and free, and I was completely in transcendence. It wasn't like I was even there. I was completely happy, and more importantly, I felt free. He said, other prisoners felt that the only way to get out of this prison was to break through the bomb wire and try to escape. He said, I never viewed it that way. I was able to escape through the mind. So what we found out through our studies in pursuing these things about the mind that you get into different states that can help you achieve, whatever it is you want to achieve. But think about when we are talking about analysts,

Starting point is 00:29:40 what could be more critical to an analyst than his ability to discern the truth in himself and others. If you are studying something and you can't discern the truth, how are you going to ever make a good decision? It's going to affect your thinking and it has nothing to do with intelligence. It's a completely different state of mind. And that's the thing that I came to realize. But the most profound thing that I got from it, and it almost blew my mind when I listened to Solzhenitsyn and he ended his whole dissertation about what happened to him in the camp. And he said, one of the things that I learned is that most people are only as happy as they make up their minds to be. Now, think about this, William. Being in a concentration camp for eight years and talking about happiness.

Starting point is 00:30:33 I mean, who would ever think that you could even think about that? And he's saying that you're only as happy as you make up your mind to be. So what this teaches me is that whatever happens in your life, irrespective of unbelievable experiences, your control under your mind determines how you end up, how you survive, and how you deal with it. And that's what people need to learn. We think about we have some problems in this life. We live in America, free country, we have all the opportunity and all that. And we have disappointments, depression, and experience and so forth and so on. And to think that under these conditions, you can still be happy if you learn how to think and use your mind.

Starting point is 00:31:22 That's pretty amazing. And that's what I got out of the not only what the yogis were able to do, but what these people. And then there was another example that he mentions. there was a Vietnamese prisoner who was a pilot. He got shot out over Vietnam, and he was in a prison for years. So he lost 80 pounds as a pilot, so let's say he was 180 to 200 pounds, and he lost 80 pounds. He was probably the same weight as my dad, and 85 to 100 pounds. He was totally emaciated, and he got out of the Vietnamese prison, and he got together with his fellow officers who grieve him, at him and were happy to see him. And they asked him, what would you like to do today? And he says,

Starting point is 00:32:10 well, I'd luck to play a game of golf. And they said, golf, in your condition, you want to play golf? He said, I played golf every day in my mind. I played 18 whole course, and I picked my clubs carefully, just like you do in the game. And I played it every day in my mind, and that's how I got through the camp. And I had some wonderful games. So when he got out, they played golf, and the officers were just shocked at his ability to play, even though he hadn't played for years. He had only played in his mind. And of course, I've read many books about the Russians, how they used their training behind. It's called Sheila Ostrandler wrote a book. the human experience is behind the Iron Curtain.

Starting point is 00:33:02 And she talked about how the Russians were practicing all these techniques, kind of like the yogis to were able to accomplish these kind of things. And so it's just all over, whether you go into the Kabbalah, the Jewish ancient tradition, whether you go into the yogis, Pontiangiala 2,000 years ago, and you go into all the major religion. I was just reading recently about a man, a Dutchman by the name of Schultz, and he is a Sufi from the Sufi religion. And he practices the same mental thing,

Starting point is 00:33:39 and he demonstrated that he could take a big needle and run it right through his arm and pull it out. And he wouldn't bleed. He wouldn't get infected. He completely withstand pain and do all kinds of extraordinary things. that the yogis did. So there are many examples of this kind of behavior that can be induced with it. The thing that I found the most interesting is that when you take the top scientist in studying physical fitness as to what determines a well-lived life or longevity, they say it isn't a diet,

Starting point is 00:34:21 It isn't the exercise. It's the lung breath. It's the capacity of your lung to exercise your lungs. And that determines the greatest wellness, how well you live physically, mentally, and how long you live. And one of the gentlemen that we study is a man by the name of Stig Seperson. He's a deep diver. What they do is they go down and they hold the breath. Now, take a look at how he was able to, through the yogi principles and through the breathing, developed his breath to where he could hold it for 22 minutes. Now, if you ask most doctors how long you could ask your breath, they'd say,

Starting point is 00:35:12 five or six minutes and that's about it. This guy does it for 22 minutes. and I understand, although it hasn't been validated, I understand that somebody recently broke his record and he got it up to 24 minutes. So, you know, it just goes on and on. But the point I'm making is this is something extraordinary. Now, Stakes Sefferson said that the secret to building up your breath is to do some of the exercises that I have reviewed in the report. Now, we did an extensive study because I was very interested in how the breath could really help somebody physically and especially healing themselves. So I took the top 10 diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes,

Starting point is 00:35:58 you know, all down the line. And I looked up all the different breathing techniques that you can use to enhance those kind of diseases. And I came up with, I believe, 62 of them. I wrote that in a report, anybody who's interested in it, we'd be happy to send them the report, no charge. But in this report that I have is 37 pages. I talk about five or six that are simple to use because most people don't want to get into figuring out which one of the 60 ones is the best for them. But I've used some basic ones. And the one that I like is just a simple technique that anybody can do any time

Starting point is 00:36:43 and I do it whenever I had the chance to build up my lung capacity. It's Dr. Wilde, he was a Harvard-trained medical doctor. He was in Arizona. He's well-written, many books on the subject of health. He's kind of off-the-charts type of think here. He doesn't necessarily follow modern medicine, but he's a Harvard-training doctor. And he developed the 47-8 routine. That means you breathe in for four seconds, you hold your, then you hold your breath for seven seconds,

Starting point is 00:37:21 and then you blow out the breath for eight seconds. So in that basis, you would be doing three breaths per minute. Still not as good as the yogis who do one per minute, but a lot better than 16 that the average person does. And then there's a sporeometer which I sent for, and I even got one once when I was in the hospital, it measures your breath, so you take in, and it measures the milliliters of breath that your lungs can take. So I started practicing my breath control. Well, it was really shocking. I'm 86, I had to think about that, I'm 86, and under 85 and over, they said, if you get up to 2,200 milliliters, whatever's on the gauge there, you're doing very well. Well, I started at that, and now I'm up to 4,500 milliliter.

Starting point is 00:38:18 So I've doubled my capacity based on my age group. Now, I'm sure a young person could do better than that, but I'm speaking per age, because what they say is as you get older, your lungs start to lose elasticity, they lose cells, and they just get weaker, just like a muscle. And if you don't use it the proper way, then obviously you're going to lose it. one of the things that really got me interested, there's a man by the name of James Nestor, and he wrote a book, which we have in the report, we mentioned it, and he had all kinds of medical problems. He had pneumonia three years in a row. Every time he got cured, there was

Starting point is 00:39:02 something else going wrong. And the doctors finally told him, you know what, James, we've done everything we could for you, but we don't think we can help you. But if you're really, desperate and open-minded, we know of a course that is taught by the yogis, that if you take it, we send people to it because we don't agree with it, we don't believe in it, but it works for them. So if you want to just take a stab at it, go ahead and take the course. You have nothing to lose. We don't have anything else to offer you. So he said, okay. So he took the course and he said, he's sitting in there and they're going through breathing exercise. He's a pretty intelligent guy's a writer and his mind just drifting all the time and he said

Starting point is 00:39:48 he was so bored he couldn't stand it. So he was going to quit it and the doctor said, one thing you have to do is you have to complete the course before you can make a judgment on it because it may sound mundane, but that's what you got to do. So one of the exercises was they put you in a real cold room. I mean, it was almost freezing in the room. And they said, he said, well, what are we doing here? He says, we want to demonstrate that by using the proper breathing technique, you can raise your temperature in cold weather. And so we're in a room that's very cold now, and let's do the exercise. And he thought, now this is getting ridiculous. You know, he's freezing there. He said he started doing the

Starting point is 00:40:33 exercise and pretty soon he was perspiring. And he said, that really got his attention. So from then on in he was sold and he wrote this book and he traveled all over the world investigating all the different techniques. It's certainly worth reading his book. He's a very well-educated man. Has all kinds of different theories about life. But he was totally convinced that this is a method. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right.

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Starting point is 00:45:04 That's Shopify. dot com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. So, Arnold, to bring some of this stuff together that you've explained so far,

Starting point is 00:45:17 when you and I talked about this the other day, you were saying, the reason you got hugely excited about this is that you started to realize that there were all of these techniques to get you into this kind of deep, absorbed state, whether through breathing techniques or hypnosis or whatever it might be that enable you to get

Starting point is 00:45:38 into this state of flow and that you started to look back on your own life and realize, oh, that's how I became a champion athlete. Oh, that's how I managed to launch my business and become a really successful investor. And so am I right in thinking that there's a sort of, you're starting in a way with the discoveries of the last six months to put together all of these pieces, to join the dots and say, oh, now I get that there's a way of getting into this deep, into this state of deep absorption and focus on one-pointedness that actually turns out to be unbelievably powerful for your career, for your health, for your investment life, for your athletic performance, whatever it might be. Is that a fair summary? It's a very good summary

Starting point is 00:46:25 because only in looking back can I appreciate how this has influenced my life. For example, as I mentioned, my parents were both in Auschwitz and the concentration camp. We were born in Amsterdam, Holland. You did the study on that. And my life was saved by a 17-year-old girl who risked her life to smuggle me through the German lines with a fake password. And then I was put into an orphanage because my folks went into hiding. And I was about two and a half years old. And when I got out of the orphanage, I looked like the kids that come out of concentration camp. And it wasn't that they were trying to starve us. They were just in a war zone. There was lack of food and water. And I was so weak and skinny that I couldn't even walk at age seven.

Starting point is 00:47:17 And my dad said when he picked me up, he said he was afraid to pick me up because my bones were sticking out so much. He was afraid he might break one. So I was in a very weak in state, and when we moved to this country, I had a lot of problem concentrating. I had a lot of emotional problems. I didn't even know what they were, but they were obviously there. I didn't do well in school. My dad enrolled me in the Hebrew school when I first kind of kindergarten level, and I didn't pass it. So the rabbi and him were trying to tell me that they were going to put me into a different class, I wasn't going with the other kids, not because I fail, but because this new class was better suited for me. Well, even as an eight

Starting point is 00:48:04 or nine-year-old, I could tell that wasn't the truth. They were just trying to make me feel better. But I realized that, and my mom hired a child psychologist to determine what could be done with me to get my weight up and get my strength back up and get my mental program going. And the doctor concluded that I might have had because of malnutrition, it might have affected my brain developed. And, you know, learning about that as a kid, that doesn't do much for yourself image when you go to school and you don't do well. And then the psychologist tells you that it's because of malnutrition, it affects your subconscious and it affects your thinking of yourself image.

Starting point is 00:48:50 A matter of fact, I always viewed myself as not being too smart. And to show you how other people saw me that way, in my annual, one of my buddies wrote, Arnold, you're about the coolest guy I know, Hope will always be friends. You're kind of dumb, but you're still cool. So that was the opinion of a good friend. And I didn't even get mad. If somebody would have said that to me today, I get upset about that. but it didn't bother me because I thought that was the way it was.

Starting point is 00:49:21 So I had to overcome these things. Well, one of the things that I overcame is I got involved in the rope climbing because I walked in the gym with my brother who was a rope climbing, and he grew up on a farm. He was a very strong kid, so he didn't suffer like I did on the malnutrition. And the coach had him climb rope because he was one of the strongest kids in the gym. So my brother said to me one day, why don't you come in the gym, and these guys have got big builds and they're strong,

Starting point is 00:49:48 and you climb the rope and you build up your strength. So he introduced me to the coach, who is this gentleman over here on my wall, who changed my life, who believed in the fact that I could be a good road climber, despite the fact that he had no evidence. But the bottom line of it is I really got focused into that, and I used to wake up at the middle of the night at 3.30 because I developed a new technique and I was practicing it. I couldn't go to sleep. And at 3.30, I'd wake up every night. I do my routine practicing it and developed it. And I became a championship road climber. I won the lead

Starting point is 00:50:29 three years in a row, set the school record. The school record was never broken. They discontinued the event after 15 years. And I climbed in the National AAU against all college seniors in high school, and it plays ninth in the nation. So I really was able to look back and see how this fanaticism about wanting to overcome my physical handicap, I became one point of this. I mean, you couldn't talk to me about anything else but rope climbing. That was it for six years. And I used to climb for two hours a day. And I became a very good champion. And then I went to a psychiatrist after I mentioned I went through a divorce and I went into five years of depression. And I didn't understand why I was so depressed. And, but what I learned is I was building my business at the time. And I read an article

Starting point is 00:51:25 that one of my problems was at 3.30 in the afternoon, I would be so tired. I couldn't move. It was like I worked 3.30 in the morning. And I read this article that if you hypnotize yourself and you go to a hypno nap, it's the equivalent of three-hour sleep. So I thought, oh my God, if I could learn to do this. So I bought the book by Lesley or Kron. It's a basic thing, how to self-hypnotize yourself. And after 10 days, I would laying down on the ground, on the floor in my office, I'd put myself up for 20 or 30 minutes, and it would be 3.30 in the afternoon. I could work until 10, 30, 11 o'clock at 9. It wasn't even tired. So that really excited. me, that was the first thing that realized what my dad used to say, there's something about the

Starting point is 00:52:14 mind we don't understand. And so I was telling the psychiatrist about it how I became a successful rope climber. He said, you know, Arnold, that is the power of the subconscious mind. You literally programmed yourself without even realizing it by just being so focused on this. Now, if you'll do the same thing with your business, same thing's going to happen. As soon as he said that, my right arm lit up. And whenever my right arm lights up, it's like there's a great truth. Somebody says something really profound or something really profound happens to me, and I get chills on my right arm.

Starting point is 00:52:53 As soon as he said that, I knew it was a truth. So I went home. I was living in a studio apartment. I cleared out everything in the room, pictures. I lined up with all the books I had to read to study to become an investment counselor. and I just made a commitment that right then and there I was going to build my business. But the problem is I didn't do very well at high school, early graduated from high school. I had no physical training. I didn't go to college, so there was no courses I took.

Starting point is 00:53:26 I just decided to study it on my own. And I had the good fortune of running through Benjamin Graham's work. But that was not an easy thing because I got into the market at the top. of the market in March of 68, the market bottomed out in this, topped out in December, and it was six years of bear market where the market went straight down, almost straight down for six years, from 68 to 74. And by the time I got into 74, I learned something very interesting. I was selling mutual funds for a company, and that was my business. So I didn't pretend to know that anything about the market. I was just a salesman for this mutual fund company, and I was working with a broker. You can pick any fund you want. And I happened to pick 15 funds,

Starting point is 00:54:19 and whenever I get a client, I'd diversify the 15 funds into the portfolio. Well, what was interesting, as I was going through the bear market, I noticed that where seven or eight of the funds did really well during a bad bear market. And it wasn't anything that I was any knowledge of mine, it was just done luck. I picked these guys sounded great, and these guys sounded good. And then there was seven or eight that just got obliterated. One of them was the O'Neill Fund that went out of business. And there were a few just like that.

Starting point is 00:54:53 So I thought to myself, here's the same market, six years of bear market. And these six or seven funds have performed admirably well. That doesn't mean they didn't go down. They just didn't get Bertrand. and the other ones just got butchered. So I thought, what is the difference in these people? So I started calling the Mutual Fund Manager and I'd go to their meetings. And every one of them was a disciple of Benjamin Graham.

Starting point is 00:55:21 So that taught me a very important lesson that Benjamin Graham, who was the father of security analysis, he was Warren Buffett's mentor. That was a science that he developed. And so I got everything I could get my hand. I'd lined all my walls, took my pictures down. I wouldn't do anything but study those books, and I had a goal each month I wanted to finish a certain amount of books so I could get through them all. So one time, just an interesting story about one pointedness, I met this girl who was a friend of a buddy of mine in the Army, and while we're in the Army, he used to tell me,

Starting point is 00:55:58 Arnie, you got to meet my cousin Barbara. She is just a auntie. You guys would get along real great. And I said, well, Jerry, the problem is I'm married, so I can't obviously date her. Then he found out I got a divorce. He says, Arnie, you got to come to Boston, man. You got to meet this girl. And I said, well, coincidentally, the insurance company is sending me to a training school in Boston. So I'm going to come there and I can meet her then. So I said, okay, I was divorced about four or five years at the time.

Starting point is 00:56:26 So I met him, we got along great, and then we decided that I wasn't going to be flying to Boston. I couldn't afford to fly back and forth, and she wasn't going to come to L.A. did it, so it was real nice meeting you, but nothing was going to ever come out of it. But anyway, one day I got a call, and she says, guess what, Arnie? My girlfriend and I are moving to L.A. I said, oh, that's great. So we started dating, got along real great, and I was really attracted to a very lovely girl. So anyway, one night she tells me, why didn't you come over for dinner? I'll cook you some dinner. and we'll hang out Wednesday night. And I said, oh, I can't do that because I'm studying that night. She says, oh, I didn't know you were going to school. I said, no, I'm not going to school. I've just got

Starting point is 00:57:12 a reading program. She says, what do you mean? I said, well, I have the books lined up. And by this month, I want to have these finished. And this month, I want this. And I have the gold said, I read so many pages each day. And if I didn't do it, I get behind. So I forced myself to read the pages so I could get through the books. She says, well, what happens if you don't read it one night? I said, well, then it delays finishing the book by one day. She says, what are you stunning to be a monk? And at that time, I didn't even get it. You know, I said, no, I'm studying to be an investment counselor. She rolled her eyes and she said, okay. And just after that, I thought, oh, my God, I didn't get it. And it told my buddies about it, they all laughed about

Starting point is 00:57:59 But talk about one pointedness. I mean, that's how focused I was in wanting to become an investment counselor. So that influenced my thinking. Now, I didn't have any particular knowledge of the subconscious mind. It just came to me that this is what you have to do to be successful. And that's what my dad left in my mind about the mind. But then when I got to the psychiatrist, he was really into the subconscious mind. but he wasn't in the hypnosis.

Starting point is 00:58:32 Well, I went there for five years, and he was a tremendous mentor, and he explained to me and told me all the books to read and so forth, and I got really into it. And I said, you know, Dr. Ramald Jack, if the subconscious can do all these things, I should be studying it all my life. Why don't people spend their life studying the subconscious?

Starting point is 00:58:54 I mean, it's like having a computer program. And he said, you know what, Arnold? Everybody would be a lot better off if they understood it, and my job as a psychiatrist is to educate people to do it. But if you're into it, I can't encourage you enough. And I said, okay, so anyway, I ended up get, I left his practice, and then I got married to my wife, and we were trying to have a baby. I think I told you the story once. And we couldn't have a baby. So she was checked out. I was checked out. No reason not to have a baby except for five or six years. We didn't have one. So I got thinking about it and I thought, you know, I bet you I have a block against having a

Starting point is 00:59:41 baby. So I thought, what could have given me that block? Then I thought of my mom. All my life, she told me, it's okay to get married, but don't ever have any kids. So I said, why not? She says, look, you know what my, your dad and I went through the war? When we were sending you to the orphanage with the girl that was with the fake passport, the orphanage was going to call us and tell us when you got there. Well, the trip was about 45 minutes and after an hour, we started wondering, we should be getting the phone call. Two hours later, we still didn't get the phone call.

Starting point is 01:00:20 I kept telling your dad, we got to go to the butcher shop to make a call. because we got to find out whether they made it or not. He says, mom, you can't go on the street. We don't have a password. You get on there. They're going to catch us and send us to Auschwitz. And the kids aren't going to have any parents. So she said, okay, but after four hours, she told them,

Starting point is 01:00:43 if you don't go with me, I can't stand it anymore. I got to go. If you don't want to go with me, it's okay. I understand I'm going by myself. So my dad said, what could I say? I couldn't let her go by herself. I knew she was going to get caught. He said, Mania, she said, no, I'm going to go.

Starting point is 01:01:01 So he said, okay, I had to go. I said, pa, how could you let her take you down there? He said, have you ever argued with your mother? And he had a big smile on his face. She knew what was going to have. I said, yeah, I got it. He said, once your mother makes up her mind, that's it. You either go with it or you don't.

Starting point is 01:01:21 And I could not live with myself if I let her go, knowing that she was going to get caught, and there she is all by herself. So I went, we got caught, and around the Auschwitz, and my mom said, every night when I went to sleep, I thought, I wonder if my kids made it. She said, Arnold, that was a greater torture than anything they did to me in Auschwitz, just to lay there at night and wonder whether my kids got it. And then to think about what they did the kids when they did catch them. So she said, it wasn't worth it to me to have kids. So that's why I didn't. So the proof of it is I have three brothers. None of them have biological children. And I didn't have a biological children. So I called them up and I said,

Starting point is 01:02:07 Dr. Ramblechak, I think I know where the block is. I think my mom brainwashed me into not having kids. As I got older, I said, no, I'm going to have kids, but I'm not going to tell her because I'll just say it was an accident. And that's what happened. But I felt that probably subconsciously I had bought into the program when I was younger. So I said to Dr. Ramal Jack, how would you like to do an experiment? I'd like to have you regress me back under hypnosis and see if we can find that block and remove it. Well, in three sessions, we found the block. He removed it.

Starting point is 01:02:47 One morning I woke up even before my wife and I said, boss, this month you're going to be pregnant. She goes, oh, no, I'm so discouraged. Sure enough, she was pregnant. Now I have a daughter. So she's in their 50s now. And I don't think I would have had her if it wasn't for the hypnosis. So that's the kind of thing that you really get from the different states of mind. I think you've made a really, really compelling case that the course of our life is really deeply influenced by how we think, by taking charge of our inner life. It's going to affect everything from our work to our health, whatever it is. I want to kind of try to make this now really practical for our listeners who these are people who are trying to build businesses, who are trying to get financial independence,

Starting point is 01:03:37 who are trying to get good health, balance their work life and their family life and the like. And you're 86 years old. You've had an incredibly successful career. You've had a really happy 50-year marriage to Ily and you've had tremendous success with your business, which is now 50 years old, century management. And so I want to take you through a series of actual tactics, techniques, tools that you've used and quiz you about them so that we can give our listeners and viewers something to hold on to something sort of very tangible about what works. And so I'm going to take you through a bunch of these things, if I may. And the first, we've talked about how to get into these, how important it is to get into these states like alpha and theta, these states where

Starting point is 01:04:23 you're more likely to be in flow, you're more likely to think very calmly and be one-pointed. You started to hypnotize yourself, as you said, after your first marriage went wrong and you were going through this period of depression. And you learned this technique in about 10 days, and you still use much the same technique every morning. Can you explain it just in a really practical way as one tool that our listeners can use? Yes. In matter of fact, what I would like to do when I explain it, I have, when I have 750 pages, I have three notebooks, 200 pages each 250, that have all my notes and all my articles and pieces of books that I put in together because I figured one of these days I want to leave this to people so that they can benefit from

Starting point is 01:05:16 all the things that I've benefited from. And I'm not interested in selling it or writing a book or publishing or anything like that. I just want to give it out to people because it could be life altering. And I've used it to people who, like my son, who developed a tremendous successful career in sports, were in track and field. He was a shot putter, but he wasn't built to be a shot putter. It was just this dream to be a shot putter. And I convinced him he could be successful, even though he was 5-9, 200 pounds at the heaviest, and he competed against guys, 64, 240 pounds, you know, typical shot putter, and he beat these guys. So we did that through hypnosis. We hypnotize him every meat. Matter of fact, for six years, he used to kid,

Starting point is 01:06:06 I'm the only 18-year-old that the dad tucks him in to go to sleep because I would hypnotize him every night and put him out for the training of the mind. But I also have, if somebody was to ask me and say, who do you think wrote the best few pages on what you can accomplish in the subconscious mind? And if you don't mind, I'd like to read this. It's probably take maybe a minute or so, and I can get them all in. And that'll give you the overview. This is a guy who studied the subconscious mind for 50 years.

Starting point is 01:06:44 unlike me, I did it as a hobby. This guy was a professional. He was a psychologist, and he spent 50 years of his life, and he summed it up in four statements. Can I read those? Sure. And then we're going to get to the practical techniques. Okay. Yeah, yeah. First, you are the architect of your destiny. Every experience or condition in your life, poverty or righteous, success or failure, health or illness is the result of action and purpose, set in motion by you. Secondly, within the area of your life, you have creative power. You can make a mental image or blueprint of the progress and expansion you want to achieve,

Starting point is 01:07:25 and by impressing the concept of your objective upon your subconscious mind, you can cause the condition you visualize in your mind to be created. The force behind all progress and achievement is energy created and applied by the mind. Third, you are irradiating power. By expanding your consciousness, you can attract what you want. The universe cannot and does not give you anything. It does give you, however, the power and challenges to achieve to create for yourself conditions and resources you want. You can have anything you want, provided you're willing to pay the prize. Fourth, you are the building and directing power of your life. Life develops only by mental, emotional,

Starting point is 01:08:11 power from within. Mental and emotional process is creating control all that comes into your experience. Nothing has ever been, is now or ever will be that is not the result of man's action. Since this law is universal and inescapable, it follows that man has essential freedom of action in determining the content of his experience. And that's the bottom line of it. So basically what he's saying is we are who we are and we create every circumstances in our life, both mentally and physically, by the way we think and believe. And after all my studies in the 37 pages that I will make available if you would like me to, I mentioned the fact that I came to the conclusion, after going through all these different experiences by these people, the yogis and

Starting point is 01:09:10 Duskoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn and Frankl and all these other people, is that it is what you put into your mind you receive. Now, by going into these different stages, I'd like to read some of the chemicals that happened to you that changed you into the person that you're not when you're before you go into it. First of all, when you go into flow, and this is by Mihal, whatever you call him. C-Simal something, yeah. Flow creates, releases a potent cocktail of neurochemicals.

Starting point is 01:09:50 Anandamine, known as the Bliss Formula. This formula creates a state of bliss just like marijuana does. He calls it cannabis. He said, but it's much more powerful than marijuana. and it doesn't hurt your body, it actually helps your body. So you literally could give yourself a marijuana high by getting into that state. Number two, it releases dopamine. That is the brain's reward and motivation chemical release when we anticipate or achieve something meaningful.

Starting point is 01:10:25 In one point of this, dopamine helps lock attention to a goal, fuels persistence, and makes the pursuit itself feel rewarded. So you're not working. When you're working on something you want to do, you don't, I never feel when I was at the office that I was working. I was working and achieving something I wanted achieved. That's not work. Work is doing something you don't want to do because you get paid for it. That's work. Opamine. Oxytocin, other called the bonding hormone. This is what bonds you to people. This is what happened to Victor Frankel on the death march. It bonded him to his wife, oxytocin. Neurofefferine. This brain's alertness and focuses amplify sharpening attention

Starting point is 01:11:10 and increases redidness for inaction. In one point, it helps maintain intense concentration while balancing arousal so the mind stays in the sweet spot between calm and energized. Endorphins, these natural opiates reduce pain, reduce pain and enhanced pleasure, often released during sustained physical effort or deep emotional engagement. Serotonin, the stabilizer of mood and well-being. So it lists all these neurochemicals that get you into that state of mind that's perfect. Now, I believe, if you want to direct answer, that if I had to choose the single best method to get into that state, I think that breathing and focus could do it, but it's a longer process, takes much longer to do. I think the easiest thing, and this was my exciting breakthrough,

Starting point is 01:12:09 what I learned, which I did by accident, I learned how to hypnotize myself to get my energy going so I wouldn't be too tired to finish the work. But then when I started hypnotizing my son, I started doing it to help him with his focus and his concentration and so forth. And when I was studying the brain waves that hurts, I realized it shocked me. I was so excited, I don't think I slept for three days. I thought, my God, all of this is coming together. And what I've learned, and I wrote this here, in beta, you're 13 to 30 hertz per second. In alpha, you're 8 to 12. In theta, you're 4 to 7 hertz. Now, here is the breakthrough. If you subscribe, alpha is relaxed alertness, calm focus creativity, common in light hypnosis and meditative states.

Starting point is 01:13:09 So you can get into alpha in a very simple, relaxed way, even light hypnosis. But if you get into theta, that's 4 to 7 hertz, deep relaxation, vivid imagery, creativity, early sleep, dominant in deeper hypnosis, and deep meditation. And it says, in these stages, you literally have the ability to change your views and your belief. And both of these states are in hypnosis. So what I, now, I called a bunch of people that I know are athletes, and I have a client of mine who's a star tennis player, world-class tennis player. I asked him, I said, Milo, how many times when you were playing tennis did you happen to get into flow? he said, oh, it was great when I got into it, but I never knew when I was going to get into it,

Starting point is 01:14:04 and it all happened by accident. But he said, I was only to get into it two or three percent of the 600 times that I played tennis. So I said, well, here's the good news. That state of four to seven hertz can be induced in hypnosis in seven to 11 minutes. Now, think about that. something that athletes have to do hundreds of times before they hit it, you can literally guarantee when I was doing my son, I had him competing against odds that were unbelievable. My favorite story, which I mentioned in this report, he was shot putting one time, and he fell out of the ring, and his foot got caught, so it sprained it, and he had a big knot on his foot, and we had a championship, the Southern California Junior College Championship,

Starting point is 01:14:56 which he worked on for three years was nine days away. So I took him to the doctor and I said, Doctor, we have a meat in nine days. What can you do to get him ready for the meat? And the doctor looks at him and he said, Arnold, you've got to be kidding. He's not going to be able to shot put for the rest of the season. He's out.

Starting point is 01:15:19 There's no way you're going to put that ankle back together in nine days. I mean, he's throwing a 16-pound ball, lifting with that leg. How the hell is he going to do that? I said, well, why can't he do it? He said, well, first of all, I got to put him into a cast because I can't let him ruin the ligaments, right? He said, oh, I didn't know that, but okay. He said, I said, well, why can't he shot put with the cast arm? He said, from what you showed me, he's spinning around the ring. He's going to spin around the ring in a cast. I mean, doesn't that throw his momentum off? I said, oh, The subconscious can adjust for that.

Starting point is 01:15:58 That's not a problem. He said, okay, there's one more problem. He's going to be under extreme pain. The reason he can't step on that foot right now is because it hurts like him. And even in the cast, it's going to hurt just the same. I said, well, I'll anesthetize him under hypnosis. And he goes, hey, I'm not into that.

Starting point is 01:16:21 I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll put him in the cast, and you take him from there. I said, okay, so we prepared. I developed a special program. I rented a hotel room next to the meet. I put him under hypnosis. And then I said, when he went on the field, he walked on the field, everybody thought, who's this guy with the cast on? He's going to be competing. So anyway, I said, here's what I want you to do, Scott. I want you to just take a few spins and just get the feel of it and the flow of it. And then when everything is working right, then you go for the win.

Starting point is 01:16:58 He said, Dad, how am I going to win with the cast? I said, you're the best guy out there. He had the best shot put in the nation and junior college that year. I said, you're the best out there. If nothing is a problem, you're going to win hands down. There's no question about that. He said, you're right. So he took a couple of spins, and then he had that classical look.

Starting point is 01:17:20 on his face, both eyes blazing, his just totally focused. So I'm standing next to the coach and I said, we're going to win today. He said, you guys drive me nuts. He couldn't believe what was going on. Anyway, the long story short, he won the neat and he threw six inches off the best he'd ever thrown in his life, under hypnosis with a cast on and a sprained ankle. Now, that's what happens when you get into one-pointed miss. but we had many times when he got into one point, and it's because I didn't realize the state of one point in this or the flow. I was just hypnotizing him because it worked for me,

Starting point is 01:18:02 and it worked for a lot of his friends, and he got to be pretty good on the team, and he had me hypnotized some of his friends, and they all broke their records when I started hypnotizing and working with him. So I know that it works. So totally practical. I'm raining you in, Arnold. I love all these stories, but I want to leave our listeners with some practical tools.

Starting point is 01:18:23 Okay. So first tool, in terms of hypnotizing oneself, when you wake up, what do you physically do to get yourself in a conducive state to have a successful day? Okay. What my theory now is, since I, and I do it more now than I've ever done it, is because I realize how effective it is. I didn't even realize I did it with Scott and he did great in the team and I did it with myself. I didn't even use hypnosis when I was in as a rope clerk.

Starting point is 01:18:58 I just used the focusing part. And I did that by accident just because that's the way I was. And when I was studying for the market, I did the same thing. But I knew that by giving myself positive suggestions. So what I would say to your audience is, first of all, you have to come to the conclusion that anything is possible. Even, I mean, I can show you physicists. I've got books on here and physicists who say,

Starting point is 01:19:27 I'll quote you the top astrophysicist in the world, who was a peer with Einstein. He said, I believe that the mind has the power to affect atoms and that even the laws of the universe are not governed by physical laws, but can be altered by the volition of human beings. That's not me talking. That's a guy like Einstein talking. Yeah, that's Arthur Eddington, right? Arthur Eddington? Yes. Eddington wrote that. Now, here's another one by the top psychologist, Gustave Young.

Starting point is 01:20:03 He said, not only does the subconscious have all the knowledge that you've learned through the lifetime of an individual, but it has all the knowledge that has ever been exposed in the universe, and that by tapping into the subconscious, Human being can attach that information. That's where all the great inventions come from. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up, and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.

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Starting point is 01:23:43 advertisement. All right, back to the show. So if you want to get into this kind of state, you're doing something where you wake up and what do you do? You're counting backwards. What do you actually do that? Here's what I would do. The ideal state is easy to get into, and you could do that by a simple exercise. I don't know whether your audience has ever heard of a gentleman by the name of Jose Silva. I don't know what you heard about. him. But Jose Silver was a Mexican immigrant who never went to school, and he got jobs in different places. And he was in a barbershop one time, and it told about how you can use your subconscious mind to achieve success. And he was very excited. He asked the barber if he could buy the magazine.

Starting point is 01:24:33 The guy says, no, you can have it. And he started experimenting with hypnosis. And this is a guy that has no education, never even went to grammar school. So then his siblings taught him how to read and write and do arithmetic. And so he started hypnotizing his kids. And he said that

Starting point is 01:24:52 an experience he had with his kids stunned him, he was reading a little poem to her and she said, Dad, I know that poem and she started reciting and she was reading his brain. So he said he knew that she had never heard of that poem.

Starting point is 01:25:08 So he hypnotized her and he was doing so good that all of his kids, he built a worldwide organization called Jose Silva Institute that is being taught at 50 to 60 languages and is all over the United States to even sent my niece to his course. He's not alive anymore, but the people carry on his kids that are carrying down the work. And I sent her to the course because it's a great way. So the easiest thing to do is I have a book, Mr. Carpenter, The Genie Within. He was a gentleman who was dying from a kidney, dying from a heart disease at age eight, I think it was age nine, and this was 80 years ago. He just recently passed away in the last few months, but I was in touch with him.

Starting point is 01:25:58 For many times, we had some wonderful discussions, and he said that his grandmother belonged to a Christian science church. and the Christian Science Church doesn't believe in doctors. They don't use medicine, no operation, they just heal through the mind. And the church has been around for 150 years. And I studied Mary Baker, Eddie, because I was fascinated with her insights under the subconscious mind. And what I found out is that there's a doctor by the name, there was a man by the name of Mr. Quimby. I don't know what his first name was, but his name is Quimby. I found a 700-page man. manuscript, and he had an accident one time, and he learned to use his mind to heal himself. And then he started healing people just through the mind. And she was one of his first students. So she learned it

Starting point is 01:26:49 from him. Anyway, she taught about how to do that. So anyway, they brought in a guy from the church. He healed Mr. Carpenter. And Mr. Carpenter told me that the thing that excited him is that he didn't know how the guy did it. So he spent all his adult life. He became an aerological engineer, but he spent his whole life. So he wrote this book called The Genie Within. And on page 22 to 24, all you have to do is read a simple exercise that he's got to just relax yourself and get into alpha state. Now, you don't need that book. You don't need anything. All you have to do is just relax yourself. But if you use Jose Silva's technique, he liked to have somebody count backwards from 100 to 1. And I like that because it's almost impossible to count backwards from 100 to 1 and not

Starting point is 01:27:43 find yourself just drifting down. And I'd be willing to bet you that if you did that, you'd probably be an alpha. I have no way to prove it because there's no way I can measure your mind, but I can tell by the way I feel. So what I do is I lay down on the bed, I put my arms over the bend so I can feel how heavy they are. And then I put it on the bed spread, and I start counting backwards, $199, $197, by the time you get to 60, you can feel your arms already getting heavier. And when you feel your arms getting heavier, you're getting into alpha state. And during that stage, so what Jose Silver said is, count backwards from 100 to 1 for a week. Next, do count backwards to 1 from 50 to 1. And the third week goes.

Starting point is 01:28:33 from 25 to 1, and then at the last week, go from 5 to 1, and you'll be able to sit down, relax your mind, and count backwards, 5 to 1, and snap your fingers, and you'll be in alpha. It's just that simple, and it takes practice. When I was reading about how to hypnotize myself, I didn't really get anywhere, but the 10th day, I felt I had achieved a hypnotic state. So I don't think it would take you more than a week or two at the most. I'm a slow learner, and I learned it in 10 days. So most people would do it in two or three turns. So what I do every morning now, as a matter of practice, is I count backwards 100 to 1,

Starting point is 01:29:21 and then I say to myself, okay, I am now in a hypnotic state, which I assume is 4 to 7 Hertz, but I don't know. and now I'm going to relax my body. So I start with my induction is usually 7 to 11. When I hypnotize you, I did it in about 11 minutes. So I put you on the ground, remember? And I had to relax and left leg and then your right leg. And then the relaxation is moving over your body.

Starting point is 01:29:51 And it's going up your spine. And now your shoulders are getting relaxed. All the muscles in your face and scalp are relaxing. And you're getting totally relaxing. and then you can test one arm. What I do is I lift up my arm, and I say, when it falls to the mattress, as soon as it falls down, you're in a deep hypnotic state. So once I do the induction, now I say, what do I want to accomplish today? If it's something specific I'm working on, I name what I'm going to do. But as a general bromant, I say, I use email coup, who is my favorite

Starting point is 01:30:29 person on auto suggestion. He developed the signs of auto suggestion. He was healing people by 30 times a day saying, every day and every way I'm getting better and bitter. And what I do is I get into the shower, get a cold shower. I learned the technique from Wim Hof. And I take a cold shower and then I say, 30 times, every day and every way I'm getting better and better. An email cool, I'm pronouncing his name, but that's okay. You get the idea. Yeah, Emil Kuwait. Yeah, Kuwait. So what he did is he was a French pharmacist, and he noticed in those days at the turn of the century,

Starting point is 01:31:12 the pharmacist was kind of like the country doctor. If you're an armherd or you had some problem, you go to the doctor, they say, Mr. Ku, what do you recommend? I got a sore shoulder. And he said, if he really knew the stuff worked and he believed in it, he would give him a big pitch, oh boy, you've got to use this. This stuff works every time. But if he wasn't sure, it didn't work so well. So he realized that the people were getting healed, not because of the medicine, but because of the suggestion. So he realized he didn't have to use medicine. He sold the pharmacy. He started having a beautiful rose garden. He bring people in with all different ailments,

Starting point is 01:31:56 and he'd interview him, he'd say, William, what's your problem? Well, I've got migraine headaches and so forth. Well, here's what I want you to do. He would relax and kind of get him into Alba state, and then he'd say, you know, there's no reason why you should have headaches. There's nothing wrong with you. All you have to do is every day and every way and get better and better. And he created the Nancy School of Suggestion, and he was curing people all over the place. So there are a couple of things I want to unpack there that you've mentioned. So the first, you talked a little bit about Harry Carpenter and the Genie Within. Because you and I have discussed this whole topic of self-hypnosis a lot over the years,

Starting point is 01:32:37 one of the resources that I've used a lot, thanks to you, that's been very helpful that I would just draw our listeners attention to, is Carpenter had this website, the Genie Within website, where there are a few audio recordings that he made that come from the book. and there's one called Track 2, which is on progressive relaxation, which gets you into the alpha state. And I've used that many, many times. I think that's a very helpful tool. The other, there's one track three, which is to get you into a Theta state, which I've only used a few times. Actually, in the last three days, I've used every day. And it puts me to sleep after a few minutes.

Starting point is 01:33:15 So I have no idea whether I'm in a deep hypnotic state or not, because I might just be asleep. But I think those are really helpful practical tools. And then as you and I have discussed before, there's also this Reverie app, R-E-V-E-E-R-I, which was created by this psychiatrist David Spiegel, who's an associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, I think, at Stanford, and director of the Stanford Center on Stress and Health and all of that sort of thing. And he's an expert on the clinical uses of hypnosis and how you can use hypnosis to heighten the brain's ability to deal with things like stress and chronic anxiety and pain and even

Starting point is 01:33:54 things like cancer outcomes. So I just want to make sure as we're closing the loop on that, that people have a sense that there are various tools for self-hypnosis that are really helpful, including the one that you've mentioned that's all to do with the Silver Method. I think it's S-I-L-B-A, S-I-L-A, S-L-A, Jose Silva. Yeah, and we'll have some resources in the notes and resources section of this episode. William, I would like to make this study. It's 37 pages. I'd like to make it available to anybody who's interested in it, free of charge. We don't sell anything. I just want to get that information out to people. Yeah, that'd be great. I'll figure out a way, Arnold, at the end of the episode, to get people

Starting point is 01:34:41 to be able to write into your office so that they can request this. That would be great if that's okay. But I wanted also to unpack this whole thing of affirmations that you mentioned, because I think one of the things when I look at what's happened in your life is it's this idea that you're able to reprogram your beliefs and get into this state that really changes how you view your life. And it sounds kind of kooky to a lot of cynical, skeptical, you know, academically oriented people. But your life is a really good proof that it's worked. And when you were talking to my master class the other day, you were explaining that actually you had changed one of the most important affirmations that you use over many years. So you had, I had never heard this before. You had told me years ago

Starting point is 01:35:30 that you would often say, I am happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise. But can you tell us how you updated that affirmation? Because I think, I think in the same way as the affirmation that you use from Emil Kouet, that every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. This other affirmation that you use constantly is a hugely helpful practical tool for imprinting, pounding in this mindset in our brains. So tell us about this other affirmation. Okay. So what happened is when I really started seeing what you could do with the subconscious mind, I feel like when you can control your subconscious mind, it's like programming your computer. Whatever you put in, that's what it's going to get back. Matter of fact,

Starting point is 01:36:23 I have this thing here. Let me just show you how the subconscious works and we'll get into it. Here's the best thing I've ever read on how the subconscious works. I'm very accommodating. I ask no questions. I accept whatever you give me. I do whatever I'm told to do. I do not presume to change anything you think, say, or do. I find it away in perfect. I find out of order and quickly and efficiently, and then I return it to you exactly as you gave it to me. Sometimes you call me your memory. I'm the reservoir into which you toss anything your heart or mind chooses to deposit there. I work night and day and I never sleep, and nothing impedes my activity. The thoughts you send me are categorized and filed into my filing system that never

Starting point is 01:37:14 fails. I'm truly your servant who does your bidding without hesitation or criticism. I cooperate when you tell me that you're this or that, and I play it back as you gave it. I'm most agreeable, since I do not think, argue, judge, analyze, question, or make decisions. I accept impressions easily. I'm going to ask you to sort out what you send me, however. My files are getting a little cluttered. I'm confused. I mean, please disregard those things that you do not want return to you. What is my name? Oh, I thought you knew. I'm your subconscious. So basically, what your subconscious is, it's your servant, it's your computer. Whatever you type into it, whether it's true or false, it doesn't think, it doesn't judge, it doesn't analyze,

Starting point is 01:38:05 it doesn't argue, it does it. So if you say yourself, you're a genius, and you keep repeating it to yourself, you're going to start getting that effect. So what I decided, once I realized that I had the ability to program anything I wanted in my life, irrespective of physical disabilities or anything else that would stand in my way in the term of the material world, I could influence it by visualizing, by repeating it. And let me tell you something. The secret to advertising, which you all probably know when you watch TV, is they got these ridiculous ads that are just, I mean, you almost have to be stupid to listen and believe those things, but people do, and they work. And all they do is they repeat it. And the more

Starting point is 01:38:58 ridiculous it is, the better it works. And why do they make it ridiculous? So you kind of dismiss and you say, oh, that's BS, then your mind goes out of the way and they get directly into your subconscious. So advertising is the fine signs of impressing the subconscious mind. And just think about what a 30-minute or a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl with hundreds of millions of people, what that's worth. They pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for 30 seconds to a minute, and why? Because it works. So repetition is the key to everything in the subconscious. If you keep on believing it and repeating it, it's going to happen. So what I decided to do many years ago when I first came to the realization, I said,

Starting point is 01:39:50 okay, what do I really want in my life? So I sat down and I came up with four things. I want to be happy. even Aristotle said in this optimal book, he said, most people in life start out, they just want to be happy. And the reason they choose money and fame and power and prestige and all that, because they think it's going to make them happy. But that isn't what makes you happy. What makes you happy is the way you think. So I said to myself, okay, I want to be happy and I want to be healthy. If I had to do it all over again, I'd start with, I want to be healthy and happy. because health to me, as I turn to be 86, and as I turn to friends and clients of mine,

Starting point is 01:40:34 I don't have too many people I know who don't have any physical problems. So, but anyway, I'm happy, healthy, and I wanted to be wealthy. Not that I realize that it makes you happy, but as my dad says, money doesn't make you happy, but it soothes the nerves. So it helps with that. So I want to be happy, healthy, wealthy. and I want to have wisdom because I realized that I've met some very intelligent people who've done some pretty stupid things. So I realize if you don't have wisdom, you might make

Starting point is 01:41:09 some bad choices. So I said, I'm happy, healthy, wealthy, and vice. And then as I got to learn more about the philosophers and the Victor Frankles of the world, I realized that you could have all those things and not have love. And so I realized that love was a very important part of that equation. So now I've altered it and I say, I am a loving, kind person and I'm happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise. And I do this if I'm standing in a supermarket line or I'm doing my exercise where I stand on one leg. By the way, this is an interesting thing for everybody that's interested in health. I found out that the single most determined thing that determines how healthy you are is your ability to stand on one leg. And I had four strokes, by the way, just about a year and a half ago, and to show you how hypnosis works,

Starting point is 01:42:11 I was reading one of my great hypnotist, a guy by the name of Tebbb, and he was a student of Gilborn. He was probably the best hypnotist in the world at one time. And he was a student of this. So he really believed in Gil Boyne, and Gil Boyne was just amazing. He was just a miracle man. He really perfected this technique. So anyway, he woke up one morning, and he had a stroke, and half of his body was paralyzed, and he couldn't speak.

Starting point is 01:42:43 He could barely, he just scribbled. He couldn't speak. So he said, this is a great time for me. me to test the value of hypnosis. So he made it a goal when he went into the hospital and he put himself under hypnosis and he said under hypnosis that in seven days he was going to walk out and be 85% cured. The doctors came to him in three days and said he was 85% cured. He could talk and his side was back to normal and everything. And three days at the end of the week, he was completely cured. And when he wrote the book, it was 20 years after that experience,

Starting point is 01:43:26 and he still never had a problem. So when I had my first, my strokes, I had four strokes at once. So I go into the hospital, and I thought about Tibet, and I thought, well, I didn't think there was anything wrong, but the doctor come back after he did the MRI, and he said, Mr. Van derbyert, he said, oh, he asked me, what brings you here? And I said, I'm not sure, but my eyes are not working that right. And something was kind of fuzzy. And I went to an ophthalologist, and he said, your vision is perfect. But there's something behind him. He was trying to be kind. And what he was saying is behind my vision is my brain and something happened there. So anyway, I went to the MRI. My wife took me to the MRI. So I'm sitting there. The doctor said, I said, you know, Doc,

Starting point is 01:44:16 It's something fuzzy with my eyes, but the doctor felt I should see a neurologist. He says, well, that's me. Let me take an MRI. So he comes back. He said, well, I think I know the problem. He said, yeah, what is it? He said, you just had four strokes. I was just shocked.

Starting point is 01:44:34 Well, as soon as I recovered, I thought, okay, this would be a great test for my hypnosis program. So they bring me in and this girl is a hypnosis. She's a therapist, physical therapist. So she says to me, I want you to squeeze my hand as hard as you can to see what my physical strength push. And I said, you know, I don't think you want me to do this because I compete with my grandsons and they're weightlifters and they do martial arts. And we always have a contest to squeeze each other's hand. and they've never been able to break me. And I do fingertip pushups. They didn't know it, but I was doing fingertip push-up

Starting point is 01:45:16 because when you lift weights, you're only strengthening your arm from the pole up, but you don't do anything to strengthen your fingers. So I learned from the rope climb to strengthen my fingers, I did push-ups on my fingertips. So that's how I used to beat him. I finally let them in on my secret.

Starting point is 01:45:35 So I told her all this, and she says, that's okay, you just had four strokes. I'm not too concerned. So I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. She just dumped up like this. So then the physical therapist comes in and gives me a test and she said, I want to see how long you can stand on one leg. Just lift up your leg, just stand on one leg. So I did it for 40 seconds. She says, boy, that's very good. I said, well, what? She says, well, usually at 85, the longest most people can stand on one leg is five to ten seconds. Here you had strokes and you'd do it.

Starting point is 01:46:09 for 40 seconds on each leg. And then I went through every damn doctor you could think of. I did the electrocardium with my heart, and I did the stress test. The only thing that shows up that I didn't fully recover was my peripheral vision. And I went to the regular doctor, and he said, well, your peripheral vision isn't 100%, but you could still pass a driving test. So I don't think it's not like it's maybe as good as it was, but it's not 100%, but it's good enough. Well, I went back to the if, because my wife was concerned about it, so I promised her I would not drive unless the ophthalmologist said that I passed the peripheral. And I personally, I think that I didn't probably lose my peripheral vision at this time. It probably happened

Starting point is 01:47:03 before didn't even know it because everybody felt I was a terrible driver. But the bottom line of it is, I don't feel any diminution due to my strokes. And every other test that I've taken has come out to be very good. Now, maybe it did hurt my peripheral vision, but I believe that I'm going to restore that anyway, so it doesn't really matter. It's kind of an academic thing. The point I'm making is there's a good example of just getting in the right frame of mind and not letting anything get in your way. How did you remain so optimistic? I mean, I've seen you go through all sorts of things,

Starting point is 01:47:45 whether it's Eileen having a fall the other day, or you having the strokes or family members getting ill or difficult times with your business several years ago before you had this fantastic bet on oil stocks and the like. How do you start? so upbeat through all adversity? You know what, William, I think it comes through experience. I don't think I started out life that way.

Starting point is 01:48:14 I started off as I learned things that work by concentrating on them mentally. It's like a muscle. You know, I really believe, and, you know, we're going through some very difficult economic times. the market is more overvalued than it's ever been. And I just met with some clients who were client of mine for 39 years. They were over this weekend. And I was explaining to them about the portfolio. And I said, you know, the market is 25% more overvalued than it's ever been.

Starting point is 01:48:48 You picked a metric and I can show it to you. And I had all of the metrics run up. I said, now, on the other hand, there are some positive things going on they could change it. And there are times, there is a time like the nifty, 50, 50, 30, 40 years ago when I started that, you know, the stocks went up to 40, 50 times earnings. And then, of course, it went into it to the client. So my view is that if you're living the right way and you're following the principles and you're doing all the right thing, it's all going to work out because that's why it's done over 50 years. I've had my ups and downs and down.

Starting point is 01:49:27 and I had some terrible times in the market, but there was no question in my mind that I was going to make it through because I programmed myself to do it. I mean, how could you have a better ally than your subconscious mind? Let me just give you an example. In this report, I included two articles. One of them is they're developing a quantum computer. The quantum computer is made by IBM, we own IBM and Google. Wait, Arnold, I can't let you talk about quantum computers when you just told me the market is 25% overvalued. You've got to talk to me about how you're positioning yourself for this zero.

Starting point is 01:50:09 I'm getting to that, okay? Just be patient, okay? So the point I'm making is the article says that we're coming up with a quantum computer in five years. It's going to be 158 million times faster than the fastest computer in the market. There's an equation that they ran that the quantum compute did it in 200 seconds or something like that. It would have taken thousands of years by the normal computer. Now, here's the most important thing. In that article, Matthew Fisher, one of the renowned physicist of all time,

Starting point is 01:50:46 has come up with the theory that the mind is a quantum computer. Not every physicist agrees with him, but he's trying to tell you that you have the ability, your mind, between those headphones, you have the ability of a computer that's 158 million times fast in the fast computer, and hasn't even been built yet, and you got it. So, how can you be pessimistic if you have this capacity to do whatever you want to do in life? And I can tell you, there is not one goal that I have not been able to beat except a minor goal, which I'm going to beat, no question about it. And that's it. Other than that, all of them are realized. So how could you not be optimistic? I don't care what happens to the world. I know I'm going to be good.

Starting point is 01:51:43 So in practical terms, Arnold, you've gone through a lot over 50 years with this investment firm. Right. You started in a six-year bear market, then you did it fantastically for many years by being very contrarian and buying a few years ago when oil stocks were massively out of favor and commodities, you made a big bet that was very contrarian that's worked out very well. When you look now, how are you positioning yourself so that you and your clients and everyone will survive a pretty, you know, certainly a period of tremendous uncertainty? Okay, I'll tell you how we're going to survive. We are going to survive. And it's not just a business to me. These people, like these people that visited me, this friend of ours is a neurologist, happens. We had some interesting talk about the mind. He happens to be a neurologist, but he's been a client of mine for 39, him and his wife, 39.38 years. And I was laying out the thing. So here's what I see. The world is in total deadedness.

Starting point is 01:52:47 We have $38 trillion due to, on both parties, doing absolutely ridiculous things financially, okay? So you look through history and you know what's going to happen. They're going to have to print money and they're printing money and they're going to have to continue to print money. And if you look at throughout history, you'll see all the organizations that have had to do this, their currency starts to depreciate, And it is no coincidence that commodities, gold, silver, copper, agriculture, all of these commodities relative to the S&P. If I was to show you the commodity index divided by the S&P, the S&P is up here and the commodity index are here. So there's a tremendous opportunity to invest not in commodity futures, but in the actual commodities. Whatever it is, we are 8% in gold.

Starting point is 01:53:47 we are involved in silver. We are, for my part, we are involved in uranium. My group didn't particularly think that was a good idea. We bought natural gas instead, which I agree, but I think uranium is still going to be a good thing. It's the fuel of the future, along with natural gas. So we're heavy into oils. We're heavy in natural gas.

Starting point is 01:54:12 We're in gold and silver. We are in other commodities. and we have different funds that have a diversification of these things. But I don't buy the futures. I only buy the companies that produce the items. And so we have 25 to, well, at least, I'd say 15% in most portfolios. We have at least 15 to 20% in cash, because when the market declines, you get an opportunity to buy bargains like you never did before. So there is ways, depends on the individual, you gather yourself up depending on the kind of risk you want to take. In my own personal portfolio, I'm 35% in treasury bonds. Now, that's not the way most clients want to do

Starting point is 01:54:58 because it's a little too conservative, but I don't need to make any more money. I've made all the money I need. And so why do I have to take any big risks? So you can design the program exactly based on what you expect. Now, I expect a dollar, just example, the central banks have bought more gold this last time than they've ever done in the history of the world, and they have the least amount of treasury bombs that they have ever.

Starting point is 01:55:32 So the point is, you're getting the message by the people who have a lot of money, the central banks, they're no longer buying the treasury bonds, they're buying gold. And why? Because the dollar declined 12 to 15% this year. And that's what happens when the currency loses favor, just like a second mortgage pays you more interest because it's a greater risk. Well, the U.S. dollar used to be the top pre-married AAA rated. They're no longer AAA rated people. And so what's going to happen is as people lose faith in the dollar, the interest rates will go up instead of down. The inflation could go up. And so we are positioned in the case that whatever happens, we benefit.

Starting point is 01:56:20 And for example, natural gas is about as cheap as it comes. The history has been, there's a BTO equivalent between natural gas. That means six thousand cubic feet of gas is worth one barrel of oil. So it's about six to one. So if you look at oil today, it's at $62, $63. You're divided by six. That means natural gas should be at $10. It's a three. Now, in the history of the world, it's sold at 50% on average. So that means on average it would go to $50 to $5, 50% of 10. But the cheapest that ever got was 25%, which is $2.5 to $3. So it's selling the cheapest it's been in 50 years at $2.5 to $3, average price would be $5, and a normal price would be $10. So I don't care what happens to the world.

Starting point is 01:57:22 There's always going to be a need for power. When you look at AI, they're going to have a huge demand for power for electricity and anything that produces. What could be the greatest thing in the world is natural gas and uranium or nuclear energy? So there's ways to take advantage of them. And they happen to be dirt cheap. If you're a regular investor, Arnold, and you wanted to have, you don't want to buy individual stocks, you wanted a really easy way to get exposure to these things like oil, natural gas, gold, silver, uranium, whatever it is. Can you just buy like a sector fund or something?

Starting point is 01:57:59 You could buy a sector fund. you could buy an ETF. There's many different funds on the market that will diversify you and will invest in those kind of things. What would you want to get in there? Like if you were to do this in a really easy way, if you were advising your idiot friend like me

Starting point is 01:58:19 who just wanted to get exposure to that sort of thing, what's a really simple way to do it? Well, there's a fund called the Goring Fund. It's selling at about 14 to 15. dollars a share. And it's a mutual fund. It's run by Guring and his partner. They've been into commodity business for 30 years. They buy, they don't buy futures. They buy stocks and natural gas and oil and gold and silver and these kind of things. And you buy into the diversified portfolio and you can put $1,000 or $100,000 in it. That's just one fund. But there's many others like it.

Starting point is 01:59:01 And so it's just a matter of deciding what you want and looking through the portfolio and saying, okay, they have 5% of this, they have 3% of this, they have two. They have a broad diversification, and you could put some money into it. And then you could put money into treasury bonds short term. We don't buy a treasury bond over three years because we know that theoretically, if the interest rates go out, the interest, the bonds will go, down if interest rates go up, so we don't want to have a 30-year bomb. The last thing I buy today is a 30-year bond, a U.S. Treasury bond. There's nobody in their right mind believes

Starting point is 01:59:42 the U.S. government can sustain this kind of deficit for 30 years. So something's got to give in the future, and it will, and we will benefit by it, you know, and that's no magic. and it's just a matter of patience and diversifying and all of that. So any good investment counselor who has an open mind to what's going on in the world, not just to buy the S&P 500, I think the S&P 500 is probably one of the worst things you could buy. Not that it couldn't go up another 25%. I mean, I've seen crazier things than this, but it's certainly not going to be a good investment over the next five years.

Starting point is 02:00:25 So anybody who has investments in the typical major indices, I think, could do better by looking elsewhere. Where do you think people should be most careful? When you look with your kind of wary skeptical eye as someone who's been in this business for 50 years and has been through bubbles and busts and the like before, what should our listeners and viewers be most careful of, a particular area of the market, particular types of stocks that seem most risky to you? I think that anything that has leverage on it is not a good idea. In other words, people leverage themselves in real estate, and that's good as long as real estate goes up.

Starting point is 02:01:08 But real estate can go down too when major recessions or depression. So you don't gamble with anything that you can't afford to lose. So you buy, like I paid off my home many years. ago just because I don't need the leverage. You know, I mean, the interest rates were low, but I still paid it off because I don't want any debt. So the first thing I do is get rid of my debt, and that's credit card and all kinds. Pay off your loans. This way you control your destiny. And then you invest in things that you think, I think gold is still a great opportunity. I think silver is more speculative, but it's still good.

Starting point is 02:01:51 I think natural gas, you can buy EQT. It's a major natural gas company that is a wonderful company with a great future. So there are a lot of good, solid companies that are in the right spot that haven't done very well recently, but they have a great opportunity. Are there things, Arnold, that remind you of, say, you know, the late 1960s or 1999-2000 when you look at the market today? How reminiscent does it feel? Well, I think that there is a lot of speculation in AI, and there's good reason for it. It's a wonderful thing. Just to give you an example, I hired a friend of mine to teach our staff AI, because, you

Starting point is 02:02:42 because as it was coming out, I knew it was going to be a big thing. This is Matthew Peterson, right? Yeah, Matthew Peterson. Yeah, yeah. It's a lovely guy. And he had taught our staff and everybody's using it. And he showed how it normally takes a month to get the real feel of a company to understand the company, the competitors, the management. What a good analyst does is a real good work starting from scratch.

Starting point is 02:03:10 It would take about a month. He got it down through AI to be able to get us everything we needed in an hour. In one hour, we can get all the documentation of the SEC. We get all the research reports on the market. We can get a ton of information that might have taken a month before, and now we can do it in an hour, just on using AI. Now, that doesn't mean that you're going to make a good decision on that. I'm talking about gathering the information so you can make that decision.

Starting point is 02:03:42 I'm not saying that AI makes a decision, but the gathering of information is incredible. I've been using AI to research all the different things in neuroscience. I can type somebody's name in there and they'll give you the whole history of it. So AI is a wonderful thing, but it's getting overhyped. However, we own IBM, which is going to be one of the leaders in quantum computer. Stocks doubled, but it's still got a huge potential. We own Google. That is a company that's going to be there with AI and the quantum computers. So there are fields that are not overly invested in, which you can still make investments in.

Starting point is 02:04:30 And then you could just buy the gold or the silver or the uranium or if you're knowledgeable in agriculture, which I'm not. So I don't mess in things that I'm not. belong. I believe they will have a future, but you'd have to go to somebody that understands agriculture, like a farmer. When you look back on your success over the last 50 years as an investor, which was clearly built on Ben Graham's principles, obviously the markets and the economy have changed massively since those days. But there are there still absolutely core principles that if you were starting now, or if you were teaching one of your grandchildren, say, to start now as an investor, that you would really want them to internalize? Like, what's kind of the core

Starting point is 02:05:23 principle that remains as relevant as ever? Well, I'll tell you what, Daski Eski said it all. He said that the people who could survive the gulag, the Russian gulag, were the people of the highest character. If I was teaching, and I do teach my grandchildren, I have, one of them is an intern now, and one of them is a gentleman that wrote to me because of your book from Israel, Schmul. Oh, yeah. Schmul Goldberg, yeah. He's an intern with our company. Yeah. And he's working with one of her analyst. And the thing that I was so impressed with Schmul was, he said he'd like to be an intern for us and said, we said, we don't have a formal intern program, but if you send me your background, I will consider it. And so he sent me his background that his mother taught him as a Jew.

Starting point is 02:06:17 He's got to be mentally strong and physically strong. So she got him involved in chess and judo, and he became internationally accomplished in both areas. And when I read that, I said, you're hired. What else do I need to know? When a guy that has this kind of commitment to judo and also to chess, he's got everything you need to be successful because he's, he had to use his mind. That's what you're learning chess, and that's what you learn in judo. It's all about the mind. So he can be a great investor. There's no doubt in my mind he's going to be. I think what I would do, if I was a young person, I wouldn't worry about any of these things. I would just develop character and the belief and the faith. Matter of fact, I wouldn't tell many people this. I probably shouldn't even

Starting point is 02:07:09 say it on your podcast, but I feel that looking back on my life, I probably could have gained a lot if I had gone to college because I might have learned things the easy way where I had to learn about the market, the hard way, suffering for six years in the bear market, right? So I think I could have avoided some things if I learned Benjamin Graham. But the bottom line of it is, any young person can learn anything they want to learn if they just let the subconscious guide them. As a matter of fact, the subconscious gives you insights that you couldn't have any other way. So your education is dependent on how you have this, I have this computer here, right? It has to be programmed. Well, I got this other computer, which is way better than this, I just need to know how to program it. And in my 700

Starting point is 02:08:08 pages, I have one page that I wished that I would have saved for this interview. I don't want to take the time to find it right now. It wouldn't take me long to find it. But what I did is I was going to give a talk to people. There was a lady that knew me very well and she knew what I was able to do with hypnosis, and she wanted me to give a talk to some college students in a marketing department, and what they did is they bring in a speaker of each year. They bring in 10 guys from industry, and then at the end of the year, they vote. I didn't know they voted on it, but they vote who was the best speech. Well, my speech won a two out of three times, and what I did is I was struggling how to tell people how to use the subconscious. And I went into flow one night. I woke up at

Starting point is 02:09:03 3.30 in the morning and my mind was just going a mile a minute and I grabbed a yellow pen and I wrote it out. And I looked at it and I thought, wow, I only changed two words. And it was exactly the way you use the subconscious mind. And I've been struggling for three weeks to get the closing to the speech, but I didn't have it. And I kept thinking about it and thinking, and then one day in the morning, I woke up at 3.30 in the morning, and I wrote it out, and I didn't even have to change the two words. I probably could buy with just changing one word. The whole thing was the speech, the closing feel. So that's how you use your mind. Arnold, I wanted to end by asking you a couple of things about happiness that you've mentioned to me recently.

Starting point is 02:09:54 When you spoke to the ritualized happier master class the other day, you said something really interesting when one of the people in the group asked you a question about your definition of happiness. And you said, the thing that has made me happiest is when I can share things that have brought me happiness such as understanding. And you said, what brings me the greatest happiness is knowing that I can share what. whatever I've struggled to learn, and it changes somebody's life. There's no greater satisfaction to me. And you said, irrespective of how much money you can make, that's just not going to do it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it seems to me early on, you really thought that money was going to do it. And gradually, you realized your view of what would actually make us happy shifted. Well, I'll tell you how that breakthrough came. So what happened is I grew up in a Jewish home.

Starting point is 02:10:46 you know, where the emphasis isn't money, success, and achievement, and so forth. And my dad, my mom and dad were very successful before the war, not because of my dad, more because of my mom. She was the businesswoman of the family. But they had a business. My dad was very good at designing ladies, coats, and suits. That was his passion. And she was a businesswoman, a good salesperson and a promoter and so forth. So it was a great combination. He had a great product, and she was able to sell it, and they did real well. And then when they came over to this country, after Auschwitz, he came over as just a regular tailor. He didn't want to start a business. He just wanted to make a living and

Starting point is 02:11:29 feed the family. And he had a lot of different philosophy. He didn't get along very well with people, because he had very little patience for people. And one time I remember we had a member of the synagogue over, a very, very successful man. And we sat around the table, and I noticed my dad didn't say very much. And I said, pop, you know, I noticed that you didn't say very much when this gentleman was talking.

Starting point is 02:11:59 And my mom was all ears because she was telling her how to be successful and where the real estate market was going and so forth. And my dad says, you know, Arnold, I've come to the conclusion with what I've been through life that if I, if you think the guy's an idiot, there's no point in arguing with him because you're not going to convince him and it's kind of a waste of time. And I said, well, pa, do you mean to tell me that you think Dr. So-and-so was an idiot? He said, yes, I think he was. And I said, how can you say he's an idiot?

Starting point is 02:12:33 the guy went to medical school 10 years. I mean, that's not an... You can't be an idiot going to him. He said, oh, yes, you can. He said, the guy just doesn't know what life's all about. But if he spent a few weeks in Auschwitz,

Starting point is 02:12:48 I guarantee you, he would have a different view point of the world. So what you learn through suffering is you learn what's truth. And he just said, and this man has a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills. I don't doubt that.

Starting point is 02:13:02 but he doesn't have truth. So I'm not interested in what he has to say. And I'm not interested in telling him what I think because he probably thinks I'm an idiot. So that's it. I said, okay, fair enough. But the point about it is that you can formulate your own ideas, but the most important thing is you've got to start off with the truth. And I had an experience. I think I shared that with you one time when I was struggling with trying to understand religion, and I was struggling with it back and forth, and one day I was sitting there with the Bible reading Bible prophecies and all these type of things that I even studied with a Bible scholar who knew everything about Jewish affairs and Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek. And I said to myself,

Starting point is 02:13:54 trying to figure this out. And the thought came to me, and it said, if you want to follow the truth, you have to go wherever it leads you. And I had to think about that, and I thought, you know, that's right. It's not important who's right or wrong. It's what is the truth. And that's what my dad was into. I think that's what he got out at concentration camp and his suffering. What is life really all about? But anyway, my thinking was that I figured out the most important thing that I want to accomplish. But what I have experienced, which is your question, is what is it that makes you the most happiest? Well, one time, when my, after struggling for many years financially, my son came up to me and I was driving this car that was 10 years old. And he says,

Starting point is 02:14:48 with all the money you're making, why don't you go out and buy yourself a Mercedes? And I said, you know, that probably would have appealed to me 10 or 15 years ago. But right, right, Now, I feel very good just having the financial independence. I said, I'm like a guy that beat his head against the wall for 10 years. And finally, I don't have to beat my head against the wall anymore. And somebody says, Arnie, how are you feeling? Oh, I'm feeling great. Why are you feeling great? Because I don't need to beat my head against the wall. So what I realized, what at first, when you didn't have any money, money was a very important point. But as you go along and you've become successful on different things, then all of a sudden it doesn't make you

Starting point is 02:15:32 as much happy. It contributes to, like my dad says, it soothes the nerves, but it doesn't really make you happy. What made me happy is, which was a dream I had, which you helped develop through your book, is I had a dream one time about 40 years ago. I wrote it in my notebook. What I would like to do with what I've learned through all the struggles, the physical struggles, the mental struggles, the money struggles, the going through a divorce and all that. What I realized is the thing that made me the happiest and brought me the greatest thrill. And even psychologists will tell you unconditional love, when you can give to people without having any interest or skin in the game, You're just doing it to be helpful.

Starting point is 02:16:23 And that's why all the things I've learned, I'm going to share them without taking any kind of a participation or money into it because I don't want people to think I'm doing this for the money. I wouldn't do this for the money. I don't need to do it for the money. I want to do it because that's my way of sharing. And that's what brings me the most happiness. When I can tell, when somebody tells me what you told me really made a difference in

Starting point is 02:16:50 my life. And it's not because I'm getting anything for it. It's just because you have the ability to give. And I think that's what Victor Frankel, Mary Baker Eddy, Apostle, Apostle Paul talks about love being the greatest thing that a human be can aspire. And when you have the ability to be in a position to help people either through your knowledge or your finances or some methodology, that's the lasting value. That's what to me life is all about, and it's what gives me the greatest pleasure. It may not be that way for everybody,

Starting point is 02:17:27 but I have to think that when you look at all the neurotransmitters, you know, there's a hormone called the helping hormone that when you do good to people, you feel good. You know, there's actually a chemical that's released in the body. So, you know, it's like the people who have runners high. That's a natural thing that comes through the way you work your body. Well, when you give to people unconditionally, not, I told one a friend of mine that's having marital problems, and he was telling me that, you know, he did this for his wife and she

Starting point is 02:18:00 did this for him. And I said to him, you know, love is not transactional. You give it because you want to give it, not because you're going to get something back. If you give it because you want something back, you've already been paid, something you're going to get back. But you don't get the feeling of truly giving. Giving has to be unconditional. No questions asked, no reward for it. You just do it because you love to do it because you love the person or you love the people or you love the cause or whatever it is. To me, that's the ultimate in life. And I don't think it wouldn't matter to me how much more money I made. That wouldn't change anything in the way I feel. It just allows me, to be more generous with what I'm doing.

Starting point is 02:18:51 The other day before we spoke, before you talked to the master class group, I just dipped in randomly to your favorite book, which is from poverty to power by James Allen, which we've talked about before on the podcast. And I like always opening things randomly. I sort of feel like in some way the universe is talking to you. And I opened to this page,

Starting point is 02:19:11 it's in The Mind is the Master volumes, this was on page 55, I think. And he starts saying, reader, do you seek to realize the birth into truth? And then he says, there is only one way. Let self die. And so then he keeps explaining how it's all about giving up this obsession with the self. He says, give up the spirit of vanity, abstain from the lust of self-indulgence, give up all hatred, strife, condemnation, and self-seeking, and become gentle and pure at heart. He says, by doing these things, is the truth found. And it's really interesting to me that he equates this kind of

Starting point is 02:19:47 clinging to self and love of self with a kind of delusion. And he says, you know, you can't understand truth basically until you let go of that cling to self. And given that it's your favorite book, I just thought I just thought I'd run that by you before we finished. No, I was going to get you. Hold on one second. Let me raise your one thing. I have it right here. So he says there's an inward enemy. He said, he said, yeah, so then, I guess this is very biblical, right? He says to be in the world and yet not of the world is the highest perfection, the most blessed piece is to achieve the greatest victory. Well, I would say that anybody who reads, I tell people, I went to the publisher one time and I wanted to give the book out to all my clients

Starting point is 02:20:36 and friends and relatives. So I called them up, I said, Skip, I'd like to buy a couple of thousand copies of your book, Poverty to Power. And he said, oh my God. I only sell about 15 a year. I said, 15 a year, a book that great, that's all you sell? He says, yeah, I can't even afford to print it. I Xerox it. And I said, well, I'm glad you mentioned that because I want to give it out as a gift. And I don't want somebody to think I Xerox the copy of the book.

Starting point is 02:21:04 And it doesn't have a very good cover. And I would like to pay for having to type set and get nice paper and a nice cover. And I'll tell you what, I'll pay for it. all and then you can give me a discount on buying the book. You know, and this way it pays for everything. So I thought that was terrific. And then I wrote in the book to the reader, to person, I said, you know, when I was going through my life, I had all kinds of struggles. And I found a lot of answers in this book. And I was hoping that one of these days I'd put all these things together in the book and shared with people so they'd learned from it like I did. But since I read James

Starting point is 02:21:45 Alan's book, I don't think I could improve on the book, so I just reprinted it and sent it out with the hope that it'll touch your life as it did mine. And his whole goal was in the book. I was looking for it right now, is that he wrote in the foreword. The reason he wrote the book is it was his dream that one day he could write a book that would help people rich or poor, you know, healthy or sick, to be able to gain a philosophy of life that would change the their life. And that's certainly what this book did. I always tell people, I give it to young people, I said, there's not a problem that you could have in your life that you can't find the answer to any problem you've ever had in this book. And I don't think you could go through this book,

Starting point is 02:22:35 no matter what your problem is, and not find not only the reason, but the solution. And his main conclusion was that the main reason that people suffer is because of selfishness. So the real secret to life is overcoming that selfishness that we are geared for. We are not programmed to be happy. We are programmed to survive. And that doesn't necessarily make you happy. It's your own survival. So he felt that the secret to life, which I agree, is to overcome your selfishness and to be able to give. That's love. I think on that note, Arnold, especially since I have to pack and fly to England in about

Starting point is 02:23:20 three hours, I better, no, no, I'm really thrilled to chat to you. And it was a measure of how much I wanted to chat to you that I was like, I've got to do this on the same day that I'm going to pack and leave for two weeks. So I better run, but this has been such a delight chatting with you as a ways. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to share these views, and I hope people will benefit from it as much as I have. It's always a great joy chatting to you, and you've helped me a lot in my own life, Arnold, so thank you. I really appreciate it. And you've still got your work cut out.

Starting point is 02:23:55 You're going to have to, you know, get me to the next level over the next few years. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time and input. And thank everybody else for the same thing. Take care. Thanks, love. All right. Lots love.

Starting point is 02:24:06 Give my best wishes to your way. wife as well. I know she fell the other day and I wish her very speedy recovery. Thank you. I will be sure to share that with her. Thank you so much. Take care. Talk soon. Thank you, Arnold. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Richer, Wiser, Happier on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before my making any decision consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH061: How To Thrive No Matter What w/ Arnold Van Den Berg

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