[00:03:55] Intro: 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.

[00:04:31] William Green: Welcome, Arnold.

[00:04:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, thank you very much, William. I appreciate that.

[00:04:36] William Green: You recently emailed me a copy of a handwritten note that you’d written probably 25 to 30 years ago that I think you then lost for decades and just rediscovered maybe six months or so ago while you were cleaning out a filing cabinet.

[00:04:50] William Green: You’d been inspired by my filing system clearly and had put it somewhere safe that you’d then forgotten about for decades, and I wanted to start by asking you to read us that note. Then after you’ve read it, we’ll discuss it and explain why rediscovering this note that you wrote to yourself 25, 30 years ago has had such a profound effect on you.

[00:05:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well then, the note to myself is, I have a dream. I have a dream that one day, I will perfect and innovate a technique that will inspire and motivate people to see the truth as James Allen wrote so eloquently that they are the makers of themselves by the thoughts they choose, and that choosing the right thoughts, man can become what he wills.

[00:05:34] Arnold Van Den Berg: By developing the right technique and application, man can achieve his wildest dream. My dream is to teach this to inspire people to believe as I do, and to be able to show them how to do it; to be able to offer this to people without hope and confidence in themselves, and to give them vision. By giving them a vision, something will stir in them and they will move themselves to realize the vision of their hearts.

[00:05:58] Arnold Van Den Berg: I want to demonstrate that no matter how hopeless the situation appears, it can be changed. It will be changed by changing an attitude towards that situation.

[00:06:09] William Green: When you sent me that note, Arnold, I thought this is kind of wonderful because we can actually devote this entire episode really to the fulfillment of that dream that you had 25, 30 years ago.

[00:06:21] William Green: And so, you can actually spend the next hour or two really talking to us about how we can change our lives by choosing the right thoughts, using techniques that have helped you harnessing insights from James Allen, and the like. So, that’s the game plan. How does that sound to you?

[00:06:34] Arnold Van Den Berg: Very good.

[00:06:36] William Green: Okay.

[00:06:37] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s a dream come true.

[00:06:41] William Green: That’s good, and so how did you come to rediscover this letter? Tell us how you lost it and then what impact on you it had when you rediscovered it.

[00:06:51] William Green: Oh, well what happened is I had this goal and then whenever you have a goal, thoughts come to you. Little flashes of inspiration.

[00:07:00] William Green: You’re driving down the street and all of a sudden, something pops in your head, so what I got into habit of doing, whenever I had a random thought that applied to a goal I had, even when I was driving, I’d pull over and write it down because I knew the subconscious was feeding this to me. I put it all in a file – I had a pretty thick file – and I kept it in one place, the goals.

[00:07:23] William Green: And then one day, I went to look for it and I couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere I could in the same cabinet, couldn’t find it. I thought, “Maybe I filed it under a different subject,” so I’d go to the different subjects, never could find it. Finally, I gave up and started a new file. Then one day, I decided to clean up my cabinet because it was piling up and papers were hanging out and so forth. “I’m going to clean up my cabinet today,” and so I started filing it and what happened is it had fell below another file and went underneath it, and so I never saw it. Then as I was cleaning the cabinet, “Wow! There it is!” Then I read it and I was really amazed how clearly defined that was in my mind.

[00:08:11] William Green: And I looked through the thing. I couldn’t figure out how long it was, but I had material going back to 1980. I had material once I was going to a client’s meeting, and this is when I lived in LA, so it had to be 30 years ago, and I wrote a note, the thought I had on the way to seeing Dr. Burke. And so that had to be at least 35 years ago.

[00:08:33] William Green: So, the stuff in the file was no less than 25 years and some is as long as 40 years. So, I estimated to be about at least 25 to 30 years, maybe even longer, could have been longer.

[00:08:49] William Green: Part of what’s nice that I just want to share with our readers, not in too self-congratulatory way, is one of the reasons why Arnold and I have been talking about this recently and emailing back and forth about this is that because I wrote about him at length in my book that kind of launched Arnold in some ways into the public eye.

[00:09:09] William Green: And since then, he is been on my podcast and various other podcasts and interviews, and so in a way, the book kind of helped to make his dream come true. So, one of the things that Arnold has been saying recently is, “Thank you, because actually, I’m getting to do the thing that was my goal all these years ago.”

[00:09:26] William Green: So this episode is, in many ways, a culmination of fulfillment of that process, and so it’s been thrilling for me also to see your coming out party. You’re what? An, 83-year-old debutante, Arnold?

[00:09:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: That’s right, 83. I’ll be 84 in August.

[00:09:43] William Green: Okay, good. So, I wanted to start by talking about your early career. Because last time you were on the podcast, we talked about the first six years of your life and people can go back and listen to that, and it’s a riveting and extraordinary story that gives a sense of how difficult your childhood was.

[00:09:59] William Green: But I wanted to wind forward a little bit and talk about your early work career. Because I think it’ll become pretty clear to people once they hear about the jobs that you had at high school and then when you graduated from high school, that you were not destined for greatness in the eyes of any of your teachers, your parents, or yourself for that matter.

[00:10:19] Arnold Van Den Berg: Even some friends. I have friends from my high school that wrote in my annual – when you signed the annual, he said, “Arnold, you’re about the coolest guy I know. I hope we’ll always be friends. You’re kind of dumb, but you’re still cool.”

[00:10:34] William Green: And this is a guy who became a doctor, right? And was assuming –

[00:10:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah, he became a doctor. He was very smart. He was class president. Everybody knew he was going places, but they didn’t feel that way about me.

[00:10:47] William Green: Well, you didn’t even make it to university, so give us a sense of what jobs you had been doing from the age of 13 or 14 while you were at high school.

[00:10:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, when I became a Bar Mitzvah, the tradition of becoming a man in the Jewish tradition, my dad came up to me and he congratulated me and he said, “What does the Bar Mitzvah mean to you?”

[00:11:09] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “I became a man.” He says, “Good. I believe that. That’s a good way, and now that you’re a man, you’ll be responsible for all your financial expenditures except room and board.” So, anything else that I wanted, it was on me. So, I got a paper route. I became very a good paper route. I was written up one time for being the top carrier, for getting the most customers, and I did very well on my paper route.

[00:11:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: And that was my spending money, buying presents for my brothers and things like that. And so that got me going, and then I did lawn work. I mowed lawns in the neighborhood, and I did any kind of part-time job. Even during the summer, I couldn’t get a job and my mom said to me, “There’s a gentleman in the neighborhood that drives a garbage truck.

[00:11:57] Arnold Van Den Berg If you want me to, I can go and ask him if you’d like to work for him.” I had the stink about that one, but I said, “Sure,” because I couldn’t get any other job. And so, I did that all summer and the guy was really an inspirational guy because he was a very small guy and at that time, I was a gymnast.

[00:12:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: I was pretty strong. He would take this big box, carve a hole in it, pull it back, put it on his knee, and then he’d move it up to the top of the truck. I couldn’t do it. He was amazing. But anyway, it was an interesting job, not one that I’d want to continue with.

[00:12:35] William Green: Then you had that extraordinary job when you were about 16. It’s a little bit of a detour thematically, but I think it’s important to mention, your flower selling job, which is one of the great stories you ever told me. So, I wondered if you could tell us what happened when you were selling flowers.

[00:12:51] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, there was a job. There was a couple of kids at school that had a flower route, and what they would do is they would recruit kids from the high schools and put you on the corner, and you’d sell flowers. What we learned is that some corners really were good because they were in good neighborhoods and people made a lot of money, and there were other parts of town that were tough and people didn’t have that much money and you didn’t do it.

[00:13:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, when you were new, they put you into the worst corner, and that is so you could prove yourself. If you proved yourself, they knew what was a good job and what was halfway. So, they had a quota for each corner. So anyway, the way to move up to the best corner is to continue to outperform the quotas in the bad neighborhoods.

[00:13:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: And then you’d move up to the one. Well, I worked for months to work myself up to the best corner, which was in Bel Air near Beverly Hills. I even had Tony Curtis buy flowers for me. He came up on his Cadillac with his wife and so forth. But anyway, I was really excited because it was hard work and the neighborhoods that weren’t too good.

[00:14:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: You just stood there for hours sometimes, not sell very much, and it gets discouraging. But anyway, finally worked up to the corner and as I was so excited getting up in the morning, knowing that I’m going to be in this great corner. So anyway, I was there about an hour or so, and then it started raining, and it got really bad.

[00:14:22] Arnold Van Den Berg: It was a real downpour and I thought, “Oh my god. I’ve worked all this time to get up to this corner and now, I’m not going to be able to do very good when it’s raining.” As I was thinking about it and going back and forth, people kept stopping in the rain and I was selling the flowers and I thought, “Well, I’m already wet.”

[00:14:43] Arnold Van Den Berg:  Yeah, I was drenched. “I’m already wet and people are still buying, so I’ll just keep selling.” So, I kept selling. Finally, a lady pulls up and says, “Young man, what are you doing in the rain?” I said, “Well, I’m selling flowers, 35 cents apiece, and three for a dollar.” She just looked at me and shook her head and she whispered to her husband and she says, “How many flowers do you have?”

[00:15:07] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “Oh, I got plenty. How many do you need?” She says, “No, no. I want you to count exactly how much you get. I want to buy all the flowers.” I said, “What?” She says, “I want to buy them all!” I said, “What? What are they for?” She says, “Young man, would you just count those flowers?” I said, “Okay,” $16, so I said, “$16.” That’s like a hundred dollars today, or even more.

[00:15:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: So she said, “Okay.” She pulls out the money and I hand her flowers and she says, “Now get in.” I said, “What do you mean?” She says, “Young man, I’m buying you those flowers to get you out of the rain, so get in. We only live a few blocks from here. You’ll get dried out and I’ll get you some soup, and so forth.” So, I was just shocked.

[00:15:53] Arnold Van Den Berg: I never experienced anything like that. So, I said, “Okay.” I got in the car and went home. She made me some soup. The husband came out with a beautiful shirt and he said, “Here, put this on. “After I was dried out, I said, “Boy, that is a beautiful shirt.” He said, “Okay.” So, we sat there and I watched TV with him for a while, and then things went by and I said, “I’m going to have to get back to my corner pretty soon because my boss is going to come and pick me up.” So, they said, “Okay.” So, I went to take off the shirt to give him the shirt, and he says, “No, no, that looks so good on you. You keep it.” I thought, “Where am I, in heaven or something?” I couldn’t believe people doing that. So, they drove me, dropped me off, and my boss came by and he said, “Where’s all your flowers?”

[00:16:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “Well, I sold them.” He said, “You sold them in the rain?” I said, “Well, let me tell you what happened. This lady came by, wanted to get me out of the rain, and she bought all my flowers.” He goes, “You’re kidding.” Yeah. He was shocked. I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Well, all right. Well, that’s great.” So anyway, that really was an amazing experience.

[00:17:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: I’ve never forgotten it, and it has influenced the way I think because at that time, I didn’t think there were people that cared about other people and wanted to help people and all of that. That just didn’t – in our neighborhood, people didn’t do things like that. It was totally out of character.

[00:17:21] Arnold Van Den Berg: So anyway, I always made a mention of this. Whenever I see the Girl Scouts selling cookies or something like that, I always buy a big batch of them, and when they look at me and there’s kind of a surprise, I said, “That wasn’t my idea. There was a lady,” and I tell them story, “that came by and wanted to get me out of the rain, and she bought all my flowers, and I know how good that felt and so I want to make you guys feel good, so thank you for all the cookies.” Then I say, “Okay, what’s your favorite? What’s your favorite? Mom, what’s your favorite?” And then I divide it up and give it all to them.

[00:17:59] William Green: I love the fact that, Arnold, that this thing that happened to you, what, 67, 68 years ago has reverberated over the decades and so you once said to me, “When somebody touches your heart like that, it changes you forever.” I remember you once saying to me, I don’t know, it sounds a little tactless to say but I think it’s worth saying, you had come through the Holocaust where you’d been – you’d gone through appalling things and 39 members of your family had been killed by the Nazis.

[00:18:27] William Green: And so, one thing you once said to me is in a way, one reason why this event had such a profound impact on you is because this couple was non-Jewish, and so there was this – it was an incredibly powerful thing for you to see non-Jewish people taking care of you.

[00:18:53] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yes, and that was very much because my mom was born in Poland in a small ghetto, and bad things happened from an antisemitic thing and they always had problems. Then they moved to Amsterdam, Holland, which was very good compared to where they came from. My dad was from Germany, but the point I’ve always heard all my life is the Jews are one thing and Gentiles are another, and you can’t really trust the Gentiles because look what happened to us, and so on and so forth.

[00:19:13] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I never had this viewpoint that Gentile people could be good people and they’d want to help Jewish people. Of course, people hid my folks during the war and there’s also people who turned them in to the Nazis. So, I wasn’t quite clear about that, but when I saw this couple who was non-Jewish and treated me like I was their son – they treated me as good as their son, so that changed my viewpoint and it opened my eyes to the fact that the things I heard about Gentiles were biased. It was through their experience, and so if you had that experience and that’s the only experience you had, then that’s what you believe.

[00:19:55] William Green: Yeah, and it’s probably one of the reasons you became so open to studying different faiths, the teachings of Christianity, and Hinduism, and Buddhism, and all these other faiths that you started to see, “Oh, well, wait a second. It’s not just my own tradition that has valuable principles.”

[00:20:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: Absolutely, yeah, and I think that’s the value of kindness. When you are kind, and I’ll talk about it later, it actually creates chemicals in your body – serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, and things of that nature. So, one of the things that we’ll talk about later is if people want to be happy, they have to build the things that create those chemicals because the brain is a chemical instrument.

[00:20:35] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so the more you do the right things that create these endorphins, and dopamine, and serotonin, and so forth, the happier you’re going to be. Well, it turns out having good diet, doing exercise, being in the sun, and being kind and being honest, those all are things that create that. All you have to do to be happy to live a good life. It’s dedicated by your chemicals in your brain.

[00:20:50] William Green: Okay, well, we’ll come back to that definitely in some detail, but first, let’s talk a bit more about your use. We were talking about your jobs, right? You’d been loading garbage on a truck, you’d been selling flowers. I think then when you graduated from high school, which –

[00:21:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: Oh, I had a good job in a wood factory too. That was four hours after school. That was a good job.

[00:21:16] William Green: Four hours a day after school while you were at high school?

[00:21:18] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah.

[00:21:24] William Green: That’s brutal. That’s hard work. And then I seem to remember that you got a job after you graduated, and you had shown me your high school transcript once when I was sitting in your office, and you were sort of laughing about the fact that you barely got through high school.

[00:21:44] William Green: You had a class of shop and acapella, where I think they told you that you had to just move your lips and not sing, so it wasn’t –

[00:21:52] Arnold Van Den Berg: I didn’t have any talent for singing, but my favorite class were two classes, auto shop and gymnastics. I was a rope climber, and so auto shop was the first two hours of the day, and I really got into it.

[00:22:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: As matter of fact, when I was in high school, my dream was to be an auto mechanic and maybe even having an auto shop type of thing. And so, I really wanted to learn everything and the teacher was really a tremendous guy. The thing that I enjoyed most about auto mechanics was not necessarily fixing the problem.

[00:22:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: I loved finding the problem, and so I went to Mr. Hal Bloom and I said, “How do you know how to figure out what’s wrong with the car?” He says, “Oh, there’s a whole methodology. There’s the electrical system, the fuel systems, and you start off with the battery and you see if you have electricity here.

[00:22:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then you move in, you have it here, and then you move in. If it doesn’t come here, then the problem is in between here and there. And so, there’s a whole methodology starting from the battery, all the way into the electrical system, and from the fuel tank to the carburetor, and then the adjustment.”

[00:23:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I really got into it. They had an engine on a stand and you could practice on it, do it, and he would fix the thing up and I’d have to find it. And I loved doing it. He even enrolled us into an automotive contest where they had 35 cars from different high schools and the mechanics would mess up, so you wouldn’t know how to figure it out.

[00:23:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then you had to use your system. We would’ve wanted – there were 35 high schools and four junior colleges, and we were the first one around the track. That was the idea, but they disqualified us not totally, but they made us go back because there were some parts – even though we got the car around the track, there was still misfiring on some spark plugs and so forth and so on.

[00:23:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then by the time we had to drive back, everybody else came in, but that was a great experience because I learned a lot. I got a job at a gas station for a $1.15 an hour, and all my buddies would come in at the gas station on Friday night when they’d go out with their girlfriends.

[00:24:07] Arnold Van Den Berg: They’d come and wash their cars and fix it up. Whenever there was a problem, they’d always come to the gas station so that I could figure out what was wrong with their car, and I’d learned to listen to different noises and things. You’d be surprised. There’s quite an art to that, so I was really interested and I was going to be that.

[00:24:24] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then one day, I had needed a part for my 41 Chevy and we didn’t have it, so I had to go to the car dealer. It was a Saturday morning and it was real cold, and an old man came out. At that time, old was 65, and he came out in a white coverall and I told him what the problem was. He says, “Let me go take a look.”

[00:24:45] Arnold Van Den Berg: So he gets on the creeper and he rolls underneath the car, and he comes out and he’s got all kinds of oil on his trousers and stuff like that. His face had some things, his hand looked [dead], and it was very cold and I thought right then and there on the spot, I said, “No, this is not what I want to do when I’m 65 years old, so I’m going to have to find something else.”

[00:25:07] Arnold Van Den Berg: Right then and there, right on the spot, I decided that’s not for me and I started looking for other things. So, while I was working at the gas station, they went bankrupt when the guy went out of business. So, I had to get another job and it was two weeks before Christmas, so I had also had a problem with my dad.

[00:25:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: We had an argument and he said, “Look, here’s the way it is. This is where you live and these are the rules, and if you can’t go by with them, that’s okay. I understand. Just find another place to live.” That kind of thing, so I thought, “You know what? That isn’t a bad idea. I think that’s what I’m going to do.”

[00:25:45] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I had a friend of mine that wanted to move out, and I said, “Duke, are you still interested in moving out?” “Oh yeah, anytime.” So, I said, “Why don’t we find an apartment?” So, what I didn’t like about the fact that my dad is he said, “If you want to go to college, you can live here free. If you don’t want to go to college, you go to work and you pay me $15 a week.”

[00:26:06] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I said that was a little high, but anyway, I got this job at the gas station and the first week, I had to buy a uniform and there were all kinds of deduction – shoes and different things, so I only made $30 for two weeks – oh no, $29 for two weeks. So, I go – my dad comes, he says, “You get paid today?” I said, “Yeah, here’s the check. I made $29.”

[00:26:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: He says, “Well, it’s been two weeks. You owe me $30. And I said, “How am I going to pay you $30 when I only made $29?” He grabs the check and he says, “You can pay me to the other dollar next week,” and that really ticked me off. I was really upset with that, and that’s when he gave me the bit about, “Hey, I’m the landlord.”

[00:26:48] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then I started telling him, “Well, Pa, I had to pay for this.” He said, “Arnold, there’s one thing you need to learn. The landlord doesn’t give a damn about your problems. He only wants your payment. That’s it. I’m the landlord, so you pay it and I’ll let you go until a couple of weeks, you can pay it back.

[00:27:06] Arnold Van Den Berg: That’s the rules of the game.” So, I said, “Okay.” So, I moved out and about two weeks after I moved out, the gas station went out of business. Now I got $40 in the bank and I’m looking for a job, and then my transmission goes out. So, I’m really in [tough bait]. I had to duck. When I saw the landlord, I had to duck out of the way.

[00:27:29] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so I went everywhere to get a job. I didn’t have any skills. I didn’t have a trade, and I’d walk into these big buildings and I said, “I’m applying for a job.” They said, “What kind of job?” I said, “I’ll take anything.” So, I went all over town and I was filling out applications. They always tell you, make it real neat.

[00:27:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: I made sure that it was neat and everything, but after a while, I got really tired of it. So, I walked by and I said, “I didn’t go into this building.” I had a feeling that I should go into the building, so I walk into the building. I told her I’m applying for a job. She says, “I’m sorry, we don’t have any jobs, but if you’d like to fill out an application…”

[00:28:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: : I did it kind of sloppily. I just wanted to get it out, and she looks at it and she says, “I just got a call from the personnel department, and the gentleman’s going out to lunch right now but if you’d like to come back in an hour, you can talk to him.” I said, “Oh, great. Anytime.” Then I thought, “Oh my god, I wish I hadn’t done that [Inaudible],” but anyway, I went back in an hour and he called me in, and he starts talking about the multilith department and I didn’t know what the multilith – it’s a printing department, but I didn’t know what the multilith meant.

[00:28:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “Would you be interested in the multilith department?” I said, “Oh, sure, be happy to.” I figured, “Well, how can I lose, right? I run garbage trucks. What can I lose?” So, he’s talking about the multilith, “Well, let me introduce you to the supervisor of the multilith department. So, I go to the multilith and he starts talking about the multilith department.

[00:28:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: I still didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t know. So, he is going on and on. He says, “Would you like to go down and see the multilith department?” I said, “Yeah.” I walk in and then of course, I saw it was a print shop. So, he said, “Oh, that’s – would you be interested?” I said, “Oh, I would love that.” It looked very interesting. So, he said, “Okay, you got to go out.” I said, “When can I start?” Because I was in trouble, right? I didn’t have much money, so he said, “Why don’t you come back after Christmas? This is like two weeks before, right? Or a few days before. It was right before Christmas. I remember his name, Mr. [ Maitland]. I said, Mr. [Maitland], is there any chance I could start right away? He said, “Arnold, I don’t have a problem starting you, but the problem is that we need to have a medical examination before I can hire you. So, we’re going to have to wait a few days anyway.” I said, “What do I have to do to get a medical?”

[00:29:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: He says, “You go to the doctor, he does a routine medical exam. It’s not a big deal, and then we can hire you,” because it has to do with the group insurance and so forth and so on. I said, “What about if I go to the doctor and I bring the medical records back? He says, “No, it’s got to be private.” So, I thought, “Well, how about if he puts it in an envelope and he seals it so I can’t open it and then I can bring it, it’d be private?”

[00:30:19] Arnold Van Den Berg: He goes, “Well, that’s kind of a new one, but I’ll call the doctor.” So, he called the doctor. Doctor says, “Sure, send him down.” So, I came down. I got the exam, I open it up, and he looks at it and he goes, “What’s the matter?” He says, “You’re color blind in a print shop,” with all kinds of different inks and all that.

[00:30:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: He says, “That’s going to be a problem.” “I said, “Well, I can see some colors.” I could tell he knew I was very upset and he was rooting for me, I think. And so, he says, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to give you the colored blank test myself.” So, he picked up three major colors, so the gold color, the blue color, and the white color, and the green color.

[00:31:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: I passed all of those because I’m red-green colorblind, but a dark green I could easily see. So, he says, “Okay, that’s all we need.” I said, “Well, when can I start?” By the time we got there, it was only a couple of days of Christmas. He says, “You know what? The day before Christmas, we only work half day. Why don’t you come in and we’ll start you on that day? So, I started the day before Christmas, and that was just the happiest time. I went over and saw a friend of mine who was selling Christmas tree, and I told him, “I got this job,” so we were all both pretty excited about it and that was a turning point in my life because it was a real clean shop.

[00:31:44] Arnold Van Den Berg: It was a big building. It was a Richfield Oil company, in their internal printing department, and I really took to it and I enjoyed fixing the machine. I was very good with mechanics, and that’s another thing I learned from mechanics. My dad always told me, “You know, Arnold, everything you learn in the real world, you will find that you’ll be able to use.”

[00:32:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: Sometimes academic things may be important in college and stuff like that, but they don’t always stick with you because you don’t use them. He said, “Everything you learn in the real world, you’ll always be able to use,” so I became very good at mechanics and I learned the importance of having the right tool.

[00:32:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: I remember when I used to work on my car and it would be difficult to get to a place and a certain technique, but if you had the right tool, it made all the difference. So when I was in high school, I always saved my money to buy the right tool.

[00:32:43] William Green: So, one thing that’s pretty clear, right? You were being groomed or grooming yourself for a blue-collar career, right?

[00:32:49] William Green: And your closest friends were these kids at high school who had blue collar careers, and you and they were always getting in fights where you were defending each other against other kids. So you were kind of a tough kid, not doing very well academically. You were a good athlete. As we can talk about later, you’d become a champion rope climber despite how malnourished you’d been coming out of the orphanage where you’d grown up during the Holocaust.

[00:33:15] William Green: What sort of image of your yourself did you have when you came out of high school? Because I think this is important to establish as we move towards explaining how it was that you turned around your life and how much of turning your life around depended on you changing your image of yourself. Because my sense is you had grown up hearing that you weren’t very smart, thinking – I remember you writing a speech once on the power of commitment where you said, “No matter how hard I worked, I was not able to accomplish my goals.” So, can you give us a sense of what you were actually like back then internally? We’ve got a sense of what was going on externally in your life.

[00:33:56] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, I think that I had this situation after the war that my mom hired the best child psychologist to figure out what was wrong with me because they enrolled me in a Hebrew class. It was like a kindergarten Hebrew class, and I failed it. I obviously couldn’t do the work. I wasn’t getting along.

[00:34:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so the rabbi – my dad called me aside and said, “You know, you’re going to move on, but you’re not going with the other kids. We’re going to send you to this special course.” I said, “How come I’m not going with the other kids?” They said, “Well, it’s just a different thing. We think this class will be better for you.” I got the feeling that that wasn’t the truth. I got the feeling I failed, and when I got into grammar school, I had trouble reading and all of these kind of things, so my mom hired this child psychologist who was one of the top. The conclusion he came to is that because of what happened in the war with the malnutrition, it could have affected my brain and it might be a permanent thing if there was permanent damage there.

[00:35:01] Arnold Van Den Berg: He couldn’t tell, but he said he just wanted to prepare my mom that this was not just a temporary problem. This may be an ongoing, and so that’s what I grew up with, thinking that I didn’t do good in Hebrew school, didn’t do good in grammar school, and my mom was concerned about it, hired a child psychologist.

[00:35:21] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so, I heard this story and that became my image. Athletically, I could do fine and like working on cars, and doing menial jobs, and working in blue collar situation, I was very good. But when it came to the academics, it was almost hopeless. The other thing that I realized looking back, it wasn’t only that I had this slow self-image, I had zero interest in what they were teaching in school.

[00:35:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: Because I remember sitting in an English class and the woman was teaching the dangling participle, and I thought, “What is this got to do with life? I want to make some money. How do I do this?” And so, I had just – English, it became the worst subject. It was boring. I never did well, I didn’t want to do it.

[00:36:10] Arnold Van Den Berg: And this just went on and on. I didn’t develop academically, and so all the teachers used to tell me, “Arnold, you’re not getting good grades and if you want to be successful in life, you got to get good grades and you got to go to college. If you want to have a good career and make money, you can’t do it if you don’t go to college.”

[00:36:31] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I was sitting there after I graduated from high school and my mom looked at me and she said, “Arnold, you look a little depressed.” I said, “Well, Ma, I am.” She said, “How come?” I said, “Well, I did very well in high school with the gymnastics and so forth, but I never did well in school, and all the teachers told me, ‘If you want to be successful and make money, you got to go to college’”.

[00:36:56] Arnold Van Den Berg: She goes, “What? The teachers are telling you that you can’t make money unless you go to college?” I said, “Yeah!” She said, “The first thing I tell you is ask them how much they make, and when you find out, you’ll see they don’t know what they’re doing.” She said, “That’s the first rule. The second thing is you have to understand the way the world works. There’s only two kinds of people. There’s the yekke and there’s the businessman.” I said, “What’s a yekke?” She says, “A yekke is a guy like your dad. He’s intelligent. He knows mathematics. He knows psychology. He knows religion. He knows politics. Ask him anything and he can answer you. Can he make money? Nothing.”

[00:37:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: She goes, “Nothing,” and I said, “Fuck.” She said, “Take your mother. Does she know all of these other subjects? No. Does she care? No. Can she make money? Your mother can make money anywhere, even in Auschwitz,” and so I was stunned with that. I said, “Well, so what do you think I should do?” She says, “You got to be a yekke or a businessman. What do you want to be?” I said, “Well, I don’t want to be a yekke. I’ll be a businessman.” “Okay, so find a business.” I said, “Well, Mom, what kind of business can I go into?” She says, “What difference does it make? Business is you find the product that you like and then you find somebody who would like to buy it,” and that’s what I do. Find a product, then sell it, and [Inaudible] in the middle, make a good living. That’s how business works. That’s all there is to business. Find a product, sell it, and make money. You don’t need to go to college or anything. That’s all you need. She says, “You can parachute your mother anywhere in the world. She doesn’t even need to know the language, and she could make money.” She said, “When I came to Holland, I couldn’t speak Dutch, and we started our business and we couldn’t afford a location, so we had a little business at the end of a dirt road street. Your mother would go out every night when your dad made the dresses and did all the stuff to create the merchandise, I would go out and sell it.” She said, “I never went home until I sold everything. That’s it. Put it in your mind. You sell it, you make money.” She says, “You know what I found out? Your dad called me one night and I came home late, and he said, ‘Where were you? What’s going on? It’s late.” She said, “You know, Hugo, I learned something. I found out that the later it got, the more I sold, and I figured out that people just bought it to get rid of me.” That was who she was.

[00:39:35] William Green: To wind back, Arnold, you mentioned your mother in Auschwitz saying she could even sell in Auschwitz, and I do think it’s worth going back and talking about that for a couple of minutes because her experience in Auschwitz was very extraordinary, and it had important ramifications for you really in terms of teaching you about the power of consciousness. Because it was as if the power of her mind could bend reality to her will.

[00:40:00] William Green: There are two stories I’d love you to tell about her time in Auschwitz, one of which is the story of her doing business with the guards, but the other is the extraordinary story of when her friend was sick.

[00:40:10] Arnold Van Den Berg: Oh, [Inaudible]. I was going to Holland one year. I was in the early seventies, and I said, “Ma, I’m going to Holland. I’m going to be going to England, and I’m going to stop by in Holland and visit the people who saved you and so forth.” “Oh, that’s wonderful. When you get there. Please look up [Inaudible].” That was the lady’s name. I said, “Who is she?” She says, “Well, Laney and I were in Auschwitz. We were on the same bunk, and she got very sick. We were very close, and she had typhus. So, what they do when you have typhus, they take a barrack, they put a guard in front of it so that you can’t go in there because you contaminate the whole camp, and they let you die there. You’re just in there. And so, I wanted to go see her, but I knew there was a guard in front and I had some nightgowns, and I had some food for her and some water, and so forth. I figured I would visit her and make her feel better.” She said, “So I went up to the guard and he said, ‘Stop.’ He had his gun there and he says, “Where you going?” She says, “Well, I’m going to go in there because I have a friend of mine that’s dying.” He said, “My orders are if you go any further than where you are right now to shoot you. You can’t go in because you contaminate the camp.”

[00:41:25] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so, she said, “Let me ask you a question. If you had a relative or a loved one that was dying in there, would you not want to go in there?” She says he said, “Well, sure, but my orders are to shoot you, so don’t go any further than this or I’m going to have to shoot you.” She says, “You know what?” She says, “I’m in a cabin where what they do is they put you – they have these cabins before the gas chamber, and they’d have you go under the cabin, they’d gas these people. Then you’d move into the next cabin.” And so, she figured from the time where she was in the cabin to how long it would take to get to the gas chamber be about two weeks. So she says, “I’m going to die in the next two weeks in the gas chamber, or I’m going to die when you shoot me, but if I’m going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m going in.” She said she just took off and started walking, and he didn’t shoot her. And so Laney was telling me this story when I visit her. I called her up and I said, “Laney, this is Arnold Van Den Berg. I’m -” “Oh, Lanya’s son! Come!” I thought geez, it was like a celebrity.

[00:42:37] Arnold Van Den Berg: She made this beautiful meal. She says, “You know, you can go through life and you will never meet anybody like your mother.” I said, “What’s going on?” She says, “Well, did she tell you when she saved my life?” I said, “No! She didn’t mention it! She just told me to go visit you.” She says, “That’s Lanya. She doesn’t think it’s a big deal.” She says, “But the amount of courage it took to stand there in front of a gun and say, ‘I’m going in.’” So she said, “I was laying there. I was kind of in delirium and I thought I heard your mother’s voice, but I thought, can’t be. All of a sudden, she comes walking in. She’s got a big smile like she owns the place.”

[00:43:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: She said, “Lanya, whatever you do, don’t come back because the next time, they’re going to shoot you.” She says, “I come back tomorrow.” She said, “No, Lanya. Don’t.” “I see you tomorrow.” She walked out. Next day, she shows up again and she says, “Lanya, you can’t do this.” She says, “How did you get by the guard?”

[00:43:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: She says, “You know, he stopped me and I explained to him, and this last time when I saw him, he walked the other way.” She says, “I think he’s afraid of me.” That was her humor, you know? The last time she says, “Laney, I’m going to tell you something. I risked my life to come and see you to bring you these foods,” and she grabbed her and she says, “You better not die on me because one of these days, we’re going to be celebrating getting out of Auschwitz, and we’re going to be drinking wine and toasting that celebration. And I’ve got it in my mind. You’ve got to put it in your mind.” She’s still holding and she says, “And whatever you do, don’t die on me.”

[00:44:20] Arnold Van Den Berg: Laney says, “I was almost afraid to die because she was that adamant about it,” and that was her. That’s just classic for her.

[00:44:29] William Green: We were talking about her yesterday over the phone, and you were telling me a story that I don’t think you’d ever told me before, where you said she, in her own mind, had a contract with God.

[00:44:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: Oh, that was funny. Yeah. She said to me, “You know, Arnold, I was never afraid that I was going to die in Auschwitz because I just knew I wasn’t.” I said, “How do you know?” She says, “I made a deal with God.” I said, “What do you mean you made a deal with God? You sit down and sign a contract or something?” That’s the way she sounded like, “Hey, it’s a done deal.”

[00:45:04] Arnold Van Den Berg: She said, “No. All I said to God, if you will let me live through Auschwitz or I can see my children, I will walk your path. I will do anything you want me to do, and I know that he accepted it, so it was done. I knew I was not going to die in Auschwitz, and nothing made any difference. I would walk down and all of a sudden, somebody would fall dead in front of me. These people were dying all the time. I knew it wasn’t going to be me.”

[00:45:36] William Green: She also had this strange attitude. I remember you telling me once when she was in an old age home, when she was an impossible old lady and would get in trouble hitting people in the old age home. You said that she thought that she was way the most beautiful person in the old age home, so they had to take a separate photo of her.

[00:45:53] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah. What happened is my mom always had this feeling that she was either special or beautiful. There was something about her – and she really believed this! One time she was telling me she was in love with this medical school student in Poland, and her dad wouldn’t let her date the guy because he wasn’t Jew – he was Jewish, but he wasn’t Jewish enough. Her dad was very orthodox. So, he said to her, “Lanya, when you live in this home, you cannot date this man.” “He’s Jewish.” He says, “No, he’s not Jewish. He doesn’t follow it. He’s not Jewish enough, so you can’t go out with him.” She said, “Okay, Papa. Then I will leave.”

[00:46:34] Arnold Van Den Berg: She was only 15 years old in Poland in a little ghetto, so he looked at her like, “What do you mean?” So anyway, she found out that we had some relatives in Germany. She wrote to them and asked them if she could come, and the people said, “Sure, come on down. We have a business and if you’d like to work in the business, we can give you a job.”

[00:46:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, she was all excited. She got on the train, went to Germany, and then she met my dad. So, I said, “What happened to the guy who you were in love with, which is the reason you left?” She says, “Arnold, when I got to Germany, I was so beautiful. All the men wanted to date me. I figure, who needs him?” So I just looked at her, and I’m looking at a picture on the mantle, and I see her when she’s a young girl.

[00:47:22] Arnold Van Den Berg: Looking at that and I said, “I don’t think I would ask her out.” She didn’t look that beautiful to me, but she did, so one time I went to visit her in the nursing home, and there was a picture of the whole group and there was a picture by herself, and I thought, “Why would they have a picture of her by herself?”

[00:47:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, we got knocked on the door and we went in and sat down and I said, “Ma, I noticed there was a different picture. They had the whole group and one by yourself,” and she said, “Don’t you know?” I said, “What do you mean?” “I’m special.” And my wife started laughing. I got actually angry when she told me that, but my wife started laughing and I thought, “I’m going to make a joke out of this.”

[00:48:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “Oh, you’re special. Well, I must be very fortunate to have such a special mom as you.” With a straight face, she said, “You said it.” She really believed that. You know what’s interesting? Whenever people would meet my mom, you know what the first thing they said is? “Your mom is so beautiful.” She wasn’t beautiful. She created that in her mind.

[00:48:33] William Green: So, I think it’s interesting thematically in terms of our conversation here and what we’ll get to soon, which is the power of belief, the way that our thoughts shape our reality, but I think it’s also interesting because people are starting to get a sense of the childhood you had, right?

[00:48:50] William Green: So you’re not doing well in school. You had a very difficult time during the Holocaust, growing up in an orphanage. Then you’re living with these parents who are not exactly easy. Your dad, who’s making you pay for everything from the age of 13, and who also while obviously an incredibly honest guy with a lot of integrity, was also pretty violent towards you.

[00:49:10] William Green: Then your mom was tough, smart, charismatic, and would do things like spraying you and your friends with a hose and saying, “You bums.” So you were full of anger and frustration in a sense that you weren’t really going anywhere, and then at the same time, you got married very early to your high school sweetheart, and that didn’t work out.

[00:49:33] William Green: So, can you give us a sense of what happened there so that we can just complete this picture of kind of gloom and doom before you started actually to turn your life around?

[00:49:43] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, what happened is I was very close to the girl that I married, my high school sweetheart. I was a good athlete. She was a cheerleader. It was perfect. We both were good dancers. We loved to dance, and we had a lot of friends, and it was just a lot of fun. I just loved my high school days. They were just terrific. Anyway, we got married, and that was another problem because her parents were Italian Catholics, and they didn’t particularly want a Jew in the family.

[00:50:10] Arnold Van Den Berg: They were very upset about that. So they wouldn’t let me take her out. So, after a while, I dated her once and they said okay. Then after a couple of times, they wouldn’t let me take her out anymore. So I had a friend of mine who was Italian. We used to call him the Italian Stallion. He would go pick her up like he was dating her, and then he’d bring her around the corner and we’d go out. Well, I had a friend of mine that was Mexican and Gail’s cousin lived right across the street, and they didn’t want her to go out with him because he was Mexican. It was just that kind of thinking in the fifties and so forth.

[00:50:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I couldn’t take her out because I was Jewish. He couldn’t take her out because he was Mexicans, and so we made a deal that we would both work together to get us together. And so we had this guy called the Italian Stallion. He was a good looking guy, a tall guy, a very nice guy, and he said, “Hey, I’ll go pick up the girls for you,” and so forth and so on.

[00:51:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so that’s the way we did it, and we started dating together and so forth. Then my folks were not excited about me marrying a Catholic girl, so they tried to talk me out of it and I said, “No, this is what I want to do. I’m going to do it.” So, my mom says, “You know what, Arnold? I told Pa. We are not going to the wedding. This is not the kind of wedding we are looking forward to.” I said, “Fine.” I was relieved almost because I figured they’d probably make a problem. So I said, “Okay, Ma. I understand. Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to go to the wedding, but I’m going to go to the wedding anyway.” She says, “Well, is it going to be a priest?”

[00:51:49] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “No, ma, it’s in a denominational. He’s a judge, and there’s no Jewish and no Catholic, and it’s totally neutral. It’s not a problem.” She says, “What are they going to have? They’re going to have a cross in one side and a swastika the other side?” I thought, “Oh.” I said, “Ma, the cross is not like a swastika.”

[00:52:12] Arnold Van Den Berg: She says, “Forget it. That’s what it is.” So there’s no point arguing, right? That’s what it is. So, she said she wasn’t going to come. About two days before the wedding, she said, “Arnold, I was talking to Pa, and I said to Pa, no matter what Arnold does, he’s still our son.” I said, “Oh, well, thank you.” She says, “So we’re going to the wedding.”

[00:52:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: And I was already happy that they weren’t going because I knew my dad would never say anything, but there’s no telling what she would say or do. So, I said, “Ma, you don’t really need to go. I know you’re not going to enjoy it and you might even cause a problem, and I don’t need that at my wedding.”

[00:52:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: She says, “I don’t make a problem, but we go and don’t tell your mother what to do. I’m going to the wedding.” So that was it. I said, “Okay.” So anyway, my ex-wife at that time called me before the wedding. She says, “You know, there’s a guy there that has a beautiful voice and he sings beautiful songs. Would you mind if we picked out a few songs to sing at the wedding?”

[00:53:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: And I said, “No, I don’t care.” So, I get to the wedding. I’m standing right up there, and all of a sudden, the first song, guess what he starts to sing? Ave Maria. And I go, “Oh, Ave Maria had a Jewish wedding.” So, I thought, “He’s not standing too far away from me. I think I’ll tap him on the shoulder and say it’s okay.”

[00:53:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: By that time, he was halfway through the song and I looked over at my mom and she gave me that look like it was a knife in my stomach. Anyway, he did the song and I was just waiting for the problems to surface, but she behaved herself and everything went well. And so, we got married.

[00:53:54] William Green: But the marriage didn’t turn out well. I think you told me once before that that high school sweetheart ran off with someone else, and you then went into a period of depression and really lost it about five years. It was during that period of depression that this kind of transformation of your life really begins. It’s, I think, very instructive for our audience here, and it’s certainly been very instructive for me in the past.

[00:54:17] William Green: One of the things that happened that changed things seems to be that you discovered self-hypnosis and that seemed – so we’ll go through several of the things in order that seem to have led to the transformation of your life.

[00:54:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, what happened, we were married, we went around four and a half years. We were married four and a half years, and I came home one day, we’re having breakfast, and she says, “You know, Arnold, I’d really been thinking about I want to move out.” I was startled. “What do you mean move out?” She said, “Well, we had these problems, so forth, and I don’t know what to do. So, I think it’s a good thing.” I said to her, “Listen, when you’re married, you don’t go live in different places. You work out the problem. So here’s the deal. You stay and we work out the problems, or if you decide to leave, we’re getting a divorce. There’s no in between there.” I wasn’t going to put up with that, but I didn’t know she had another guy.

[00:55:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: That was just the way I felt. It’s ridiculous to move away from a problem. So, she said, “Okay.” So, the next morning, I asked her, “Well, what did you decide?” She says, “Well, if I can’t move out of my own, I’d like to get a divorce.” I said, “Okay.” So we got an attorney and we started the divorce problem, and that really put me into a very depressed state of mind. Dr. Ramljak, my psychiatrist, explained later that the anger is the thing that creates the depression. It creates all the cortisol, all the different chemicals in your body, and it just shoots down.” Well, I was angry for many other reasons, but this really angered me, especially since she took off with another guy.

[00:55:53] Arnold Van Den Berg: For the male ego, there’s nothing worse, right? So anyway, I said to her, “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to play baseball. I’m going to ask you three times if you would like to go back and work out the problems. And I’m going to do it three times and after three times, three strikes, and you’re out. And if that’s the case, it’s done in my mind. I’ll never call you again.” So I called her the first time. She said, “No, I’m not really interested.” I said, “Okay.” Called her a month later, not interested. So, the second time I called her, she was actually a little bit cold to me like I was bothering her. I said, “You know what, Gail? I told you I was going to go three times and ask you to go back. This is the second time, but the way you’re treating me, if you can’t even show any respect, then it’s over. So why don’t we accelerate the second time to the third time and call it the third strike?” She was very comfortable with that. She says, “Okay.” So, I hung up and I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’m never going to call you again anytime in my life. That’s a commitment.” So, I hung up the phone and I cried like a baby because I knew it was over in my mind, and that was it. Well, then I went into a deep depression and the problem is I was starting my business and at 3:30 in the afternoon, I would get so tired. I felt like it was 3:30 in the morning.

[00:57:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: I could hardly study. So, I read an article that said 20 minutes under hypnosis is the equivalent to three and a half hours of sleep. And I thought, “Oh my god, that’s just what I need.” So I bought a book. The first one I bought was Self-Hypnosis by Dr. LeCrone, I think it was his name. Anyway, it was a very simple process and I practiced it for a week.

[00:57:43] Arnold Van Den Berg: After a week, I could go out just like that. I would be on the floor three to five minutes, and I would be out. I’d wake up 20 or 30 minutes, and I could work until 10:30 at night. So that was a godsend thing and that really got me excited about hypnosis, and I started talking to my friends about it.

[00:58:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: I offered to do hypnosis on them, and I read everything I could get my hand on. The reason that I got excited about it is because this story about my dad on a death march where he told me there’s something about the mind that we don’t understand. And so, I knew there was something to it, but anyway, I started reading and studying hypnosis, and I got very good at it, but I was still depressed. I was depressed most of the time, but at least I was able to work. So, there was a woman in my office and she said to me, “You know, Arnold, I went through a similar experience as you did. And I met this psychiatrist and he really helped me. And I think Dr. Ramljak could really help you with your depression.”

[00:58:48] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so, I said, “Well, it isn’t getting any better, so I’ll take a shot at it.” So, I went to see him and I told him about how I got through the day with using self-hypnosis. He says, “Well, Arnold, that’s a wonderful idea. However, how would you like to find out why you’re so angry?” I said, “Oh, that’s really important. That’s why I’m here.” He said, “Okay, why don’t we start working on that?” So I made an agreement that I would stick with the program and we’d work out the problem, and get rid of the anger, and then the depression would lift and indeed it did.

[00:59:27] William Green: And so, to go back in some detail with the self-hypnosis, one of the things that I guess has always been an issue with hypnosis is that it’s got this dubious reputation that comes from our image of stage hypnotists who take away your control. You and I were chatting yesterday about this guy I listen to on the Huberman podcast, David Spiegel, who has an app called Reveri. That’s a hypnosis app that I’ve been using just for a couple of days so far, and he’s the Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine.

[01:00:09] William Green: And he makes this distinction between using hypnosis in a medical situation, in an analytical practice – he’s a psychiatrist – and stage hypnosis. One of the things that really surprised me was to hear that he’s using it to treat asthma, and stress, and insomnia, and post-traumatic stress, and to control pain, and to stop smoking, and even to help people with cancer deal with pain and the like. And so, it seems like you stumbled upon this thing very early, at a point where it didn’t have that kind of respectability, it was just regarded as this kooky thing, and you became a kind of a guinea pig for it.

[01:00:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah. I’ll tell you why that – it’s not only stage hypnosis. When hypnosis first started, they had the [Inaudible] and they thought it was animal magnetism.

[01:01:07] Arnold Van Den Berg: They had a lot of kooky ideas. They were using hypnosis, but they didn’t know what was causing it, so I read about that and there was a gentleman by the name of Émile Co – Coué or I don’t know how to pronounce it.

[01:01:18] William Green: Yeah, Coué, I think. Yeah, Émile Coué.

[01:01:21] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah, Émile Coué, and he was an amazing guy. I learned so much from him.

[01:01:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: And what he did is he was a French pharmacist. So, people in the old days, at the turn of the century, going to the pharmacy and say, “I have a skin rash,” or “I’m not feeling good, what would you recommend?” He was like the country doctor, right? He recommends the thing. So, he said people would come in and he said that – here’s the interesting thing, you talk about belief.

[01:01:48] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “If I believed in the product and I knew it was good and I tried it to be for, I would recommend it and it would work every time, but if I wasn’t sure about the product, then people use it but I hadn’t seen the great results, I’d say, ‘This is probably something you should try. I am not sure about it, but give it a try,’ and so it wouldn’t work.”

[01:02:10] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said – so after a while, after a few years, he realized that it wasn’t the medicine that made the people well. It was his belief in that medicine like the placebo, right? So in modern medicine, you have the placebo. In his days, you had the pharmacist, what he believed, and so he said he sold this pharmacy and he started healing people by suggestion called autosuggestion.

[01:02:35] Arnold Van Den Berg: He’s the master of autosuggestion, and here’s what he did. People had kooky ideas about hypnotists, so he would lose credibility by saying he was going to hypnotize them. So what he did is he got them into a highly suggestive state. He had a beautiful rose garden. He would play beautiful classical music.

[01:02:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: He would have all the people come in and sit down, and then he would talk them into getting relaxed, “I want you people to all just relax. Let all the tension go. Don’t think about anything else. Just think about my voice, and I’m going to tell you how you can heal yourself.” So he’d go up and say, “What’s your problem?”

[01:03:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: He would say, “Okay, here’s a prescription for you. Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better. And you do that 30 times a day.” So he started healing amazing. He had a tremendous reputation. People were coming from all over just to go to his seminars, and so I read a couple of books by people who were his students, but he never wrote that much himself.

[01:03:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: And when he was interviewed later on in life, “Why didn’t you write some books?” He said, “I have the ability to heal somebody in six minutes,” and he used to treat 40,000 people a year. He said, “I don’t want to take three months to write a book. There’s other people who can write the book. I want to practice it because this is what I do and I am good at it, and it’s a gift from God and I want to practice it. That’s what I’m called to do,” so he did that. So, I learned a lot from him and about the different – so when I start to hypnotize a person, what I do is I talk with them and tell them how it works and why it works, and we go through their – and I play classical music so they get kind of relaxed, and then I walk them my –

[01:04:29] William Green: Yeah, I remember you played me the Four Seasons by Vivaldi when you hypnotized me a few years back.

[01:04:34] Arnold Van Den Berg: That’s right, and you know what? I used to play that when I hypnotized my son every night during track season, and he told me, “Dad, whenever I watch TV and there’s an ad that comes on with Vivaldi’s music, I automatically go into this relaxed state.” So I play classical music, it relaxes them.

[01:04:51] Arnold Van Den Berg: And then my induction is about seven minutes between the time I start and the time throughout, it’s about seven minutes. I go through a very slow process. I have them flex their muscles and [Inaudible], and I talk them into this type of situation. It’s nothing sophisticated, and so they go out and I’ve had amazing results.

[01:05:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: You cannot – some of the results I’ve had, if I told people, some of them I think they might not believe me because it’s so miraculous. You know the one that was the most famous one is my son was a track athlete and he was a shot putter, and he sprained his ankle and it swelled up. It was like he had a knot on it, and we had a championship meet nine days later.

[01:05:40] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I went to the doctor and he looks at the ankle and he says, “Oh, he’s out for the season. There’s no way I’m going to get this ankle ready for him to push a 16-pound ball up.” So I said, “Why? He says, “Well, Arnold, I have to put him in a cast because he could ruin his ligaments,” and he said, “He does the spin technique, he spins around the ring. How are you going to spin around with the cast?” I said, “The subconscious will adjust for that. I’m not worried about that.” He said, “Okay, there’s another problem, Arnold. When you have a sprained ankle as serious as his, and I put him in a cast, he’s going to be on crutches because he can’t step on the leg. It hurts. So how in the hell is he going to go into the shot putting ring? [Inaudible]? You just can’t do it.” I said, “You know what, Doctor? Subconscious can anesthetize him. There was a doctor in India that did 150 surgeries under hypnosis. That’s all he used.” He goes, “Look, I’m not into that. I’m a doctor.” It’s like, “Don’t give this voodoo stuff to me.” I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. You put him in the cast and I’ll take over after that.” He said, “Fine.” So, I prepared Scott. I’ve developed the program for it, and then the day of the meet, I took him to a hotel and I put him out under hypnosis.

[01:07:00] Arnold Van Den Berg: And then I didn’t bring him out of hypnosis. I kept him in there, and he was under the meet for a couple hours. The whole meet was under hypnosis, and I said to him, “Now Scott, what you do is everything’s ready to go. Take a few spins just to make sure that everything works and there’s no pain in everything. Once you realize you’re okay, then you go for the win.” He said, “Dad, how am I going to go for the win when I got the cast and all that?” I said, “You’re the best out there,” and he happened to be. He had the best mark. He was the best one out there. He should of won it, but with the sprained ankle, it was questionable.

[01:07:35] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I said, “Try it a few times, and then go for the win.” So he said, “Okay.” Did a few times and he looked at me and he went – that means it’s on.

[01:07:45] William Green: Thumbs up. For people who are listening, the thumbs up signal.

[01:07:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah, and his eyes were flashing and I told him – I was standing next to the coach and I went, “We’re going to win today.”

[01:07:58] Arnold Van Den Berg: He goes, “You guys drive me nuts.” So anyway, he gets in there, little show at first, but then on the final round, on the third put, what I did is when I watched him is first of all, how high would he go if he was up high, jump up and [Inaudible]. It had to be perfect. He couldn’t push it too far because it would go horizontal.

[01:08:20] Arnold Van Den Berg: You couldn’t go too high because it would go high. So I watched, I looked up the jump, it was perfect. I watched his flick, the angle was perfect. I said to the coach, “It’s gone.” So, here’s what was really amazing. So the line, the 50 yard line was there – 50 feet line, I should say, and everybody was underneath the line.

[01:08:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: So if he went over the line, that was it. So, it started to go down before the line and I thought, “Oh god, it looks like it’s going to -” and then all of a sudden, it stuttered like – and it went over the line and the stadium just went nuts. I couldn’t talk to him for 10 minutes. There were so many people around him, they couldn’t believe it.

[01:09:01] Arnold Van Den Berg: They even wrote an article about it. And so these kind of experiences really got me to believing in it, and of course I had many along the way.

[01:09:10] William Green: I want to give our audience some sort of practical advice here to hang on to so they can explore this further if they don’t know much about this.

[01:09:21] William Green: So, I’m pretty skeptical about hypnosis, right? Despite the fact that I think it actually had a great benefit to me, you hypnotizing me, but I think one thing that’s really helped me was to listen to Andrew Huberman’s podcast back in February 2022, when he interviewed this guy, David Spiegel. Because they’re both professors at Stanford Medical School.

[01:09:42] William Green: So, Huberman is this legendary professor of neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine, and so he’s interviewing David Spiegel, this guy we mentioned who brought out the Reveri app, about why it is that it works. Spiegel is explaining that he’s hypnotized like 7,000 people over the years.

[01:10:01] William Green: And he was explaining that basically, hypnosis is this naturally occurring state of highly focused attention. So, he’s talking about how you can change the brain state basically in ways that can help you to deal with anything from pain to chronic stress, and so I think that’s worth checking out.

[01:10:22] William Green: I think it’s really worth checking out, this app Reveri, which Arnold hasn’t used but which I’ve been playing around with the last few days. It’s spelled R-E-V-E-R-I, that was created by David Spiegel, which gives you a way of hypnotizing yourself if you want to play with this. Then another really useful resource that we’ve discussed before, Arnold, that I think is worth mentioning is there’s a book that you’ve recommended by Harry Carpenter called The Genie Within, that also is really good.

[01:10:49] William Green: Can you tell us a little bit about The Genie within? Because that seems to be one of the best single books on this if people want to go further with this.

[01:11:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: Oh, absolutely. What happened is as I was studying the subconscious mind and all of the different psychological factors and the different things you could do, one of my secretaries said to me, “You know, Arnold, I read a book by a man named Mr. Carpenter called The Genie Within, and I think you would really enjoy the book and I think you’d even enjoy meeting him. He’s an incredible guy.” I said, “Oh, order the book.” So we ordered the book. I read it right away, and I thought, “Wow, this is like finding From Poverty to Power.” It was revolutionary. Now, at that time, which was five years ago, I had accumulated up until now 680 pages of notes, and articles, and different things that I cut out of books to put into this file.

[01:11:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s called the Central File of the Subconscious, and what I hope to do with it is I thought that I would collect all of this material and – I didn’t want to write a book. I just wanted to give people information, which I do to help them understand different things, and I thought I would call them The Collection of the Subconscious Mind.

[01:12:10] Arnold Van Den Berg: And it’s from all kinds of – it’s from religion, it’s from science, it’s from physics, it’s from quanti – it’s just all over the place, and so I was preparing it and then I started editing. I think I sent you the first 55 pages of [Inaudible]. Anyway, the bottom line of it is that I read the book and I said, “You know what? It’s the same thing that happened to me when I read Poverty to Power. My dream was to collect all these good ideas and put them in the book,” but when I read The Poverty to Power, I said, “There’s no way I could write a book because it wouldn’t be as good as this one and I couldn’t improve on that one.”

[01:12:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: When I read The Genie Within, I said, “Even my 680 pages, I’m not going to be able to do as good a job as this guy did.” So I called him up and I congratulated him. I said, “Mr. Carpenter, you don’t know me. My name is Arnold Van Den Berg. I’m a student of the subconscious mind for 50 years, and I want you to know I’ve read hundreds of books.” Look, I’ve got books all over. I never throw a book away because I always make notes and then I can find them. So, I said, “It’s the best book I’ve read on the subject, and I think you did a marvelous job, and I thank you for it. I’m going to give it out to anybody who will read it.” He said, “You know what, Arnold? I appreciate that. Thank you for calling me,” and he says, “You know, I’m a little disappointed.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, I didn’t write the book to make money. I’m an aeronautical engineer and I’ve made my money in my field, and I didn’t write the book to make money. I wrote the book to help people, and I was hoping that young people could read it because it could change their life.”

[01:13:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “It sure could,” and I said, “How many books have you sold?” He said, “I’ve only sold about 70,000 in six or seven years.” I said, “Let me tell you something right now as we speak. You only sold 70,000 copies of this book until you met me, but now that I’m familiar with your book, I’m going to give it to anybody who will read it and so your sales are going to skyrocket.” He chuckled, laughed. He says, “Well, that would be nice,” and he said, “I tell you what, just to show good faith, I’m going to give you an order for a hundred books so that I can have some in my office as people come in.” So he says, “Oh, I’ll give you a discount.”

[01:14:30] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “Mr. Carpenter, I believe in universal law that when somebody does something good, the universe rewards them, and I feel that you deserve to get whatever you get out of it and if you don’t need the money, donate it to your favorite charity, but I don’t want the discount. I am very happy to pay. This is the first time in anything that I’m offering to pay retail, but in this case, you deserve it all and you are to be congratulated.” So here’s what happened to him. He was eight years old and he was dying from incurable heart disease. He was eight years old. So one of his family members belonged to the Christian Science Church. They believe in healing, right? So, one of the persons says, “Why don’t you have a healer from the church come and he could heal your son?” The people have the confess, “Well, we don’t really believe in that. We’re Christian scientists,” but just like a lot of people, they don’t believe. They said, “What do you got to lose? Bring him in. Nothing happens. He’s going to die anyway,” so they said, “Well, okay.”

[01:15:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, they brought him in. Three months later, he went back to school, was playing sports, and the guy’s 80 years old. He’s as old as I am, and so he said all of his life, he used the principles – and by the way, I went through his bibliography. I read almost every book he had in his bibliography.

[01:15:50] William Green: One thing you may not have used Arnold, that I think is a useful resource for people before we turn to the next subject is he has a website for The Genie within, and it’s just thegeniewithin.com. There’s a section on there of CDs and MP3s that he sells. Last time we chatted about this on the podcast, I bought that and there’s one thing – it’s track two. It’s called Achieving Alpha with metronome sound, and it sounds pretty odd, but it gets you into this very deep state of relaxation.

[01:16:24] William Green: And I’ve done it quite often over the last year or so, and my wife has been much more diligent about using it and has found it incredibly helpful, and was just telling me when we were going for a walk yesterday that there’s one thing that he tells you to do where you can put your thumb and forefinger together and say alpha in your mind, and it gets you back into that state automatically.

[01:16:47] William Green: And she said, “I’ve actually listened to this recording often enough that I can now get myself in that state just by doing that.” And so I think – I’ve never actually really listened to the other tracks. That’s the one I found really helpful, and so I just listened to it over and over.

[01:17:02] William Green: I’m not vouching for any of this stuff. What the hell do I know? I’m no expert, but I think if our listeners want to learn more, Harry Carpenter and The Genie Within is a good resource. Those recordings, the CDs and MP3s on his geniewithin.com website are worth exploring. I think David Spiegel’s Reveri app, which we mentioned, is worth looking into.

[01:17:25] William Green: Arnold’s friends with a lady named Dr. Joyce Glasser, G-L-A-S-S-E-R, who’s written books about this sort of thing. There are a bunch of resources that I think are worth exploring, but you also mentioned a couple of minutes ago, James Allen and the impact of his books on your life, particularly From Poverty to Power.

[01:17:50] William Green: And I wanted to talk about that with you because it seems to me there were about three things going on simultaneously at this period when your life was turning around that you lucked out going to Dr. Ramljak, who was extraordinary and helped you deal with your anger and other emotional issues, you lucked out in discovering self-hypnosis, which I think enabled you to relax and access different parts of your mind and deal with some of your anxiety and the like, and then I think you lucked out in that you stumbled upon James Allen’s books back in probably about 1966 through ‘67, shortly after your divorce.

[01:18:25] William Green: And I think that the first book of his that you found that had a transformative effect on you was As a Man Thinketh. Can you talk about the impact that that had on you? Then we’ll turn to the other book, From Poverty to Power.

[01:18:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: What happened when I was in the insurance business, I had a supervisor, and we got along good. He was a great guy. He helped me a lot and he called me out one day and he said, “Arnie, I have a new agent and he’s really an interesting guy and he wants to start his own business. And I told him about you and he said, ‘Oh, I’d love to meet Arnold.’” He said, “Would you mind meeting with him? He’s a great young guy and I think you guys would enjoy it,” and so on and so forth. “Sure. Be happy. Just have him give me a call.” So he called me up, I said, “Why don’t we go to lunch? You’re friend of Ted Saltzman. Be happy to have lunch with you.” So he said, “Okay.” So we went through the lunch and he’s telling me about all the ideas, and I was giving him all my business ideas and we were really clicking in this thing.

[01:19:26] Arnold Van Den Berg: So he said, “You know what, Arnold? I have a book that I know you’re going to love. Everything you’re talking about is what this guy writes about, and so I’d like to come by tomorrow. We don’t need to go out to lunch. I just want to bring the book by so you get it.” I said, “Oh, I’d love to have it.” So, he came back the next day. We had a cup of coffee and I [Inaudible] on my nightstand. And one night I said, “You know what, I’m going to read this book.” So I read the book. I was captivated. He explained everything so beautiful, and it’s a little book. It’s probably not only 35 or 30 pages, but it is really – he nails everything.

[01:20:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: He gives three examples about how the mind works and all of this stuff, so I was really excited. So, one day I was at a trade show and I was giving a lecture. They had me give a talk on business, and  one of the men that was in my class said, “Arnold, did you ever read – I know you like James Allen, but did you ever read his other books?”

[01:20:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: I said, “I didn’t even know he had any other books!” He says, “Oh my god. He’s written about 20 or 30 books.” I said, “No kidding, where do I get those?” He says, “Well, there’s a publisher who specializes in James Allen’s book called Skip Whitson in New Mexico.” So I looked him up, called him and said, “Mr. Whitson, this is Arnold Van Den Berg. I gave a seminar the other day and they referred me to you because you’re supposed to be the expert on James Allen.” He says, “Well, thank you.” I said, “How many books do you have on James Allen?” He says, “Oh, about 20 or 23,” whatever. So, anyway, the problem is that some of them were copied. They took chapters and made a book out of it.

[01:21:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I don’t know how many books he read, but the one that is the best deal is Mind is Master. It’s a only $20 and you get everything he’s ever written. You have it, right?

[01:21:17] William Green: Yeah, it’s very good. It’s very good. It starts with From Poverty to Power, and then As a Man Thinketh.

[01:21:24] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah. So, I said, “Why don’t you put them all in a box, send them to me, and I’ll send you a check.”

[01:21:30] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “Oh, okay, great.” So, all of a sudden, I get this big box of books with all of this [Inaudible]. They were all poorly – the type set was faded and it looked like it was a Xerox copy, and I just thought, “Geez, all this good writing. What’s going on?” So I called him up and I said, “How come you don’t print them in good paper, and good type setting, and all that?

[01:21:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: And he said, “Arnold, I never get enough demand for them. James Allen’s book, Poverty to Power, I probably sell about 15 to 20 a year. So I can’t afford to do it.” So, I wanted to – so I called him up a couple of years later because I wanted to send one to every one of my clients and any friend just like The Genie Within. It was a book I’d hoped to write, but it was already written.

[01:22:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I said to him, “I tell you what, Skip. Why don’t we make a deal? I’ll pay for the type setting, redo the type setting, make it nice, come up with a decent color, and use some decent paper besides Xerox paper. So look, because I want to give him out as gifts. I don’t want this to be a shoddy deal.” He said, “Oh, I’m happy to do it. If you’re going to pay for this, that’s great,” and so we made the deal and I said, “The only thing I’m going to ask is I would like to write the foreword to the book as to why I’m giving it to people as a present.” What I wrote in the foreword is basically I said, “All my life, I’ve been collecting sayings and quotes, and stuff, and one day hoped to write a book like this, but when I read James Allen’s book, I knew I couldn’t improve on it. So therefore, I’m reprinting it and giving it to you as a gift.”

[01:23:10] William Green: So, you printed something like 2000 copies and have given a lot away. What had such a profound effect on you? If you could synthesize and distill it down to one or two ideas, or one or two quotes that really had a profound impact on you, why did that change the course of your life and become the most important book that you’ve read?

[01:23:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: Right. That’s right. Let me tell you one secret about books that I discovered. I have all kinds of books, but there are some that speak to you and who you are, and speak to your subconscious, all of your experience together and you could just feel that it’s good. So I tell people, when you have a favorite book, read it over and over and over. Because the subconscious mind works on repetition.

[01:24:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: So the more you repeat it to yourself, the more effect it has on you. That’s what I learned. I kept referring to James Allen’s book to find the answers to questions that were bothering me, and I got to the point where it just became a regular thing where every time I read it, I learned something else.

[01:24:20] Arnold Van Den Berg: I kept reading it. No matter how much I’ve learned, I still – I pick that book up tomorrow and read it, I would pick something I hadn’t seen before. So, your subconscious mind zeros in on the things that are in there, and the way the subconscious mind works, it works on the things that is the most recent.

[01:24:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, if you have a goal and you think about it, and it starts to work on it, and then you start on something else, it puts that aside and it works on the new stuff. Then the longer time it goes, the more you forget about that and it doesn’t affect you as much. It’s like when you’re going to school and you’re taking the test, what do you have to do?

[01:24:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: You have to keep on repeating, studying it over and over and over. Once it’s subconscious, you can spit it out anytime you want. I remember things from 20 or 30 years ago that were very impressional on me, and I can still remember it because I kept repeating it over and over. So repetition is the key.

[01:25:18] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so what this book does is I would be willing to bet that any reader could read that, and it would be hard for me to believe that he could read all that and not learn something about life that he might have experienced or might have thought about, but he didn’t do.

[01:25:34] William Green: I was just rereading the book this morning, and I reread As a Man Thinketh yesterday, and From Poverty to Power this morning, and one of the things that struck me that I’m sure must have resonated deeply with you was this sense that, as he puts it, the secret of all happiness or misery is within. And so one of the things he was saying is if you want to improve your outward life, the key is you want to unswervingly resolve to improve your inner life.

[01:26:04] William Green: And so I was thinking here you were as this 20 something year old guy, having just gone through a divorce, having gone through the Holocaust, had all these tough jobs, tough time making a living, low self-esteem, and then suddenly you come across this writer who’s saying, “Wait a second, you can change all of your outer circumstances if you discipline your mind, eradicate your weaknesses, accept all conditions as necessary factors in your training,” as he said.

[01:26:36] William Green: So, in a way, it’s like he gave you a practical escape route where if you worked on yourself, you’d be able to change your outer circumstances.

[01:26:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: Exactly. It’s character. Here’s the thing. I made it my goal that one of the things I would do and I’ll do until the day I die, is that every day, my goal is to improve on something one way or another.

[01:27:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I want to always improve myself. Now, here’s the key, as he points out, as you improve yourself, you improve your life, and it affects many different things. It can affect the financial, it can affect your relation with people. It can affect you – find a book that gives you understanding. So, every day, when I go through my routine, that’s one of the things I work on right away.

[01:27:30] Arnold Van Den Berg: For example, when I start in the morning, the most important thing I do out of bed, I don’t want to think about anything else. I go downstairs, I have a mini trampoline, which I bounce on, and I do that for one hour, and next to the trampoline is a little desk. So, all of a sudden, I’m on the trampoline, I’m going back and forth, and all of a sudden, a flash comes in.

[01:27:52] Arnold Van Den Berg: I always write the flashes down because those are subconscious. So after a while, I have a whole list of things that I’ve come up to. Well, James Allen pointed out that you can create your life and you can create your circumstances by the way you think, and that’s always the bible, As a Man Thinketh, right?

[01:28:12] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, what happens is you have a thought, you continue that thought, it eventually leads to action. The key to improving yourself is not necessarily to do in one direction, but if you do things that make you more honest, more hardworking, that you take the proper diet, that you do the exercise, you do everything else, your whole body works to improve you, like I mentioned, the chemicals that you have when you do good and when you do things right. So, one of the things that he taught is that as you improve your thinking, you improve your life. I knew, when I read James Allen, I felt it, that what he was saying, he was speaking the truth and I used to get chills on my arm when I read certain things.

[01:28:59] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I knew it was on the path and I am telling you, there’s never any reason to feel bad about yourself. Now, if more and more young people understood this, they would pick any goal. There’s nothing impossible. The mind has the ability to influence thoughts. It has the influence to people.

[01:29:19] Arnold Van Den Berg: Matter of fact, I have a book that I read early in my career, one of the most influential, and it’s called,  The Wisdom of your Subconscious Mind. He made four points. He spent 50 years studying the subconscious mind. Can I read it for you?

[01:29:37] William Green: Sure. Yeah, sure. This is the Fisher book, is it?

[01:29:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s The Wisdom of your Subconscious Mind by JK Williams. He asked four points. He says, “The creative insight and wisdom of the subconscious mind, when properly understood and correctly applied, sustain the following four statements: First, you are the architect of your destiny. Every experience or condition, by poverty, riches, success or failure, health or illness is the result of action and purpose set by you, so you’re responsible for it all. Second, within the area of your life, you have created power. You can make – here’s the key. You can make a mental image or a blueprint of the progress and expansion you want to achieve, 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. In other words, you create your own reality. Creative energy is the self-induced action of mind upon itself and within itself. The force behind all progress and achievement is energy created and applied by the mind. Third, you are radiating power. By expanding your consciousness, you can attract what you want. Like the [Inaudible], you can have only what you can surround and absorb within yourself. The universe cannot and does not give you anything. It does give you, however, the power and challenge to achieve, to create for yourself the conditions and resources you do want. You can have anything you want, providing you are willing to pay the price.” And here’s the final one, “Fourth, you are the building directing power of your life. Life develops only by mental and emotional power from within. Mental and emotional processes, creating control, all that comes into your experience. Never nothing has ever been is now ever will be that is not the result of man’s action. Since this law is universal, inescapable, it follows that man, in his aspirations, is not obsolete. That man has essential freedom of action in determining the content of the experience, that the mind [Inaudible] more than something other than the internal reaction of a [Inaudible] in the brain. In other words, you are the directing force. You control everything and every condition in your life.” Now, what happened is that as I started studying James Allen, I realized how important [Inaudible] are. I have a process where I literally screen my thoughts when I develop an angry thought or negative thoughts, and that’s another point I wanted to point out, is that when you have that thought, it makes an impression.

[01:32:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: So you have 24,000 thoughts a day, 24,000 a day, and every thought makes an impression on the subconscious mind. So you are your computer programming of your subconscious mind. When you think something or you do it, it makes an impression on the mind, and the more it makes an impression, the more it’s likely going to work on it because it’s the current thing.

[01:32:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: So you are the developer of that mind. Now here’s the good and bad news: 80% of your thought process – not yours, but the average – is negative. It gets worse.

[01:32:54] William Green: Yeah, mine is about 92% negative.

[01:32:56] Arnold Van Den Berg: No, no, 80%. It gets worse. 95% of it is repetitive. So think about that. The average person thinks 24,000 thoughts a day, and 80% of them are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive.

[01:33:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: You wonder how anybody’s ever normal. How can anybody achieve something when they’re programming the most powerful thing in the world negatively? So I made up –

[01:33:24] William Green: Well, so Arnold, let’s be practical here, right? So, so let’s say we buy into this idea. Whatever we make of this statistics, which are the numbers, which are really hard to pin down or to know, we know that, as Tom Gayner would say, this is directionally correct, right?

[01:33:40] William Green: Like if we have lots of negative thoughts, lots of worry, lots of anger, lots of anxiety, it’s not doing us any good physically, emotionally, and this runs through From Poverty to Power as well. He says at one point, worry is soul suicide, and he says there’s no practice more degrading, debasing, and soul destroying than that of self-pity.

[01:34:04] William Green: And so we see this in all of these different areas, this idea that anger, worry, anxiety, thoughts of fear, they’re bad for us. They don’t help us. In practical terms, what do you do when you are suddenly bombarded with, say, a feeling of worry? I know that you’ve gone through so much with your family, with people you love getting sick or worries about business or worries about the market or with COVID over the last decade. What do you actually do in practical terms that can help us?

[01:34:40] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, first of all, you start off with the idea that you got to have a positive goal. Because if you have a positive goal, your tendency starts to think about how you can achieve that goal, and it works on the positive things. So a good thing to start is everybody should have a goal. We’re servomechanism.

[01:34:59] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s like shooting up a heat-seeking missile to seek out the exhaust of a plane and blows it up, but if there’s no plane, it just circles around and wastes energy. So having a goal is a fundamental thing. The second thing I do is I try to consider positive things, and the way you do it is whenever I have a negative thought, I don’t say, “Oh, we erase that.”

[01:35:22] Arnold Van Den Berg: I just say, “I’m happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise.” So, the minute I have a negative thought, I immediately counter it by making four impressions in the subconscious mind, I’m happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise. That’s number two. So, what that does is it immediately switches your mind to thinking about the positive things.

[01:35:43] William Green: What’s the origin of that phrase, Arnold, “I’m happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise”? Who wrote that?

[01:35:49] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, I, I don’t know who wrote it, but I adopted it. Okay? I know that Benjamin Franklin said, “Early to bed, early to rise makes men healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Okay? So, I’ve read different things that say that. I just wanted to get a mantra. Now, look. I’m a big believer in – let me –

[01:36:07] William Green: And it’s the repetition that’s powerful as well, right? Repetition is important.

[01:36:12] Arnold Van Den Berg: Key! It’s the key. Now, let me give you an example. You can structure your life with a good – let’s say you want to improve yourself, okay? What most people talk about is when they suffer, they think that all they do is suffer.

[01:36:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: But what most people don’t realize, it’s during the suffering that you’re going through the anguish and you’re searching your subconscious mind, and you’re thinking about it, and you’re talking to people about it, and it keeps on building up, and every time you overcome a suffering, you gain insight. Let me read you one. “If you could erase all the mistakes of your past, all the mistakes and suffering, you would also erase all of the wisdom of your present.

[01:36:55] Arnold Van Den Berg: Remember the lesson, not the disappointment.” So, the key is you don’t want to worry about erasing these bad things because they gave you insight, and if you erase those sufferings, then you erase the insight. You don’t want to think about the disappointment. You think about the lesson. So it’s a way of thinking.

[01:37:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: This is what all of James Allen’s book talks about. Everything you think is an impression on your subconscious mind, and it molds you into the future you are. So the more positive you can think, the more positive things you do. Here’s another thing, what I was going to say is how did you become who you are and how did I become who I am? Well, it starts off – this is the way thoughts work. Programming creates beliefs. Okay? So when you were born, your parents were influencing you. You didn’t have a conscious mind. You couldn’t say, “I don’t know whether I agree with this or not.” You soaked it up in your subconscious.

[01:37:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: Now, whether they were good advice or bad advice from your relatives, from the environment, whatever it is, whatever gets stuck in your subconscious mind, that’s in the program. Until you erase it, it stays in there. So programming creates belief. Belief creates attitude. Attitudes creates feeling. Feeling, that’s the most important thing. Feeling determines action, and action creates results. So, what you want to do is create mantra. For example, my philosophy is what I learned from auto mechanics is the most important thing is the tool. You have to have the knowledge, but you got to have the tool.

[01:38:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I tried to figure out what is the best tool I can use to improve my life. I’ve searched everything. I’ve read all the different religions, the philosophies, the stoics, the Greeks, the Romans, wherever. You introduced me to the Kabbalah, which confirms everything. So what I decided, the best thing you can do physically, better than anything else – NASA made a study that determined to build up the physical part of the astronauts when they go out of space and they lose bone density because there’s weightlessness, they developed the mini trampoline. Now, you say jumping on the mini trampoline, that is the single thing, and I can tell you just to prove it, that if you want to burn calories, it’s a measure of how effective the exercise is, jumping on the trampoline is 11 times more – burns more calorie than walking, five times more calories than swimming, and three times more calories than the running.

[01:39:37] Arnold Van Den Berg: Now, they concluded that it’s 68% more effective than any other exercise, and the reason is that they measure G-force. When you’re running, you lift up your legs, it’s one and a half times the G-force. If you’re bouncing, you go way down and then you go way up, it’s four times. So, if you did five minutes on the trampoline, it’s the equivalent of walking a mile.

[01:40:00] Arnold Van Den Berg: So it’s incredibly efficient. So, with all the exercises, I came to the conclusion that I do an hour of trampoline work every day. I did it this morning. I don’t go anywhere until I get the trampoline. So that takes care of the physical part. Then I make sure that I drink plenty of water because that’s an important part of the body. More important than anybody else.

[01:40:25] Arnold Van Den Berg: Matter of fact, there was a book written, You’re Not Sick, you’re Thirsty! And what this guy explained is that most people don’t drink enough water and they develop all these other kind of things. Then the next thing I worked on is what else can it do? And so the next thing was the subconscious mind.

[01:40:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: So physically, it’s the trampoline, the proper diet, and plenty of water. Mentally, it’s the subconscious mind and the program, and the instructions that you have given it through your goals. Then you completely repeat those and you become there. You have to –

[01:41:00] William Green: So in terms of the subconscious, Arnold, so there are a couple of things, right?

[01:41:04] William Green: You mentioned goal setting, having a clear goal, right? So clearly you have to have – from the books you’ve sent me on this, you have to define your goal fairly narrowly. There’s also a sense in which you’ve had great success visualizing your goal, and you sent me something just this morning, a picture of you on the cover of a magazine back in, I don’t know, it must have been in the 1970s I think.

[01:41:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: 1979.

[01:41:30] William Green: Yeah. Where you had visualized yourself all those years earlier as a sort of successful investor, and you’d cut out a picture from Barron’s of this guy with shadow on his face, wearing a nice jacket and tie. And then you came out on the cover of this magazine looking exactly like that with the shadow of your face.

[01:41:52] William Green: So, visualization is clearly has – so setting goals, visualization, and then these kind of mantras, these repeated affirmations have been key for you.

[01:42:04] Arnold Van Den Berg: That’s right, that’s right. And I developed mantra. For example, I develop a mantra for the physical, and the rule is don’t sit when you can stand. Don’t stand when you can walk. Don’t walk when you can run, and if there are stairs, climb it. So I do that as a mantra. Now what’s interesting, the other day I was waiting for my wife because she’s getting a root canal, and I took her to the doctor, and I thought I would just do some readings while I was in the car. Then all of a sudden, the thought trapped in. Don’t sit when you can stand and – don’t run – or run.

[01:42:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: And I thought, “You know? That’s right.” So I got out of the car and I started walking. So I walked for 20 or 30 minutes, which I would’ve never done if that thing hadn’t flashed in my mind. So what you do is whatever you’re working on, you create a mantra and you create that and it flashes in your mind.

[01:42:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: For example, W. Clement Stone was a great executive and a believer in the mind and all that, and he said, “A lot of people procrastinate. So what you do is a hundred times a day for two to three weeks, you were repeat, ‘Do it now. Do it now.’” What happens when you go to procrastinate, it flashes in your mind.

[01:43:17] Arnold Van Den Berg: Do it now. So if you want to lose weight, you make a mantra of what you need to do to lose weight and you repeat it repeatedly. When I get up, first thing I do is I do my trampoline work, then I go into the shower. I take a warm shower, and then I take a cold shower. Then the cold shower, I repeat every day and every way, I’m getting better and better.

[01:43:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: And I do it at least 30 to 40 times during the cold shower, and it creates endorphins, it creates circulation. It gets you into a good mode. You feel good after the shower because you’ve had some endorphins running. Then you go about your work and you become more effective. So it’s a matter of programming your time, and your life, and your thinking to the end of becoming better and better.

[01:44:07] Arnold Van Den Berg: Let me read you a biblical quote for those people who are believers in the Bible and Christians. This is what Jesus said, “Ask and it’ll be given. Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened. For everyone who ask, receives. He who seeks, finds. And to him who knocks, it’ll be open.” Many times when you’re reading philosophers or people who have developed patents and so forth, they’ll work on something and they try to figure it out and nothing happens. They go away from it and all of a sudden, they’re doing something else and the inspiration comes and give it to it. So if you give your subconscious mind, it takes everything literally.

[01:44:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: You got to be careful. For example, if you’re asking the subconscious mind for an answer, what I did as I used to have serious back problems. So, I asked the subconscious – and you want to do this before you go to sleep. If you ask the subconscious, you go to sleep and say, “Why do I have pain in my back?”

[01:45:06] Arnold Van Den Berg: After a month, one day, I woke up. The answer. The answer was when you get behind in your work, your back goes out. The minute that happened, I knew that what it was, and I’ve never – and this is about 35 years ago, maybe even longer, 40 – I’ve never had a back problem since, and I have helped people cure their back problems by similar things through Dr. [Inaudible] [01:45:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: But getting back to The Genie Within, I had an analyst call me from New York. He said, “I heard one of your speeches about the subconscious. Can I ask you some questions?” I said, “Sure.” So we talked for a while and I said, “You know what, Patrick? Let me do this. Let me send you the book The Genie Within because it has a chapter addressing the thing you need to do.”

[01:45:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, three weeks later, I get a letter back. He said, “Arnold, thank you so much for The Genie Within, and I want to tell you something. I never told you. You must have felt it intuitively, but I was in extreme pain. And so I took one of the chapters and I did the exercise. In the first session, I went into Theta.”

[01:46:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: He didn’t go into Alpha. He went all the way to Theta, and he said, “I pictured myself lifting weights, and lifting up my nephews, and doing physical things. And in one session, the back pain that I’ve had for 20 years was cured in one session.” That’s what the subconscious can do. The minute you accept it and believe it, it becomes reality.

[01:46:33] Arnold Van Den Berg: And you read about these people who get healed overnight because they did something. Like at Lourdes, you go to Lourdes and people get healed and some don’t. So there was this one French doctor, his name escaped me – Alexis Carrol was his name. He wrote a book and he studied how people get healed at Lourdes.

[01:46:55] Arnold Van Den Berg: And he said, “I ain’t ever going to accept it until I see it.” So he told the Catholic Church that he would like to have or somebody who’s going to Lourdes to get examined to get healed, and he would like to examine her and follow her to make sure it’s real. Some people think they have a problem, but they don’t.

[01:47:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, he studied this 14-year-old girl who had a terminal disease, and she went to Lourdes and did everything, and she got healed. He said after that experience, he knew that it was real, and what he attributed to is not what Lourdes does, it’s what you believe. We have a doctor, I have a doctor that I followed for 25 or 30 years, his books. I’ve never gone to him, but I read all of his books.

[01:47:37] Arnold Van Den Berg: I think I have five of his books. He wrote the theory about the placebo. He said, “When you take the medical profession, 40% of people get healed by using the placebo. They take something that they feel will heal him.” He said that it was all based on belief, right? If you have a person with a disease and then you give them a sugar pill and they get healed, then it’s because of the belief.

[01:48:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, he thought he could improve on it and because of his technique, he’s raised the cure rate from 40% to 70% and 85%, up in that range. He said the way he does it is he’ll use a shot instead of a pill. He’ll use a color instead of a white pill. He’ll make a special design on it and he creates a ritual, just like the medicine man of [Inaudible].

[01:48:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: They create this whole ritual and they get the person to believe in it. Once they believe in it, it works. There was one interesting thing about the placebo, by the way. It was a hit cover of a magazine. It’s called It’s All in Your Minds. So, they had this procedure that would cure some form of dementia.

[01:48:45] Arnold Van Den Berg: I forgot whether it was Parkinson’s or some other disease. So the doctor had a technique where he’d go and drill into the brain and change something, and it seemed to heal a few people. That was his theory. So, they wanted to do a test on it, but how do you do a test to give somebody a placebo if you’re going to drill in their head?

[01:49:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, what they did is they took the person told them they were going to do this operation on their head. They shaved the head, they get him all prepared for surgery. They went through the whole thing, and then some people got the surgery and some people didn’t. Well, it turns out after a while, some people got cured, but after a while, they found medically that it was not possible to have the cure.

[01:49:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: So they went to this one guy who was completely cured, and they said, “We were wrong in our research, and the surgery didn’t really prove to heal anything.” He said, “I don’t give a damn what it is. I’m healed and I’m fine with it,” and so he kept on believing it and he was healed. He never had the disease.

[01:49:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: So it’s the belief system. There’s a – what’s his name? Bruce Lindsay. He wrote a book, The Biology of Belief. That’s an incredible book. He showed that even your thinking and belief can change your genes and your DNA, so you can remake yourself by the way you think and believe. It’s all about belief.

[01:50:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: Even Jesus said, if you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can say that this mountain move, then it’ll move. Now, did he mean that literally? If you talk to quantum physicists, they’ll tell you he meant it literally because it can be done. People don’t take it at face value that if you give your subconscious a direction and a belief, and you repeat it, and you visualize it, it’s going to happen.

[01:50:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s like praying to God. Praying to God and asking Him, “Would you heal me?” If you believe it, it can happen. Matter of fact, they say prayer works better in groups where people have strong beliefs. I’ll give you an example in my dad. My dad told me he thought how powerful the mind was.

[01:50:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “I had a very good friend of mine in Auschwitz, and every night, we’d sit around and say, ‘Did you hear anything about the radio, about the war?’” And everybody talk about their wife and kids, and so forth. And so, this went on for quite a while, and one day, he came up to my dad, and he said, “Hugo, I finally figured out what’s going on.” My dad says, “What’s going on?”

[01:51:20] Arnold Van Den Berg: He says, “Well, they really want to kill us all, but rather than just kill us or gas us, they want to use us and get the labor out of it, the free labor, and then you get run down and you die and they get rid of you, and they get a new car load.” So, my dad says, “Well, what’s new about that? It’s been happening every day?”

[01:51:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: And he said, “Yeah, but I don’t believe we’re ever going to get out of this, and all we do is suffer every day. Just sub-zero weather, working 12 to 14 hours a day, getting beat up.” He said, “I’m through with it.” My dad told him, “If you think that way, you will not survive. Because the only reason we survive, because we have in our mind the hope that we will see our wives and children, and that’s what keeps you going. The minute you give up on that, you’re done.” My dad says he was shocked. He went to look for him in the morning. He was dead. He said, “Once you give up the belief, you’re gone.” He said, “We were living on vapors, and the minute you give that up, boom. That’s it.”

[01:52:25] William Green: There are a couple of other powerful things that I think came through from the James Allen books. One of which is the importance of actually serving others, having a, a good character, having integrity.

[01:52:38] William Green: And it seems like that’s something that’s also been profoundly important for you, this idea of actually behaving in an honorable way. You see this a lot in James Allen’s discussion of wealth as well. There’s one great quote from From Poverty to Power where he says, “Money does not constitute true wealth, nor position nor power, and to rely upon it alone is to stand upon a slippery place. Your true wealth is your stock of virtue, and your true power, the uses to which you put it. Rectify your heart and you will rectify your life.” Then he says, “Lust, hatred, anger, vanity, pride, covetousness, self-indulgence, self-seeking, obstinacy – all these are poverty and weakness. Whereas love, pure purity, gentleness, meekness, patience, compassion, generosity, self-forgetfulness, and self-renunciation, all these are wealth and power.” I wonder if you could just talk about this idea for a minute.

[01:53:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: First thing I want to say is amen.

[01:53:40] William Green: Yeah. This idea that there’s some kind of connection between virtue and prosperity in his mind, and he sort of talks about people who – he says at one point, I think the rich man who’s barren of virtue is in reality, poor.

[01:53:52] William Green: Can you talk about this, the sort of James Allen type definition of wealth as not just being about how much money you have, but actually having something to do with the quality of your character.

[01:54:04] Arnold Van Den Berg: Oh, perfect. I would say this. First of all, my theory is money has a diminishing return. When you don’t have anything, it becomes an obsession to make some money and to be able to live a decent life, and so on and so forth.

[01:54:18] Arnold Van Den Berg: So it’s like a curve. There was a study done by a university in California where they got these people together and say, “Does money really make a difference in happiness?” And the answer is absolutely. For example, they took people at 30,000 a year, what was their level of happiness? They do brainwaves and this kind of stuff. What is it? At 50,000 a year?

[01:54:40] Arnold Van Den Berg: And they determined that once a person – this is about five or seven years ago, so let’s say instead of 150, it’s 200,000. Once a person reaches a level of 150 to 200,000, money does not increase their happiness. They might be more comfortable and they feel better, but it has no major effect.

[01:55:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: So after a certain amount, whether you accumulate a certain amount in one sum, or you increase it through earnings, at some point, it has a diminishing return. Now where I learned that as a secret from James Allen is I was going through some very tough times, but I had some good friends that were going through equally or even worse.

[01:55:23] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, I said to myself, I’m going to stop thinking about my problem. I’m going to go out and help these guys. So, I was able to help him and make a big difference in him, and the feeling I got, I can’t even explain. It was almost like a spiritual experience, and I thought to myself, what happened? Now, I look back and say, “Well, the endorphins, the adrenaline, the serotonin, and dopamine set in. It’s like a dopamine high, right?”

[01:55:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: They even call it the helper’s high. When you do good and it creates dopamine in your system, they call it the helper’s high. It’s like the running the runner’s high. You get a high out of it by helping people. So that taught me a lesson that I need to quit thinking about myself and believe that things are going to get better.

[01:56:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: When I have the opportunity to help somebody, I do it, and it brought me so much pleasure over the years that it almost becomes like an addiction. You want to keep doing things because you feel so good about yourself. One of the quotes that I have, I think I mentioned to you, is they said that once giving becomes unconditional, that means you give the money because you want to help. Not because you want to get recognized, not putting on a building, that type of thing, but you do it to genuinely help people and you don’t expect anything else. You just want to do it. It creates the unconditional love, creates pure joy, and that’s the secret to life. Matter of fact, here, this is written thousands of years ago. It was by Aristotle.

[01:57:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “Most people start off life, they want to be happy or successful. How do you do that”? He said, “You figure out a way you can help people. You gather all the information, you gather all the capital, and all the things you need to do, and then you commit yourself to it, and that is what’s going to create happiness and success.”

[01:57:25] Arnold Van Den Berg: And this was written over 2000 years ago. When we were talking, whether it’s the Kabbalah or Hinduism or quantum physics, or the study of the subconscious mind, it all comes down to the same thing. Let me tell you what Lincoln said about it. He said, “When I do good, I feel good. When I don’t do good, I feel bad. That’s my religion.” So if I had to sum up everything, William, it means living a good clean life, eating the best foods, drinking the most water, doing the exercise – exercise is included in every chemical in the brain – and realizing, and this was my discovery, realizing that the single most important thing that you can achieve in your life is to practice love.

[01:58:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: Viktor Frankl says, “The salvation of man comes through love and in love. It’s the greatest force in the universe.” I even wrote a three or four-page thing on it, and basically, what I did is I quoted three people: I quoted Jesus or the New Testament, I quoted a man by the name of – his name will come to me.

[01:58:39] Arnold Van Den Berg: Arthur – no.

[01:58:41] William Green: Yeah, Montagu. Ashley Montagu, yeah. I read this, yeah.

[01:58:45] Arnold Van Den Berg: Ashley Montagu. He said that no matter what way you look at it – and he spent 60 years of his life studying what makes people happy. So, he was a British guy and sorry, your accent, it was kind of comical.

[01:58:59] William Green: You’re saying my accent is comical, Arnold?

[01:59:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: I didn’t mean that. What made you study 60 years of happiness? He said in his British accent, “Because I was so profoundly unhappy. That was the reason.” So he spent 60 years – he wrote 40 or 50 books. He studied anthropology, sociology, everything and he came to the conclusion that the only thing that matters in a successful life is to practice love.

[01:59:34] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, “Here’s the real question. What if you’re not as loving of a person as you could be? What do you do?” He says, “You do loving things because it’s not what you eat. It’s not what you think. It’s what you do, and by doing, you make the impression on the subconscious mind and it programs you into doing more.

[01:59:59] William Green: Yeah, I was struck. You sent me some quotes from him and he said, “The answer is simply to behave as if you were a loving person,” and so at a certain point, if you behave as if you are that, then it becomes self-fulfilling. You said if you work at it long enough, someday you’ll wake up and find that you have become what you’ve been doing.

[02:00:19] William Green: The other quote that you sent me that had a powerful impact on me, that I thought was beautifully written about the subject of the importance of love was from the great Christian Science –

[02:00:29] Arnold Van Den Berg: Mary Baker Eddy?

[02:00:31] William Green: Yeah. Mary Baker Eddy wrote over a century ago. It’s an amazing quote, beautiful piece of writing.

[02:00:38] William Green: She said, “The greatest need of the human self is for love. You can have all the wealth, your coffers will hold, all the fame your world can offer, all the education your schools can teach. You can have had your every other wish fulfilled. Your every other dream come true, but if love is not among these, you’ll be empty, barren. The need to express love is so vital, your physical body is affected if you have no way of giving of your deepest self.” And it made me kind of think about your life, Arnold, that in some ways, I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this, but in some ways I feel like the real trump card you had, the thing that saved you from that period of depression and being lost and feeling helpless was meeting Eileen, who you’ve been married to for over 50 years, who just is an incredibly loving, and kind, and compassionate person.

[02:01:26] William Green: And it seems to me, in some ways, she’s the proof of what you learned from people like Mary Baker Eddy and Ashley Montagu.

[02:01:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, she is a perfect example because Eileen is the closest to you’ll ever get to anybody who’s loving. Everybody meets her, loves her. She worked in. In an orphanage for 20 years, putting on little programs every Wednesday for the kids.

[02:01:53] Arnold Van Den Berg: She loved the kids. They loved her. She’s been written up on many different things. But the most important thing that I learned from Eileen is for forgive. That’s one of the things I would like to cover, is there’s several things that really prevent you from reaching your potential. One of them is if you have anger.

[02:02:13] Arnold Van Den Berg: The other one is if you lie, if you’re not truthful. And there’s many reasons for that but getting onto anger, I’ll give you an example. Dr. Ramljack tried to convince me that I was really angry at my mother. “Okay? Cause I came there for anger.” So he says “Well, one of the things, your problem is that you’re very angry at your mother.”

[02:02:35] Arnold Van Den Berg: And I couldn’t accept that at the time, you know, cause of what my mother went through. Even though we had difficulties, I didn’t want to come out and say, “I really didn’t like her or I was angry at her.” So he tried to convince me of that, and he couldn’t convince me. So one day I could always tell nonverbal communications, he’d take his pen.

[02:02:54] Arnold Van Den Berg: And he says, by the way, whenever he said that, I knew he was setting me up. So I thought, okay, here it comes. He says, by the way, I would like you, to handle, would you mind handling my IRA? Well, I was just starting a business and I have very small clients and here’s the doctor wants to me to be, his advisor.

[02:03:15] Arnold Van Den Berg: I was thrilled to debt. So he gave me the lady at the bank where the IRA was and I was going to start investing it. So first thing I did, I got home and I called the lady, and the minute I heard her voice, I got so angry and upset that the whole conversation switched to where I almost hung up on her. And then I thought to myself, I don’t want to ever deal with her.

[02:03:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: So then the next week I had to come in and tell him that I wasn’t going to manage his irate. And I felt kind of bad, but I even felt bad that I couldn’t do it because I needed the business, you know? But it shows you how it overrules. So he, I said back to, then he goes to me like this. Oh, by the way, did you happen to talk to this woman?

[02:03:59] William Green: This is this, for people who, who are not watching this but are listening, Arnold is scratching his head with a pen, an imitation of Dr. Ramljack.

[02:04:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, anyway, I said, you know, Dr. Ramljack, I’m really sorry about this, but this woman is such a- I just can’t deal with it. You know what he did? He put his head down on the desk, right on his desk.

[02:04:20] Arnold Van Den Berg: I never had seen him do that and he just started laughing and now I’m sitting there, I felt bad. Now, I’m getting a little angry that he’s laughing at me. Right? I said, what is so funny? He said, I’m sorry. He said, let me tell you, Arnold, this woman is one of the sweetest woman in the world. She’s only got one problem.

[02:04:43] Arnold Van Den Berg: Her accent is a German Jewish accent. Like your mom and I just sat there and looked at him. I was caught. It’s like getting caught with your hands in the cookie jar. Yeah, all of a sudden, I knew I was had, and he said, now are you ready to start talking about the anger towards your mother? And I said, yes.

[02:05:04] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so that was one of the things I had to work out. You know, I had the feeling that she gave me away when she, you know, when- [crosstalk] [02:05:11] William Green: But so once you had actually made this recognition, once you’d acknowledged that there was a problem with anger, was it affirmations that helped you? Because I remember you would go around saying, I’m a loving person to sort of change this [crosstalk] [02:05:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: Change dialogue in your mind. Absolutely.

[02:05:30] William Green: Is that the thing, is that the phrase that really helped you most, do you think? Just saying, I’m a loving person over and over?

[02:05:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: I don’t think it was the most, but it was one of them. You know, it’s a series of things, but here’s what’s interesting. The first thing that helps you is the recognition that the reason your anger is not rational.

[02:05:49] Arnold Van Den Berg: That helps a little bit. Okay? Then you start thinking about anger and let me give you the best definition I’ve heard about how to deal with anger. Usually when people interact, they develop some anger because somebody criticized him or something like that. So what happens if you express the anger? If you do something to upset me and I, and, and you express it or I do something upset you, and you express it, then the anger goes away because you’ve expressed it doesn’t matter what I do with it.

[02:06:22] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s, you’ve gotten it off your chest, so to speak, but if you don’t, if you repress and say, you know, I don’t want to send Arnold and hurt our relationship, so I’m just going to bottle it, well, then you create, then you repress it. Well, once it goes into repression, the more you think about it, the angry you get, the more you repeat it to yourself.

[02:06:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: Just like an advertising agent. You keep on repeating it to yourself. Eventually it goes subconscious, and the subconscious says, okay, he’s angry. How do we get rid of it? We create indirect expression. It creates depression because it creates all the chemicals that get you depressed. That’s why when you go to a psychiatrist, they give you these pills that’ll lift you up.

[02:07:06] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s to get rid of the depression. It creates addiction, compulsive behavior, alcoholism, smoking, gambling, eating disorder, sickness, and blaming others. So the anger that gets repressed means that you repeat it often enough to where it goes subconscious. Once it goes subconscious, it creates all kinds of problems.

[02:07:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: Now let me give you the things that it does. It affects your cardio cardiovascular system, five ways it affects your immune system, four ways it affects your digestive system. Three ways it has creates pressure on your eyes, which affects your eye side, creates migraines, headaches, and bone density. There are 17 things that when you have angry thoughts that affect your whole body, and if that goes on for years, you can see why people are sick and bitter.

[02:07:58] Arnold Van Den Berg: Now in the [Inaudible] which is the Hindu Philosophy, here’s what they say from anger arises delusion. From delusion, loss of memory is caused from loss of memory. The discrimination facility is ruined and from the room of discrimination, he perishes. So anger can literally kill you and that’s what it does over the long run.

[02:08:25] Arnold Van Den Berg: And what relieved me is when I got rid of the anger over time, it was like lifting a weight off my shoulder. I felt lighter. You know, you just feel better.

[02:08:36] William Green: So in general, when it comes to anger, anxiety, fear, you know, these, these emotions that most of us are being barrage with these kinds of negative emotions, the master move is kind of to replace them with a more positive thought.

[02:08:54] William Green: Is that what you would recommend? Basically?

[02:08:57] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yes. Well, it is a number of things, but here’s the thing, the subconscious will believe anything. You kill it, even if it isn’t true. So if you’re an angry person and you say, I’m a loving person, if you repeat it often enough and you start acting it out, then eventually you go subconscious, and then you become the loving person.

[02:09:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: If you’re an angry person and you keep on repeating that, then you’ll become an angry, bitter, violent person, and that’s what happens to people. Now, I think my feeling is that in programming your life and your beliefs and the improvement of your life, there are some things that you can do. For example, the most important thing that governs people is habits.

[02:09:42] Arnold Van Den Berg: People do things out of habit, and so if you develop good things, you develop good habit. If you develop bad things, you develop bad habits. So I’ve always told people, my fury on breaking bad habits is you got to do it cold Turkey, because if you say, I’m going to quit smoking, but I’m only going to do a few at a time, then each time you get the   you smoke the cigarette, you feel good.

[02:10:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: It gives you pleasure that registers that you want to do it again because you’re repeating it. But if you cut it out, eventually it, the, the, the habits go down. It’s a little tougher, but you, you stick to it. And even if you fail, you go back to it and then it lessens. But cold Turkey is the single best way to cut a bad habit.

[02:10:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: Okay, now here’s what William James says. The greatest thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. For this, we must make automatic and habitual as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can. So let’s say somebody wants to improve their life, they set a goal.

[02:10:50] Arnold Van Den Berg: Now they need to have the habits to reinforce those things, right? Because if you don’t do it often enough, it doesn’t work. So what you do in creating a habit is we all have choices every day. And so what happens is you get to a fork in a road, do I want to eat that pie or [crosstalk] yes, yes. Don’t I want to eat?

[02:11:10] William Green: No, I want to.

[02:11:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: So, yeah. So the thing about it is the more you refuse to eat it, the stronger that emotion becomes, and the more you eat it, the more stronger that emotion comes. So you build your character by resisting things that you want to eliminate in your life. And character is the summation of all the good things that you have accumulated in your life.

[02:11:38] Arnold Van Den Berg: And they now bring forth the, the harvest. You know, that’s what you sow. And what they say is never suffer an exception to occur until the new habit is securely rooted. In other words, if you’re going to stop eating pie, you don’t suffer one exception because the minute you suffer an exception, you get back into the habit.

[02:11:58] Arnold Van Den Berg: So you want to do it long enough to where it becomes a real habit and I’ll give you an example. I started on the trampoline 15 minutes a day and I’ve just picked it up. The time goes by and then the more stronger I get and the more resilient I am, I don’t stop perspiring until the trampoline till about 25 to 30 minutes.

[02:12:17] Arnold Van Den Berg: Then I got to take out my sweatshirt. So I know that I’ve done a pretty good workout, and then I go for the rest of the hour. So the first thing I do is before I even wake up, I just stumble downstairs. I get down the trampoline, I’ve set my timer and I get going. Now, once I’m done with that, I immediately go into the shower because if I hesitate and start reading something, it delays it and then I get late.

[02:12:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: So everything has to go according to plan. The trampoline, the shower, then the shaving, cleaning up, and then we set the goals for the day if I hadn’t already done it. So it’s a matter of developing these kind of habits to where my trampoline habit is so strong now that it really amazes me that I almost feel guilty when I don’t do it.

[02:13:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s kind of like when you know something is on the right way and you know it’s the right way, and then you, you swerve from that and not do it, you kind of get a little guilt feeling.

[02:13:16] William Green: So I feel like for you, Arnold, one of the keys to your life, when I look back at your success and, you know, we’ve had so many conversations over the last years, one of the keys just seems to be that you’re kind of maniacal when, when you find one of these things that works, whether it’s reading obsessively or affirmations or taking notes or exercising on the trampoline or intermittent fasting or whatever, you just, or you know, or becoming vegan, you know, you are, you are very extreme.

[02:13:47] William Green: Like you, I mean, I remember you saying, for example, when you became obsessed with chess in your use and you, or, or you played golf for the first time. You just said, no, no, these are going to shackle my mind. And so you wouldn’t do these things that you loved because you knew that you wanted to succeed in your business.

[02:14:04] William Green: And so I, I feel like one of the things that you have in common with a lot of the other really successful investors I’ve interviewed over the years is just this intensity that you are kind of a maniac in the, in the best possible way.

[02:14:19] Arnold Van Den Berg: Well, you know, it’s a good description, but here’s how you become a maniac.

[02:14:25] Arnold Van Den Berg: You view it repeatedly over and over and over, and it isn’t maniac. It’s you have to do it. It’s like an instinct. It becomes an instinct. This is the way it is. This is the right way, and this is the wrong way, and all of these kind of things. But let me give you, there’s a guy who wrote a book called From the Perfect Business by Michael LeBoeuf and he kind of summarized it pretty simple.

[02:14:49] Arnold Van Den Berg: He said, if your life is a series of thought and it is and if you become what you think about and you will, and if you have the power of choice and you do, then it logically follows that you can create the life you want by choosing what to think about. That’s the foundation of it all, you know? Yeah.

[02:15:11] Arnold Van Den Berg: That’s the way it works. It’s very simple.

[02:15:15] William Green: The other thing as we, as we bring this to a close Arnold, the other thing that I wanted to say is, is there’s a lovely thing that I noticed in, As a Man Thinketh, the first book that you read by James Allen, where he ends the book with a final chapter actually on Serenity.

[02:15:33] William Green: And he talks about that exquisite poise of character, which we call Serenity. And he says it’s as precious as wisdom and more to be desired than gold. And then he pauses and says, yay, even than fine gold, you know, more precious even than fine gold. And then he says, how insignificant mere money seeking looks in comparison with a serene life.

[02:15:55] William Green: And I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, that there’s so much emphasis on getting to a point where we have enough money, enough wealth that will be se secure. And it just seems to me that this emphasis on, on serenity, on peace of mind is so critical. It’s such a critical aspect of a truly abundant life.

[02:16:16] William Green: And I just wondered what you think about that sense of the value of serenity, peace of mind.

[02:16:23] Arnold Van Den Berg: I totally agree with that. Matter of fact, as I go into the different studies, like when I started studying the Bible and I studied the New Testament, I read what Christ talked about, all these things and then I go into the Old Testament and see the same thing.

[02:16:40] Arnold Van Den Berg: And then I go into Buddhism and Hinduism and they all teach the same thing. And I go into the stoics and the Greeks and the Roman, the great philosophers, they all talked about the same thing. And so, you know, these are just general principles that throughout history people have learned is what creates successful life.

[02:17:03] Arnold Van Den Berg: And it isn’t money. Matter of fact, there are studies made that the more money a person has, the more chances he has of creating falses, number one, they get treated differently. So they become demanding of, of people, of situations, right? They come, they feel like they’re privileged, and then they want to get, and they get their way by buying people.

[02:17:26] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so you, you degrade your character by taking the wealth and abusing and using people. And I’ve always had a rule, if you want to really find out how somebody le how somebody believes, I always tell people the way a person treats someone who can be of no use to them is a real indication of their character.

[02:17:49] Arnold Van Den Berg: And what I look for when I go out to lunch and dinner with people, I see the way they trade, the waitress or the waiter, if they say, Hey, You know, I want this and get this and you know, kind of a orderly thing that tells me something about them. They might treat me well, but that doesn’t mean they treat somebody well.

[02:18:05] Arnold Van Den Berg: That can’t be of any use to them. So it’s a good indication of that. And so all of these different principles bear out the same thing. That money has a diminishing return. I’ll be the first to say. It’s something that I worked very hard to establish to create my financial independence. Matter of fact, my goal in life wasn’t to make a lot of money.

[02:18:28] Arnold Van Den Berg: My goal in life was to have enough to where I could be financially in independent, where I wouldn’t have to cater to people, I wouldn’t have to put up with things, I wouldn’t have to do things I didn’t believe in. I wouldn’t have to do things just for the money. That was my primary goal. So if I was to start out in life, I’d say the first thing you want to do is financial independence.

[02:18:47] Arnold Van Den Berg: You want to work on your mind and your body and so forth, and you create that kind of a life. And then you have the fruits of your labor. But to me, the great joy of having a lot of money is being able to help people. It doesn’t affect my lifestyle, but it makes a big difference in their life. And that’s a very wonderful feeling.

[02:19:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: And  that’s what I enjoy. By the way, I was looking for this quote by William Tiller. From what? The bleep p and l he says, your consciousness influence, influences others around you. It influences material property. It influences your future. You are co-creating your future. Now, this is one of the top quantum physicists in the country, probably in the world.

[02:19:31] Arnold Van Den Berg: Everything gets down to the thinking, but the main joy of life is not from the money. Cause the real thing that makes you feel good is the way you feel about yourself. And if you don’t feel good about yourself, you can have all the money in the world be pretty a lonely person. You know what really, really got me going when I realized I had some friends that are money managers in India.

[02:19:55] Arnold Van Den Berg: And they wanted to meet with me and so we got together with a friend and we talked for five hours. And we never even mentioned the stock market. It wasn’t even on our mind. We talked about meditation and hypnosis and the subconscious mind and the principles of Buddhism and then they gave me a book where they recommended the book called of Physics.

[02:20:16] Arnold Van Den Berg: And what this quantum physicist explained that from a quantum physicist, he explained that everything that Buddhism and Hinduism teaches can be verified through quantum physics. Well, you can do the same thing with any religion and you’ll find out. So what happened is after I studied town of physics, I thought, my God, these quantum physicists just teach the same thing that the people in the subconscious who are experts how to teach.

[02:20:41] Arnold Van Den Berg: So it all comes down together. You know, William, I think in the long term there are not going to be any miracles. They’re not going to be things we don’t understand because it’s all understandable in the subatomic world of quantum physics. And that’s what, where I see the, the religion and science are going to merge.

[02:21:02] Arnold Van Den Berg: They’re going to find out that the people two or 3000 years ago knew more about it than we do today. We’re basically relearning what they already knew. You look at the Yokes, the Cabales, the Christians, the ancient Hebrews, you know, they all say the same thing.

[02:21:18] William Green: It seems like the under the underlying message from, from all of these different spiritual paths that I’ve studied is that everything is, is consciousness.

[02:21:27] William Green: That your consciousness creates your reality. And so, if, so, so I think James Allen figured out this stuff a century or so ago, and I, I was looking at my copy of, um, from poverty to power this, this morning, and I saw that I’d, I’d written a note in it from the last time I read it, saying Arnold got lucky in stumbling upon this particular teacher because he understood these, these great spiritual secrets basically.

[02:21:54] William Green: That, that it’s your, your consciousness is going to create your reality. And so you got lucky. I think that very early in your journey, you figured out this central thing that if you could gain control over your mind and over your thoughts, your every, everything in your life would change. You’d get greater peace of mind.

[02:22:10] William Green: You’d have an impact on the people around you. You’d have more wealth, you’d be more trustworthy. So I think it all, it all basically flows from that fundamental understanding of the importance of consciousness and of your, of your thoughts.

[02:22:23] Arnold Van Den Berg: Yeah. But let me repeat one thing that we talked about. I agree with that.

[02:22:27] Arnold Van Den Berg: I was very fortunate to find that, but I wouldn’t have found it. If I wasn’t ready before I was seeking, remember what the Bible says? Seek and you shall find, knock and it’ll be a door will be open. So if you have your consciousness seeking, I’ll give you an example. What really set my life on that path. I was studying, you know, I was dating my ex-wife and she was Catholic.

[02:22:55] Arnold Van Den Berg: And so we started talking if we got married, how are we going to raise the kids? And you know, her parents didn’t want me in the family, let alone a Jew. And my parents didn’t want us to raise the kids Catholic. And so I thought, you know, it’s about time I learned what I really believed because I wasn’t sure about any of it.

[02:23:14] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I started asking her about the Catholic church and I thought, Jesus, how could they believe this? You know? And then I go talk to the rabbi, and I talk to the scholar. And so you listen to one side, it sounds pretty persuasive. And then you listen to the other side. So the whole question got down to the what?

[02:23:29] Arnold Van Den Berg: Who is Jesus? Is he the Messiah or is he an imposter or is he just a good guy, you know, what is he. Well, the Jews, if it isn’t the Messiah, he’s not the right guy. And to the Christians, if you don’t believe he’s the son of God, you can’t be saved. So you’re going back and forth. And that went on for months and I got very troubled.

[02:23:48] Arnold Van Den Berg: So I’m sending there, mark, what if Jesus to Messiah? What am I going to do? What am I going to tell my parents? And I’m become a Christian? So anyway, I was just agonizing over it and all of a sudden, the thought flashed in my mind and it said, if you want to follow the truth, you have to go wherever it could delete you.

[02:24:08] Arnold Van Den Berg: That was the turning point in my life because I thought about it for a second and I thought, that’s right. Why am I agonizing? Who’s right? The Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, or the Buddhists. The most important thing is what is the truth? So I made that my mantra that no matter what I did, everything I did, I used the asset test.

[02:24:30] Arnold Van Den Berg: What is the truth? So when you become so focused and looking for the truth and you read James Allen, you’re going to get hooked because that’s what you’re looking for.

[02:24:41] William Green: Arnold, on this note, I think we should draw to a close, but I think you’ve given our listeners so many things to think about in in their own quest for the truth, whether it’s exploring hypnosis or self-hypnosis, or reading James Allen or exploring different religious or spiritual parts.

[02:25:00] William Green: Different habits. There’s a lot to grab onto here and to explore further. So thank you so much for all your generosity and sharing these ideas and I hope it’s helped you to fulfill the, the dream that we spoke about at the start where you were going to share all of these techniques.

[02:25:17] Arnold Van Den Berg: It just happened and it’ll continue to happen because that is the thing that gives me the greatest joy to know that my thoughts could have helped somebody. And what really makes it worthwhile is when you’re suffering, you agonize and you go through it and you finally go past it, and then you say you meet other people or going through the same thing.

[02:25:36] Arnold Van Den Berg: It’s easy to help them and it makes a big difference and what could be more rewarding.

[02:25:42] William Green: Thank you so much. You’ve helped me a great deal, Arnold, so thank you.

[02:25:46] Arnold Van Den Berg: Thank you, William. Bye. Right.

[02:25:49] William Green: All right folks. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Arnold Van Den Berg and the some of these tools and tech techniques and books we’ve discussed will help you in your own life. If you’d like to learn more about Arnold, you may want to read the epilogue of my book, Richer, Wiser, Happier, where I write about him at some length. You may also enjoy going back and listening to an earlier interview that I did with him on the podcast back in May 2022.

[02:26:14] William Green: It’s episode six of The Richer, Wiser, Happier Podcast. I’d also really recommend reading his favorite book by James Allen, which is titled From Poverty to Power. There’s a very good collection of about 19 books by James Allen, which is called Mind is the Master, which is the thing that I’ve got, and I definitely recommend checking that out.

[02:26:35] William Green: There’s some really good stuff there. Some of it may feel a little dated I think but he was a beautiful writer and the wisdom I think is powerful and enduring. I’ve included this and various other resources in the show notes for this episode of the podcast, so feel free to check that out.  I’ll be back really soon with some more terrific guests, and in the meantime, as always, you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter @WilliamGreen72, and do let me know how you’re liking the podcast. It’s really great hearing from you. I was very struck over the last couple of weeks by the response that I got on the conversation that I had with Pico Iyer on the podcast and it was just lovely to hear about the impact that it had on a lot of people.

[02:27:15] William Green: And if you haven’t listened to that conversation already, I’d really encourage you to do so just because he shares a great deal of really thought provoking wisdom, both relevant to investors and businessmen, but I think also really to any of us who are trying to lead a richer, wiser, happier life. In any case, I’ll be back soon and until then take great care of yourself and stay well. Thanks again for listening.

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