NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 21, 2001

The secret to staying young and healthy

Everybody works on trying to stay young, in many, many ways, but the one that I've talked most about is never retire. Because no matter how old you are, if you're able to work, by all means do it. You'll live longer, you'll be healthier physically and healthier mentally.

On his daily water exercises

It's the best exercise. Everybody needs exercise, but the older you get, the more essential it is to have exercise. And I don't recommend the water, except it's a very quick, fast way to get plenty of exercise. I get as much exercise in 45 minutes as others do in four hours on the golf course or two hours on the tennis court.

On the stock market bubble

.All over the world, common stocks are far too high. I felt that we were witnessing the world's largest financial mania. In fact, I published an ancient book, or republished one, called "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," which covered the ancient bubbles. But it didn't have anything in the 20th century. So I added on the newest bubbles that occurred in the 20th century, including the Japanese bubble. And then this technology bubble came along, and it was far bigger than any previous bubble of any nation ever.

The crash

Exactly a year ago, the Dow Jones reached its peak on January 10, 2000. The Nasdaq became the world's largest market, and it has gone down 62 percent from what it was a year ago. That's a crash. It's so big a crash it's affected the whole world's markets.

On consumer debt and the negative U.S. savings rate

When I was a child, the U.S. was famous all over the world for being thrifty. They were the most thrifty nation on earth. But now the figures show the savings is less than zero savings, as compared to, say, South Korea, where the people there save 18 cents out of every dollar. Or the world's champion now is China, where it's 24 cents. The people in America, whose income averages about $22,000, they say they don't earn enough to save. The people in China, where they average $500 a year, they still save 24 cents out of every dollar.

The Bush tax cut

Cutting taxes is always magic to stimulate an economy. The latest example is very clear, in Ireland. Ireland was known as a dead country. It was a saying, at least 10 years ago, that everybody in Ireland that had to get up and go had already got up and left. That was fairly true. Then the government came in and cut taxes, cut them down to about half. Now Ireland is flooded with Europeans, people want to move there, people want citizenship there. Cutting taxes is a magic thing to do. It should be more. If you want a clear example of that, cut your taxes down to where they are in Singapore.

On the spiritual path

I don't sell any advice to anybody. I don't manage anybody's money except my charity foundations. So 90 percent of my time is on how to help everybody, including myself, build spiritual wealth, because that is really the only real wealth. In all those years, I helped wealthy families become more wealthy. It didn't have any effect. They were happy the day it went up, but no common effect on the family. As far as I could see, no common effect on civilization, as to which families had a little more money than the other.

But spiritual wealth, that helps everybody. A person that gains spiritual wealth on his own is far more happy, productive, inventive, more loving, more loved, and if you can have enough people building spiritual wealth, then the whole world becomes a kind of heaven on earth. If you're far away from there, spiritual wealth is doubly beneficial - beneficial to the person that came to the Lord and beneficial to everybody else, so doubly beneficial. Furthermore, it's permanent. The money world is temporary; the spiritual world is permanent.

Power of prayer

When you think about it, isn't it remarkable that there has never been a civilization that didn't pray. Never. George Gallup did an opinion poll: 94 percent of Americans pray. And 70 percent like their medical doctor to pray for them. And 40 percent of their medical doctors do pray for the patient. But until just about 20 years ago, there had been zero scientific studies about does it work. If so, what kind and so forth.

So we have financed two groups of scientists, two groups of medical research people, to do studies on prayer. One of them, the bigger one, is at Harvard, Dr. Herbert Benson, and he won't be ready to report for another six months. But the one at Georgetown University has already been reported, and they find that people who go to church an average of once a week live seven years longer than the ones who don't. Also they go to hospitals 25 percent less than people that don't, and when they do go to the hospital they get out 25 percent quicker. So we are just now in the process of launching a great program to help people in Congress, legislators, to realize there is an easier way to reduce medical costs for the whole nation, by just encouraging people to go to church and pray.

The need for spiritual research

My guess is the quantity of spiritual information has doubled in a thousand years. But the quantity of medical information is up a hundredfold in just one century. And the quantity of information about electronics is up a thousandfold in the past century, and so forth. So I think it's not too ambitious to say that if we do enough research on spiritual information and increase one hundredfold in one century, now that's an enormous change from doubling in a thousand years. Now, what would it take to do that? Nobody knows. But we do a lot of thinking in here. We look at how much has been accomplished by science research and how much research is done.