Speaker 1: Today we can take your skim stam cell, turn it
Speaker 1: back to the day you were born, and tell it
Speaker 1: it's now a heart stem cell, and you can see
Speaker 1: today these cells beating like there are.
Speaker 2: Heart the best selling author and the host the number
Speaker 2: one health and wellness.
Speaker 1: Podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty.
Speaker 2: Hey, everyone, welcome back to the number one health podcast
Speaker 2: in the world, On Purpose. I am so grateful that
Speaker 2: you come back every week to listen, learn and grow.
Speaker 2: I know that each of you are on a quest
Speaker 2: to become happier, healthier, and more healed. And my role
Speaker 2: is to try and find great conversations and individuals that
Speaker 2: we can learn from that can guide us navigate this
Speaker 2: path that we're all on. Today's guest has had quite
Speaker 2: the fascinating journey, and we'll be diving into all aspects
Speaker 2: of failure, health, success, wellness.
Speaker 3: And so much more.
Speaker 2: I'm really honored to have on the podcast Michael Milkin
Speaker 2: or Mike Milkin, who's been uniquely successful in creating value you,
Speaker 2: whether measured in lives saved or whether it's job created.
Speaker 2: Michael and his colleagues financed thousands of companies that collectively
Speaker 2: created millions of jobs Michael's philanthropy, which began in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies and paralleled his business career, expanded in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty two with the establishment of the Milk and Family Foundation.
Speaker 2: After two decades of actively supporting medical research, Michael became
Speaker 2: a patient in nineteen ninety three when he was diagnosed
Speaker 2: with terminal cancer. We're going to be talking about that today.
Speaker 2: Over the last three decades, Michael has increased his focus
Speaker 2: on making the research process more effective and efficient, and today,
Speaker 2: Mike's twenty twenty three memoir, Faster Cures Accelerating the Future
Speaker 2: of Health, documents his lifetime of work in the field.
Speaker 3: Is out.
Speaker 2: Now we're going to put this in the link, so
Speaker 2: make sure you go order yourself a copy of Faster
Speaker 2: Cures Accelerating the Future of Health. Welcome to on Purpose,
Speaker 2: Mike Milk and Mike, thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: Wonderful to be with you again. We've been on numerous
Speaker 1: continents and it's good to be here in Los Angeles
Speaker 1: at the same time.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I want to start off by saying a
Speaker 2: big thank you to James Morgan who introduced me to
Speaker 2: you way back in twenty seventeen in London when I
Speaker 2: first met you and I spoke at the Milk and
Speaker 2: Institute event in London. We then did La shortly after,
Speaker 2: and then we did Singapore as well. So I've been
Speaker 2: really grateful to be involved with the Institute a number
Speaker 2: of times. And I actually don't think you know this story,
Speaker 2: but this podcast actually was inspired by a conversation I
Speaker 2: watched at the Building Meaningful Lives event and I thought
Speaker 2: to myself, I wanted to create a place where people
Speaker 2: could come and share the deeper parts of themselves that
Speaker 2: they don't often share elsewhere, and so it actually all
Speaker 2: goes back to you this whole platform. So thank you
Speaker 2: so much.
Speaker 1: Well, it was my honor and pleasure, and what you've
Speaker 1: done with this program to reach people throughout the world
Speaker 1: is just so impressive.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you. I'm very grateful.
Speaker 2: Well, Mike, let's dive straight into it, because you truly
Speaker 2: have one of the most fascinating journeys, I believe, on
Speaker 2: the planet, and so I want to try and get
Speaker 2: into as much of it today. And I think a
Speaker 2: lot of our audience will be familiar, some of them
Speaker 2: won't be familiar at all, So I'd love to get
Speaker 2: into some of those details but can you walk me
Speaker 2: through one of your earliest childhood memories that you think
Speaker 2: has had a big impact on who you are today
Speaker 2: or how you are the way you are today.
Speaker 3: Do you have a.
Speaker 2: Childhood memory or an interaction with your parents, or an
Speaker 2: interaction with a friend or a teacher that you think
Speaker 2: has stayed with you.
Speaker 1: I think when I was very young, I had this
Speaker 1: love of data and knowledge. My favorite book was the Almanac,
Speaker 1: and at night I'd have it under my pillow, take
Speaker 1: out a flashlight and read it. And my parents had
Speaker 1: these bridge clubs where adults would come over and come
Speaker 1: once a month and I'd have a chance to interact
Speaker 1: with fifteen sixteen, in some cases twenty adults. And what
Speaker 1: I discovered in this interaction is very few people ever
Speaker 1: did research. When you ask a person why they believe
Speaker 1: in something, etc. They heard it from someone else, and
Speaker 1: it might be based on fact, it might be based
Speaker 1: on fiction. And so from a very young age, I
Speaker 1: began to question why people held certain beliefs, why they
Speaker 1: made certain decisions, and explore data and information. And I'd
Speaker 1: say the first major event was discovering that my father
Speaker 1: had had polio. I had no knowledge. And then one
Speaker 1: day a friend that was over we were playing catch
Speaker 1: told me my father had a limp. I really never
Speaker 1: noticed it, and I was thrust in to the world
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen fifties of what polio was, what occurred,
Speaker 1: the understanding of it, the fact that in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: two it was declared an epidemic and the United States
Speaker 1: was worried that it would bankrupt the country, having to
Speaker 1: build iron lung hotels to keep people alive. Well, a
Speaker 1: few years later there was a solution, and there was
Speaker 1: a vaccine created. Two people worked on it and it
Speaker 1: became prevalent. But what I also noticed was that teenagers
Speaker 1: were not taking the vaccine their parents because they were
Speaker 1: worried the vaccine was going to give them polio. And
Speaker 1: so the end of the story was there was an
Speaker 1: individual who went on a very popular show in the
Speaker 1: United States called the Ed Sullivan Show that we used
Speaker 1: to watch, and more than a year after it was available,
Speaker 1: less than one percent of every teenager in America had
Speaker 1: been vaccinated. And this individual's name was Elvis Presley. And
Speaker 1: because it was okay for Elvis afterwards, within one year
Speaker 1: eighty percent were vaccinated, And so there was a lot
Speaker 1: to learn here from this one. Because you had a
Speaker 1: solution didn't mean people would adopt it. To the fact
Speaker 1: that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt
Speaker 1: the country was obviously proven wrong. Numerous people were affected
Speaker 1: by it, but I think at the peaks only sixty
Speaker 1: two thousand people. And this has repeated itself throughout history
Speaker 1: of people telling you the world is coming to an end,
Speaker 1: It's not going to come to end, and science coming
Speaker 1: to the rescue.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, incredible.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited to dive into so many of those
Speaker 2: ideas that you just mentioned that throughout the course of
Speaker 2: our interview. I want to go back to that position
Speaker 2: of you starting out. You came from a modest background,
Speaker 2: but and you've had lots of successes and then valleys
Speaker 2: in your life, peaks and valleys. If you walk us
Speaker 2: into the direction of your first peak, did you always
Speaker 2: set out to be financially successful when you first created
Speaker 2: that first success in your life? What was the would
Speaker 2: you say the key principles that you used in order
Speaker 2: to manufacture that first success that you had.
Speaker 1: I did not plan to go into the financial service business.
Speaker 1: I wanted to run the space program and I was
Speaker 1: totally infatuated. When Sputnik went out, it was a catastrophe
Speaker 1: if you read the headlines in the United States at
Speaker 1: the time. There was the middle of the Cold War.
Speaker 1: Now quote Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.
Speaker 1: And I was very, very good in math and science,
Speaker 1: and I wrote a letter to the President of the
Speaker 1: United States told him I was ready to run the
Speaker 1: space program. Now I never really got a response. I
Speaker 1: was eleven years old, but that was my plan. And
Speaker 1: my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a
Speaker 1: leader and Nobel Prize winners and the sciences, and I
Speaker 1: was preparing someday to run the space program. Then I
Speaker 1: was in Los Angeles where we are today, during something
Speaker 1: that became known as the Watts Riots. It was August eleventh,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, and Los Angeles was on fire, the
Speaker 1: city of dreams, the city of entertainment. I had just
Speaker 1: been in Berkeley, and we had the free speech movement
Speaker 1: six or seven months before, but this was different. The
Speaker 1: city was on fire, and I went and met a
Speaker 1: young African American man who told me he would never
Speaker 1: have a chance to borrow money to have a business.
Speaker 1: His father didn't because of the color of his skin.
Speaker 1: It seemed totally irrational to me, and I decided to
Speaker 1: go back and figure out why this was occurring. When
Speaker 1: I went back to Berkeley and began to study credit,
Speaker 1: and very similar to when I was younger, I discovered
Speaker 1: everything that people said about credit was wrong. It didn't
Speaker 1: make anydifference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the
Speaker 1: head of the Federal Reserve, and what they were saying
Speaker 1: was inaccurate. And so I sat on a path. I
Speaker 1: had to give up my dream at that time of
Speaker 1: the Space program to begin working on what I might
Speaker 1: have called the democrazation of capital, and I pursued that
Speaker 1: during this period of time from nineteen sixty five for
Speaker 1: the next twenty to twenty five years. So that was
Speaker 1: not my path, but the studying and what I had
Speaker 1: done as an undergrad and then as a grand student
Speaker 1: in my decision to quote go to Wall Street was
Speaker 1: really to redirect the access to capital, have a fundamental change,
Speaker 1: and yes, in the next thirty years, sixty two million
Speaker 1: jobs in the United States were created. There's always a backlash.
Speaker 1: As a physic major, for every force, there's resistance, and
Speaker 1: so changing the financial system at that time. Many people
Speaker 1: wish that I didn't exist, the idea that you were
Speaker 1: a large company and you had access to capital and
Speaker 1: the others didn't. So there were five hundred investment grade
Speaker 1: companies and tens of millions of non investment grade companies. Well,
Speaker 1: once you empower them and created financial markets, we discovered
Speaker 1: sixty two million jobs were created in non investment grade
Speaker 1: companies and minus four so there was a lot of change.
Speaker 1: Today there's hundreds of firms headed by people that work
Speaker 1: for me, And I would say it's those structures are
Speaker 1: the basis of modern financial markets around the world. But
Speaker 1: it's not it is not unusual. At one of our
Speaker 1: scientific retreats and the first part of this century, I
Speaker 1: was in the back of the room and I invited
Speaker 1: two young people from Australia to come and speak, and
Speaker 1: they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong,
Speaker 1: everything they were telling you about ulcers. And these two
Speaker 1: senior scientists I had there in the back of the room,
Speaker 1: one turned the other and said, who are these jobos?
Speaker 1: They didn't even go to a good school. Well four
Speaker 1: years later these jobos won a Nobel Prize. So challenging
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom and theory I think has been something I've
Speaker 1: tried to do is you try to move forward, create jobs,
Speaker 1: solve medical problems throughout my life, and it goes all
Speaker 1: the way back to my little almanac and discovering my
Speaker 1: father head polio.
Speaker 2: One thing I'm noticing from your answers is that you
Speaker 2: have this keen ability to spot patterns and analyze patterns.
Speaker 2: You're almost seeing that there are systems, which ultimately are
Speaker 2: patterns that no longer serve us, and you believe that
Speaker 2: there are better systems or better patterns that would have
Speaker 2: an impact on the world. And you also have used
Speaker 2: the word study a few times in your first few answers,
Speaker 2: And I think there's this big difference between academic study
Speaker 2: and pattern study. And I find that the most successful
Speaker 2: people in the world are great at studying patterns. It's
Speaker 2: not really about the academic study. Could you help break
Speaker 2: both of those down for us, because I feel like
Speaker 2: you're probably the best person to ask that question too.
Speaker 2: In genuinely understand the difference because I think we had
Speaker 2: the Wed study, but when you say the Wed study
Speaker 2: you mean something else.
Speaker 1: I would say extremely insightful. So we could say there
Speaker 1: is inductive reasons. There's deductive reasons. The very first speech
Speaker 1: I gave on Wall Street was the best investor was
Speaker 1: a social scientist understanding what things were in a bigger
Speaker 1: world and stepping back and then going down and looking
Speaker 1: at the data to find out if your broad ideas
Speaker 1: of the world were changing. In the last few months,
Speaker 1: the world has opened up to the idea of where
Speaker 1: are the children of the world? For twenty years. The
Speaker 1: handwriting has been on the wall. The world did not
Speaker 1: open up to it until the last short period of
Speaker 1: time here. But the birth rate in northern in Asia, Europe,
Speaker 1: the United States has dropped so significantly that whereas the
Speaker 1: population of the US is doubled, there are less children
Speaker 1: born today than there were seventy years ago in the
Speaker 1: United States. China's birth rate has dropped so low that
Speaker 1: the number of children born in China last year was
Speaker 1: less than ten million. So you think about a country
Speaker 1: of one point four billion, but of average life expectancy,
Speaker 1: taking those that live to one hundred and averaging with
Speaker 1: those that die young is seventy five. If you have
Speaker 1: ten million children born a year and you multiply it
Speaker 1: by seventy five, that's a population of seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty million, not a billion. Four And so as people
Speaker 1: think about things, We've had more people dying in Japan
Speaker 1: now for a very long period of time than are born,
Speaker 1: and so they have decreasing population. In most of the
Speaker 1: developed worlds, the birth rate is below replacement. But this
Speaker 1: has not been going on for since the pandemic. This
Speaker 1: has been going on for a long period of time,
Speaker 1: and so when do you see it? And so about
Speaker 1: twenty thirty years ago, became quite concerned because it appeared
Speaker 1: to us that the future where the children were going
Speaker 1: to be born was in Sub Sahara Africa, and the
Speaker 1: rest of the world as a whole might be decreasing
Speaker 1: in terms of population. So what were the opportunities going
Speaker 1: to be for the children of Sub Sahara Africa? And today,
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three, more children are born in Nigeria
Speaker 1: than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia
Speaker 1: by a substantial amount, and more than twice as many
Speaker 1: children are born and Geria than the United States. So
Speaker 1: people are looking at where you are here now. When
Speaker 1: I had my little ALMANACX, I was too young to
Speaker 1: know that if you matched one almanac against another almanac,
Speaker 1: you were actually getting the first derivative. You were measuring change,
Speaker 1: and then if you had a few of them, you
Speaker 1: were measuring the rate of change. And so I think
Speaker 1: when answering your question, you have to look at the
Speaker 1: broad social implications and what is occurring. Then you have
Speaker 1: to ask yourself to the systems that currently exist fit
Speaker 1: where the world is going. I then if I had
Speaker 1: four almanacs, could calculate the second derivative, the rate of change,
Speaker 1: and I would say this is prevalent. In medicine, you
Speaker 1: could be diagnosed with cancer, is it a slow growing
Speaker 1: cranzer or instead of fast growing And the case of melanoma,
Speaker 1: it doubled every month if it was advanced. So a
Speaker 1: billion cancer sales ten months later are a trillion. Other
Speaker 1: cancers are very slow growing, so you could take your
Speaker 1: time to address it. And so understanding the rate of
Speaker 1: change and today what's happening in the world and where
Speaker 1: the children are born, and the facts that they're going
Speaker 1: to need opportunities, they're going to need jobs, or we're
Speaker 1: going to see one to two billion people on the move.
Speaker 1: So the question is when how early do you see that?
Speaker 1: And one of the exciting things about medicine today is
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties, there was this idea that everything
Speaker 1: was in your blood. Well, you didn't know what to
Speaker 1: look for, you couldn't sequence, you couldn't do anything. So
Speaker 1: might be there, but I can't find it. Now today,
Speaker 1: we now have tests that can measure the waste, the
Speaker 1: DNA link leakage in your blood, So you can find
Speaker 1: a life threatening disease today when there's just a very
Speaker 1: small amount of cells in your body, long before you
Speaker 1: could ever find it in a mammogram or a CT
Speaker 1: or an MRI. And so therefore dealing with these life
Speaker 1: threatning diseases today at their infancy is so much easier.
Speaker 1: But this was a dream until computers were a million
Speaker 1: times faster and data storage costs were one billion. It
Speaker 1: was an idea, It was a dream, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: a reality.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, thank you for sharing that I wanted to before
Speaker 2: we dive into all the incredible work you've done in healthcare.
Speaker 2: I definitely wanted to talk about this part of your Jenny,
Speaker 2: which we've talked about personally. But you making all these
Speaker 2: shifts and changes and pushing the boundaries. You ended up
Speaker 2: going to prison in nineteen ninety after pleading guilty to
Speaker 2: several felony charges related to securities violations. But to me,
Speaker 2: I'm fascinated by a how that happened for you, but
Speaker 2: be more importantly how you use that time because the
Speaker 2: comeback now looking backwards, it's it's incredible. But to live
Speaker 2: that Steve Jobs famously said, you can always connect the
Speaker 2: dots looking backwards, you can't when you're moving forwards. I
Speaker 2: just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone
Speaker 2: had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo. Ends
Speaker 2: about it to go to prison, walk us through first
Speaker 2: of all, how did you.
Speaker 3: End up there?
Speaker 2: And then and then we'll talk about what it was
Speaker 2: like there, because I think that's just such an interesting
Speaker 2: part of your journey.
Speaker 1: Now looking backwards, well, I think that issue there was
Speaker 1: an unusual period of time and once again complete revolution
Speaker 1: and finance. There are many points in history where you've
Speaker 1: had people that were presidents went to prison Brazil today
Speaker 1: and are now the president of the country. You again,
Speaker 1: So when the president gave me a pardon, he commented
Speaker 1: that these things were never crimes before. They've never been
Speaker 1: crimes since they related to bookkeeping and things like that,
Speaker 1: but I had to find a way to bring it
Speaker 1: to an end. And if you fought for ten or
Speaker 1: twenty years, to me, I had to find a way
Speaker 1: to live again. And so I think if you're true
Speaker 1: to yourself and you know the issues and the individuals
Speaker 1: know you, I viewed this as going to be a
Speaker 1: short period of time and I had to cut it
Speaker 1: short and make a decision for my family, etc. To
Speaker 1: live again. And it was a short period of time
Speaker 1: and the scheme of things. When I think of the
Speaker 1: diversion of less than two years, if I go back
Speaker 1: to World War Two, you had people that volunteered and
Speaker 1: were gone for four years fighting for freedom and what
Speaker 1: they believed in. And so I think my view was
Speaker 1: that I had to find a solution to bring it
Speaker 1: to an end, and it didn't really change who I was,
Speaker 1: what I did. The financial systems we built are now
Speaker 1: adopted throughout the world, whether you're in India or Singapore
Speaker 1: or whatever it might be. And yes, there was disruption
Speaker 1: in the force. I would say to you if you
Speaker 1: think about a country. You and I first met in
Speaker 1: the UK when the mercantile class rose up in England,
Speaker 1: who was under threat the nobility, and so the mobility
Speaker 1: would go to the king or the queen and say, well,
Speaker 1: we can't compete anymore. What are we going to do?
Speaker 1: But the old financial system didn't really meet the future
Speaker 1: needs the world. And so yes, I spent time thinking.
Speaker 1: I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education.
Speaker 3: How did you spend your days for those two years?
Speaker 1: I spent my time thinking about the world. I would
Speaker 1: write sometimes ambassadors around the world, suggesting what I think
Speaker 1: they should have done, or should do, or what the
Speaker 1: country should do. So it didn't it didn't interrupt those interactions,
Speaker 1: it didn't stop our philanthropic efforts, etc. I did get
Speaker 1: to interact with a group of people at that time,
Speaker 1: the group that was in the prison camp, this was
Speaker 1: a very low security area, were primarily there for drugs, marijuana,
Speaker 1: ship captains and other types of things. And so it
Speaker 1: was a period of time I was able to interact
Speaker 1: with my family. I think anyone that's separated from their family,
Speaker 1: and when I think back to those people that went
Speaker 1: and fought in World War Two in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: that might have been separated for four years, their only
Speaker 1: way of communicating with their family was through a letter.
Speaker 1: You know, the telephone was invented and in long distance call.
Speaker 1: When I was young, no one made long distance calls
Speaker 1: because it was ten to twelve minutes to call another country.
Speaker 1: So in the nineteen seventies, if I wanted to speak
Speaker 1: to Mumbai, I had to be prepared. It was ten
Speaker 1: dollars to twelve hours a minute, so those calls had
Speaker 1: to be short. And that was a period of time.
Speaker 1: In that period of time when a person's salary was
Speaker 1: hundreds of dollars a week, not thousands of dollars a week.
Speaker 1: Today people have a hard time relating to that because
Speaker 1: it's free on WhatsApp or on your phone. But I
Speaker 1: could communicate with my children, my family, and so when
Speaker 1: you're separated, the first thought is is your family going
Speaker 1: to be okay? Are your relationships? My wife and I
Speaker 1: had known each other since we were twelve. She knew
Speaker 1: who I was, I knew who she was. My business associates,
Speaker 1: thousands of them knew who I was, knew the issues,
Speaker 1: and so it wasn't a situation where I felt separated
Speaker 1: from the world, you know, And therefore communication still existed.
Speaker 1: A telephone existed. You weren't allowed to have a cell phone,
Speaker 1: but you could make a call on a payphone, so
Speaker 1: it wasn't the same separation. When I think of many
Speaker 1: people that were sent to the gulag in Russia, there's
Speaker 1: you know, whether it was soul Needsen or others or Shermansky.
Speaker 1: They wrote about how they took away their communications, they
Speaker 1: took away their visits. They even took away pencil and paper,
Speaker 1: they took away books. And one of them wrote that
Speaker 1: he knew he had won then because there was nothing
Speaker 1: else that they could take away. And so I think
Speaker 1: having inner strength is extremely important during that period. When
Speaker 1: when I think about my challenges relative to the tens
Speaker 1: of millions of people that have gone off to fight
Speaker 1: in wars, my parents' generation that lived through the depression
Speaker 1: and World War Two so that we could be free,
Speaker 1: my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.
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Speaker 2: off eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK,
Speaker 2: select countries in the EU and Australia. I think it's
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of in his strength, not only to
Speaker 2: be able to navigate those two years, even though you
Speaker 2: are saying you didn't feel that long in the biggest
Speaker 2: scheme of things that I still believe that there is
Speaker 2: such a resilience there. But the way you came back.
Speaker 1: Well, let's just talk about n Della. You're talking more
Speaker 1: than twenty.
Speaker 3: Years, Yeah, twenty seven, okay?
Speaker 1: And did he come back bitter? No? Okay? And in
Speaker 1: South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe as
Speaker 1: Rhodesha went, so he instead of being bitter, and when
Speaker 1: he got out, I had a chance to visit with him.
Speaker 1: We came to see each other. And so my view
Speaker 1: was revenge or bitterness is an unproductive emotion. If you
Speaker 1: have something to give and focus and build, you have
Speaker 1: to focus going forward. You can't sit and focus on
Speaker 1: the path. And I had thousands of people that had
Speaker 1: worked for me who could carry on our mission in
Speaker 1: finance and our foundations. By forming the Milk And Institute
Speaker 1: didn't change much what I had done in the for
Speaker 1: profit world. There I now did in the nonprofit world.
Speaker 1: So my view was the insights, the ideas carried on.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you know the current president in Brazil,
Speaker 1: who spent a short time in prison, you know, has
Speaker 1: certain views, but he has so many responsibilities and things
Speaker 1: he has to do for Brazil. If he was stuck
Speaker 1: in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.
Speaker 2: I'm so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela. There's a
Speaker 2: beautiful statement Inze where he said that when I walked
Speaker 2: out of the gates of the jail, I realized that
Speaker 2: if I was to hold on to that resentment or bitterness,
Speaker 2: that I would still be in prison and along those lines,
Speaker 2: and I think that's such a powerful statement of his
Speaker 2: that he believed that resentment and bitterness and revenge with
Speaker 2: the actual prison that would hold and limit him moving forward.
Speaker 1: Well, as you know well and your viewers know well,
Speaker 1: there are so many people in the world that have
Speaker 1: mental health issues today, and in many ways they're all
Speaker 1: traced to something in their past. And so being free,
Speaker 1: being free of your past, not forgetting it, not reflecting
Speaker 1: on it, not having it be part of your decision process,
Speaker 1: allows you to go forward and to fly from that standpoint.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I want to talk about your switch from financial
Speaker 2: well to medical research, but before we do that, I
Speaker 2: want to talk about your own journey with being diagnosed
Speaker 2: with terminal prostate cancer, which I can't imagine is an
Speaker 2: easy thing to hear at such a young age as
Speaker 2: well when you first received that. What was it like
Speaker 2: to receive such a diagnosis as someone again who is
Speaker 2: thinking about the future, trying to build. Were you someone
Speaker 2: who was quite focused on your health as well, or
Speaker 2: were you somewhat negligent because you were focused on work?
Speaker 2: And how did it feel to hear that.
Speaker 1: I would say to you, I probably had one of
Speaker 1: the least healthy diets in the world until that day
Speaker 1: I was diagnosed. But I experience this with my father's
Speaker 1: death in the nineteen seventies, and it was the first
Speaker 1: time my economic theories were tested during a period of
Speaker 1: time from seventy three to seventy seven, which I would
Speaker 1: call my financial clinical trials, all the ideas that I
Speaker 1: had developed, and by the mid nineteen seventies I had
Speaker 1: become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas, and
Speaker 1: most of them, ninety percent of the people believed we
Speaker 1: were headed to this financial depression again, and my views were, No,
Speaker 1: we weren't in history, but I could not save my
Speaker 1: father's life from melanoma. And it had a significant view
Speaker 1: here that it was the first time in my life
Speaker 1: that I could not solve a problem. I could help
Speaker 1: rebuild a company, I might be able to help rebuild
Speaker 1: a country financially, but I could not find a decision.
Speaker 1: I visited all these senior people, and I went to
Speaker 1: the major medical centers travel with my dad, and I
Speaker 1: concluded by nineteen seventy six that science could not move
Speaker 1: fast enough no matter what I had done or could
Speaker 1: do to save my father's life. So I had made
Speaker 1: the decision then to move back to California so that
Speaker 1: my two children, my wife Laurie, and I two children
Speaker 1: at the time, would know my father before he died.
Speaker 1: And he died about nine months after we moved back
Speaker 1: to California, and then I moved families, et cetera, thousands
Speaker 1: of people back to California, And so this has stayed
Speaker 1: with me. I've lost ten relatives to cancer, and my
Speaker 1: diagnosis was worse than theirs. So obviously I'm now reflecting
Speaker 1: what am I going to do and when it looked
Speaker 1: like I had eighteen months to live. You have to
Speaker 1: figure out what could I do different than they did.
Speaker 1: And the first decision I made is I would focus
Speaker 1: on anything that's reversible. So for two years I did
Speaker 1: not eat anything except fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. I
Speaker 1: had no idea whether it would benefit me, but I
Speaker 1: figured it wouldn't hurt me, and none of my relatives
Speaker 1: or friends who had died from life threatening diseases had
Speaker 1: ever changed their diety. And as I explored the world
Speaker 1: of the Chi medicine in China, or eire Veda medicine
Speaker 1: in India, or witch doctors in the central part of Africa,
Speaker 1: or Indians in the northwest Amazon, or healers from Russia,
Speaker 1: it came to me that I would really focus on
Speaker 1: ora Veda medicine and then five thousand year history. The
Speaker 1: belief was your gut, your microbiome was your second brain.
Speaker 1: So everything you eat, everything you drink, everything you exercise,
Speaker 1: everything you're experiencing is going into your second brain. So
Speaker 1: I was going to change my second brain, even though
Speaker 1: there was no proof you couldn't sequence at the time.
Speaker 1: And so that was a focus that I focused on,
Speaker 1: and I think The other thing I was very focused
Speaker 1: on is that most people diagnose with a life threatening
Speaker 1: disease do the least they can do at day one,
Speaker 1: and if it reoccurs later in life, they do everything
Speaker 1: they can to stay alive. But if you had done
Speaker 1: more at the beginning, then you have had a better chance.
Speaker 1: And so once I had driven my cancer burden to
Speaker 1: what appeared to be zero, I then made the decision
Speaker 1: to have radiation, whereas someone else might have done nothing,
Speaker 1: because I figured the burden was the least. And so
Speaker 1: I set off on this journey thinking about my father
Speaker 1: and my relatives and friends. And I had a bunch
Speaker 1: of friends that I had interacted with that had passed away,
Speaker 1: that how could I accelerate science? So first I could
Speaker 1: try to change my body. And at this time we
Speaker 1: weren't talking crisper. We weren't talking about a technology that
Speaker 1: could change your genes that is still not wildly to deploy,
Speaker 1: because we don't know as we create a new human
Speaker 1: race whether this is good or bad. And so I
Speaker 1: set off on this journey of how to accel rate science.
Speaker 1: But that journey in science is not much different than
Speaker 1: my journey in finance or the journey, we took an
Speaker 1: education in what we did. I was going to try
Speaker 1: to attract the best and most talented people in the
Speaker 1: world to come work in this field. And no matter
Speaker 1: how talented you were, if you were the individual that
Speaker 1: perceived the future was mobile phones or cell phones, Craig McCall,
Speaker 1: that was a good idea, but unless you had access
Speaker 1: to billions of dollars, you could never access that idea.
Speaker 1: If you were Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would
Speaker 1: change and we could drive the cost over time from
Speaker 1: twelve dollars a minute to talk to India to zero,
Speaker 1: you needed billions of dollars. So the same focus of
Speaker 1: attention one attract the best and brightest to work in
Speaker 1: the field. Two bring enough financial capital to serve as
Speaker 1: a multiplier effect, and three create teamwork. Many organizations have
Speaker 1: people that have real talent, but they don't act as
Speaker 1: a team. They don't act as one and therefore what
Speaker 1: I saw in medicine there was no team, there was
Speaker 1: not enough financial capital, and many of the brightest people
Speaker 1: were not working in this field. So those were the
Speaker 1: first levels I was focused on. But that was no different.
Speaker 1: In education, we had created a national Educator Award to
Speaker 1: attract the best and brightest into the field, and finance
Speaker 1: had searched out the world's leading entrepreneurs, providing them capital
Speaker 1: and advice and helped create teams for them. So that
Speaker 1: that was the revolution that began in ninety three in
Speaker 1: healthcare and medical research. And I faced just as much
Speaker 1: resistance as I did in the financial revolution. The first
Speaker 1: comment was, prove it well. In nineteen ninety three, you
Speaker 1: couldn't prove anything. I could show you antidotal evidence that
Speaker 1: in places of the world where people were plant eaters China,
Speaker 1: not meat eaters, that the incidents of hormone driven cancers
Speaker 1: or diabetes was far less, and in places that we
Speaker 1: had different diets, fast food diet, it was far more. So. Yes,
Speaker 1: there was anecdotal evidence, and so they said, well, prove
Speaker 1: it well. You couldn't sequence the human genome. You couldn't
Speaker 1: do anything in nineteen ninety three, and Francis Collins, who
Speaker 1: I met in I twenty three, set off on a
Speaker 1: journey to sequence. It wasn't till many, many years later,
Speaker 1: and billions of dollars that they completed that. And I'll
Speaker 1: never forget. In nineteen ninety four, I had one of
Speaker 1: our scientific retreats with the world's leading clinicians in cancer
Speaker 1: and science, and I wanted to get a doctor David Heber,
Speaker 1: who had founded the Center for Human Nutrition PHDMD at
Speaker 1: UCLA on the program. And the people in charge of
Speaker 1: the program said, you know, Mike, we're going to lose
Speaker 1: credibility if we have this soft science ideas that there's
Speaker 1: some relationship between what you eat and whether you're getting cancer.
Speaker 1: And they fought me and told me it would degrade
Speaker 1: what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer
Speaker 1: research group in the world. And I eventually reached a
Speaker 1: compromise with him. He would get to speak at linfe
Speaker 1: I wrote about it. He would not be on the program,
Speaker 1: he would not have a microphone, and if you wanted
Speaker 1: to listen, you had to sit close. And if you
Speaker 1: didn't want to be infected with this idea that there
Speaker 1: might be a link to how you live your life
Speaker 1: and what you eat and what you drink and your health,
Speaker 1: you could just sit far away and worn't have to.
Speaker 1: Twenty five years later, Jay, twenty five years later, I
Speaker 1: went to our scientific retreat. I was not in charge
Speaker 1: of the programming, and maybe twenty percent of every session
Speaker 1: over four days was cancer and your microbio. So initially
Speaker 1: putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo, whether it's finance,
Speaker 1: whether it's education, or whether it's medical, are challenged. Later
Speaker 1: they're accepted, well accepted in anyone could have thought of
Speaker 1: that idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's so fascinating because I feel like coming from
Speaker 2: an Indian background and my wife being an aerobatic health counselor,
Speaker 2: and you're so exposed to the idea early on that
Speaker 2: your gut health is such a big part of your
Speaker 2: overall health. But you're so right that until we see
Speaker 2: it in the research and the science and beyond the anecdotes,
Speaker 2: we don't fully comprehend these ideas. And so you're accelerating
Speaker 2: that research. Now, what would you say were the biggest
Speaker 2: challenges you saw when you entered the medical field in
Speaker 2: research and in our treatment of diseases.
Speaker 1: So I had entered the field in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies for twenty years, but I was primarily a donor, etc.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough
Speaker 1: to save my father's life. So I in ninety three
Speaker 1: designed it. I couldn't help others if I couldn't help
Speaker 1: myself and I first had to survive. But there were
Speaker 1: those three elements one teamwork, partnership, so I wrote about
Speaker 1: I went to this MD Anderson, and the two leading
Speaker 1: cancer centers off and on rated in the world were
Speaker 1: either MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York,
Speaker 1: one in Houston, one in New York. And I noticed
Speaker 1: there was no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering at the
Speaker 1: cancer conference in Houston. And I told the person putting
Speaker 1: the conference on, why is there no one here from
Speaker 1: Memorial Sloan Kettering here if we're trying to accelerate research,
Speaker 1: and he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan Kettering as
Speaker 1: a competitor, and I told him not to the patient. So, therefore,
Speaker 1: once we promised funding for research in this field, we
Speaker 1: would only find if you shared all your data. And
Speaker 1: I eventually gone on my board Andy Grove, who was
Speaker 1: the CEO of Intel, and we worked on this is
Speaker 1: early technology with computers and connecting, that we would connect
Speaker 1: all of our researchers digitally together and it might be
Speaker 1: easier for someone at MD Anderson to talk to someone
Speaker 1: at Memorial sloan kettering via technology than someone else to
Speaker 1: find at MD Anderson. But we told them that we
Speaker 1: couldn't fund any of their research unless they shared their data. Now,
Speaker 1: some people told me, well, I have to wait for
Speaker 1: Nature or Sell magazine to come out. The story will
Speaker 1: be out in a year. And we told them that
Speaker 1: their research was so important that they didn't need any
Speaker 1: of our funds. Our funds were only for those who
Speaker 1: were willing to share. And I would say within six months,
Speaker 1: everyone in the world was willing to share. And no
Speaker 1: matter how much we raised in money, I was out
Speaker 1: there first recruiting the best and brightest, and second trying
Speaker 1: to convince people who were thinking of leaving the field
Speaker 1: to stay in the field. And I wrote in the
Speaker 1: book a little bit about an individual who was being
Speaker 1: recruited to make better apples, and I was successful in
Speaker 1: convincing him that we could live and still eat the
Speaker 1: same apples for maybe the next twenty years. But people
Speaker 1: being diagnosed with cancer throughout the world, and the fact
Speaker 1: it was going to be increasing, not decreasing, we couldn't
Speaker 1: wait for solutions and so and then the other element
Speaker 1: I would say to you was government. There is no
Speaker 1: individual there is no foundation my family foundations which were created,
Speaker 1: and today there's with our centers more than ten of them,
Speaker 1: nor Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus
Speaker 1: Warren Buffett, which is is my largest foundation today in
Speaker 1: the world. The amount of money they have is small
Speaker 1: relative to the government. So if you can redirect the
Speaker 1: funds of the government, you now have access to hundreds
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars that could be redeployed. And so
Speaker 1: we spent two to three years making the economic argument
Speaker 1: of what the elimination of cancer was. But one of
Speaker 1: the challenges, when you talk about challenges, we are not
Speaker 1: able as a country to increase significantly our investment in
Speaker 1: the National Institutes of Health, the largest medical research group
Speaker 1: in the world. And I discovered in my analysis that
Speaker 1: one of the reasons was there were five hundred different
Speaker 1: diseases constantly appealing for more funds, and so unlike a laser,
Speaker 1: you had all these voices out there, whether it's Parkinson's,
Speaker 1: whether it was Alzheimer's, whether it's diabetes, and there wasn't
Speaker 1: a focused request. And so beginning two years later in
Speaker 1: ninety five, I went to the various disease specific groups
Speaker 1: and said, if you will stand down, we will have
Speaker 1: a combined effort focused on cancer, all cancers, like a laser,
Speaker 1: to double the NIH budget, and we will work on that,
Speaker 1: and when it's doubled, all medical research will double, not
Speaker 1: just cancer. And they agreed, and so we put on
Speaker 1: a March. It took three years and all this data, etc.
Speaker 1: To show and interacted with our political leaders that this
Speaker 1: would be one of the best investments the country could
Speaker 1: make and the leaders in the world in the twenty
Speaker 1: second century will be the leaders and the twenty first
Speaker 1: century in bioscience. And so with the March concluding in
Speaker 1: ninety eight, the President of the United States shortly thereafter
Speaker 1: signed into law what became the doubling of the NIH budget.
Speaker 1: There's been an incremental five hundred billion dollars in basic
Speaker 1: research spent. It laid the groundwork for what we did
Speaker 1: to get a quick solution for COVID nineteen. Every disease
Speaker 1: has benefited from it. The financial commitment was ten million
Speaker 1: dollars in the March. Today there's a five hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollar hour payoffs. So the first efforts of individual philanthropy,
Speaker 1: the efforts of recruiting young scientists, to work in the field,
Speaker 1: which is probably the highest rate of return in any
Speaker 1: philanthropy that I've seen. The cause of teamwork was coupled
Speaker 1: now with the increased benefit of getting the government focused
Speaker 1: on this area well.
Speaker 2: And I want to read out this is on page
Speaker 2: one to eleven of the book where you talk about
Speaker 2: a new type of organization, and you've lay out these
Speaker 2: very clear principles that you're just speaking about right now. So,
Speaker 2: as you said, recruit the best and brightest scientists and physicians,
Speaker 2: focus on the career paths of these young investigators, require
Speaker 2: collaboration in place of competition, build cross sector ties, Identify
Speaker 2: the most promising research not funded by the NIH. Eliminate
Speaker 2: needless bureaucracy. And the list continues. And I mean, you
Speaker 2: make it sound so easy when I'm listening to you
Speaker 2: right now and when you read it like this, But
Speaker 2: I'm imagining that each one of these items took a
Speaker 2: lot of time energy. I mean, you make it sound
Speaker 2: so seamless, But I would love to know how challenging
Speaker 2: is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level.
Speaker 1: So if you were at a Parkinson's Foundation or a
Speaker 1: diabetes foundation and thousands of talented people try to increase funding.
Speaker 1: But it was like there was a zero sum game.
Speaker 1: If I increased funding for diabetes, I had to take
Speaker 1: it away from someone else. And so getting them to
Speaker 1: accept that they were unsuccessful and to stand down and
Speaker 1: have faith. It's somewhat based on past performance in the
Speaker 1: financial investment they want in business, they want to know
Speaker 1: what's your past performance? Do you have a track record?
Speaker 1: So we had a track record of success to build on,
Speaker 1: and we didn't ask them to stand down for their lifetime.
Speaker 1: We just asked them to stand down for a few
Speaker 1: months here so we could focus like a laser our
Speaker 1: attention on this issue. Eliminating cancer is a cause of death.
Speaker 1: And bringing in the leading economists in the world was
Speaker 1: worth fifty trillion dollars to the US economy in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, multiples of what the economy and so
Speaker 1: we could show the results. And so, yes, you have
Speaker 1: to have a past track record convincing a person not
Speaker 1: to change their career. I remember one of the world's
Speaker 1: leading chemists has been about to be given a job
Speaker 1: as the dean of the most prestigious universe in the world,
Speaker 1: but he would leave the laboratory so I went and
Speaker 1: asked him who's running Warner Brothers. At the time, it
Speaker 1: was two friends of mine, Terry Simmel and Bob Dailey.
Speaker 1: He had no clue who was running. I asked him,
Speaker 1: has he ever heard of Stephen Spielberg? And he says, yes,
Speaker 1: he's heard of Stephen Spielberg. I said, well, if you
Speaker 1: become the Dean, no one will ever hear of you,
Speaker 1: because Steven Spielberg took years to make movies and product
Speaker 1: You're working on breakthroughs here in bioscience that might change
Speaker 1: the world. You becoming a manager of others might never
Speaker 1: change the world. And so luckily he decided to stay that.
Speaker 1: When you think of young scientists, the hundreds or thousands
Speaker 1: that I've dealt with, you graduated in high school, you
Speaker 1: were seventeen or eighteen years old, you're now thirty one
Speaker 1: or thirty two or thirty three years old. You've gone
Speaker 1: to medical school, you got a PhD. You had fellowships, residencies, internships,
Speaker 1: and now you're ready for your own laboratory and there's
Speaker 1: no money. It's very easy to make the decision to
Speaker 1: go into industry family practice and give up your basic research.
Speaker 1: But if we can greet you at that time and
Speaker 1: give you your own laboratory and get the institution to
Speaker 1: match for one hundred thousand dollars a year for three years,
Speaker 1: you've changed the career. And whether it's in our Melanoma
Speaker 1: Research Alliance, or whether it's in our Faster Cures Group
Speaker 1: for All life threatening Diseases, or whether it's in the
Speaker 1: Prostate Cancer Foundation. If we have twenty five young scientists
Speaker 1: and they each are going to work for forty years,
Speaker 1: by funding them at two and a half million dollars
Speaker 1: for the first year and each year, you've bought one
Speaker 1: thousand years of their time. And when I look back
Speaker 1: over the thirty years to all these new therapies that
Speaker 1: have been created, you will find a young scientist, a
Speaker 1: young person there. It's very interesting. At the National Institutes
Speaker 1: of Health, the first age that you get an award
Speaker 1: is forty three. If you look at who's won Nobel
Speaker 1: Prizes and science, most people have won for an idea
Speaker 1: they had when they were within a few years of school.
Speaker 1: James Watson was in his twenties when he put forth
Speaker 1: this idea we have genes, etc. You know so many
Speaker 1: Einstein I think was twenty three, and so the idea
Speaker 1: that you're going to school and you're studying, and you've
Speaker 1: now spent fifteen years after high school and now we're
Speaker 1: going to tell you can wait another twelve years. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: And so the system really was not prepared for the
Speaker 1: fact that we needed to get the best and brightest
Speaker 1: and divert their careers younger. And so I have spent
Speaker 1: more than thirty years working on this, the same thing
Speaker 1: we had worked on forty years ago with educators to
Speaker 1: try to get them to stay as an educator. When
Speaker 1: you go to India today, people are so confused today
Speaker 1: that think India is like China. There were twenty three
Speaker 1: or twenty four million in children born last year in India.
Speaker 1: There were nine to ten million born in China, more
Speaker 1: than twice as many children. Today, there are more than
Speaker 1: two hundred million more children in India than in China.
Speaker 1: China is more advanced digitally, but there's very few countries
Speaker 1: where the competition for education you know today is more significant.
Speaker 1: And they also have a belief in healthcare not based
Speaker 1: on modern technology but five thousand years of anecdotal experience.
Speaker 1: So yes, our theory is that your gut have been
Speaker 1: proven to be true with modern sequencing technologies. And this
Speaker 1: year they've just approved giving the microbiom own of one
Speaker 1: person who responded well to treatment to another person that
Speaker 1: didn't respond well, admitting that because they have a different gut,
Speaker 1: they're going to respond well, and how their genes are
Speaker 1: expressed or how the therapy they're given is going to
Speaker 1: be expressed differently. But in India, you had five thousand
Speaker 1: years of experience of if you did this, that happened
Speaker 1: when I went to the Northern Amazon, Northwest Amazon. Here,
Speaker 1: I am dressed head to toe and I wrote about
Speaker 1: it all in black. And our Indian guide has a
Speaker 1: pair of shorts on and that's it. He's immune to everything.
Speaker 1: I'm not immune to anything. And he takes me over
Speaker 1: and he says, well, we use this bush against malaria,
Speaker 1: and we use this for this. And he shows me this,
Speaker 1: and he said, if we ever get separated, you can
Speaker 1: hack this bush and drink the water inside. But then
Speaker 1: he goes and he tells me, but don't drink the
Speaker 1: water in this bush. It could kill you. So they
Speaker 1: both look the same to me, Okay, both of them.
Speaker 1: So I got a rope and we tied it around
Speaker 1: his waist and my ways so we would never be
Speaker 1: separated as we are hacking through the jungle. And so
Speaker 1: I think the world today is adjusting to what have
Speaker 1: we learned over thousands of years that we didn't take
Speaker 1: in consideration. And the environmental movement, the effort here in
Speaker 1: healthy human, healthy planet is totally interrelated.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: What have you found as you'll, I guess the things
Speaker 2: that you're most happy about that proved to you. The
Speaker 2: research is going in the right direction. What are you
Speaker 2: pointing towards as successes or solutions.
Speaker 1: Well, let's just took about two that the world has
Speaker 1: full knowledge of HIV AIDS. The number one talk show
Speaker 1: host not the number one healthcare podcast in the world.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty seven, Oprah Winfrey goes on television and
Speaker 1: tells the people of America that one in five are
Speaker 1: going to die from AIDS in the next three years.
Speaker 1: That's based on her work. Well, unfortunately, many people died,
Speaker 1: but we didn't have eighty million people die. We had
Speaker 1: tens of thousands. And the cocktails and the anti virals
Speaker 1: that were created. So one of the most popular people
Speaker 1: in the United States, Magic Johnson, announced in nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: one that he was diagnosed with a V and he's
Speaker 1: going to have to retire at his peak of his
Speaker 1: career from the NBA. Most people, including myself, thought he
Speaker 1: might not make it. Today's a friend. He's participated in
Speaker 1: our faster cures effort. He's bigger than life. His smile
Speaker 1: is bigger than life. It's thirty two years later. Where
Speaker 1: do we see it the most? When you say where
Speaker 1: are the results? Look at sub Sahara, Africa. Two thirds
Speaker 1: of everyone with HIV and AIDS lived in sub Sahara, Africa.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to go work there, they wanted you
Speaker 1: to work thirty years ago they paid you compact pay
Speaker 1: out of fear that you could be infected. Well, today,
Speaker 1: the chance of a woman with proper care passing AIDS
Speaker 1: onto her children is two percent, down from ninety five.
Speaker 1: So the population of Subsherra, Africa is growing. Children that
Speaker 1: were orphans are no longer born with HIV. People with
Speaker 1: HIV and AIDS are living today, not dying. And what
Speaker 1: do we just see in the last three years during COVID,
Speaker 1: the leaders in the state that you and I are
Speaker 1: in today California, told Californians that one in two Californians
Speaker 1: are going to get the disease in the next three months,
Speaker 1: and that five million of people in California will have
Speaker 1: to be hospitalized, but there's only a few hundred thousand
Speaker 1: hospital beds. It was a catastrophe. More than a million
Speaker 1: people died in America, more than ten or twenty million worldwide.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't fifty percent of the population, it wasn't
Speaker 1: ten percent of the population. And it was only sixty
Speaker 1: three days between the sequencing of the virus and the
Speaker 1: first human being getting a vaccine. Sixty three days, nine weeks,
Speaker 1: not ten years. And so that is why I wrote
Speaker 1: the book. Okay, I wrote the book because we are
Speaker 1: in the verge of a total revolution, the same as
Speaker 1: I saw in finance in healthcare today with technology, and
Speaker 1: so it's time to put your foot on the accelerator
Speaker 1: and go faster, not time to ease up, because we
Speaker 1: think we have put into suspended animation this pandemic. And
Speaker 1: so that was my concerning There were these points of
Speaker 1: the March and ninety eight. There was this point of
Speaker 1: the set libration of science in twenty twelve, and there's
Speaker 1: a point here today that people don't have to die.
Speaker 1: For the first time in history. We have a good
Speaker 1: chance to cure your disease in your own lifetime if
Speaker 1: we stay with it.
Speaker 2: How can me and my community support these efforts? How
Speaker 2: can people be involved? How can people be engaged if
Speaker 2: they feel inspired by what you're doing and the work
Speaker 2: that you're leading on, how can they get involved? Because
Speaker 2: I think that's often you know, what you're sharing is
Speaker 2: a healthier future, which I think we all want. But
Speaker 2: naturally we often people get discouraged because of headlines and
Speaker 2: news and everything that we see around us.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things or things aren't true that
Speaker 1: are in the headlines. So just the concept of healthy human,
Speaker 1: healthy planet. Such a large percent of the earth today
Speaker 1: is devoted to raising animals seventy to eighty billion animals
Speaker 1: for humans to eat, and that doesn't count the billions
Speaker 1: of fish. We are on the verge of essentially being
Speaker 1: able to create a hamburger without a calf, without a cow.
Speaker 1: Now for a person in India who doesn't eat a hamburger,
Speaker 1: doesn't make any difference, okay, But if we can grow
Speaker 1: it in a laboratory and just give it light and
Speaker 1: energy and nutrients, we don't have to go through the
Speaker 1: whole process of all the water required, all the land
Speaker 1: required to grow physical animals. So yes, we can grow
Speaker 1: food in a laboratory. And now it has just been
Speaker 1: approved to allow this to occur. We needed to get
Speaker 1: the cost down. It used to be thirty thousand ounce,
Speaker 1: then it went to three. Now it's a few hundred.
Speaker 1: But it's only a matter of time where we can
Speaker 1: have a substantial change in the planet. A friend of
Speaker 1: mine put up the money to do a book called
Speaker 1: draw Down, and draw Down listed the twenty major factors
Speaker 1: that were changing our atmosphere and the environment the earth
Speaker 1: is in. Ten of them relate to food, ten of
Speaker 1: them relate to other things. And so we have a chance.
Speaker 1: And the environmental movement, combined with the health movement, science
Speaker 1: today can show you what happened. So we know today
Speaker 1: that what were all these vegetables on the planet for?
Speaker 1: If you believe in Darwin, what's the purpose of broccoli, califlower,
Speaker 1: Brussels flouts? These things are little pac man, they're out
Speaker 1: there eating. Okay, car synogens in your body. We've learned
Speaker 1: today that your immune system can do amazing things. And
Speaker 1: I wrote about it when I first heard Jim Allison
Speaker 1: talk in nineteen ninety seven that your immune system is
Speaker 1: smarter than all the scientists in the room, but someone
Speaker 1: turned off your immune system and that's why you got
Speaker 1: a life threatening disease. Okay, and that occurred, and so
Speaker 1: he developed and won a Nobel Prize for the concept
Speaker 1: of checkpoint inhibitors, and we financed his work for ten years.
Speaker 1: In prostate cancer. It wasn't that effective, but the minute
Speaker 1: we moved to melanoma, the death rate has dropped by
Speaker 1: fifty percent. And so what he did is we turned
Speaker 1: off the switch and the cancer that turned off your
Speaker 1: immune system. The idea of growing your own organs. There
Speaker 1: are now people that have had organ transplants from others
Speaker 1: take these drugs to prevent rejection by their own immune system.
Speaker 1: Well at Mass General in Boston other things there looks
Speaker 1: like there's now a technology that you can input to
Speaker 1: a certain degree the immune system of the person that
Speaker 1: donates your organ to you, so you'll have two immune systems.
Speaker 1: So when you get that organ, you don't need rejection.
Speaker 1: Your immune systems will be operating. So technology is just
Speaker 1: moving non evasive surgery. When I watch star trek as
Speaker 1: a kid. The doctor bones. He didn't do any evasive surgery,
Speaker 1: put a little thing on your body and it did everything. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what non invasive focus ultrasound can do. So the promise,
Speaker 1: the promise is with us today and so we're just
Speaker 1: trying to get a mission here, going to make sure
Speaker 1: we stay with our efforts that the world mobilized. When
Speaker 1: you look at what happened and the months of COVID one,
Speaker 1: I came back and told everyone at every one of
Speaker 1: our centers that we will all be judged by what
Speaker 1: we did during this period of time. I'm not a
Speaker 1: didn't want to compete with you, but we launched podcasts
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty five of them. And the reason
Speaker 1: I launched them was threefold. One, if I'm talking to
Speaker 1: Francis Collins ahead of the NIH, I want you or
Speaker 1: anyone else to hear what he's saying. Anyone in the
Speaker 1: world could listen. I might be able to talk to
Speaker 1: the CEO of of Alex Gorski Jay and Jay. Most
Speaker 1: of people couldn't, but you can listen to the conversation. Two,
Speaker 1: by talking to him, I can encourage them maybe to
Speaker 1: take action they wouldn't have taken. So when I first
Speaker 1: spoke to Alex Gorski in April on this podcast, he
Speaker 1: was talking about maybe going into clinical trials in January
Speaker 1: of twenty one, and so my comment was why not July,
Speaker 1: which he ended up doing and it was approved by January.
Speaker 1: And so the third effort was to see how people
Speaker 1: were coping. So, if I talked to the largest employers
Speaker 1: in the world who had employees over the world, what
Speaker 1: were they doing in China, Italy, et cetera that you
Speaker 1: might be doing in the United States if you were
Speaker 1: responsible for thousands or tens of thousands, or in the
Speaker 1: case of a Walmart, millions employees, are you going to
Speaker 1: be doing? And when I spoke to the CEO of Target,
Speaker 1: he told me that he was protecting their employees. But
Speaker 1: what happened was when people who lived in small living
Speaker 1: units apartments came into the store with their kids. The
Speaker 1: kids were running all over the store. And so how
Speaker 1: you're going to protect the kids and how you're going
Speaker 1: to protect your workers, And so this had had to
Speaker 1: be done in a short period of time. Today, I'm
Speaker 1: no longer doing podcasts. I'm deferring to you how the world.
Speaker 1: But for me I meditated. It made a big difference,
Speaker 1: I think in my outcome. I went to the leaders
Speaker 1: in immunology in the world, and I discovered the smell
Speaker 1: of the seashore and the smell of certain kind of
Speaker 1: trees Sequoia cedar trees seemed to energize my immune system.
Speaker 1: And so when we think of the senses, smell, taste, touch,
Speaker 1: all of these come into play in rejuvenating your body.
Speaker 1: So I used to sit at high tide and smell
Speaker 1: the seashore. Why why did that energize my immune system?
Speaker 1: I have no idea except we came out of the sea.
Speaker 1: So maybe that was returning to the sea and the
Speaker 1: smell of the pine needles and things like that. Maybe
Speaker 1: it was relating when I was young with my father.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, but my view was we don't
Speaker 1: use all of our senses and we understand. One of
Speaker 1: the things that Iravador brought me was understanding of so
Speaker 1: many different elements of touch. So I had a chance
Speaker 1: to see things that I never thought I would see
Speaker 1: in my life. I visited a man in China, ge doctor,
Speaker 1: who was over ninety years old, and he told me
Speaker 1: if he came out of the mountains, he would die.
Speaker 1: But when he put his hands on me, he could
Speaker 1: create such unbelievable heat. How did he do that? I
Speaker 1: have no idea, okay, but it gave you a chance
Speaker 1: to experiencing different things. And just like the two young
Speaker 1: men from Australia who challenged conventional wisdom, and the first
Speaker 1: reaction was they didn't even go to a good university,
Speaker 1: why should we be listening to them? And then a
Speaker 1: few years later everybody accepts it. And so I've found
Speaker 1: these similarities in my life, whether it was in finance,
Speaker 1: whether it was in public health, whether it's in medical research.
Speaker 1: But it all comes back to the people on your team.
Speaker 1: So when I was in India, if India is playing
Speaker 1: Pakistan in cricket, nothing else is going on, Okay, they
Speaker 1: could be arguing and fighting about anything, but you have
Speaker 1: to take time out for that game. And so there
Speaker 1: are things that focus your attention. And part of this
Speaker 1: effort is this concept of healthy human, healthy planet. Yes,
Speaker 1: technology has solved so many problems for us, but I
Speaker 1: think what I've tried to do, particularly in the last
Speaker 1: thirty years, I've gone from an extremely unhealthy diet okay,
Speaker 1: to an extreme for the first nine years, I got
Speaker 1: my ire Veta massages twice a week for nine years,
Speaker 1: and so I was willing to do things that I
Speaker 1: would have scoffed at in the nineteen seventies, sixties, eighties
Speaker 1: is way out there, okay, But today I'm visiting with
Speaker 1: you today, I'm the happiest guy to do a podcast
Speaker 1: with you thirty years later because I changed, the world changed,
Speaker 1: and going forward, we're going to have to make more changes,
Speaker 1: more adoption of things. It's very hard. It's very hard.
Speaker 1: In the United States today, we now have this quote
Speaker 1: diabetes pilled that apparently controls your appetite and your weight. Okay,
Speaker 1: so so it's a lot easier than having personal discipline.
Speaker 1: For me. I ate more hot dogs, I believe than
Speaker 1: anyone except those people that win the Nathan's hot Dog
Speaker 1: eating contest. And how we can eat fifty to sixty
Speaker 1: hot dogs and buns in that short period of time,
Speaker 1: I have no idea, but no hot dog was worth
Speaker 1: your life. But not everyone. And when I found most
Speaker 1: people don't want to be lectured on their diet or
Speaker 1: what they should eat or not eat. And when you
Speaker 1: discover things like a Nobel Prize, when they're Elizabeth Blackburn
Speaker 1: about what sugar does to you. So what happened when
Speaker 1: Mexico put a tax on sugar or Chili put a
Speaker 1: tax on they increased their advertising as sales fell off,
Speaker 1: and the same thing occurs. Unfortunately, the developing world is
Speaker 1: subject to this advertisement and these addicted foods and drugs
Speaker 1: as they move around the world. In China, literally no
Speaker 1: one had diabetes forty years ago. You didn't even study
Speaker 1: it in school. And now people in China have the
Speaker 1: most number of people with diabetes in the world.
Speaker 2: And there's no way of regulating that at a government level,
Speaker 2: or there's no way because I feel I agree with you,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I think that we're all now
Speaker 2: becoming more and more aware of the amount of sugar
Speaker 2: in sugary drinks, the amount of you know, unhealthy fats
Speaker 2: and carbohydrates, the amount of you know, whatever it may be,
Speaker 2: or the amount of artificial even in a speaking of
Speaker 2: plant based foods, even the current like plant based you
Speaker 2: know foods, they're not all healthy either. So is there
Speaker 2: no way to make sure that at a higher level
Speaker 2: that we don't even get access to this or is
Speaker 2: it just a discipline conversation.
Speaker 1: No, I think we will be there. The idea that
Speaker 1: you can take a calf, a sell from a calf,
Speaker 1: not a calf, but a cell. If we can find
Speaker 1: an animal that never was shot with hormones. More than
Speaker 1: fifty percent of all the drugs are shot into animals.
Speaker 1: So you might think that you're healthy and you're not
Speaker 1: taking things, but what you ate did and so. But
Speaker 1: I think we'll have an entirely new food chain in
Speaker 1: twenty to thirty years. If you look at companies, the
Speaker 1: market has adjusted, and I wrote about it in the book.
Speaker 1: So at one time Craft was selling between ninety and
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars. This year, I don't know where it
Speaker 1: is today, call it thirty five to forty wow. Nesley
Speaker 1: announced that they were going to become a health company.
Speaker 1: What was the market reaction? Social media reaction. First they
Speaker 1: give you diabetes, then they're going to deal with it.
Speaker 1: There are three sixty they create their own problems, etc.
Speaker 1: So Nesley went out and hired a CEO, not from
Speaker 1: the consumer packaging, but a CEO who had worked in healthcare,
Speaker 1: and they sold their candy business in the United States,
Speaker 1: They sold other businesses and they focused here on healthy businesses, etc.
Speaker 1: And Nestley has flourished, so the market is willing to
Speaker 1: pay more for that. And yes, the first iterations of
Speaker 1: plant based diet to make a taste, we don't know
Speaker 1: if they're any better with all the ingredients they put in,
Speaker 1: but the ability to grow the same as your ability. Today.
Speaker 1: We can take your skin stem cell, turn it back
Speaker 1: to the day you were born and tell it it's
Speaker 1: now a heart stem cell, it's you, and then give
Speaker 1: it energy, light, energy, nutrients, and you can see today
Speaker 1: in a little peatrie dish, these cells beating like they're
Speaker 1: a heart. And so we'll be able to create pure
Speaker 1: foods not contaminate the planet in the future. And so
Speaker 1: this is what technologies promise is and that once again,
Speaker 1: that's why I wrote the book. You're busy, I'm busy.
Speaker 1: It's not easy to write the book. You've just finished
Speaker 1: a tour of more than forty cities in the world
Speaker 1: on your new book, and so it's not easy to
Speaker 1: take the time. The analogy I have made is there
Speaker 1: was this show in the United States called I Love
Speaker 1: Lucy and Lucille Ball was packaging chocolates that coming down
Speaker 1: the line, and they were coming down faster than she
Speaker 1: could pack them, So she's putting them here, she's putting
Speaker 1: them in her mouth. Everything. What are you going to
Speaker 1: do so my life? In your life? There's plenty of
Speaker 1: things we're focused on. I've probably given fifty speeches in
Speaker 1: the last month, but to set the time down was
Speaker 1: my concern here that we have a chance. Technology has
Speaker 1: given us a chance for the solution for all these
Speaker 1: life threatening diseases. We estimate there's ten thousand life threatening
Speaker 1: diseases that faster Our Center for Faster Cures has looked at,
Speaker 1: and there's solutions for five hundred. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of work to do, and we are on the verge
Speaker 1: with the use of technology having the ability to do this.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Mike.
Speaker 2: Everyone has been listening and watching. The book is called
Speaker 2: Faster Cures, Accelerating the Future of Health. Grab a copy
Speaker 2: right now if you're listening, and I hope that this
Speaker 2: is one of those episodes that you'll share with a
Speaker 2: family member, a friend of yours that may really want
Speaker 2: to listen to it. And I want you to share
Speaker 2: your insights on social media, whether you're on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok,
Speaker 2: share the clips, share the messages share the insights of
Speaker 2: wisdom that might share with us today with your communities
Speaker 2: as well, because I think this conversation on improving our
Speaker 2: own personal health is so needed, especially looking at how
Speaker 2: the world is trying to find new innovative ways to
Speaker 2: help us deal with it. Mike, we end every On
Speaker 2: Purpose episode with a final five. These questions have to
Speaker 2: be answered in one word to one sentence maximum for
Speaker 2: each question, and so Michael Milkham, these are your final five.
Speaker 2: The first question is what is the best advice you've
Speaker 2: ever received?
Speaker 1: Do the research?
Speaker 2: Nice, great Answer've never had that before. Second question is
Speaker 2: what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
Speaker 1: You'll learn it from the newspaper.
Speaker 2: Three, what do you do first thing in the morning
Speaker 2: and the last thing before you go to bed?
Speaker 1: I say hello to my wife and good morning, and
Speaker 1: I give her a kiss before we go to bed
Speaker 1: at night. We've known each other sixty five years, we've
Speaker 1: been married for fifty five years, and so that's what
Speaker 1: I do first thing in the morning and last thing.
Speaker 2: That's beautiful question numberfore about that? What would be your
Speaker 2: number one lesson from the sixty five years you've been together?
Speaker 2: If you had to say there was one thing that
Speaker 2: has been the most powerful lesson you've learned in love?
Speaker 3: What would that be.
Speaker 1: See the world through someone else's eyes?
Speaker 3: Great advice, Great advice. I love that.
Speaker 2: Fifth and final question, If you could create one law
Speaker 2: in the world that everyone had to follow, what would
Speaker 2: it be.
Speaker 1: Treat others as you would like to be treated.
Speaker 2: Beautiful Mike Milk and everyone, thank you so much for
Speaker 2: listening to om purpose. I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 2: I hope you'll share it, and I'll hope you'll join
Speaker 2: us for the next one. Thank you so much, Mike,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for being sure to see you
Speaker 2: generous and insightful today. It's been a joy talking to you. Likewise,
Speaker 2: thank you so much. If you love this episode, you'll
Speaker 2: enjoy my interview with doctor Daniel Ahman on how to
Speaker 2: change your life by changing your brain.
Speaker 4: If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
Speaker 4: a healthy brain.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over
Speaker 4: a thousand convicted felons and over one hundred murderers, and
Speaker 4: their brains
Speaker 3: Are very damaged.