Mike Milken ON: How to Connect Your Life Purpose with Business Success & The Mindset Behind Strategic Decision Making

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today we can take your skim stam cell, turn it
back to the day you were born, and tell it
it's now a heart stem cell, and you can see
today these cells beating like there are.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Heart the best selling author and the host the number
one health and wellness.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the number one health podcast
in the world, On Purpose. I am so grateful that
you come back every week to listen, learn and grow.
I know that each of you are on a quest
to become happier, healthier, and more healed. And my role
is to try and find great conversations and individuals that
we can learn from that can guide us navigate this

(00:42):
path that we're all on. Today's guest has had quite
the fascinating journey, and we'll be diving into all aspects
of failure, health, success, wellness.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
And so much more.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
I'm really honored to have on the podcast Michael Milkin
or Mike Milkin, who's been uniquely successful in creating value you,
whether measured in lives saved or whether it's job created.
Michael and his colleagues financed thousands of companies that collectively
created millions of jobs Michael's philanthropy, which began in the
nineteen seventies and paralleled his business career, expanded in nineteen

(01:17):
eighty two with the establishment of the Milk and Family Foundation.
After two decades of actively supporting medical research, Michael became
a patient in nineteen ninety three when he was diagnosed
with terminal cancer. We're going to be talking about that today.
Over the last three decades, Michael has increased his focus
on making the research process more effective and efficient, and today,

(01:41):
Mike's twenty twenty three memoir, Faster Cures Accelerating the Future
of Health, documents his lifetime of work in the field.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Is out.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Now we're going to put this in the link, so
make sure you go order yourself a copy of Faster
Cures Accelerating the Future of Health. Welcome to on Purpose,
Mike Milk and Mike, thank you for being here.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Wonderful to be with you again. We've been on numerous
continents and it's good to be here in Los Angeles
at the same time.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
Absolutely, and I want to start off by saying a
big thank you to James Morgan who introduced me to
you way back in twenty seventeen in London when I
first met you and I spoke at the Milk and
Institute event in London. We then did La shortly after,
and then we did Singapore as well. So I've been
really grateful to be involved with the Institute a number
of times. And I actually don't think you know this story,

(02:33):
but this podcast actually was inspired by a conversation I
watched at the Building Meaningful Lives event and I thought
to myself, I wanted to create a place where people
could come and share the deeper parts of themselves that
they don't often share elsewhere, and so it actually all
goes back to you this whole platform. So thank you

(02:53):
so much.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Well, it was my honor and pleasure, and what you've
done with this program to reach people throughout the world
is just so impressive.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Thank you, thank you. I'm very grateful.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Well, Mike, let's dive straight into it, because you truly
have one of the most fascinating journeys, I believe, on
the planet, and so I want to try and get
into as much of it today. And I think a
lot of our audience will be familiar, some of them
won't be familiar at all, So I'd love to get
into some of those details but can you walk me
through one of your earliest childhood memories that you think

(03:24):
has had a big impact on who you are today
or how you are the way you are today.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
Do you have a.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
Childhood memory or an interaction with your parents, or an
interaction with a friend or a teacher that you think
has stayed with you.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
I think when I was very young, I had this
love of data and knowledge. My favorite book was the Almanac,
and at night I'd have it under my pillow, take
out a flashlight and read it. And my parents had
these bridge clubs where adults would come over and come

(04:02):
once a month and I'd have a chance to interact
with fifteen sixteen, in some cases twenty adults. And what
I discovered in this interaction is very few people ever
did research. When you ask a person why they believe
in something, etc. They heard it from someone else, and

(04:23):
it might be based on fact, it might be based
on fiction. And so from a very young age, I
began to question why people held certain beliefs, why they
made certain decisions, and explore data and information. And I'd
say the first major event was discovering that my father

(04:47):
had had polio. I had no knowledge. And then one
day a friend that was over we were playing catch
told me my father had a limp. I really never
noticed it, and I was thrust in to the world
in the early nineteen fifties of what polio was, what occurred,
the understanding of it, the fact that in nineteen fifty

(05:11):
two it was declared an epidemic and the United States
was worried that it would bankrupt the country, having to
build iron lung hotels to keep people alive. Well, a
few years later there was a solution, and there was
a vaccine created. Two people worked on it and it

(05:31):
became prevalent. But what I also noticed was that teenagers
were not taking the vaccine their parents because they were
worried the vaccine was going to give them polio. And
so the end of the story was there was an
individual who went on a very popular show in the

(05:52):
United States called the Ed Sullivan Show that we used
to watch, and more than a year after it was available,
less than one percent of every teenager in America had
been vaccinated. And this individual's name was Elvis Presley. And
because it was okay for Elvis afterwards, within one year

(06:14):
eighty percent were vaccinated, And so there was a lot
to learn here from this one. Because you had a
solution didn't mean people would adopt it. To the fact
that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt
the country was obviously proven wrong. Numerous people were affected

(06:37):
by it, but I think at the peaks only sixty
two thousand people. And this has repeated itself throughout history
of people telling you the world is coming to an end,
It's not going to come to end, and science coming
to the rescue.

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Well, yeah, incredible.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
I'm so excited to dive into so many of those
ideas that you just mentioned that throughout the course of
our interview. I want to go back to that position
of you starting out. You came from a modest background,
but and you've had lots of successes and then valleys
in your life, peaks and valleys. If you walk us
into the direction of your first peak, did you always

(07:16):
set out to be financially successful when you first created
that first success in your life? What was the would
you say the key principles that you used in order
to manufacture that first success that you had.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
I did not plan to go into the financial service business.
I wanted to run the space program and I was
totally infatuated. When Sputnik went out, it was a catastrophe
if you read the headlines in the United States at
the time. There was the middle of the Cold War.

(07:52):
Now quote Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.
And I was very, very good in math and science,
and I wrote a letter to the President of the
United States told him I was ready to run the
space program. Now I never really got a response. I
was eleven years old, but that was my plan. And

(08:14):
my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a
leader and Nobel Prize winners and the sciences, and I
was preparing someday to run the space program. Then I
was in Los Angeles where we are today, during something
that became known as the Watts Riots. It was August eleventh,

(08:36):
nineteen sixty five, and Los Angeles was on fire, the
city of dreams, the city of entertainment. I had just
been in Berkeley, and we had the free speech movement
six or seven months before, but this was different. The
city was on fire, and I went and met a

(08:58):
young African American man who told me he would never
have a chance to borrow money to have a business.
His father didn't because of the color of his skin.
It seemed totally irrational to me, and I decided to
go back and figure out why this was occurring. When
I went back to Berkeley and began to study credit,

(09:20):
and very similar to when I was younger, I discovered
everything that people said about credit was wrong. It didn't
make anydifference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the
head of the Federal Reserve, and what they were saying
was inaccurate. And so I sat on a path. I
had to give up my dream at that time of

(09:41):
the Space program to begin working on what I might
have called the democrazation of capital, and I pursued that
during this period of time from nineteen sixty five for
the next twenty to twenty five years. So that was
not my path, but the studying and what I had
done as an undergrad and then as a grand student

(10:02):
in my decision to quote go to Wall Street was
really to redirect the access to capital, have a fundamental change,
and yes, in the next thirty years, sixty two million
jobs in the United States were created. There's always a backlash.
As a physic major, for every force, there's resistance, and

(10:24):
so changing the financial system at that time. Many people
wish that I didn't exist, the idea that you were
a large company and you had access to capital and
the others didn't. So there were five hundred investment grade
companies and tens of millions of non investment grade companies. Well,

(10:45):
once you empower them and created financial markets, we discovered
sixty two million jobs were created in non investment grade
companies and minus four so there was a lot of change.
Today there's hundreds of firms headed by people that work
for me, And I would say it's those structures are

(11:08):
the basis of modern financial markets around the world. But
it's not it is not unusual. At one of our
scientific retreats and the first part of this century, I
was in the back of the room and I invited
two young people from Australia to come and speak, and

(11:28):
they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong,
everything they were telling you about ulcers. And these two
senior scientists I had there in the back of the room,
one turned the other and said, who are these jobos?
They didn't even go to a good school. Well four

(11:50):
years later these jobos won a Nobel Prize. So challenging
conventional wisdom and theory I think has been something I've
tried to do is you try to move forward, create jobs,
solve medical problems throughout my life, and it goes all
the way back to my little almanac and discovering my

(12:12):
father head polio.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
One thing I'm noticing from your answers is that you
have this keen ability to spot patterns and analyze patterns.
You're almost seeing that there are systems, which ultimately are
patterns that no longer serve us, and you believe that
there are better systems or better patterns that would have
an impact on the world. And you also have used

(12:35):
the word study a few times in your first few answers,
And I think there's this big difference between academic study
and pattern study. And I find that the most successful
people in the world are great at studying patterns. It's
not really about the academic study. Could you help break
both of those down for us, because I feel like

(12:56):
you're probably the best person to ask that question too.
In genuinely understand the difference because I think we had
the Wed study, but when you say the Wed study
you mean something else.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
I would say extremely insightful. So we could say there
is inductive reasons. There's deductive reasons. The very first speech
I gave on Wall Street was the best investor was
a social scientist understanding what things were in a bigger
world and stepping back and then going down and looking

(13:29):
at the data to find out if your broad ideas
of the world were changing. In the last few months,
the world has opened up to the idea of where
are the children of the world? For twenty years. The
handwriting has been on the wall. The world did not

(13:52):
open up to it until the last short period of
time here. But the birth rate in northern in Asia, Europe,
the United States has dropped so significantly that whereas the
population of the US is doubled, there are less children
born today than there were seventy years ago in the

(14:13):
United States. China's birth rate has dropped so low that
the number of children born in China last year was
less than ten million. So you think about a country
of one point four billion, but of average life expectancy,
taking those that live to one hundred and averaging with
those that die young is seventy five. If you have

(14:36):
ten million children born a year and you multiply it
by seventy five, that's a population of seven hundred and
fifty million, not a billion. Four And so as people
think about things, We've had more people dying in Japan
now for a very long period of time than are born,

(14:58):
and so they have decreasing population. In most of the
developed worlds, the birth rate is below replacement. But this
has not been going on for since the pandemic. This
has been going on for a long period of time,
and so when do you see it? And so about
twenty thirty years ago, became quite concerned because it appeared

(15:22):
to us that the future where the children were going
to be born was in Sub Sahara Africa, and the
rest of the world as a whole might be decreasing
in terms of population. So what were the opportunities going
to be for the children of Sub Sahara Africa? And today,

(15:43):
in twenty twenty three, more children are born in Nigeria
than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia
by a substantial amount, and more than twice as many
children are born and Geria than the United States. So

(16:03):
people are looking at where you are here now. When
I had my little ALMANACX, I was too young to
know that if you matched one almanac against another almanac,
you were actually getting the first derivative. You were measuring change,
and then if you had a few of them, you

(16:25):
were measuring the rate of change. And so I think
when answering your question, you have to look at the
broad social implications and what is occurring. Then you have
to ask yourself to the systems that currently exist fit
where the world is going. I then if I had

(16:46):
four almanacs, could calculate the second derivative, the rate of change,
and I would say this is prevalent. In medicine, you
could be diagnosed with cancer, is it a slow growing
cranzer or instead of fast growing And the case of melanoma,
it doubled every month if it was advanced. So a

(17:06):
billion cancer sales ten months later are a trillion. Other
cancers are very slow growing, so you could take your
time to address it. And so understanding the rate of
change and today what's happening in the world and where
the children are born, and the facts that they're going
to need opportunities, they're going to need jobs, or we're

(17:28):
going to see one to two billion people on the move.
So the question is when how early do you see that?
And one of the exciting things about medicine today is
in the nineteen eighties, there was this idea that everything
was in your blood. Well, you didn't know what to
look for, you couldn't sequence, you couldn't do anything. So

(17:52):
might be there, but I can't find it. Now today,
we now have tests that can measure the waste, the
DNA link leakage in your blood, So you can find
a life threatening disease today when there's just a very
small amount of cells in your body, long before you

(18:13):
could ever find it in a mammogram or a CT
or an MRI. And so therefore dealing with these life
threatning diseases today at their infancy is so much easier.
But this was a dream until computers were a million
times faster and data storage costs were one billion. It

(18:34):
was an idea, It was a dream, but it wasn't
a reality.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
Absolutely, thank you for sharing that I wanted to before
we dive into all the incredible work you've done in healthcare.
I definitely wanted to talk about this part of your Jenny,
which we've talked about personally. But you making all these
shifts and changes and pushing the boundaries. You ended up
going to prison in nineteen ninety after pleading guilty to
several felony charges related to securities violations. But to me,

(19:02):
I'm fascinated by a how that happened for you, but
be more importantly how you use that time because the
comeback now looking backwards, it's it's incredible. But to live
that Steve Jobs famously said, you can always connect the
dots looking backwards, you can't when you're moving forwards. I

(19:22):
just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone
had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo. Ends
about it to go to prison, walk us through first
of all, how did you.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
End up there?

Speaker 2 (19:34):
And then and then we'll talk about what it was
like there, because I think that's just such an interesting
part of your journey.

Speaker 1 (19:40):
Now looking backwards, well, I think that issue there was
an unusual period of time and once again complete revolution
and finance. There are many points in history where you've
had people that were presidents went to prison Brazil today
and are now the president of the country. You again,

(20:01):
So when the president gave me a pardon, he commented
that these things were never crimes before. They've never been
crimes since they related to bookkeeping and things like that,
but I had to find a way to bring it
to an end. And if you fought for ten or

(20:21):
twenty years, to me, I had to find a way
to live again. And so I think if you're true
to yourself and you know the issues and the individuals
know you, I viewed this as going to be a
short period of time and I had to cut it
short and make a decision for my family, etc. To

(20:43):
live again. And it was a short period of time
and the scheme of things. When I think of the
diversion of less than two years, if I go back
to World War Two, you had people that volunteered and
were gone for four years fighting for freedom and what
they believed in. And so I think my view was

(21:07):
that I had to find a solution to bring it
to an end, and it didn't really change who I was,
what I did. The financial systems we built are now
adopted throughout the world, whether you're in India or Singapore
or whatever it might be. And yes, there was disruption

(21:29):
in the force. I would say to you if you
think about a country. You and I first met in
the UK when the mercantile class rose up in England,
who was under threat the nobility, and so the mobility

(21:49):
would go to the king or the queen and say, well,
we can't compete anymore. What are we going to do?
But the old financial system didn't really meet the future
needs the world. And so yes, I spent time thinking.
I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
How did you spend your days for those two years?

Speaker 1 (22:12):
I spent my time thinking about the world. I would
write sometimes ambassadors around the world, suggesting what I think
they should have done, or should do, or what the
country should do. So it didn't it didn't interrupt those interactions,
it didn't stop our philanthropic efforts, etc. I did get

(22:37):
to interact with a group of people at that time,
the group that was in the prison camp, this was
a very low security area, were primarily there for drugs, marijuana,
ship captains and other types of things. And so it
was a period of time I was able to interact

(22:58):
with my family. I think anyone that's separated from their family,
and when I think back to those people that went
and fought in World War Two in the nineteen forties,
that might have been separated for four years, their only
way of communicating with their family was through a letter.
You know, the telephone was invented and in long distance call.

(23:22):
When I was young, no one made long distance calls
because it was ten to twelve minutes to call another country.
So in the nineteen seventies, if I wanted to speak
to Mumbai, I had to be prepared. It was ten
dollars to twelve hours a minute, so those calls had
to be short. And that was a period of time.

(23:44):
In that period of time when a person's salary was
hundreds of dollars a week, not thousands of dollars a week.
Today people have a hard time relating to that because
it's free on WhatsApp or on your phone. But I
could communicate with my children, my family, and so when
you're separated, the first thought is is your family going

(24:07):
to be okay? Are your relationships? My wife and I
had known each other since we were twelve. She knew
who I was, I knew who she was. My business associates,
thousands of them knew who I was, knew the issues,
and so it wasn't a situation where I felt separated

(24:29):
from the world, you know, And therefore communication still existed.
A telephone existed. You weren't allowed to have a cell phone,
but you could make a call on a payphone, so
it wasn't the same separation. When I think of many
people that were sent to the gulag in Russia, there's

(24:53):
you know, whether it was soul Needsen or others or Shermansky.
They wrote about how they took away their communications, they
took away their visits. They even took away pencil and paper,
they took away books. And one of them wrote that
he knew he had won then because there was nothing

(25:15):
else that they could take away. And so I think
having inner strength is extremely important during that period. When
when I think about my challenges relative to the tens
of millions of people that have gone off to fight
in wars, my parents' generation that lived through the depression

(25:39):
and World War Two so that we could be free,
my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
This episode is brought to you by eight Sleep. Did
you know that temperature is one of the most important
factors in improving your sleep quality? When you wake up
in the middle of the nine or feel extra groggy
in the morning, temperature is almost always to blame. Why
while traditional mattresses trap heat throughout the night, science has
shown that your body temperature actually needs to drop in

(26:12):
the early and middle part of your sleep and rise
in the morning so that you can fall asleep fast
and get more deep sleep. The pod cover by eight
Sleep fits on any bed like a fitted sheet. The
pod cover will improve your sleep by automatically adjusting the
temperature on each side of the bed based on you
and your partner's individual needs. It can cool down and

(26:34):
warm up, and adjusts based on the phases of your
sleep and the environment that you're in. The comfort level
is off the charts, but that's not even the best part.
The temperature control technology has been a total game changer
for me. I wake up feeling more refreshed, energized, and
ready to take on the day. It even tracks my
sleep patterns and can be integrated into my smart home system.

(26:56):
I've never experienced sleep like this. Invest in the rest
with the eight sleep pod. Go to eight sleep dot
com forward slash Purpose and save one hundred and fifty
dollars on the pod cover by eight Sleep. That's the
best offer you'll find, but you must visit eightsleep dot
com forward slash Purpose for one hundred and fifty dollars

(27:17):
off eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK,
select countries in the EU and Australia. I think it's
an incredible amount of in his strength, not only to
be able to navigate those two years, even though you
are saying you didn't feel that long in the biggest
scheme of things that I still believe that there is
such a resilience there. But the way you came back.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Well, let's just talk about n Della. You're talking more
than twenty.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
Years, Yeah, twenty seven, okay?

Speaker 1 (27:46):
And did he come back bitter? No? Okay? And in
South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe as
Rhodesha went, so he instead of being bitter, and when
he got out, I had a chance to visit with him.
We came to see each other. And so my view

(28:10):
was revenge or bitterness is an unproductive emotion. If you
have something to give and focus and build, you have
to focus going forward. You can't sit and focus on
the path. And I had thousands of people that had
worked for me who could carry on our mission in

(28:32):
finance and our foundations. By forming the Milk And Institute
didn't change much what I had done in the for
profit world. There I now did in the nonprofit world.
So my view was the insights, the ideas carried on.

(28:52):
And I'm sure you know the current president in Brazil,
who spent a short time in prison, you know, has
certain views, but he has so many responsibilities and things
he has to do for Brazil. If he was stuck
in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
I'm so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela. There's a
beautiful statement Inze where he said that when I walked
out of the gates of the jail, I realized that
if I was to hold on to that resentment or bitterness,
that I would still be in prison and along those lines,
and I think that's such a powerful statement of his

(29:32):
that he believed that resentment and bitterness and revenge with
the actual prison that would hold and limit him moving forward.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Well, as you know well and your viewers know well,
there are so many people in the world that have
mental health issues today, and in many ways they're all
traced to something in their past. And so being free,
being free of your past, not forgetting it, not reflecting

(30:05):
on it, not having it be part of your decision process,
allows you to go forward and to fly from that standpoint.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
Absolutely, I want to talk about your switch from financial
well to medical research, but before we do that, I
want to talk about your own journey with being diagnosed
with terminal prostate cancer, which I can't imagine is an
easy thing to hear at such a young age as
well when you first received that. What was it like
to receive such a diagnosis as someone again who is

(30:38):
thinking about the future, trying to build. Were you someone
who was quite focused on your health as well, or
were you somewhat negligent because you were focused on work?
And how did it feel to hear that.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
I would say to you, I probably had one of
the least healthy diets in the world until that day
I was diagnosed. But I experience this with my father's
death in the nineteen seventies, and it was the first
time my economic theories were tested during a period of

(31:11):
time from seventy three to seventy seven, which I would
call my financial clinical trials, all the ideas that I
had developed, and by the mid nineteen seventies I had
become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas, and
most of them, ninety percent of the people believed we

(31:33):
were headed to this financial depression again, and my views were, No,
we weren't in history, but I could not save my
father's life from melanoma. And it had a significant view
here that it was the first time in my life

(31:53):
that I could not solve a problem. I could help
rebuild a company, I might be able to help rebuild
a country financially, but I could not find a decision.
I visited all these senior people, and I went to
the major medical centers travel with my dad, and I
concluded by nineteen seventy six that science could not move

(32:15):
fast enough no matter what I had done or could
do to save my father's life. So I had made
the decision then to move back to California so that
my two children, my wife Laurie, and I two children
at the time, would know my father before he died.

(32:36):
And he died about nine months after we moved back
to California, and then I moved families, et cetera, thousands
of people back to California, And so this has stayed
with me. I've lost ten relatives to cancer, and my
diagnosis was worse than theirs. So obviously I'm now reflecting

(33:00):
what am I going to do and when it looked
like I had eighteen months to live. You have to
figure out what could I do different than they did.
And the first decision I made is I would focus
on anything that's reversible. So for two years I did

(33:20):
not eat anything except fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. I
had no idea whether it would benefit me, but I
figured it wouldn't hurt me, and none of my relatives
or friends who had died from life threatening diseases had
ever changed their diety. And as I explored the world

(33:43):
of the Chi medicine in China, or eire Veda medicine
in India, or witch doctors in the central part of Africa,
or Indians in the northwest Amazon, or healers from Russia,
it came to me that I would really focus on

(34:03):
ora Veda medicine and then five thousand year history. The
belief was your gut, your microbiome was your second brain.
So everything you eat, everything you drink, everything you exercise,
everything you're experiencing is going into your second brain. So

(34:25):
I was going to change my second brain, even though
there was no proof you couldn't sequence at the time.
And so that was a focus that I focused on,
and I think The other thing I was very focused
on is that most people diagnose with a life threatening

(34:45):
disease do the least they can do at day one,
and if it reoccurs later in life, they do everything
they can to stay alive. But if you had done
more at the beginning, then you have had a better chance.
And so once I had driven my cancer burden to

(35:07):
what appeared to be zero, I then made the decision
to have radiation, whereas someone else might have done nothing,
because I figured the burden was the least. And so
I set off on this journey thinking about my father
and my relatives and friends. And I had a bunch
of friends that I had interacted with that had passed away,

(35:31):
that how could I accelerate science? So first I could
try to change my body. And at this time we
weren't talking crisper. We weren't talking about a technology that
could change your genes that is still not wildly to deploy,
because we don't know as we create a new human

(35:52):
race whether this is good or bad. And so I
set off on this journey of how to accel rate science.
But that journey in science is not much different than
my journey in finance or the journey, we took an
education in what we did. I was going to try
to attract the best and most talented people in the

(36:15):
world to come work in this field. And no matter
how talented you were, if you were the individual that
perceived the future was mobile phones or cell phones, Craig McCall,
that was a good idea, but unless you had access

(36:36):
to billions of dollars, you could never access that idea.
If you were Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would
change and we could drive the cost over time from
twelve dollars a minute to talk to India to zero,
you needed billions of dollars. So the same focus of

(36:56):
attention one attract the best and brightest to work in
the field. Two bring enough financial capital to serve as
a multiplier effect, and three create teamwork. Many organizations have
people that have real talent, but they don't act as

(37:20):
a team. They don't act as one and therefore what
I saw in medicine there was no team, there was
not enough financial capital, and many of the brightest people
were not working in this field. So those were the
first levels I was focused on. But that was no different.

(37:42):
In education, we had created a national Educator Award to
attract the best and brightest into the field, and finance
had searched out the world's leading entrepreneurs, providing them capital
and advice and helped create teams for them. So that
that was the revolution that began in ninety three in

(38:04):
healthcare and medical research. And I faced just as much
resistance as I did in the financial revolution. The first
comment was, prove it well. In nineteen ninety three, you
couldn't prove anything. I could show you antidotal evidence that

(38:24):
in places of the world where people were plant eaters China,
not meat eaters, that the incidents of hormone driven cancers
or diabetes was far less, and in places that we
had different diets, fast food diet, it was far more. So. Yes,

(38:46):
there was anecdotal evidence, and so they said, well, prove
it well. You couldn't sequence the human genome. You couldn't
do anything in nineteen ninety three, and Francis Collins, who
I met in I twenty three, set off on a
journey to sequence. It wasn't till many, many years later,
and billions of dollars that they completed that. And I'll

(39:09):
never forget. In nineteen ninety four, I had one of
our scientific retreats with the world's leading clinicians in cancer
and science, and I wanted to get a doctor David Heber,
who had founded the Center for Human Nutrition PHDMD at
UCLA on the program. And the people in charge of

(39:32):
the program said, you know, Mike, we're going to lose
credibility if we have this soft science ideas that there's
some relationship between what you eat and whether you're getting cancer.
And they fought me and told me it would degrade
what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer

(39:53):
research group in the world. And I eventually reached a
compromise with him. He would get to speak at linfe
I wrote about it. He would not be on the program,
he would not have a microphone, and if you wanted
to listen, you had to sit close. And if you
didn't want to be infected with this idea that there
might be a link to how you live your life

(40:15):
and what you eat and what you drink and your health,
you could just sit far away and worn't have to.
Twenty five years later, Jay, twenty five years later, I
went to our scientific retreat. I was not in charge
of the programming, and maybe twenty percent of every session

(40:37):
over four days was cancer and your microbio. So initially
putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo, whether it's finance,
whether it's education, or whether it's medical, are challenged. Later
they're accepted, well accepted in anyone could have thought of

(41:00):
that idea.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
No, it's so fascinating because I feel like coming from
an Indian background and my wife being an aerobatic health counselor,
and you're so exposed to the idea early on that
your gut health is such a big part of your
overall health. But you're so right that until we see
it in the research and the science and beyond the anecdotes,

(41:23):
we don't fully comprehend these ideas. And so you're accelerating
that research. Now, what would you say were the biggest
challenges you saw when you entered the medical field in
research and in our treatment of diseases.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
So I had entered the field in the early nineteen
seventies for twenty years, but I was primarily a donor, etc.
And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough
to save my father's life. So I in ninety three
designed it. I couldn't help others if I couldn't help

(42:01):
myself and I first had to survive. But there were
those three elements one teamwork, partnership, so I wrote about
I went to this MD Anderson, and the two leading
cancer centers off and on rated in the world were
either MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York,

(42:23):
one in Houston, one in New York. And I noticed
there was no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering at the
cancer conference in Houston. And I told the person putting
the conference on, why is there no one here from
Memorial Sloan Kettering here if we're trying to accelerate research,
and he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan Kettering as

(42:47):
a competitor, and I told him not to the patient. So, therefore,
once we promised funding for research in this field, we
would only find if you shared all your data. And
I eventually gone on my board Andy Grove, who was
the CEO of Intel, and we worked on this is

(43:09):
early technology with computers and connecting, that we would connect
all of our researchers digitally together and it might be
easier for someone at MD Anderson to talk to someone
at Memorial sloan kettering via technology than someone else to
find at MD Anderson. But we told them that we

(43:32):
couldn't fund any of their research unless they shared their data. Now,
some people told me, well, I have to wait for
Nature or Sell magazine to come out. The story will
be out in a year. And we told them that
their research was so important that they didn't need any
of our funds. Our funds were only for those who

(43:54):
were willing to share. And I would say within six months,
everyone in the world was willing to share. And no
matter how much we raised in money, I was out
there first recruiting the best and brightest, and second trying
to convince people who were thinking of leaving the field

(44:16):
to stay in the field. And I wrote in the
book a little bit about an individual who was being
recruited to make better apples, and I was successful in
convincing him that we could live and still eat the
same apples for maybe the next twenty years. But people
being diagnosed with cancer throughout the world, and the fact

(44:39):
it was going to be increasing, not decreasing, we couldn't
wait for solutions and so and then the other element
I would say to you was government. There is no
individual there is no foundation my family foundations which were created,
and today there's with our centers more than ten of them,

(45:03):
nor Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus
Warren Buffett, which is is my largest foundation today in
the world. The amount of money they have is small
relative to the government. So if you can redirect the

(45:23):
funds of the government, you now have access to hundreds
of billions of dollars that could be redeployed. And so
we spent two to three years making the economic argument
of what the elimination of cancer was. But one of
the challenges, when you talk about challenges, we are not

(45:47):
able as a country to increase significantly our investment in
the National Institutes of Health, the largest medical research group
in the world. And I discovered in my analysis that
one of the reasons was there were five hundred different
diseases constantly appealing for more funds, and so unlike a laser,

(46:12):
you had all these voices out there, whether it's Parkinson's,
whether it was Alzheimer's, whether it's diabetes, and there wasn't
a focused request. And so beginning two years later in
ninety five, I went to the various disease specific groups
and said, if you will stand down, we will have

(46:36):
a combined effort focused on cancer, all cancers, like a laser,
to double the NIH budget, and we will work on that,
and when it's doubled, all medical research will double, not
just cancer. And they agreed, and so we put on
a March. It took three years and all this data, etc.

(47:01):
To show and interacted with our political leaders that this
would be one of the best investments the country could
make and the leaders in the world in the twenty
second century will be the leaders and the twenty first
century in bioscience. And so with the March concluding in

(47:22):
ninety eight, the President of the United States shortly thereafter
signed into law what became the doubling of the NIH budget.
There's been an incremental five hundred billion dollars in basic
research spent. It laid the groundwork for what we did

(47:42):
to get a quick solution for COVID nineteen. Every disease
has benefited from it. The financial commitment was ten million
dollars in the March. Today there's a five hundred billion
dollar hour payoffs. So the first efforts of individual philanthropy,

(48:07):
the efforts of recruiting young scientists, to work in the field,
which is probably the highest rate of return in any
philanthropy that I've seen. The cause of teamwork was coupled
now with the increased benefit of getting the government focused
on this area well.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
And I want to read out this is on page
one to eleven of the book where you talk about
a new type of organization, and you've lay out these
very clear principles that you're just speaking about right now. So,
as you said, recruit the best and brightest scientists and physicians,
focus on the career paths of these young investigators, require
collaboration in place of competition, build cross sector ties, Identify

(48:50):
the most promising research not funded by the NIH. Eliminate
needless bureaucracy. And the list continues. And I mean, you
make it sound so easy when I'm listening to you
right now and when you read it like this, But
I'm imagining that each one of these items took a
lot of time energy. I mean, you make it sound

(49:14):
so seamless, But I would love to know how challenging
is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
So if you were at a Parkinson's Foundation or a
diabetes foundation and thousands of talented people try to increase funding.
But it was like there was a zero sum game.
If I increased funding for diabetes, I had to take
it away from someone else. And so getting them to

(49:44):
accept that they were unsuccessful and to stand down and
have faith. It's somewhat based on past performance in the
financial investment they want in business, they want to know
what's your past performance? Do you have a track record?
So we had a track record of success to build on,

(50:08):
and we didn't ask them to stand down for their lifetime.
We just asked them to stand down for a few
months here so we could focus like a laser our
attention on this issue. Eliminating cancer is a cause of death.
And bringing in the leading economists in the world was

(50:29):
worth fifty trillion dollars to the US economy in the
early nineteen nineties, multiples of what the economy and so
we could show the results. And so, yes, you have
to have a past track record convincing a person not
to change their career. I remember one of the world's

(50:53):
leading chemists has been about to be given a job
as the dean of the most prestigious universe in the world,
but he would leave the laboratory so I went and
asked him who's running Warner Brothers. At the time, it
was two friends of mine, Terry Simmel and Bob Dailey.

(51:14):
He had no clue who was running. I asked him,
has he ever heard of Stephen Spielberg? And he says, yes,
he's heard of Stephen Spielberg. I said, well, if you
become the Dean, no one will ever hear of you,
because Steven Spielberg took years to make movies and product

(51:35):
You're working on breakthroughs here in bioscience that might change
the world. You becoming a manager of others might never
change the world. And so luckily he decided to stay that.
When you think of young scientists, the hundreds or thousands

(51:56):
that I've dealt with, you graduated in high school, you
were seventeen or eighteen years old, you're now thirty one
or thirty two or thirty three years old. You've gone
to medical school, you got a PhD. You had fellowships, residencies, internships,

(52:17):
and now you're ready for your own laboratory and there's
no money. It's very easy to make the decision to
go into industry family practice and give up your basic research.
But if we can greet you at that time and
give you your own laboratory and get the institution to

(52:39):
match for one hundred thousand dollars a year for three years,
you've changed the career. And whether it's in our Melanoma
Research Alliance, or whether it's in our Faster Cures Group
for All life threatening Diseases, or whether it's in the
Prostate Cancer Foundation. If we have twenty five young scientists

(53:04):
and they each are going to work for forty years,
by funding them at two and a half million dollars
for the first year and each year, you've bought one
thousand years of their time. And when I look back
over the thirty years to all these new therapies that

(53:25):
have been created, you will find a young scientist, a
young person there. It's very interesting. At the National Institutes
of Health, the first age that you get an award
is forty three. If you look at who's won Nobel
Prizes and science, most people have won for an idea

(53:47):
they had when they were within a few years of school.
James Watson was in his twenties when he put forth
this idea we have genes, etc. You know so many
Einstein I think was twenty three, and so the idea

(54:09):
that you're going to school and you're studying, and you've
now spent fifteen years after high school and now we're
going to tell you can wait another twelve years. It's ridiculous.
And so the system really was not prepared for the
fact that we needed to get the best and brightest

(54:31):
and divert their careers younger. And so I have spent
more than thirty years working on this, the same thing
we had worked on forty years ago with educators to
try to get them to stay as an educator. When
you go to India today, people are so confused today

(54:53):
that think India is like China. There were twenty three
or twenty four million in children born last year in India.
There were nine to ten million born in China, more
than twice as many children. Today, there are more than
two hundred million more children in India than in China.

(55:17):
China is more advanced digitally, but there's very few countries
where the competition for education you know today is more significant.
And they also have a belief in healthcare not based
on modern technology but five thousand years of anecdotal experience.

(55:44):
So yes, our theory is that your gut have been
proven to be true with modern sequencing technologies. And this
year they've just approved giving the microbiom own of one
person who responded well to treatment to another person that

(56:06):
didn't respond well, admitting that because they have a different gut,
they're going to respond well, and how their genes are
expressed or how the therapy they're given is going to
be expressed differently. But in India, you had five thousand
years of experience of if you did this, that happened

(56:29):
when I went to the Northern Amazon, Northwest Amazon. Here,
I am dressed head to toe and I wrote about
it all in black. And our Indian guide has a
pair of shorts on and that's it. He's immune to everything.
I'm not immune to anything. And he takes me over

(56:51):
and he says, well, we use this bush against malaria,
and we use this for this. And he shows me this,
and he said, if we ever get separated, you can
hack this bush and drink the water inside. But then
he goes and he tells me, but don't drink the
water in this bush. It could kill you. So they

(57:12):
both look the same to me, Okay, both of them.
So I got a rope and we tied it around
his waist and my ways so we would never be
separated as we are hacking through the jungle. And so
I think the world today is adjusting to what have

(57:33):
we learned over thousands of years that we didn't take
in consideration. And the environmental movement, the effort here in
healthy human, healthy planet is totally interrelated.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
What have you found as you'll, I guess the things
that you're most happy about that proved to you. The
research is going in the right direction. What are you
pointing towards as successes or solutions.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Well, let's just took about two that the world has
full knowledge of HIV AIDS. The number one talk show
host not the number one healthcare podcast in the world.
In nineteen eighty seven, Oprah Winfrey goes on television and
tells the people of America that one in five are

(58:27):
going to die from AIDS in the next three years.
That's based on her work. Well, unfortunately, many people died,
but we didn't have eighty million people die. We had
tens of thousands. And the cocktails and the anti virals

(58:47):
that were created. So one of the most popular people
in the United States, Magic Johnson, announced in nineteen ninety
one that he was diagnosed with a V and he's
going to have to retire at his peak of his
career from the NBA. Most people, including myself, thought he

(59:09):
might not make it. Today's a friend. He's participated in
our faster cures effort. He's bigger than life. His smile
is bigger than life. It's thirty two years later. Where
do we see it the most? When you say where
are the results? Look at sub Sahara, Africa. Two thirds

(59:32):
of everyone with HIV and AIDS lived in sub Sahara, Africa.
If you wanted to go work there, they wanted you
to work thirty years ago they paid you compact pay
out of fear that you could be infected. Well, today,
the chance of a woman with proper care passing AIDS

(59:53):
onto her children is two percent, down from ninety five.
So the population of Subsherra, Africa is growing. Children that
were orphans are no longer born with HIV. People with
HIV and AIDS are living today, not dying. And what

(01:00:14):
do we just see in the last three years during COVID,
the leaders in the state that you and I are
in today California, told Californians that one in two Californians
are going to get the disease in the next three months,

(01:00:36):
and that five million of people in California will have
to be hospitalized, but there's only a few hundred thousand
hospital beds. It was a catastrophe. More than a million
people died in America, more than ten or twenty million worldwide.

(01:00:56):
But it wasn't fifty percent of the population, it wasn't
ten percent of the population. And it was only sixty
three days between the sequencing of the virus and the
first human being getting a vaccine. Sixty three days, nine weeks,

(01:01:17):
not ten years. And so that is why I wrote
the book. Okay, I wrote the book because we are
in the verge of a total revolution, the same as
I saw in finance in healthcare today with technology, and

(01:01:37):
so it's time to put your foot on the accelerator
and go faster, not time to ease up, because we
think we have put into suspended animation this pandemic. And
so that was my concerning There were these points of
the March and ninety eight. There was this point of

(01:01:59):
the set libration of science in twenty twelve, and there's
a point here today that people don't have to die.
For the first time in history. We have a good
chance to cure your disease in your own lifetime if
we stay with it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
How can me and my community support these efforts? How
can people be involved? How can people be engaged if
they feel inspired by what you're doing and the work
that you're leading on, how can they get involved? Because
I think that's often you know, what you're sharing is
a healthier future, which I think we all want. But
naturally we often people get discouraged because of headlines and

(01:02:43):
news and everything that we see around us.

Speaker 1 (01:02:45):
There's a lot of things or things aren't true that
are in the headlines. So just the concept of healthy human,
healthy planet. Such a large percent of the earth today
is devoted to raising animals seventy to eighty billion animals

(01:03:07):
for humans to eat, and that doesn't count the billions
of fish. We are on the verge of essentially being
able to create a hamburger without a calf, without a cow.
Now for a person in India who doesn't eat a hamburger,
doesn't make any difference, okay, But if we can grow

(01:03:30):
it in a laboratory and just give it light and
energy and nutrients, we don't have to go through the
whole process of all the water required, all the land
required to grow physical animals. So yes, we can grow
food in a laboratory. And now it has just been

(01:03:52):
approved to allow this to occur. We needed to get
the cost down. It used to be thirty thousand ounce,
then it went to three. Now it's a few hundred.
But it's only a matter of time where we can
have a substantial change in the planet. A friend of
mine put up the money to do a book called

(01:04:14):
draw Down, and draw Down listed the twenty major factors
that were changing our atmosphere and the environment the earth
is in. Ten of them relate to food, ten of
them relate to other things. And so we have a chance.

(01:04:35):
And the environmental movement, combined with the health movement, science
today can show you what happened. So we know today
that what were all these vegetables on the planet for?
If you believe in Darwin, what's the purpose of broccoli, califlower,
Brussels flouts? These things are little pac man, they're out

(01:04:59):
there eating. Okay, car synogens in your body. We've learned
today that your immune system can do amazing things. And
I wrote about it when I first heard Jim Allison
talk in nineteen ninety seven that your immune system is

(01:05:20):
smarter than all the scientists in the room, but someone
turned off your immune system and that's why you got
a life threatening disease. Okay, and that occurred, and so
he developed and won a Nobel Prize for the concept
of checkpoint inhibitors, and we financed his work for ten years.

(01:05:44):
In prostate cancer. It wasn't that effective, but the minute
we moved to melanoma, the death rate has dropped by
fifty percent. And so what he did is we turned
off the switch and the cancer that turned off your
immune system. The idea of growing your own organs. There

(01:06:06):
are now people that have had organ transplants from others
take these drugs to prevent rejection by their own immune system.
Well at Mass General in Boston other things there looks
like there's now a technology that you can input to
a certain degree the immune system of the person that

(01:06:30):
donates your organ to you, so you'll have two immune systems.
So when you get that organ, you don't need rejection.
Your immune systems will be operating. So technology is just
moving non evasive surgery. When I watch star trek as
a kid. The doctor bones. He didn't do any evasive surgery,

(01:06:53):
put a little thing on your body and it did everything. Well,
that's what non invasive focus ultrasound can do. So the promise,
the promise is with us today and so we're just
trying to get a mission here, going to make sure
we stay with our efforts that the world mobilized. When

(01:07:17):
you look at what happened and the months of COVID one,
I came back and told everyone at every one of
our centers that we will all be judged by what
we did during this period of time. I'm not a
didn't want to compete with you, but we launched podcasts

(01:07:39):
one hundred and twenty five of them. And the reason
I launched them was threefold. One, if I'm talking to
Francis Collins ahead of the NIH, I want you or
anyone else to hear what he's saying. Anyone in the
world could listen. I might be able to talk to
the CEO of of Alex Gorski Jay and Jay. Most

(01:08:03):
of people couldn't, but you can listen to the conversation. Two,
by talking to him, I can encourage them maybe to
take action they wouldn't have taken. So when I first
spoke to Alex Gorski in April on this podcast, he
was talking about maybe going into clinical trials in January

(01:08:24):
of twenty one, and so my comment was why not July,
which he ended up doing and it was approved by January.
And so the third effort was to see how people
were coping. So, if I talked to the largest employers
in the world who had employees over the world, what

(01:08:45):
were they doing in China, Italy, et cetera that you
might be doing in the United States if you were
responsible for thousands or tens of thousands, or in the
case of a Walmart, millions employees, are you going to
be doing? And when I spoke to the CEO of Target,
he told me that he was protecting their employees. But

(01:09:09):
what happened was when people who lived in small living
units apartments came into the store with their kids. The
kids were running all over the store. And so how
you're going to protect the kids and how you're going
to protect your workers, And so this had had to
be done in a short period of time. Today, I'm

(01:09:32):
no longer doing podcasts. I'm deferring to you how the world.
But for me I meditated. It made a big difference,
I think in my outcome. I went to the leaders
in immunology in the world, and I discovered the smell
of the seashore and the smell of certain kind of

(01:09:54):
trees Sequoia cedar trees seemed to energize my immune system.
And so when we think of the senses, smell, taste, touch,
all of these come into play in rejuvenating your body.
So I used to sit at high tide and smell

(01:10:15):
the seashore. Why why did that energize my immune system?
I have no idea except we came out of the sea.
So maybe that was returning to the sea and the
smell of the pine needles and things like that. Maybe
it was relating when I was young with my father.

(01:10:35):
So I don't know, but my view was we don't
use all of our senses and we understand. One of
the things that Iravador brought me was understanding of so
many different elements of touch. So I had a chance

(01:10:56):
to see things that I never thought I would see
in my life. I visited a man in China, ge doctor,
who was over ninety years old, and he told me
if he came out of the mountains, he would die.
But when he put his hands on me, he could
create such unbelievable heat. How did he do that? I

(01:11:18):
have no idea, okay, but it gave you a chance
to experiencing different things. And just like the two young
men from Australia who challenged conventional wisdom, and the first
reaction was they didn't even go to a good university,
why should we be listening to them? And then a

(01:11:41):
few years later everybody accepts it. And so I've found
these similarities in my life, whether it was in finance,
whether it was in public health, whether it's in medical research.
But it all comes back to the people on your team.

(01:12:02):
So when I was in India, if India is playing
Pakistan in cricket, nothing else is going on, Okay, they
could be arguing and fighting about anything, but you have
to take time out for that game. And so there
are things that focus your attention. And part of this

(01:12:25):
effort is this concept of healthy human, healthy planet. Yes,
technology has solved so many problems for us, but I
think what I've tried to do, particularly in the last
thirty years, I've gone from an extremely unhealthy diet okay,

(01:12:46):
to an extreme for the first nine years, I got
my ire Veta massages twice a week for nine years,
and so I was willing to do things that I
would have scoffed at in the nineteen seventies, sixties, eighties

(01:13:06):
is way out there, okay, But today I'm visiting with
you today, I'm the happiest guy to do a podcast
with you thirty years later because I changed, the world changed,
and going forward, we're going to have to make more changes,

(01:13:30):
more adoption of things. It's very hard. It's very hard.
In the United States today, we now have this quote
diabetes pilled that apparently controls your appetite and your weight. Okay,
so so it's a lot easier than having personal discipline.

(01:13:51):
For me. I ate more hot dogs, I believe than
anyone except those people that win the Nathan's hot Dog
eating contest. And how we can eat fifty to sixty
hot dogs and buns in that short period of time,
I have no idea, but no hot dog was worth

(01:14:14):
your life. But not everyone. And when I found most
people don't want to be lectured on their diet or
what they should eat or not eat. And when you
discover things like a Nobel Prize, when they're Elizabeth Blackburn
about what sugar does to you. So what happened when

(01:14:34):
Mexico put a tax on sugar or Chili put a
tax on they increased their advertising as sales fell off,
and the same thing occurs. Unfortunately, the developing world is
subject to this advertisement and these addicted foods and drugs

(01:14:56):
as they move around the world. In China, literally no
one had diabetes forty years ago. You didn't even study
it in school. And now people in China have the
most number of people with diabetes in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
And there's no way of regulating that at a government level,
or there's no way because I feel I agree with you,
I mean, you know, I think that we're all now
becoming more and more aware of the amount of sugar
in sugary drinks, the amount of you know, unhealthy fats
and carbohydrates, the amount of you know, whatever it may be,

(01:15:31):
or the amount of artificial even in a speaking of
plant based foods, even the current like plant based you
know foods, they're not all healthy either. So is there
no way to make sure that at a higher level
that we don't even get access to this or is
it just a discipline conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:15:50):
No, I think we will be there. The idea that
you can take a calf, a sell from a calf,
not a calf, but a cell. If we can find
an animal that never was shot with hormones. More than
fifty percent of all the drugs are shot into animals.
So you might think that you're healthy and you're not

(01:16:12):
taking things, but what you ate did and so. But
I think we'll have an entirely new food chain in
twenty to thirty years. If you look at companies, the
market has adjusted, and I wrote about it in the book.
So at one time Craft was selling between ninety and

(01:16:35):
one hundred dollars. This year, I don't know where it
is today, call it thirty five to forty wow. Nesley
announced that they were going to become a health company.
What was the market reaction? Social media reaction. First they
give you diabetes, then they're going to deal with it.

(01:16:57):
There are three sixty they create their own problems, etc.
So Nesley went out and hired a CEO, not from
the consumer packaging, but a CEO who had worked in healthcare,
and they sold their candy business in the United States,
They sold other businesses and they focused here on healthy businesses, etc.

(01:17:21):
And Nestley has flourished, so the market is willing to
pay more for that. And yes, the first iterations of
plant based diet to make a taste, we don't know
if they're any better with all the ingredients they put in,
but the ability to grow the same as your ability. Today.

(01:17:45):
We can take your skin stem cell, turn it back
to the day you were born and tell it it's
now a heart stem cell, it's you, and then give
it energy, light, energy, nutrients, and you can see today

(01:18:05):
in a little peatrie dish, these cells beating like they're
a heart. And so we'll be able to create pure
foods not contaminate the planet in the future. And so
this is what technologies promise is and that once again,

(01:18:27):
that's why I wrote the book. You're busy, I'm busy.
It's not easy to write the book. You've just finished
a tour of more than forty cities in the world
on your new book, and so it's not easy to
take the time. The analogy I have made is there
was this show in the United States called I Love

(01:18:47):
Lucy and Lucille Ball was packaging chocolates that coming down
the line, and they were coming down faster than she
could pack them, So she's putting them here, she's putting
them in her mouth. Everything. What are you going to
do so my life? In your life? There's plenty of
things we're focused on. I've probably given fifty speeches in

(01:19:11):
the last month, but to set the time down was
my concern here that we have a chance. Technology has
given us a chance for the solution for all these
life threatening diseases. We estimate there's ten thousand life threatening

(01:19:32):
diseases that faster Our Center for Faster Cures has looked at,
and there's solutions for five hundred. So there's a lot
of work to do, and we are on the verge
with the use of technology having the ability to do this.

Speaker 3 (01:19:51):
Thank you, Mike.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
Everyone has been listening and watching. The book is called
Faster Cures, Accelerating the Future of Health. Grab a copy
right now if you're listening, and I hope that this
is one of those episodes that you'll share with a
family member, a friend of yours that may really want
to listen to it. And I want you to share
your insights on social media, whether you're on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok,

(01:20:13):
share the clips, share the messages share the insights of
wisdom that might share with us today with your communities
as well, because I think this conversation on improving our
own personal health is so needed, especially looking at how
the world is trying to find new innovative ways to
help us deal with it. Mike, we end every On
Purpose episode with a final five. These questions have to

(01:20:36):
be answered in one word to one sentence maximum for
each question, and so Michael Milkham, these are your final five.
The first question is what is the best advice you've
ever received?

Speaker 1 (01:20:47):
Do the research?

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
Nice, great Answer've never had that before. Second question is
what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (01:20:55):
You'll learn it from the newspaper.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
Three, what do you do first thing in the morning
and the last thing before you go to bed?

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
I say hello to my wife and good morning, and
I give her a kiss before we go to bed
at night. We've known each other sixty five years, we've
been married for fifty five years, and so that's what
I do first thing in the morning and last thing.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
That's beautiful question numberfore about that? What would be your
number one lesson from the sixty five years you've been together?
If you had to say there was one thing that
has been the most powerful lesson you've learned in love?

Speaker 3 (01:21:32):
What would that be.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
See the world through someone else's eyes?

Speaker 3 (01:21:37):
Great advice, Great advice. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:40):
Fifth and final question, If you could create one law
in the world that everyone had to follow, what would
it be.

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
Treat others as you would like to be treated.

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):
Beautiful Mike Milk and everyone, thank you so much for
listening to om purpose. I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you'll share it, and I'll hope you'll join
us for the next one. Thank you so much, Mike,
thank you so much for being sure to see you
generous and insightful today. It's been a joy talking to you. Likewise,
thank you so much. If you love this episode, you'll
enjoy my interview with doctor Daniel Ahman on how to

(01:22:13):
change your life by changing your brain.

Speaker 4 (01:22:15):
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with
a healthy brain.

Speaker 1 (01:22:22):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:22:22):
I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over
a thousand convicted felons and over one hundred murderers, and
their brains

Speaker 3 (01:22:31):
Are very damaged.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Jay Shetty

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

24/7 News: The Latest

Therapy Gecko

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Mike Milken ON: How to Connect Your Life Purpose with Business Success & The Mindset Behind Strategic Decision Making