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Today, 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.
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And you can see today these cells beating like they're a heart.
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The best-selling author and host the number one health and wellness podcast with Jay Shetty.
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Mike, let's dive straight into it because you truly have one of the most fascinating journeys, I believe, on the planet.
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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.
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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 has had a big impact on on who you are today or how you are the way you are today?
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Do you have a childhood memory or an interaction with your parents or an interaction with a friend or a teacher that you think has stayed with you?
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I think when I was very young, I had this love of data and knowledge.
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My favorite book was the Almanac.
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And at night, I'd have it under my pillow, take out a flashlight, and read it.
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And my parents had these bridge clubs where adults would come over, and come once a month, and I'd have a chance to interact with 15, 16, in some cases, 20 adults.
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And what I discovered in this interaction is very few people ever did research.
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When you ask a person why they believe in something, etc.
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, they heard it from someone else, and it might be based on fact, it might be based on fiction.
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And so, from a very young age, I began to question why people held certain beliefs, why they made certain decisions, and and explored data and information.
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And I'd say the first major event was discovering that my father had had polio.
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I had no knowledge and then one day um a friend that was over, we were playing catch, told me my father had a limp.
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I really never noticed it.
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And I was thrust into the world in the early 1950s of what polio was, what occurred, the understanding of it, the fact that in 1952 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.
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Well, a few years later there was a solution and there was a vaccine created.
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Two people worked on it and it became prevalent, but what I also noticed was that teenagers were not taking the vaccine, their parents, cuz they were worried the vaccine was going to give them polio.
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And so the end of the story was there was an individual who went on a very popular show in the United States called the Ed Sullivan Show that we used to watch.
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And more than a year after it was available, less than 1% of every teenager in America had been vaccinated.
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And this individual's name was Elvis Presley.
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And because it was okay for Elvis, afterwards, within 1 year, 80% were vaccinated.
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And so there was a lot to learn here from this.
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One, because you had a solution didn't mean people would adopt it.
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Two, the fact that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt the country was obviously proven wrong.
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Numerous people were affected by it, but I I think at the peaks only 62,000 people.
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And this has repeated itself throughout history of people telling you the world is coming to an end.
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It's not going to come to an end and science coming to the rescue. Wow, yeah. Incredible.
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I'm so excited to dive into so many of those ideas that you just mentioned that throughout the course of our interview.
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I want to go back to that position of you starting out.
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You came from a modest background.
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But and you've had lots of successes and then valleys in your life, peaks and valleys.
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If you walk us into the direction of your first peak, did you always set out to be financially successful when you first created that first success in your life?
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What was the would you say the key principles that you used in order to manufacture that first success that you had?
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I did not plan to go into the financial service business.
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I wanted to run the space program.
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And I was totally infatuated when Sputnik went up.
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It was a catastrophe if you read the headlines in the United States at the time.
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There was the middle of the Cold War.
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Now, quote, Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.
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And I was very, very good in math and science.
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And I wrote a letter to the president of the United States.
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Told them I was ready to run the space program.
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Now, I never really got a response. I was 11 years old. But that was my plan.
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And my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a leader in Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.
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And I was preparing someday to run the space program.
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Then I was in Los Angeles, where we are today, during something that became known as the Watts riots.
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It was August 11th, 1965.
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And Los Angeles was on fire.
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The city of dreams, the city of entertainment.
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I had just been in Berkeley and and we had the free speech movement six or seven months before, but this was different. The city was on fire.
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And I went and met a young African-American man who told me he would never have a chance to borrow money to have a business.
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His father didn't because of the color of his skin.
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It seemed totally irrational to me.
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And I decided to go back and figure out why this was occurring.
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When I went back to Berkeley and began to study credit.
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And very similar to when I was younger, I discovered everything that people said about credit was wrong.
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It didn't make any difference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve.
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And what they were saying was inaccurate. And so I set on a path.
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I had to give up my dream at that time of the space program to begin working on what I might have called the democratization of capital.
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And I pursued that during this period of time from 1965 for the next 20 to 25 years.
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So I that was not my path.
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But the studying and what I had done as an undergrad and then as a grad student and my decision to quote go to Wall Street was really to redirect the access to capital.
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Have a fundamental change.
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And yes, in the next 30 years, 62 million jobs in the United States were created.
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There's always a backlash.
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As a physic major, for every force, there's resistance.
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And so changing the financial system at that time, many people wished that I didn't exist.
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The idea that you were a large company and you had access to capital and the others didn't.
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So, there were 500 investment grade companies and tens of millions of non-investment grade companies.
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Well, once you empower them and created financial markets, we discovered 62 million jobs were created in non-investment grade companies and minus four.
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So, there was a lot of change.
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Today, there's hundreds of firms headed by people that work for me.
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And I would say it's that those structures are the basis of modern financial markets around the world.
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But, it's not it is not unusual.
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At one of our scientific retreats in 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.
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And they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong.
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Everything they were telling you about ulcers.
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And these two senior scientists I had there in the back of the room.
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One turned to the other and said, "Who are these yobbos?
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They didn't even go to a good school."
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Well, four years later these yobbos won a Nobel Prize.
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So, challenging conventional wisdom and theory, I think, has been something I've tried to do as 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 father had polio.
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One thing I'm noticing from your answers is that you have this keen ability to spot patterns and analyze patterns.
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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.
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And you also have used the word study a few times in your first few answers.
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And I think there's this big difference between academic study and pattern study.
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And I find that the most successful people in the world are great at studying patterns.
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It's not really about the academic study.
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Could you help break both of those down for us, because I feel like you're probably the best person to ask that question to in genuinely understanding the difference, because I think we hear the word study, but when you say the word study, you mean something else.
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I would say extremely insightful.
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So, we could say there is inductive reasons, there's deductive reasons.
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The very first speech I gave on Wall Street was the best investor was a social scientist.
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Understanding where things were in a bigger world and stepping back.
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And then going down and looking at the data to find out if your broad ideas of the world were changing.
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In the last few months, the world has opened up to the idea of where are the children of the world.
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For 20 years, the handwriting has been on the wall.
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The world did not open up to it until the last short period of time here.
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But the birth rate in Northern Asia, Europe, the United States has dropped so significantly that whereas the population of the US has doubled, there are less children born today than there were 70 years ago in the United States.
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China's birth rate has dropped so low that the number of children born in China last year was less than 10 million.
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So, you think about a country of 1. 4 billion.
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But, if average life expectancy, taking those that live to 100 and averaging with those that die young, is 75.
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If you have 10 million children born a year, and you multiply it by 75, that's a population of 750 million, not a billion four.
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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.
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And so, they have a decreasing population in most of the developed worlds, the birth rate is below replacement.
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But, this has not been going on for since the pandemic.
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This has been going on for a long period of time.
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And so, when do you see it?
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And so, about 20, 30 years ago, we became quite concerned because it appeared to us that the future, where the children were going to be born, was in sub-Saharan Africa.
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And the rest of the world as a whole might be decreasing in terms of population.
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So, what were the opportunities going to be for the children of sub-Saharan Africa?
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And today, in 2023, more children are born in Nigeria than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia, by a substantial amount.
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And more than twice as many children are born in just Nigeria than the United States.
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So, people are looking at where you are here.
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Now, when I had my little almanacs, I was too young to know that if you matched one almanac against another almanac, you were actually getting the first derivative.
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You were measuring change.
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And then if you had a few of them, you were measuring the rate of change.
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And so I think when answering your question, you have to look at the broad social implications and what is occurring.
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Then you have to ask yourself do the systems that currently exist fit where the world is going?
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I then if I had four almanacs could calculate the second derivative, the rate of change.
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And I would say this is prevalent in medicine.
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You could be diagnosed with cancer.
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Is it a slow growing cancer or is it a fast growing?
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In the case of melanoma, it doubled every month.
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If it was advanced, so a billion cancer cells one and 10 months later are a trillion.
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Other cancers are very slow growing, so you could take your time to address it.
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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 going to see one to two billion people on the move.
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So the question is when how early do you see that?
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And one of the exciting things about medicine today is in the 1980s, there was this idea that everything was in your blood.
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Well, you didn't know what to look for. You couldn't sequence.
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You couldn't do anything.
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So might be there, but I can't find it.
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Now today we now have tests that can measured the waste the DNA late leakage in your blood.
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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 could ever find it in a mammogram or a CT or an MRI.
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And so, therefore, dealing with these life threatening diseases today at their infancy is so much easier.
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But this was a dream until computers were a million times faster and data storage costs were 1 billion. It was an idea.
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It was a dream, but it wasn't a reality. Absolutely.
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Thank you for sharing that.
15:56
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 journey, 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 1990 after pleading guilty to several felony charges related to securities violations.
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But to me, I'm fascinated by A, how that happened for you, but B, more importantly, how you used 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.
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You can't when you're moving forwards.
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I just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo, ends up having to go to prison.
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Walk us through first of all, how did you end up there?
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And then and then we'll talk about what it was like there because I think that's just such a interesting part of your journey now looking backwards.
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Well, I think that issue, there was an unusual period of time.
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And once again, a complete revolution in finance.
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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 again.
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So, when the president gave me a pardon, he commented that these things were never crimes before, they've never been crimes since.
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They related to bookkeeping and things like that.
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But, I had to find a way to bring it to an end.
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And I you if you fought for 10 or 20 years, uh to me, I had to find a way to live again.
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And so, I think if you're true to yourself and you know the issues, uh and the individuals know you, uh I viewed this as going to be a short period of time.
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And I had to cut it short and make a decision for my family, etc. to live again.
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And it was a short period of time in the scheme of things when I think of the diversion of less than 2 years.
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If I go back to World War II, you had people that volunteered and were gone for 4 years fighting for freedom and what they believed in.
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And so, I think my view was that I had to find a solution to bring it to an end.
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And and it didn't really change who I was, what I did.
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Uh the financial systems we built are now adopted throughout the world, whether you're in India, or Singapore, or whatever it might be.
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And yes, there was disruption in the force.
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I would say to you if you think about a country you and I first met in, the UK, when the mo when the mercantile class rose up in England, who was under threat? The nobility.
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And so, the nobility would go to the king or the queen and say, "Well, we can't compete anymore.
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What are we going to do?"
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But, the old financial system didn't really meet the future needs of the world.
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And so, yes, uh I spent uh time thinking.
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I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education.
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How did you spend your days for those 2 years?
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I spent my time thinking about the world.
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I would write sometimes ambassadors at around the world suggesting what I think they should have done or or should do or what the country should do.
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So, it didn't uh it didn't interrupt uh those interactions.
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Um it didn't stop our philanthropic efforts. Et cetera.
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I did get to interact with a group of people.
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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.
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And so, it was a period of time I was able to interact with my family.
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I think anyone that's separated from their family, and when I think back to those people that went and fought in World War II in the 1940s, that might have been separated for 4 years, their only way of communicating with their family was through a letter.
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You know, the telephone was invented.
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And in long-distance call, when I was young, no one made long-distance calls because it was 10 to 12 minutes to call another country.
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So, in the 1970s, if I wanted to speak to Mumbai, I had to be prepared.
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It was $10 to $12 a minute.
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So, those calls had to be short.
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And that was a period of time yeah in that period of time when a person's salary was hundreds of dollars a a not thousands of dollars a week.
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Today, people have a hard time relating to that because it's free on WhatsApp or on your phone.
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But, I could communicate with my children, my family.
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And so, when you're separated, the first thought is is your family going to be okay?
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Are your relationships My wife and I had known each other since we were 12.
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She knew who I was, I knew who she was.
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My business associates, thousands of them, knew who I was, knew the issues, and so it wasn't a situation where I felt separated from the world.
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You know, and therefore communication still existed. A telephone existed.
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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.
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When I think of many people that were sent to the gulag in Russia, uh there's, you know, whether it was Solzhenitsyn or others or Sharansky, 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.
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And one of them wrote that he know he knew he had won then cuz there was nothing else that they could take away.
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And so, I think having inner strength is extremely important during that period.
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Well, when I think about my challenges relative to the tens of millions of people that have gone off to fight in wars, uh my parents' generation that lived through the depression and World War II so that we could be free, uh my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.
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I think it's an incredible amount of inner strength not only to be able to navigate those 2 years even though you are saying it didn't feel that long in the bigger scheme of things.
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I I still believe that there is such a resilience there but the way you came back.
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Well, let's just talk about Mandela.
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You're talking more than 20 years. Yeah, 27.
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Okay, and did he come back bitter? No.
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Okay, and and South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe as Rhodesia went.
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So, here instead of being bitter and when he got out I had a chance to visit with him.
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We came to see each other.
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And so my view was revenge or bitterness is an unproductive emotion.
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If you have something to give and focus and build you have to focus going forward.
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You can't sit and focus on the path.
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And I had thousands of people that had worked for me who could carry on our mission in finance and our foundations by forming the Milken Institute uh didn't change much what I had done in the for-profit world there I now did in the non-profit world.
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So, my view was the insights the ideas carried on.
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And I I am 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.
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If he was stuck in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.
24:48
I I'm so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela.
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There's a beautiful statement in his 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.
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And along those lines, and I think that's such a powerful statement of his that he believed that resentment and bitterness and revenge were the actual prison that would hold and limit him moving forward.
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Well, as you know well, and your viewers know well, there are so many people in the world that have mental health issues today.
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And in many ways, they're all traced to something in their past.
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And so, being free, being free of your past, not forgetting it, not reflecting on it, not having it be part of your decision process allows you to go forward and to fly from that standpoint. Absolutely.
25:54
I want to talk about your switch from financial world to medical research.
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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 receive that.
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What was it like to receive such a diagnosis as someone again who is thinking about the future, trying to build?
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Were you someone who was quite focused on your health as well, or were you somewhat negligent because you were focused on work?
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And how did it feel to hear that?
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Uh I would say to you I probably had one of the least healthy diets in the world until that day I was diagnosed.
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Uh but I experienced this with my father's death in the 1970s.
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And it was the first time my economic theories were tested during a period of time from '73 to '77, which I would call my financial clinical trials, all the ideas that I had developed.
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And by the the mid-1970s, I had become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas.
27:08
And most of them, 90% of the people, believed we were headed to this financial depression again, and my views were no, we weren't in history.
27:19
So, but I could not save my father's life from melanoma.
27:27
And it had a significant view here that it was the first time in my life that I could not solve a problem.
27:33
I could help rebuild a company.
27:37
I might be able to help rebuild a country financially, but I could not find a decision.
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I visited all these senior people, and I went to the major medical centers, traveled with my dad, and I concluded by 1976 that science could not move fast enough, no matter what I had done, or could do, to save my father's life.
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So, I had made the decision then to move back to California, so that my two children, my wife Lori and I, two children at the time, would know my father before he died.
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And he died about 9 months after we moved back to California, and then I moved families, etc.
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, thousands of people back to California.
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And so, this has stayed with me.
28:27
I've lost 10 relatives to cancer, and my diagnosis was worse than theirs.
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So, obviously, I'm now reflecting, what am I going to do?
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And when it looked like I had 18 months to live, you have to figure out, what could I do different than they did.
28:50
And the first decision I made is I would focus on anything that's reversible.
28:57
So, for 2 years I did not eat anything except fresh fruit and fresh vegetables.
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I had no idea whether it would benefit me, but I figured it wouldn't hurt me.
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And none of my relatives or friends who had died from life-threatening diseases had ever changed their diet.
29:20
And as I explored the world of the Chinese medicine in China or Ayurveda medicine in India or witch doctors in the central part of Africa or Indians in the Northwest Amazon or healers from Russia, you know, it came to me that I I would really focus on Ayurveda medicine.
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And in the 5,000 year history, the belief was your gut, your microbiome, was your second brain.
29:54
So, everything you eat, everything you drink, everything you exercise, everything you're experiencing is going into your second brain.
30:02
So, I was going to change my second brain even though there was no proof.
30:07
You couldn't sequence at the time.
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And so, that was a focus that I focused on.
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And I think the other thing I was very focused on is that most people diagnosed with a life-threatening disease do the least they can do at day one.
30:31
And if it reoccurs later in life, they do everything they can to stay alive.
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But if you had done more at the beginning, then you would have had a better chance and so once I had driven my cancer burden to what appeared to be zero, I then made the decision to have radiation whereas someone else might have done nothing cuz I figured the burden was the least.
30:59
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 that how could I accelerate science?
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So first I could try to change my body.
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And at this time we weren't talking CRISPR, we weren't talking about a technology that could change your genes that is still not widely deployed because we don't know as we create a new human race whether this is good or bad.
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And so I set off on this journey of how to accelerate science.
31:41
But that journey in science is not much different than my journey in finance or the journey we took in education and what we did.
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I was going to try to attract the best and most talented people in the world to come work in this field.
31:58
And no matter how talented you were if you were the individual that perceived the future was mobile phones or cell phones, Craig McCaw.
32:12
That was a good idea, but unless you had access to billions of dollars, you could never access that idea.
32:17
If you were a Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would change and we could drive the cost over time from $12 a minute to talk to India to zero.
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You needed billions of dollars.
32:32
So the same focus of attention One, attract the best and brightest to work in the field.
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Two, bring enough financial capital to service a multiplier effect.
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And three, create teamwork.
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Many organizations have people that have real talent, but they don't act as a team. They don't act as one.
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And therefore, what I saw in medicine, there was no team.
33:08
There was not enough financial capital.
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And many of the brightest people were not working in this field.
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So, those were the first levels I was focused on, but that was no different.
33:20
In education, we had created a national educator award to attract the best and brightest into the field.
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And finance had searched out the world's leading entrepreneurs, providing them capital and advice, and help create teams for them.
33:35
So, that that was the revolution that began in '93 in health care and medical research.
33:44
And I faced just as much resistance as I did in the financial revolution.
33:54
The first comment was, "Prove it."
33:58
Well, in 1993, you couldn't prove anything.
34:00
I could show you anecdotal evidence that in places of the world where people were plant eaters, China, not meat eaters, that the incidence of hormone-driven cancers or diabetes was far less.
34:19
And in places that we had different diets, fast food diet, it was far more.
34:25
So, yes, there was anecdotal evidence, and so they said, "Well, prove it."
34:29
Well, I I you couldn't sequence the human genome.
34:33
You couldn't do anything in 1993.
34:35
And Francis Collins, who I met in '93, set off on a journey to sequence.
34:43
It wasn't till many, many years later and billions of dollars that they completed that.
34:49
And I'll never forget in 1994, I had one of our scientific retreats with the world's leading clinicians in cancer and science.
34:59
And I wanted to get a Dr.
35:01
David Heber, who had founded the Center for Human Nutrition, PhD, MD at UCLA, on the program.
35:10
And the people in charge of 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."
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And they fought me and told me it would degrade what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer research group in the world.
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And I eventually reached a compromise with him.
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He would get to speak at lunch. I wrote about it.
35:39
He would not be on the program.
35:43
He would not have a microphone.
35:43
And if you wanted to listen, you had to sit close.
35:46
And if you didn't want to be infected with this idea that there might be a link to how you live your life and what you eat and what you drink and your health, you could just sit far away and weren't have to.
36:01
25 years later, Jay, 25 years later, I went to our scientific retreat.
36:08
I was not in charge of the programming.
36:12
And maybe 20% of every session over 4 days was cancer and your microbiome.
36:20
So, initially putting forth ideas that challenged the status quo, whether it's finance, whether it's education, or whether it's medical, are challenged.
36:33
Later, they're accepted, well accepted, and anyone could have thought of that idea. Mhm. Yeah, I know.
36:42
I It's It's so fascinating because I feel like coming from an Indian background and my wife being an Ayurvedic 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.
36:56
But you're so right that until we see it in the research and the science and beyond the anecdotes, we don't fully comprehend these ideas.
37:05
And so you're accelerating that research.
37:07
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?
37:17
So, I had entered the field in the early 1970s for 20 years, but I was primarily a donor. etc.
37:27
And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life.
37:35
So, I in '93 decided I couldn't help others if I couldn't help myself.
37:42
And I first had to survive.
37:44
But there were those three elements.
37:46
One, teamwork, partnership.
37:49
So, I wrote about I went to this MD Anderson.
37:54
And the two leading cancer centers off and on rated in the world were either MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York.
38:02
One in Houston, one in New York.
38:06
And I noticed there was no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering at the cancer conference in Houston.
38:11
And I told the person putting the conference on, "Why is there no one here from Memorial Sloan Kettering if we're trying to accelerate research.
38:23
And he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan Kettering as a competitor.
38:29
And I told him not to the patient.
38:29
So, therefore, once we promised funding for research in this field, we would only fund if you shared all your data.
38:42
And I eventually got on my board Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel.
38:47
And we worked on this is early technology with computers and connecting that we would connect all of our researchers digitally together.
38:58
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.
39:09
But, we told them that we couldn't fund any of their research unless they shared their data.
39:14
Now, some people told me, "Well, I have to wait for Nature or Cell magazine to come out.
39:22
The story will be out in a year."
39:24
And we told them that their research was so important that they didn't need any of our funds.
39:31
Our funds were only for those who were willing to share.
39:33
And I would say within 6 months everyone in the world was willing to share.
39:41
And no matter how much we raised in money, I was out there first recruiting the best and brightest.
39:49
And second, trying to convince people who were thinking of leaving the field to stay in the field.
39:58
And I wrote in the book a little bit about an individual who was being recruited to make better apples.
40:05
And I was successful in convincing him that we could live and still eat the same apples for maybe the next 20 years, but people being diagnosed with cancer throughout the world and the fact it was going to be increasing, not decreasing, we couldn't wait for solutions.
40:22
And so and then the the other element I would say to you was government.
40:30
There is no individual, there is no foundation, my family foundations which were created and today there's with our centers more than 10 of them.
40:42
Nor Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus Warren Buffett, uh which is one is one of the largest foundation today in the world.
40:54
The amount of money they have is small relative to the government.
41:00
So if you can redirect the funds of the government, you now have access to hundreds of billions of dollars that could be redeployed.
41:13
And so we spent two to three years making the economic argument of what the elimination of cancer was.
41:22
But one of the challenges, when you talk about challenges, we were not able as a country to increase significantly our investment in the National Institutes of Health, the largest medical research group in the world.
41:37
And I discovered in my analysis that one of the reasons was there were 500 different diseases constantly appealing for more funds.
41:48
And so unlike a laser, you had all these voices out there, whether it's Parkinson's, whether it was Alzheimer's, whether it's diabetes.
41:59
And there wasn't a focused request.
41:59
And so beginning two years later in '95, I went to the various disease specific groups and said, "If you will stand down, we will have a combined effort focused on cancer, all cancers, like a laser to double the NIH budget.
42:25
And we will work on that, and when it's doubled, all medical research will double, not just cancer."
42:33
And they agreed, and so we put on a march.
42:36
It took 3 years and all this data, etc.
42:39
, 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 22nd century will be the leaders in the 21st century in bioscience.
42:59
And so, with the march concluding in '98, the President of the United States shortly thereafter signed into law what became the doubling of the NIH budget.
43:11
There's been an incremental $500 in basic research spent.
43:19
It laid the groundwork for what we did to get a quick solution for COVID-19.
43:26
Every disease has benefited from it.
43:30
The financial commitment was $10 million in the march.
43:37
Today, there's a $500 billion payoff.
43:39
So, the first efforts of individual philanthropy, 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.
44:06
Wow, and I want to read out this is on page 111 of the book where you talk about a new type of organization and you've lay out these you know, very clear principles that you're just speaking about right now.
44:17
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 the most promising research not funded by the NIH, uh eliminate needless bureaucracy, and the list continues.
44:34
And I 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 effort, time, energy.
44:52
I mean, you you make it sound so seamless, but I I would love to know like how how challenging is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level?
45:00
So, if you were at a Parkinson's Foundation or a Diabetes Foundation and thousands of talented people tried to increase funding, but it was like there was a zero-sum game.
45:16
If I increase funding for diabetes, I had to take it away from someone else.
45:22
And so, getting them to accept that they were unsuccessful and to stand down and have faith, it's somewhat based on past performance.
45:34
In the financial investment, they want in business, they want to know, "Okay, what's your past performance?
45:39
Do you have a track record?"
45:42
So, we had a track record of success to build on and and we didn't ask them to stand down for their lifetime.
45:51
We just asked them to stand down for a few months here so we could focus like a laser our attention on this issue.
46:01
Eliminating cancer as a cause of death and bringing in the leading economist in the world was worth $50 trillion to the US economy in the early 1990s, multiples of what the economy and so we could show the results.
46:20
And so yes, you have to have a past track record.
46:24
Convincing a person not to change their career.
46:31
I remember one of the world's leading chemist was been about to be given a job as the dean of the most prestigious university in the world, but he would leave the laboratory.
46:43
So I went and asked him who's running Warner Brothers?
46:46
At the time it was two friends of mine, Terry Semel and Bob Daly.
46:54
He had no clue who was running.
46:56
I asked him has he ever heard of Steven Spielberg?
47:00
And he says, yes, he's heard of Steven Spielberg.
47:02
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.
47:12
You're working on breakthroughs here in bioscience.
47:19
That might change the world.
47:21
You becoming a manager of others might never change the world.
47:27
And so luckily, he decided to stay.
47:27
When you think of young scientist the hundreds or thousands that I've dealt with you graduated high school, you were 17 or 18 years old.
47:43
You're now 31 or 32 or 33 years old.
47:48
You've gone to medical school. You got a PhD.
47:50
You had fellowships, residencies, internships.
47:56
And now you're ready for your own laboratory, and there's no money.
48:01
It's very easy to make the decision to go into industry, family practice, and give up your basic research.
48:11
But if we can greet you at that time and give you your own laboratory and get the institution to match for $100,000 a year for 3 years, you've changed the career.
48:27
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 25 young scientists and they each are going to work for 40 years, by funding them at 2 and 1/2 million dollars for the first year and each year, you've bought 1,000 years of their time.
48:59
And when I look back over the 30 years to all these new therapies that have been created, you will find a young scientist, a young person there.
49:11
It's very interesting at the National Institutes of Health, the first age that you get an award is 43.
49:19
If you look at who's won Nobel Prizes in science, most people have won for an idea they had when they were within a few years of school.
49:32
James Watson was in his 20s when he put forth his idea that if we have genes, etc.
49:42
You know, so many Einstein, I think was 23.
49:45
And so the idea that you're going to school and you're studying and you've now spent 15 years after high school and now we're going to tell you you can wait another 12 years? It's ridiculous.
50:01
And so the system really was not prepared for the fact that we needed to get the best and brightest and divert their careers younger.
50:12
And so I have spent more than 30 years working on this.
50:16
The same thing we had worked on 40 years ago with educators to try to get them to stay as an educator.
50:27
When you go to India today people are so confused today that think India is like China.
50:36
There were 23 or 24 million children born last year in India.
50:43
There were 9 to 10 million born in China.
50:45
More than twice as many children.
50:49
Today there are more than 200 million more children in India than in China.
50:56
China is more advanced digitally but there's very few countries where the competition for education you know today is more significant.
51:06
And they also have a belief in health care not based on modern technology but 5,000 years of anecdotal experience.
51:20
So yes our theory is that your gut have been proven to be true with modern sequencing technologies.
51:31
And this year they've just approved giving the microbiome of one person who responded well to treatment to another person that 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.
52:01
But in India, you had 5,000 years of experience of if you did this, that happened.
52:08
And when I went to the northern Amazon, northwest Amazon, here I am dressed head to toe and I wrote about it all in black.
52:21
And our Indian guide has a pair of shorts on and that's it.
52:23
He's immune to everything.
52:27
I'm not immune to anything.
52:27
And he takes me over and he says, "Well, we use this bush against malaria and we use this for this."
52:37
And he shows me this and he says, "If we ever get separated, you can hack this bush and drink the water inside."
52:46
But then he goes and he tells me, "But don't drink the water in this bush, it could kill you."
52:50
So, they both look the same to me. Okay, both of them.
52:54
So, I got a rope and we tied it around his waist and my waist so we would never be separated as we were hacking through the jungle.
53:04
And so, I think the world today is adjusting to what have we learned over thousands of years that we didn't take in consideration.
53:19
And the environmental movement, the efforts here in healthy human, healthy planet, is totally interrelated. Absolutely.
53:28
What have you found as your I guess the things that you're most happy about that prove to you the research is going in the right direction.
53:37
What are you pointing towards as successes or solutions?
53:42
Well, let's just talk about two that the world has full knowledge of. HIV AIDS.
53:48
The number one talk show host, not the number one healthcare podcast in the world, in 1987, Oprah Winfrey goes on television and tells the people of America that one in five are going to die from AIDS in the next 3 years.
54:08
That's based on her work.
54:13
Well, unfortunately, many people died.
54:16
But we didn't have 80 million people die.
54:20
We had tens of thousands.
54:23
And the cocktails and the antivirals that were created, so when one of the most popular people in the United States, Magic Johnson, announced in 1991 that he was diagnosed with HIV and he's going to have to retire at his peak of his career from the NBA, most people, including myself, thought he might not make it. Today, he's a friend.
54:51
He's participated in our Faster Cures effort. He's bigger than life.
54:56
His smile is bigger than life. It's 32 years later.
55:04
Where do we see it the most when you say, "Where are the results?"
55:06
Look at sub-Saharan Africa.
55:10
2/3 of everyone with HIV and AIDS lived in sub-Saharan Africa.
55:14
If you wanted to go work there, they wanted you to work.
55:20
30 years ago, they paid you combat pay out of fear that you could be infected.
55:26
Well, today, the chance of a woman with proper care passing AIDS on to her children is 2% down from 95.
55:36
So, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is growing.
55:43
Children that were orphans are no longer born with HIV.
55:47
People with HIV and AIDS are living today, not dying.
55:53
And what did we just see in the last 3 years during COVID?
55:59
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 3 months.
56:15
And that 5 million of people in California will have to be hospitalized, but there's only a few hundred thousand hospital beds. It was a catastrophe.
56:28
More than a million people died in America, more than 10 or 20 million worldwide.
56:36
But it wasn't 50% of the population.
56:39
It wasn't 10% of the population.
56:42
And it was only 63 days between the sequencing of the virus and the first human being getting a vaccine.
56:52
63 days, 9 weeks, not 10 years.
56:58
And so, that is why I wrote the book.
57:02
Okay, I wrote the book cuz we are on the verge of a total revolution, the same as I saw in finance in healthcare today with technology.
57:16
And so, it's time to put your foot on the accelerator and go faster.
57:21
Not time to ease up because we think we have put into suspended animation this pandemic.
57:30
And so, that was my concern.
57:33
There were these points of the March in '98.
57:37
There was this point of the celebration of science in 2012.
57:42
And there's a point here today that people don't have to die.
57:46
For the first time in history, we have a good chance to cure your disease in your own lifetime if we stay with it.
57:57
Mike, how can me and my community support these efforts?
58:00
How can people be involved?
58:02
How can people be engaged if they feel inspired by what you're doing and and the work that you're leading on?
58:08
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.
58:15
But naturally, we often people get discouraged because of headlines and news and everything that we see around us.
58:23
Or things that aren't true that are in the headlines.
58:26
So, just the concept of healthy human, healthy planet.
58:35
Such a large percent of the earth today is devoted to raising animals, 70 to 80 billion animals for humans to eat.
58:49
And that doesn't count the billions of fish.
58:53
We are on the verge of essentially being able to create a hamburger without a calf, without a cow.
59:02
Now, for a person in India who doesn't eat a hamburger, it doesn't make any difference.
59:08
Okay, but if we can grow it in the 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.
59:26
So yes, we can grow food in a laboratory.
59:30
And now it has just been approved to allow this to occur.
59:33
We needed to get the cost down.
59:37
It used to be 30,000 an ounce, then it went to three, now it's a few hundred.
59:42
But it's only a matter of time where we can have a substantial change in the planet.
59:50
A friend of mine put up the money to do a book called Drawdown.
59:53
And Drawdown listed the 20 major factors that were changing our atmosphere and the environment the Earth is in.
1:00:06
10 of them relate to food.
1:00:09
10 of them relate to other things.
1:00:12
And so, we have a chance and the environmental movement combined with the health movement.
1:00:19
Science today can show you what happens.
1:00:22
So, we know today that what were all these vegetables on the planet for if you believed in Darwin?
1:00:31
What's the purpose of broccoli?
1:00:34
Cauliflower, Brussels sprouts.
1:00:34
These things are little Pac-Man that are out there eating.
1:00:41
Okay, carcinogens in your body.
1:00:44
We've learned today that your immune system can do amazing things.
1:00:50
And I wrote about it when I first heard Jim Allison talk in 19 97 that your immune system is smarter than all the scientists in the room.
1:01:03
But someone turned off your immune system.
1:01:06
And that's why you got a life-threatening disease. Okay, and that occurred.
1:01:12
And so, he developed and won a Nobel Prize for the concept of checkpoint inhibitors.
1:01:19
And we financed his work for 10 years in prostate cancer.
1:01:24
It wasn't that effective.
1:01:25
But the minute we moved to melanoma, the death rate has dropped by 50%.
1:01:33
And so what he did is we turned off the switch in the cancer that turned off your immune system.
1:01:41
The idea of growing your own organs, there are now people that have had organ transplants from others take these drugs to prevent rejection by their own immune system.
1:01:57
Well, at Mass General in Boston and 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 donates your organ to use so you'll have two immune systems.
1:02:11
So when you get that organ, you don't need rejection.
1:02:14
Your immune systems will be operating.
1:02:18
So technology is just moving non-invasive surgery.
1:02:25
When I watched Star Trek as a kid, the doctor Bones, he didn't do any invasive surgery.
1:02:31
Put a little thing on your body and it did everything.
1:02:33
Well, that's what non-invasive focused ultrasound can do.
1:02:37
So the promise the promise is with us today.
1:02:45
And so we're just trying to get a mission here going to make sure we stay with our efforts that the world mobilize.
1:02:55
When you look at what happened in 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.
1:03:13
I'm not a didn't want to compete with you, but we launched podcast, 125 of them.
1:03:18
And the reason I launched them was threefold.
1:03:23
One, if I'm talking to Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, I want you or anyone else to hear what he's saying.
1:03:33
Anyone in the world could listen.
1:03:33
I might be able to talk to the CEO of Alex Gorsky at J&J.
1:03:40
Most of people couldn't, but you can listen to the conversation.
1:03:45
Two, by talking to him, I can encourage them maybe to take action they wouldn't have taken.
1:03:52
So, when I first spoke to Alex Gorsky in April on this podcast, he was talking about maybe joining the clinical trials in January of '21.
1:04:02
And so, my comment was, "Why not July?"
1:04:09
Which he ended up doing, and it was approved by January.
1:04:14
And so, the third effort was to see how people were coping.
1:04:19
So, if I talked to the largest employers in the world, who had employees over the world, what were they doing in China, Italy, etc.
1:04:26
, that you might be doing in the United States?
1:04:30
If you were in responsible for thousands or tens of thousands, or in the case of a Walmart, millions of employees, what are you going to be doing?
1:04:40
And when I spoke to the CEO of Target, he told me that he was protecting their employees.
1:04:48
But 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.
1:05:00
And so, how you going to protect the kids, and how you going to protect your workers?
1:05:04
And so, this had to be had to be done in a short period of time.
1:05:10
Today, I'm no longer doing podcasts.
1:05:10
I'm deferring to you to tell the world. But for me, I meditated.
1:05:20
It made a big difference, I think, in my outcome.
1:05:22
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 trees, sequoia, cedar trees, seemed to energize my immune system.
1:05:38
And so, when we think of the senses, smell, taste, touch, all of these come into play in rejuvenating your body.
1:05:47
So, I used to sit at high tide and smell the seashore. I Why?
1:05:57
Why did that energize my immune system?
1:05:59
I have no idea, except we came out of the sea.
1:06:02
So, maybe that was returning to the sea.
1:06:05
And the smell of the pine needles and things like that, maybe it was relating when I was young with my father.
1:06:14
So, I I don't know, but my view was we don't use all of our senses.
1:06:22
And we understand one of the things that Ayurveda brought me was understanding of so many different elements of touch.
1:06:33
So, I I had a chance to see things that I never thought I would see in my life.
1:06:39
I visited a man in China, Qi doctor, who was over 90 years old, and he told me if he came out of the mountains, he would die.
1:06:49
But when he put his hands on me, he could create such unbelievable heat. How did he do that? I have no idea. Okay?
1:06:59
But it gave you a chance to experiencing different things.
1:07:02
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.
1:07:14
Why should we be listening to them?
1:07:19
And then a few years later everybody accepts it.
1:07:24
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.
1:07:36
But it all comes back to the people on your team.
1:07:41
So when I was in India if India's playing Pakistan in cricket nothing else is going on, okay?
1:07:48
They could be arguing and fighting about anything, but you have to take time out for that game.
1:07:56
And so there are things that focus your attention.
1:08:03
And part of this effort is this concept of healthy human, healthy planet.
1:08:06
Yes technology has solved so many problems for us.
1:08:15
But I think what I've tried to do particularly in the last 30 years I've gone from an extremely unhealthy diet okay, to an extreme for the first 9 years.
1:08:28
I got my Ayurveda massages twice a week for 9 years.
1:08:37
And so I was willing to do things that I would have scoffed at in the 1970s, 60s, 80s as way out there.
1:08:48
Okay, but today I'm visiting with you today.
1:08:51
I'm the happiest guy to do a podcast with you.
1:08:55
30 years later because I changed. The world changed.
1:09:04
Uh and going forward, we're going to have to make more changes, more adoption of things. It's very hard. It's very hard.
1:09:14
In the United States today, we now have this quote diabetes pill that apparently controls your appetite and your weight.
1:09:25
Okay, so As in big, yeah.
1:09:26
Yeah, so it's a lot easier than having personal discipline for me.
1:09:33
I ate more hot dogs, I believe, than anyone except those people that win the Nathan's hot dog eating contest.
1:09:39
And how we can eat 50 to 60 hot dogs and buns in that short period of time, I have no idea.
1:09:50
But no hot dog was worth your life.
1:09:55
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.
1:10:05
And when you discover things like a Nobel Prize winner, Elizabeth Blackburn, about what sugar does to you, so what happened when Mexico put a tax on sugar or Chile put a tax on they increased their advertising as sales fell off.
1:10:22
And the same thing occurs.
1:10:27
Unfortunately, the developing world is subject to this advertisement and these addicted foods and drugs as they move around the world.
1:10:36
In China, literally no one had diabetes 40 years ago.
1:10:42
You didn't even study it in school.
1:10:44
And now, people in China have the most number of people with diabetes in the world.
1:10:47
And there's no way of regulating that at a government level or there's no way because I feel I agree with you.
1:10:57
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 or the amount of artificial even even in speaking of plant-based foods, even the current like plant-based, you know, foods this they're not all healthy either.
1:11:19
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?
1:11:29
No, I think we will be there.
1:11:29
The idea that you can take a calf a cell from a calf not a calf but a cell.
1:11:37
If we can find an animal that never was shot with hormones.
1:11:42
More than 50% of all the drugs are shot into animals.
1:11:47
So, you might think you're that you're healthy and you're not taking things, but what you ate Yeah.
1:11:56
And so, but I think we'll have an entirely new food chain in 20 to 30 years.
1:12:02
If you look at companies, the market has adjusted.
1:12:05
And I wrote about it in the book.
1:12:09
So, at one time Kraft was selling between 90 and $100 this year.
1:12:17
I don't know where it is today. Call it 35 to 40. Wow.
1:12:22
Nestle announced that they were going to become a health company.
1:12:28
What was the market reaction, social media reaction?
1:12:31
First, they give you diabetes.
1:12:35
Then, they're going to deal with it. They're a 360.
1:12:37
They create their own problems, et cetera.
1:12:39
So, Nestle went out and hired a CEO not from the consumer packaging, but a CEO who had worked in health care.
1:12:49
And they They their candy business in the United States.
1:12:53
They sold other businesses and they focused here on healthy businesses, etc.
1:12:59
And Nestlé has flourished.
1:13:02
So, the market is willing to pay more for that.
1:13:05
And yes, the first iterations of plant-based diet to make it taste we don't know if they're any better with all the ingredients they put in.
1:13:18
But, the ability to grow the same as your ability today 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.
1:13:37
And then give it energy, light, energy, nutrients, and you can see today in a little Petri dish these cells beating like they're a heart.
1:13:50
And so, we'll be able to create pure foods, not contaminate the planet in the future.
1:14:00
And so, this is what technology's promises and that once again, that's why I wrote the book.
1:14:09
I'm You're busy, I'm busy.
1:14:09
It's not easy to write the book.
1:14:13
You've just finished a tour of more than 40 cities in the world on your new book.
1:14:19
And so, it's not easy to take the time.
1:14:21
The analogy I have made is there was this show in the United States called I Love Lucy.
1:14:26
And Lucille Ball was packaging chocolates that coming down the line.
1:14:33
And they were coming down faster than she could pack them.
1:14:35
So, she's putting them here, she's putting them in her mouth and everything.
1:14:38
What are you going to do?
1:14:41
So, my life and your life, there's plenty of things we're focused on.
1:14:46
I've probably given 50 speeches in the last month.
1:14:53
But, to set the time down was my concern here that we have a chance.
1:15:00
Technology has given us a chance for the solution for all these life-threatening diseases.
1:15:05
We estimate there's 10,000 life-threatening diseases that looked at.
1:15:17
And there's solutions for 500.
1:15:17
So, there's a lot of work to do.
1:15:23
And we are on the verge with the use of technology having the ability to do this. Thank you, Mike.
1:15:29
Everyone has been listening and watching.
1:15:31
The book is called FasterCures: Accelerating the Future of Health.
1:15:36
Grab a copy right now if you're listening.
1:15:38
And I hope that this is one of those episodes that you'll share with a family member or friend of yours that may really want to listen to it.
1:15:46
And I want you to share your insights on social media, whether you're on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Share the clips. Share the messages.
1:15:55
Share the insights of wisdom that Mike shared 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.
1:16:10
Mike, we end every On Purpose episode with a final five.
1:16:12
These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum for each question.
1:16:19
And so, Michael Milken, these are your final five.
1:16:22
The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever received? Do the research. Nice. Great answer. Never had that before.
1:16:30
Second question is, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?
1:16:33
You'll learn it from the newspaper.
1:16:38
Uh question number three, what do you do first thing in the morning and the last thing before you go to bed?
1:16:42
I say hello to my wife and good morning. And I give her a kiss.
1:16:49
Before we go to bed at night.
1:16:49
We've known each other 65 years.
1:16:51
We've been married for 55 years.
1:16:53
And so that's what I do first thing in the morning and last thing. That's beautiful.
1:16:58
Question number four about that, what would be your number one lesson from the 65 years you've been together?
1:17:06
If you had to say there's one thing that has been the most powerful lesson you've learned in love, what would that be?
1:17:11
See the world through someone else's eyes. Mhm. Great advice. Great advice. I love that.
1:17:19
Uh fifth and final question, if you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be?
1:17:26
Treat others as you would like to be treated. Beautiful.
1:17:29
Mike Mel can everyone, thank you so much for listening to On Purpose.
1:17:32
I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
1:17:34
I hope you'll share it and I'll hope you'll join us for the next one. Thank you so much, Mike.
1:17:40
Thank you so much for being Thanks. Good to see you.
1:17:41
generous and insightful today.
1:17:43
It's been a joy talking to you. Likewise. Thank you so much.
1:17:47
If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr.
1:17:49
Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
1:17:54
If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain.
1:18:01
You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged.