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

Have you ever had a brilliant idea or solution, only to find resistance when trying to implement it? In this enlightening episode, we welcome a visionary leader who empowers companies to create a backbone for modern financial markets worldwide and revolutionize our take on science and modern medicine. Today, I welcome Mike Milken, who has been uniquely successful in creating value, whether measured in lives saved (Fortune magazine called him “The Man Who Changed Medicine”), students inspired (Forbes said he is an education visionary), or jobs created. Beginning in 1969, he and his colleagues financed thousands of companies that collectively created millions of jobs. Join us as we explore the journey of turning dreams into reality, despite the initial challenges and obstacles. In the face of life-threatening illness, what will you choose to focus on? Together, we delve into the realm of cancer research and the importance of providing support to drive groundbreaking advancements, uncover the fascinating world of gut health and the profound impact it has on our immunity, the profound connection between personal health and the well-being of the world we inhabit, and we ponder whether laboratory-grown food is a sustainable, long-term change for the betterment of our planet. Now, envision a future where pure, uncontaminated food can be created - how would this impact our lives and the world around us? In this interview with Mike Milken, you'll learn: How science has evolved over the years The years of scientific research on cancer treatment and other illnesses The importance of organic food intake How we can be more proactive in taking care of our health How impactful investors are in financing economic and science based companies Tune in on this thought-provoking journey as we unlock the wisdom and potential to create positive change in ourselves and the world. Let us embrace our innate ability to envision and manifest a healthier, harmonious future for all. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 00:35 “Just because you had a solution doesn’t mean that people will adopt it.” 04:17 Empowering companies financially to create a backbone for the modern financial markets around the world 10:08 It was an idea, it was a dream, but it wasn’t a reality yet 16:47 If you’re true to yourself and you know the issues, you can restart your life with a different path 23:19 Revenge and bitterness are unproductive emotions, they become your prison 26:13 What do you focus on when you encounter a life threatening illness? 37:08 Providing support for cancer research and convincing people to help with the research 44:57 The evolution of intensive research on gut health and how our immunity develops in accordance to the environment you live in 53:30 What will you do if you can cure your disease in your own lifetime? 57:58 Would you eat food grown in a laboratory? Is this a substantial long-term change? 01:00:46 Your immune system is smarter than all the scientists in the world, but something in your body is turning it off 01:06:17 A healthy human makes a healthy planet. How do we attain this? 01:11:22 What will you do when you have the ability to create pure food and not contaminate the planet? 01:16:10 Mike on Final Five Episode Resources: https://milkeninstitute.org/ https://www.mikemilken.com/ https://www.mff.org/ Faster Cures: Accelerating the Future of Health See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Orange Theory Fitness. One of the best investments you can make is in your own strength. The choices you make today can help shape how you feel for years to come. Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage and studio for details. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in.

• 0:42Jay Shetty?

  Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process, and once something sells, Vinted creates a prepaid shipping label for you. And the best part, there are no seller fees, so you keep what you earn. It's a simple way to clear out your closet, be less wasteful, and maybe make some extra money along the way. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. Download the Vinted app for free to start selling with no seller fees, so you keep every dollar you earn. This episode is brought to you by AG1. Are you feeling September reset too?

• 1:25Jay Shetty?

  Shorter days, longer to-do lists, earlier alarms, all those routines you promised yourself you'd pick back up. It can feel like your whole life is recalibrating. And when everything around you is changing, it helps to have a few things you can rely on. AG1 Next Gen is one of those easy habits to keep. It's the clinically-backed, comprehensive daily health drink that supports your gut health, energy production, and foundational nutrition all in one scoop. AG1's ingredients are sourced from quality partners for absorption, potency, and nutrient density to deliver the foundational nutrition your body needs. And alongside a proper diet, AG1 Next Gen meets 94% of nutrient requirements,

• 2:09Jay Shetty?

  and it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com/onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com/onpurpose.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  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. And you can see today, these cells beating like they're a heart.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  The bestselling author and host. The number one healthy wellness podcast.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

• 2:49Jay Shetty?

  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 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, and so much more. I'm really honored to have on the podcast Michael Milken, or Mike Milken, who's been uniquely successful in creating

• 3:28Jay Shetty?

  value, 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 1970s and paralleled his business career, expanded in 1982 with the establishment of the Milken Family Foundation. After two decades of actively supporting medical research, Michael became a patient in 1993, 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.

• 4:08Jay Shetty?

  And today, Mike's 2023 memoir, Faster Cures: Accelerating the Future of Health Documents, his lifetime of work in the field is out 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 Milken. Mike, thank you for being here.

• 4:29Speaker 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.

• 4:38Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, and I want to start off by saying a big thank you to James Morgan, who introduced me to you way back in 2017 in London, when I first met you and I spoke at the Milken 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, 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 so much.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:31Jay Shetty?

  Thank you, thank you. I'm very grateful. 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 has had a big impact on who you are today or how you are the way you are today? 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?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And come, 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 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 explored data and information.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And I'd say the first major event was discovering that my father 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 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.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Well, a few years later, there was a solution, and there was a vaccine created, two people worked on it, and it 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 United States called The Ed Sullivan Show that we used to watch. And more than a year after it was available, less than 1% of every teenager in America had been vaccinated.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  And this individual's name was Elvis Presley. And because it was okay for Elvis, afterwards, within one year, 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. Two, the fact that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt the country was obviously proven wrong. Numerous people were affected by it, but I think at the peaks, only 62,000 people. And this has repeated itself throughout history

• 9:14Speaker 01

  of people telling you the world is coming to an end. It's not going to come to an end, and science coming to the rescue.

• 9:23Jay Shetty?

  Wow, yeah, incredible. I'm so excited to dive into so many of those ideas that you just mentioned there 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 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?

• 10:00Speaker 01

  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 up. It was a catastrophe if you read the headlines in the United States at the time. It was the middle of the Cold War. 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 11 years old, but that was my plan.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  And my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a leader in Nobel Prize winners in the sciences. And I was preparing someday to run the space program.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Then I was in Los Angeles, where we are today, during something that became known as the Watts Riots. It was August 11th, 1965. 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 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.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And I decided to go back and figure out why this was occurring, when I went back to Berkeley, and began to study credit. And very similar to when I was younger, I discovered everything that people said about credit was wrong. It didn't make any difference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve, and what they were saying was inaccurate. And so I set on a path. I had to give up my dream at that time of the space program, to begin working on what I might have called the "democrization of capital." And I pursued that during this period of time, from 1965, for the next 20 to 25 years.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  So, that was not my path, but the studying and what I had done as an undergrad, and then as a grad student, my decision to "go to Wall Street", was really to redirect the access to capital, have a fundamental change. And yes, in the next 30 years, 62 million jobs in the United States were created. There's always a backlash. As a physics major, for every force, there's resistance. And so, changing the financial system at that time, many people wished that I didn't exist. The idea that you were a large company and you had access to capital and the others didn't.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  So there were 500 investment-grade companies and tens of millions of non-investment-grade companies. Well, once you empowered them and created financial markets, we discovered 62 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 the basis of modern financial markets around the world. But it's not, it is not unusual. At one of our scientific retreats in the first part of this century, I was in the back

• 13:51Speaker 01

  of the room and I invited two young people from Australia to come and speak. And they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong. Everything they were telling you about ulcers. And these two senior scientists I had, they were in the back of the room. One turned to the other and said, "Who are these yobos? They didn't even go to a good school." Well, four years later, these yobos won a Nobel Prize. 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.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And it goes all the way back to my little almanac and discovering my father had polio.

• 14:42Jay Shetty?

  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 the word "study" a few times in your first few answers. And I think there's this big difference between academic study and patent study. And I find that the most successful people in the world are great at studying patents. It's not really about the academic study. 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

• 15:27Jay Shetty?

  understanding the difference. Because I think we hit the word study, but when you say the word study, you mean something else.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 16:15Speaker 01

  For 20 years, the handwriting has been on the wall. The world did not open up to it until the last short period of time here. But the birth rate in Northern 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 70 years ago in the United States. China's birth rate has dropped so low that the number of children born in China last year was less than 10 million. So you think about a country of 1.4 billion, but of average life expectancy, taking those

• 16:59Speaker 01

  that live to 100 and averaging with those that die young, is 75. 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. And so as people think about things, we've had more people dying in Japan now for a very long period of time. Then are born, and so they have a 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.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  This has been going on for a long period of time. And so when do you see it? And so about 20, 30 years ago, became quite concerned because it appeared to us that the future where the children were going to be born was in sub-Saharan 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-Saharan Africa? And today, in 2023, more children are born in Nigeria than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia, by a substantial amount.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And more than twice as many children are born in just Nigeria than the United States. So people are looking at where you are here. 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, you were measuring change. And then if you had a few of them, you 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, do the systems that currently exist

• 19:09Speaker 01

  fit where the world is going? I then, if I had 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 cancer, or is it a fast-growing? In the case of melanoma, it doubled every month. If it was advanced, so a billion cancer cells won it. 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

• 19:53Speaker 01

  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. So, the question is, when, how early do you see that? And one of the exciting things about medicine today is in the 1980s, 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, might be there, but I can't find it. Now, today, we now have tests that can measure the waste, the DNA leakage in your blood. So, you can find a life-threatening disease today when there's just a very small amount

• 20:38Speaker 01

  of cells in your body, long before you could ever find it in a mammogram, or a CT, or an MRI. And so, therefore, dealing with these life-threatening 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 billionth. It was an idea, it was a dream, but it wasn't a reality.

• 21:07Jay Shetty?

  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 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. But, to me... I'm fascinated by A, how that happened for you, but B, more importantly, how you use that time because the comeback, now looking backwards, 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."

• 21:50Jay Shetty?

  I just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone who had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo, ends up having to go to prison. Walk us through, first of all, how did you end up there? 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 now looking backwards.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  Well, I think that issue, there was an unusual period of time. And once again, a complete revolution in 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 again. 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 10 or 20 years, to me, I had to find a way to live again.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  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, et cetera, to live again. And it was a short period of time in the scheme of things. When I think of the diversion of less than two years, if I go back to World War II, 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 that I had to find a solution to bring it to an end.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  And, 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 wherever it might be. And yes, there was disruption in the force.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  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 nobility would go to the king or the queen and say, "We can't compete anymore. What are we going to do?" But the old financial system didn't really meet the future needs of the world. And so, yes, I spent time thinking. I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education. How did you spend your days for those two years? I spent my time thinking about the world.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  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 interrupt those interactions. It didn't stop our philanthropic efforts, etc. I did get 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 with my family.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  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 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, when I was young, no one made long-distance calls, because it was $10 to $12 a minute to call another country. So in the 1970s, if I wanted to speak to Mumbai, I had to be prepared. It was $10 to $12 a minute. So those calls had to be short.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  And that was a period of time, and 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 gonna be okay? Are your relationships? My wife and I had known each other since we were 12. She knew who I was, I knew who she was. My business associates, thousands of them, knew who I was, knew the issues.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  And so, it wasn't a situation where I felt separated from the world. You know, and therefore, communication still existed. A telephone existed. You weren't allowed to have a cellphone, 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, you know, whether it was Solzhenitsyn or others, or Shcherinsky, 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.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And one of them wrote that he knew he had one then, because there was nothing else that they could take away. And so, I think having inner strength is extremely important during that period. But 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 and World War II, so that we could be free, my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.

• 28:18Jay Shetty?

  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 night 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 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.

• 29:02Jay Shetty?

  It can cool down and 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. I've never experienced sleep like this. Invest in the rest you deserve with the Eight Sleep Pod. Go to eightsleep.com/purpose and save $150 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. That's the best offer you'll find, but you must visit eightsleep.com/purpose for $150 off.

• 29:46Jay Shetty?

  Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

• 29:54Jay Shetty?

  I think it's incredible amount of inner strength, not only to be able to navigate those two years, even though you are saying it didn't feel that long. In the bigger scheme of things, I still believe that there is such a resilience there. But the way you came back.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, let's just talk about Mandela. You're talking more than 20 years.

• 30:13Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, 27.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Okay, and did he come back bitter? No. Okay, and in South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia went. So 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 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,

• 30:58Speaker 01

  who could carry on our mission in 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. And 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. If he was stuck in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.

• 31:39Jay Shetty?

  I am so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela. There's a beautiful statement of 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." 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.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  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...

• 32:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:43Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. I want to talk about your switch from financial world 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 was 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?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I would say to you, I probably had one of the least healthy diets in the world until that day I was diagnosed.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  But I experienced this with my father's death in the 1970s. 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. And by the mid 1970s, I had become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas. 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.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  So, but I could not save my father's life from melanoma.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And it had a significant view here that it was the first time in my life 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, 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. So I had made the decision then to move back to California.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  So that my two children, my wife Lori and I, two children at the time, would know my father before he died. 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 10 relatives to cancer and my diagnosis was worse than theirs. So obviously, I'm now reflecting, what am I going to do? And when it looked like I had 18 months to live, you have to figure out, what could I do different than they did?

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And the first decision I made is I would focus on anything that's reversible. So for two years, I did 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 diet. And as I explored the world of Chi medicine in China, or Ayurveda medicine in India,

• 36:17Speaker 01

  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 would really focus on Ayurveda medicine. And in the 5,000-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 I was going to change my second brain, even though there was no proof, you couldn't

• 37:00Speaker 01

  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 disease.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Do the least they can do at day one.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  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 would have had a better chance. And so, once I had driven my cancer burden to what appeared to be zero,

• 37:39Speaker 01

  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, that how could I accelerate science? So first, I could try to change my body. 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.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  And so, I set off on this journey of how to accelerate science. 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. I was going to try to attract the best and most talented people in the 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 to billions of dollars, you could never access that idea.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  If you were 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, you needed billions of dollars. So the same focus of 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.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Many organizations have people that have real talent, but they don't act as 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. 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, provided them capital and advice, and helped create teams for them.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  So that was the revolution that began in 93 in 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 1993, you couldn't prove anything. 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. And in places that we had different diets,

• 41:11Speaker 01

  fast-food diet, it was far more. So yes, 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 1993. And Francis Collins, who I met in 93, set off on a journey to sequence. It wasn't until many, many years later and billions of dollars that they completed that. And I'll never forget, in 1994, 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,

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Ph.D., M.D. at UCLA, on the program. And the people in charge of the program said, "You know, Mike, we're going to lose credibility."

• 42:05Speaker 01

  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 research group in the world. And I eventually reached a compromise with him. He would get to speak at lunch. 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 and what you eat and what you drink and your health, you could just sit far away and weren't have to.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  25 years later, Jay, 25 years later, I went to our scientific retreat. I was not in charge of the programming. And maybe 20% of every session over four days was cancer and your microbiome. 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. Later, they're accepted, well accepted, and anyone could have thought of that idea.

• 43:31Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. I know how important every hire is for a business. If you need to make the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. Indeed sponsored jobs helps find quality candidates when you need the most. You can reach who you need based on whatever criteria you're looking for, like skills, certifications, or location. In fact, people are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast.

• 44:17Jay Shetty?

  Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This episode is brought to you by Amtrak. You know that feeling when you're already tired and you haven't even gotten there yet? That's where Amtrak comes in. Leave the driving behind and settle into a comfortable seat with plenty of room to stretch out. Catch up on work with wifi, grab a snack at the cafe car, or just sit back and enjoy your favourite podcast. Choose a cellar or North East Regional and get there without the stress of getting there. Visit amtrak.com to plan your next trip.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 45:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, no, it's so fascinating because I feel like coming from an Indian background and my wife being an Ayurvedic health counsellor 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, 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?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  So I had entered the field in the early 1970s for 20 years, but I was primarily a donor, et cetera. And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life. So I, in 93, decided I couldn't help others if I couldn't help myself. And I first had to survive. But there were those three elements. One,

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Teamwork, partnership. So I wrote about, I went to this M.D. Anderson, and the two leading cancer centers off and on, rated in the world, were either M.D. Anderson or Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York. 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 if we're trying to accelerate research?" And he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan-Kettering as a competitor. And I told him, "Not to the patient."

• 47:13Speaker 01

  So therefore, once we promised funding for research in this field, we would only fund if you shared all your data. And I eventually got on my board, Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and we worked on, this is early technology with computers and connecting, that we would connect all of our researchers digitally together. And it might be easier for someone at M.D. Anderson to talk to someone at Memorial Sloan-Kettering via technology than someone else to find at M.D. Anderson. But we told them that we couldn't fund any of their research unless they shared their data.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Now, some people told me, "Well, I have to wait for Nature or Cell 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 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 to stay in the field. And I wrote in the book a little bit about

• 48:42Speaker 01

  an individual who was being recruited to make better apples.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  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. 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 10 of them, nor Bill Gates and Melinda

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus Warren Buffett, which is one of, is the largest foundation today in the world. The amount of money they have is small relative to the government. So if you can redirect the 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 were not able as a country to increase

• 50:11Speaker 01

  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 500 different diseases constantly appealing for more funds. 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, and there wasn't a focused request. And so, beginning two years later in 95, I went to the various disease-specific groups and said, if you will stand down...

• 50:57Speaker 01

  We will have 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, et cetera, 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.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  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. There's been an incremental $500 billion in basic research spent. It laid the groundwork for what we did to get a quick solution for COVID-19. Every disease has benefited from it. The financial commitment was $10 million in the march. Today, there's a $500 billion payoff.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:48Jay Shetty?

  Well, 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 laid out these, you know, 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 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 effort, time, energy.

• 53:34Jay Shetty?

  I mean, you make it sound so seamless, but I would love to know like, how challenging is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  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. If I increase funding for diabetes, I had to take it away from someone else. And so getting them to accept that they were unsuccessful and to stand down and have faith,

• 54:14Speaker 01

  it's somewhat based on past performance and the financial investment they want in business. They want to know, okay, what's your past performance? Do you have a track record? So we had a track record of success to build on 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.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Eliminating cancer as a cause of death and bringing in the leading economists in the world was worth $50 trillion to the US economy in the early 1990s, multiples of what the economy is. 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.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  I remember one of the world's leading chemists was about to be given a job as the dean of the most prestigious university 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 Semel and Bob Daley. He had no clue who was running. I asked him, "Has he ever heard of Steven Spielberg?" And he says, "Yes, he's heard of Steven 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.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  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. When you think of young scientists, the hundreds or thousands that I've dealt with, you graduated high school, you were 17 or 18 years old. You're now 31 or 32 or 33 years old. You've gone to medical school, you got a PhD, you had fellowships, residencies, internships,

• 56:38Speaker 01

  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 match for $100,000 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 25 young scientists...

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And they each are going to work for 40 years. By funding them at $2.5 million for the first year, and each year, you've bought 1,000 years of their time. 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. It's very interesting. At the National Institutes of Health, the first age that you get an award is 43. If you look at who's won Nobel Prizes in Science,

• 58:05Speaker 01

  most people have won for an idea they had when they were within a few years of school. James Watson was in his 20s when he put forth this idea. We have genes, etc. You know, so many. Einstein, I think, was 23. 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.

• 58:44Speaker 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. And so I have spent more than 30 years working on this. The same thing we had worked on 40 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 that think India is like China.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  There were 23 or 24 million children born last year in India. There were 9 to 10 million born in China, more than twice as many children. Today, there are more than 200 million more children in India than in China. 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,

• 59:59Speaker 01

  but 5,000 years of anecdotal experience. So, yes, our theories that your gut have been proven to be true with modern sequencing technologies. 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,

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  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 5,000 years of experience of, if you did this, that happened. When I went to the northern Amazon, northwest Amazon,

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  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 and he says, well, we use this bush against malaria, and we use this for this. And he shows me this, and he says, 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 both look the same to me. Okay, both of them?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  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. 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? And the environmental movement, the effort here in healthy human, healthy planet, is totally interrelated.

• 1:02:09Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. 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? What are you pointing towards as successes or solutions?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Well, let's just talk 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 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 three years. That's based on her work. Well, unfortunately, many people died, but we didn't have 80 million people die. We had tens of thousands. And

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Today, he's a friend. He's participated in our Faster Cures effort. He's bigger than life. His smile is bigger than life.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  It's 32 years later. Where do we see it the most? When you say, "Where are the results?" Look at Sub-Saharan Africa. Two-thirds of everyone with HIV and AIDS lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. If you wanted to go work there, they wanted you to work. 30 years ago, they paid you compat pay out of fear that you could be infected. Well, today, the chance of a woman with proper care passing AIDS on to her children is 2% down from 95. So, the population of Sub-Saharan Africa is growing.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  Children that were orphans are no longer born with HIV. People with HIV and AIDS are living today, not dying. And what did we just see in the last three years during COVID?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  The leaders in the state that you and I are in today, California, told Californians that 1 in 2 Californians are going to get the disease in the next three months. 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. More than a million people died in America, more than 10 or 20 million worldwide. But it wasn't 50% of the population. It wasn't 10% of the population.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  And it was only 63 days between the sequencing of the virus and the first human being getting a vaccine. 63 days, nine weeks, not 10 years. And so, that is why I wrote the book. Okay, I wrote the book because we are on the verge... Of a total revolution, the same as I saw in finance, in healthcare today, with technology. And so it's time to put your foot on the accelerator and go faster.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Not time to ease up, because we think we have put into suspended animation this pandemic. And so that was my concern. There were these points of the March in 98. There was this point of the celebration of science in 2012. 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.

• 1:06:40Jay Shetty?

  Mike, 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 news and everything that we see around us.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Or things that 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. 70 to 80 billion animals 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, it doesn't make any difference.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Okay, but if we can grow 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 approved to allow this to occur. We needed to get the cost down. It used to be 30,000 an 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.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  A friend of mine put up the money to do a book called Drawdown. And Drawdown listed the 20 major factors that were changing our atmosphere and the environment the Earth is in. 10 of them relate to food, 10 of them relate to other things. And so we have a chance. And the environmental movement combined with the health movement. Science today can show you what happens. 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?

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Cauliflower, Brussels sprouts? These things are little Pac-Man, they're out there eating. Okay, carcinogens 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 1997. That your immune system is 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.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  And so he developed and won a Nobel Prize for the concept of checkpoint inhibitors. And we financed his work for 10 years in prostate cancer. It wasn't that effective. But the minute we moved to melanoma, the death rate has dropped by 50%. And so what he did is we turned off the switch in the cancer that turned off your immune system. The idea of growing your own organs.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  There 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 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 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-invasive surgery. When I watched Star Trek as a kid, the doctor

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Bones, he didn't do any invasive surgery. Put a little thing on your body and it did everything. Well, that's what non-invasive focused 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 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.

• 1:11:54Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected and more engaged with your drive. So you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't.

• 1:12:37Jay Shetty?

  Mazda, more of what matters to you. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is the chance to step outside of our routine. Travel is a way of slowing us down and shifting our perspective. And with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, every journey becomes even more rewarding. Earn four times the points on flights and hotels booked direct. Enjoy access to award-winning airport lounges, three times the points on dining, and reserve exclusive tables. Learn more at chase.com/sapphirereserve.

• 1:13:19Jay Shetty?

  Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A member FDIC. Subject to credit approval, terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. If you're talking about quality food, you can't forget Whole Foods Market, who've been holding themselves to the highest standards since they opened in 1980. That means you'll see thousands of organic products across their stores, from the produce department to the aisles. It also means you'll never see certain ingredients. They've banned artificial sweeteners and colors, high fructose corn syrup and more, so you can shop with peace of mind. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  I'm not a, didn't want to compete with you, but we launched podcasts, 125 of them. And the reason I launched them was threefold. 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. Anyone in the world could listen. I might be able to talk to the CEO of Alex Gorsky at J and J. Most 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 Gorsky in April on this podcast,

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  he was talking about maybe going into clinical trials in January of 21. And so my comment was, why not July?

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  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 talk to the largest employers in the world, who had employees all over the world, what were they doing in China, Italy, etc., 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, what are you going to be doing? And when I spoke to the CEO of Target, he told me that he was protecting their employees.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  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. And so how are you going to protect the kids? And how are you going to protect your workers? And so this had to be, had to be done in a short period of time. Today, I'm no longer doing podcasts. I'm deferring to you to tell 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,

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  and the smell of certain kind of 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 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.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  So I, I don't know. But my view was, we don't use all of our senses. And we understand one of the things that Ayurveda brought me.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Was understanding of so many different elements of touch. So I had a chance to see things that I never thought I would see in my life. I visited a man in China, G Doctor, who was over 90 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 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.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  And the first reaction was, they didn't even go to a good university. Why should we be listening to them? And then, a 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. So when I was in India, if India's 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

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  that game. And so, there are things that focus your attention. And part of this 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 30 years, I've gone from an extremely unhealthy diet, okay, to an extreme for the first nine years. I got my Ayurveda massages twice a week for nine years. And so I was willing to do things that I would have scoffed at.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  In the 1970s, 60s, 80s 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 gonna have to make more changes, more adoption of things. It's very hard. It's very hard. In the United States today, we now have this quote, "diabetes pill" that apparently controls your appetite and your weight.

• 1:20:13Jay Shetty?

  Ozempic, yeah.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a lot easier than having personal discipline. 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 he can eat 50 to 60 hot dogs and buns in that short period of time? I have no idea. But no hot dog was worth your life. But not every one. And what I've 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 winner or Elizabeth Blackburn about what sugar does to you.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  So what happened when Mexico put a tax on sugar? Or Chile 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 as they move around the world. In China, literally no one had diabetes 40 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.

• 1:21:38Jay Shetty?

  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, or the amount of artificial, even even in a, speaking of plant-based foods, even the current like plant-based, you know, foods, this, 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?

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  No, I think we will be there. The idea that you can take a calf, a cell from a calf, not a calf, but a cell. If we can find an animal that never was shot with hormones, more than 50% of all the drugs are shot into animals. So you might think that you're healthy and you're not taking things, but what you ate did. And so, but I think we'll have an entirely new food chain in 20 to 30 years. If you look at companies, the market has adjusted. And I wrote about it in the book. So at one time,

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Kraft was selling between $90 and $100 a share. I don't know where it is today. Call it 35 to 40.

• 1:23:08Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Nestle 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. There are 360. They create their own problems, etc. So Nestle 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. And Nestle has flourished. So the market

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  is willing to pay more for that. 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. But the ability to grow, the same as your ability

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  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. 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. And so, we'll be able to create pure foods, not contaminate the planet in the future. And so, this is what technology's promise is. And that, once again, that's why I wrote the book.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  I'm, you're busy, I'm busy. It's not easy to write the book. You've just finished a tour of more than 40 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 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 and everything. What are you gonna do? So my life and your life, there's plenty of things we're focused on. I've probably given 50 speeches in the last month.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  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 10,000 life-threatening diseases that Faster, our Center for Faster Cures, has looked at. And there's solutions for 500. 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.

• 1:26:18Jay Shetty?

  Thank you, Mike. Everyone who's 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. Share the clips, share the messages, 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.

• 1:26:59Jay Shetty?

  Mike, we end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum for each question. And so, Michael Milken, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best advice you've ever received?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Do the research.

• 1:27:17Jay Shetty?

  Nice, great answer. Never had that before. Second question is, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  You'll learn it from the newspaper.

• 1:27:27Jay Shetty?

  Question number three, what do you do first thing in the morning and the last thing before you go to bed?

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  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 65 years. We've been married for 55 years. And so that's what I do. First thing in the morning and last thing.

• 1:27:47Jay Shetty?

  That's beautiful. Question number four about that, what would be your number one lesson from the 65 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, what would that be?

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  See the world through someone else's eyes.

• 1:28:04Jay Shetty?

  Great advice. Great advice. I love that. Our fifth and final question. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be?

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  Treat others as you would like to be treated.

• 1:28:18Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Mike Milken, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to On Purpose. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope you'll share it and I hope you'll join us for the next one. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you so much for being so kind, generous and insightful today. It's been a joy talking to you.

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  Likewise.

• 1:28:34Jay Shetty?

  Thank you so much. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

  If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. 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.

• 1:29:00Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.