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

32:34I would say to you I probably had one of the least healthy diets in the world until that day I was diagnosed. 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. So, but I could not save my father's life from melanoma.

33:32And 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 so that my two children, my wife Lori and I, two children at the time, would know my father before he died.

34:21And 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. 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.

35:17And 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 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 sequence at the time and so that was a focus that I focused on.

36:23And 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. 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, 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?

37:19So 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 wily to deploy because we don't know, as we create a new human race, whether this is good or bad. 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.

38:18That was a good idea, but unless you had access to billions of dollars, you could never access that idea. If you were Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would change and we could drive the cost over time from$12 a minute to talk to India to zero, you needed billions of 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. 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.

39:14There 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. 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.

40:02well 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, 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.

40:54and 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 PhD MD at UCLA on the program and the people in charge of the program and said, you know, Mike, we're going to lose credibility if we have this soft science ideas that there's some relationship between what you eat and whether you're getting cancer. And they fought me and told me it would degrade what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer research group in the world. And I eventually reached a compromise with him.

41:43he 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 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.

42:39Later, they're accepted, well accepted, and anyone could have thought of that idea. One thing I've been reflecting on lately is how even the smallest choices can create a big impact over time. Whether it's choosing to spend a quiet night in to recharge or making a decision that brings you closer to a long-term goal. Those moments of intention really matter. And when it comes to the choices we make with our money, that same mindset applies. I've learned that saving for the things that truly matter, like your first home or a reliable car, starts with small, thoughtful decisions. That's why I appreciate what State Farm is doing with their personal price plan.

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44:41If you're listening right now and feeling that pull to grow in your career or make a bigger impact, Walden is designed exactly for that. For over 50 years, they've helped working adults get the W. with the knowledge, confidence and real skills to create meaningful change. What makes Walden stand out is how flexible it is. With Walden's tempo learning, you're in control. No set weekly deadlines, no rigid schedules, just a pace that actually fits your life. And everything you learn is practical. You're working through real-world scenarios that prepare you to make a positive difference in your community and beyond.

45:18You're also guided by faculty who've lived the work themselves, scholars and practitioners with real experience this is the kind of opportunity that reminds you it's never too late to go after what you want if you've been waiting for the right moment this is it head to waldenu.edu and take that first step walden university set a course for change certified to operate by chev yeah no 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 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?

46:22So I had entered the field in the early 1970s for 20 years, but I was primarily a donor, etc. And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life. so I in 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 teamwork partnership so I wrote about I went to this MD Anderson and the two leading cancer centers off and on rated in the world were either MD Anderson Center 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.

47:17And 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 them not to the patient. 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 MD Anderson to talk to someone at Memorial Sloan Kettering via technology than someone else to find at MD Anderson.

48:12But we told them that we couldn't fund any of their research unless they shared their data. Now, some people told me, well, I have to wait for Nature or Sell magazine to come out. The story will be out in a year. And we told them that their research was so important that they didn't need any of our funds. Our funds were only for those who 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.

49:01And I wrote in the book a little bit about an individual who was being recruited to make better apples. And I was successful in convincing him that we could live and still eat the same apples for maybe the next 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 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 Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus Warren Buffett, which is one of the largest foundation today in the world.

49:57The 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 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 morphos.

50:51And 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, 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, 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.

51:52And the leaders in the world in the 22nd century will be the leaders and the 21st century in bioscience. 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. 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.

53:10Well, 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 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 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.

53:55I mean, you make it sound so seamless, but I would love to know, how challenging is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level? 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 increased 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, 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?

54:44Do you have a track record? so we had a track record of success to build on and and we didn't ask them to stand down for their lifetime we just asked them to stand down for a few months here so we could focus like a laser our attention on this issue eliminating cancer is a cause of death and bringing in the leading economist in the world was worth$50 trillion to the U.S. 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. I remember one of the world's leading chemist, was about to be given a job as the dean of the most prestigious university in the world, but he would leave the laboratory.

55:46So I went and asked him, who's running Warner Brothers? At the time, it was two friends of mine, Terry Semel and Bob Daly. 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. 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.

56:46You're now 31 or 32 or 33 years old. You've gone to medical school. You got a PhD. You had fellowships, residencies, internships, 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 and they each are going to work for 40 years by funding them at two and a half million dollars 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.

58:14It'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, 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 that we have genes, et cetera. 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 can wait another 12 years, it's ridiculous. 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.

59:16And 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. 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.

1:00:12And they also have a belief in health care, not based on modern technology, 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, 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.

1:01:11When I went to the northern Amazon, northwest Amazon, here I am dressed head to toe and I wrote about it all in black and our Indian guide has a pair of shorts on and that's it he's immune to everything I'm not immune to anything and he takes me over 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. 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.

1:02:08And 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. 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? 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.

1:03:00in 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 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.

1:03:56He's participated in our Faster Cures effort. He's bigger than life. His smile is bigger than life. It's 32 years later. Where do we see it the most when you say where are the results? Look at sub-Sahara Africa. Two-thirds of everyone with HIV and AIDS lived in sub-Sahara Africa. If you wanted to go work there, they wanted you to work. 30 years ago, they paid you compact pay out of fear that you could be infected. Well, today, the chance of a woman with proper care passing AIDS onto her children is 2%, down from 95%. So the population of sub-Saharan Africa is growing. Children that were orphans are no longer born with HIV.

1:04:52People with HIV and AIDS are living today, not dying. And what did we just see in the last three years during COVID? The leaders in the state that you and I are in today, California, told Californians that one in two Californians are going to get the disease in the next three months. 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. And it was only 63 days between the sequencing of the virus and the first human being getting a vaccine.

1:05:5863 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, 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 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?

1:07:12How 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. There's a lot of 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.

1:08:05Now, for a person in India who doesn't eat a hamburger, it doesn't make any difference. 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. 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. A friend of mine put up the money to do a book called Drawdown.

1:08:58And 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 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.

1:09:53And 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 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 move 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, there are now people that have had organ transplants from others take these drugs to prevent rejection by their own immune system.

1:11:00Well, 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 bones. He didn't do any invasive surgery. He put a little thing on your body and it did everything. Well, that's what non-invasive focus ultrasound can do. So the promise, the promise is with us today.

1:11:48And so we're just trying to get a mission here going to make sure we stay with our efforts, that the world mobilize. 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. Having the right people in your corner to support you is a great form of self-care. Just like the friend who shows up to a housewarming party when you get that dream home, celebrates your big promotion, or goes with you on a walk to clear your mind, State Farm is there to help you feel supported.

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1:13:11brought to you by Walden University. If you're listening right now and feeling that pull to grow in your career or make a bigger impact, Walden is designed exactly for that. For over 50 years, they've helped working adults get the W with the knowledge, confidence and real skills to create meaningful change. What makes Walden stand out is how flexible it is. With Walden's tempo learning, you're in control. No set weekly deadlines, no rigid schedules, just a pace that actually fits your life. And everything you learn is practical. You're working through real world scenarios that prepare you to make a positive difference in your community and beyond.

1:13:51You're also guided by faculty who've lived the work themselves, scholars and practitioners with real experience. This is the kind of opportunity that reminds you it's never too late to go after what you want. If you've been waiting for the right moment, this is it. Head to waldenu.edu and take that first step. Walden University, set a course for change. Certified to operate by Chev. This episode of On Purpose is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. I believe that travel is one of the greatest gifts that we've ever been given. And Chase Sapphire Reserve has been my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations.

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1:15:14Discover more with Chase Sapphire Reserve at chase.com forward slash sapphire reserve. cards issued by jp morgan chase bank na member fdic subject to credit approval terms apply i'm not a didn't want to compete with you but we launched podcast 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 Gorski at J &J. Most of the people couldn't, but you can listen to the conversation. Two, by talking to them, I can encourage them maybe to take action they wouldn't have taken.

1:16:11So when I first spoke to Alex Gorski in April on this podcast, he was talking about maybe going into clinical trials in January of 21. And so my comment was, why not July? Which he ended up doing, and it was approved by January. And so the third effort was to see how people were coping. So if I talk to the largest employers in the world, who had employees all over the world, what were they doing in China, Italy, et cetera, that you might be doing in the United States. If you were responsible for thousands or tens of thousands, or in the case of a Walmart millions of employees, what are you going to be doing?

1:16:58And when I spoke to the CEO of Target, he told me that he was protecting their employees. 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 podcast 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 and the smell of certain kind of trees, sequoia, cedar trees, seemed to energize my immune system.

1:17:57And 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 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. So I don't know. but my view was we don't use all of our senses. And we understand one of the things that Ayurveda brought me 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.

1:18:56I visited a man in China, Xi 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, 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.

1:19:59So when I was in India, if India is playing Pakistan in cricket, nothing else is going on. Okay. They could be arguing and fighting about anything, but you have to take time out for that game. And so there are things that focus your attention. And part of this effort is this concept of healthy human, healthy planet. it. 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 in the 1970s, 60s, 80s, way out there.

1:21:06Okay, but today I'm visiting with you today. I'm the happiest guy to do a podcast with you. 30 years later, because I changed, the world changed. and going forward we're going to 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 okay so as i'm big 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 we 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 when i found most people don't want to be lectured on their diet or what they should eat or not eat.

1:22:22And 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. 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. And there's no way of regulating that at a government level or there's no way, because I feel, I agree with you.

1:23:16I 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 in speaking of plant-based foods, even the current like plant-based foods, they're not all healthy either. So is there no way to make sure that at a higher level that we don't even get access to this or is it just a discipline conversation? 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.

1:23:57if we can find an animal that never was shot with hormones more than 50 percent of all the drugs are shot into animals so you might think you're 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, Kraft was selling between$90 and$100 a share. I don't know where it is today. Call it$35 to$40. Wow.

1:24:42Nestle 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. They're a 360. They create their own problems, et cetera. 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, et cetera. And Nestle has flourished. So the market 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.

1:25:35But 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. 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. 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.

1:26:36And 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 going to 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 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.

1:27:24We estimate there's 10 ,000 life-threatening diseases that 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 thank you mike everyone has been listening and watching the book is called foster 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.

1:28:18Because I think this conversation on improving our own personal health is so needed, especially looking at how the world is trying to find new innovative ways to help us deal with it. Mike, we end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These questions have to 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? Do the research. That's great answer. Never had that before. Second question is, what is the worst advice you've ever heard or received? You'll learn it from the newspaper.

1:28:56Question number three, what do you do first thing in the morning and the last thing before you go to bed? 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. 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? See the world through someone else's eyes.

1:29:34Great advice. Great advice. I love that. Fifth and final question. If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? Treat others as you would like to be treated. 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'll 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. Likewise. Thank you so much. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr.

1:30:09Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain. 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. This episode of On Purpose is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve. I believe that travel is one of the greatest gifts that we've ever been given. And Chase Sapphire Reserve has been my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. When I use my Chase Sapphire Reserve card, I get eight times the points on all the purchases I make through Chase Travel.

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