Today we can take your skim stam cell, turn it back to the day you were born, and tell it it's now a heart stem cell, and you can see today these cells beating like there are.

Today we can take your skim stam cell, turn it back to the day you were born, and tell it it's now a heart stem cell, and you can see today these cells beating like there are.

Heart the best selling author and the host the number one health and wellness.

Heart the best selling author and the host the number one health and wellness.

Podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty.

Podcast On Purpose with Jay 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.

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.

And so much more.

I'm really honored to have on the podcast Michael Milkin or Mike Milkin, who's been uniquely successful in creating value you, whether measured in lives saved or whether it's job created. Michael and his colleagues financed thousands of companies that collectively created millions of jobs Michael's philanthropy, which began in the nineteen seventies and paralleled his business career, expanded in nineteen eighty two with the establishment of the Milk and Family Foundation. After two decades of actively supporting medical research, Michael became a patient in nineteen ninety three when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We're going to be talking about that today. Over the last three decades, Michael has increased his focus on making the research process more effective and efficient, and today, Mike's twenty twenty three memoir, Faster Cures Accelerating the Future of Health, documents his lifetime of work in the field.

I'm really honored to have on the podcast Michael Milkin or Mike Milkin, who's been uniquely successful in creating value you, whether measured in lives saved or whether it's job created. Michael and his colleagues financed thousands of companies that collectively created millions of jobs Michael's philanthropy, which began in the nineteen seventies and paralleled his business career, expanded in nineteen eighty two with the establishment of the Milk and Family Foundation. After two decades of actively supporting medical research, Michael became a patient in nineteen ninety three when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We're going to be talking about that today. Over the last three decades, Michael has increased his focus on making the research process more effective and efficient, and today, Mike's twenty twenty three memoir, Faster Cures Accelerating the Future of Health, documents his lifetime of work in the field.

Is out.

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 Milk and Mike, thank you for being here.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Thank you, thank you. I'm very grateful.

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.

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.

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.

Childhood memory or an interaction with your parents, or an interaction with a friend or a teacher that you think has stayed with you.

I think when I was very young, I had this love of data and knowledge. My favorite book was the Almanac, and at night I'd have it under my pillow, take out a flashlight and read it. And my parents had these bridge clubs where adults would come over and come 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 explore data and information. 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 in to the world in the early nineteen fifties of what polio was, what occurred, the understanding of it, the fact that in nineteen fifty two it was declared an epidemic and the United States was worried that it would bankrupt the country, having to build iron lung hotels to keep people alive. Well, a few years later there was a solution, and there was a vaccine created. Two people worked on it and it 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 one percent of every teenager in America had been vaccinated. And this individual's name was Elvis Presley. And because it was okay for Elvis afterwards, within one year eighty percent were vaccinated, And so there was a lot to learn here from this one. Because you had a solution didn't mean people would adopt it. To the fact that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt the country was obviously proven wrong. Numerous people were affected by it, but I think at the peaks only sixty two thousand people. And this has repeated itself throughout history of people telling you the world is coming to an end, It's not going to come to end, and science coming to the rescue.

I think when I was very young, I had this love of data and knowledge. My favorite book was the Almanac, and at night I'd have it under my pillow, take out a flashlight and read it. And my parents had these bridge clubs where adults would come over and come 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 explore data and information. 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 in to the world in the early nineteen fifties of what polio was, what occurred, the understanding of it, the fact that in nineteen fifty two it was declared an epidemic and the United States was worried that it would bankrupt the country, having to build iron lung hotels to keep people alive. Well, a few years later there was a solution, and there was a vaccine created. Two people worked on it and it 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 one percent of every teenager in America had been vaccinated. And this individual's name was Elvis Presley. And because it was okay for Elvis afterwards, within one year eighty percent were vaccinated, And so there was a lot to learn here from this one. Because you had a solution didn't mean people would adopt it. To the fact that this was considered something that was going to bankrupt the country was obviously proven wrong. Numerous people were affected by it, but I think at the peaks only sixty two thousand people. And this has repeated itself throughout history of people telling you the world is coming to an end, It's not going to come to end, and science coming to the rescue.

Well, yeah, incredible.

Well, yeah, incredible.

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

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

I did not plan to go into the financial service business. I wanted to run the space program and I was totally infatuated. When Sputnik went out, it was a catastrophe if you read the headlines in the United States at the time. There was the middle of the Cold War. Now quote Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space. And I was very, very good in math and science, and I wrote a letter to the President of the United States told him I was ready to run the space program. Now I never really got a response. I was eleven years old, but that was my plan. And my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a leader and Nobel Prize winners and the sciences, and I was preparing someday to run the space program. Then I was in Los Angeles where we are today, during something that became known as the Watts Riots. It was August eleventh, nineteen sixty five, and Los Angeles was on fire, the city of dreams, the city of entertainment. I had just been in Berkeley, and we had the free speech movement six or seven months before, but this was different. The city was on fire, and I went and met a young African American man who told me he would never have a chance to borrow money to have a business. His father didn't because of the color of his skin. It seemed totally irrational to me, and I decided to go back and figure out why this was occurring. When I went back to Berkeley and began to study credit, and very similar to when I was younger, I discovered everything that people said about credit was wrong. It didn't make anydifference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve, and what they were saying was inaccurate. And so I sat on a path. I had to give up my dream at that time of the Space program to begin working on what I might have called the democrazation of capital, and I pursued that during this period of time from nineteen sixty five for the next twenty to twenty five years. So that was not my path, but the studying and what I had done as an undergrad and then as a grand student in my decision to quote go to Wall Street was really to redirect the access to capital, have a fundamental change, and yes, in the next thirty years, sixty two million jobs in the United States were created. There's always a backlash. As a physic major, for every force, there's resistance, and so changing the financial system at that time. Many people wish that I didn't exist, the idea that you were a large company and you had access to capital and the others didn't. So there were five hundred investment grade companies and tens of millions of non investment grade companies. Well, once you empower them and created financial markets, we discovered sixty two million jobs were created in non investment grade companies and minus four so there was a lot of change. Today there's hundreds of firms headed by people that work for me, And I would say it's those structures are the basis of modern financial markets around the world. But it's not it is not unusual. At one of our scientific retreats and the first part of this century, I was in the back of the room and I invited two young people from Australia to come and speak, and they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong, everything they were telling you about ulcers. And these two senior scientists I had there in the back of the room, one turned the other and said, who are these jobos? They didn't even go to a good school. Well four years later these jobos won a Nobel Prize. So challenging conventional wisdom and theory I think has been something I've tried to do is you try to move forward, create jobs, solve medical problems throughout my life, and it goes all the way back to my little almanac and discovering my father head polio.

I did not plan to go into the financial service business. I wanted to run the space program and I was totally infatuated. When Sputnik went out, it was a catastrophe if you read the headlines in the United States at the time. There was the middle of the Cold War. Now quote Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space. And I was very, very good in math and science, and I wrote a letter to the President of the United States told him I was ready to run the space program. Now I never really got a response. I was eleven years old, but that was my plan. And my plan was I went to Berkeley, which was a leader and Nobel Prize winners and the sciences, and I was preparing someday to run the space program. Then I was in Los Angeles where we are today, during something that became known as the Watts Riots. It was August eleventh, nineteen sixty five, and Los Angeles was on fire, the city of dreams, the city of entertainment. I had just been in Berkeley, and we had the free speech movement six or seven months before, but this was different. The city was on fire, and I went and met a young African American man who told me he would never have a chance to borrow money to have a business. His father didn't because of the color of his skin. It seemed totally irrational to me, and I decided to go back and figure out why this was occurring. When I went back to Berkeley and began to study credit, and very similar to when I was younger, I discovered everything that people said about credit was wrong. It didn't make anydifference if you're the Secretary of the Treasury, the head of the Federal Reserve, and what they were saying was inaccurate. And so I sat on a path. I had to give up my dream at that time of the Space program to begin working on what I might have called the democrazation of capital, and I pursued that during this period of time from nineteen sixty five for the next twenty to twenty five years. So that was not my path, but the studying and what I had done as an undergrad and then as a grand student in my decision to quote go to Wall Street was really to redirect the access to capital, have a fundamental change, and yes, in the next thirty years, sixty two million jobs in the United States were created. There's always a backlash. As a physic major, for every force, there's resistance, and so changing the financial system at that time. Many people wish that I didn't exist, the idea that you were a large company and you had access to capital and the others didn't. So there were five hundred investment grade companies and tens of millions of non investment grade companies. Well, once you empower them and created financial markets, we discovered sixty two million jobs were created in non investment grade companies and minus four so there was a lot of change. Today there's hundreds of firms headed by people that work for me, And I would say it's those structures are the basis of modern financial markets around the world. But it's not it is not unusual. At one of our scientific retreats and the first part of this century, I was in the back of the room and I invited two young people from Australia to come and speak, and they commented that everything you thought about ulcers was wrong, everything they were telling you about ulcers. And these two senior scientists I had there in the back of the room, one turned the other and said, who are these jobos? They didn't even go to a good school. Well four years later these jobos won a Nobel Prize. So challenging conventional wisdom and theory I think has been something I've tried to do is you try to move forward, create jobs, solve medical problems throughout my life, and it goes all the way back to my little almanac and discovering my father head polio.

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 pattern study. And I find that the most successful people in the world are great at studying patterns. It's not really about the academic study. Could you help break both of those down for us, because I feel like you're probably the best person to ask that question too. In genuinely understand the difference because I think we had the Wed study, but when you say the Wed study you mean something else.

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 pattern study. And I find that the most successful people in the world are great at studying patterns. It's not really about the academic study. Could you help break both of those down for us, because I feel like you're probably the best person to ask that question too. In genuinely understand the difference because I think we had the Wed study, but when you say the Wed study you mean something else.

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? For twenty 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 in Asia, Europe, the United States has dropped so significantly that whereas the population of the US is doubled, there are less children born today than there were seventy years ago in the United States. China's birth rate has dropped so low that the number of children born in China last year was less than ten million. So you think about a country of one point four billion, but of average life expectancy, taking those that live to one hundred and averaging with those that die young is seventy five. If you have ten million children born a year and you multiply it by seventy five, that's a population of seven hundred and fifty million, not a billion. Four And so as people think about things, We've had more people dying in Japan now for a very long period of time than are born, and so they have decreasing population. In most of the developed worlds, the birth rate is below replacement. But this has not been going on for since the pandemic. This has been going on for a long period of time, and so when do you see it? And so about twenty thirty years ago, became quite concerned because it appeared to us that the future where the children were going to be born was in Sub Sahara Africa, and the rest of the world as a whole might be decreasing in terms of population. So what were the opportunities going to be for the children of Sub Sahara Africa? And today, in twenty twenty three, more children are born in Nigeria than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia by a substantial amount, and more than twice as many children are born and Geria than the United States. So people are looking at where you are here now. When I had my little ALMANACX, I was too young to know that if you matched one almanac against another almanac, you were actually getting the first derivative. You were measuring change, and then if you had a few of them, you were measuring the rate of change. And so I think when answering your question, you have to look at the broad social implications and what is occurring. Then you have to ask yourself to the systems that currently exist fit where the world is going. I then if I had four almanacs, could calculate the second derivative, the rate of change, and I would say this is prevalent. In medicine, you could be diagnosed with cancer, is it a slow growing cranzer or instead of fast growing And the case of melanoma, it doubled every month if it was advanced. So a billion cancer sales ten months later are a trillion. Other cancers are very slow growing, so you could take your time to address it. And so understanding the rate of change and today what's happening in the world and where the children are born, and the facts that they're going to need opportunities, they're going to need jobs, or we're going to see one to two billion people on the move. So the question is when how early do you see that? And one of the exciting things about medicine today is in the nineteen eighties, there was this idea that everything was in your blood. Well, you didn't know what to look for, you couldn't sequence, you couldn't do anything. So might be there, but I can't find it. Now today, we now have tests that can measure the waste, the DNA link leakage in your blood, So you can find a life threatening disease today when there's just a very small amount of cells in your body, long before you could ever find it in a mammogram or a CT or an MRI. And so therefore dealing with these life threatning diseases today at their infancy is so much easier. But this was a dream until computers were a million times faster and data storage costs were one billion. It was an idea, It was a dream, but it wasn't a reality.

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? For twenty 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 in Asia, Europe, the United States has dropped so significantly that whereas the population of the US is doubled, there are less children born today than there were seventy years ago in the United States. China's birth rate has dropped so low that the number of children born in China last year was less than ten million. So you think about a country of one point four billion, but of average life expectancy, taking those that live to one hundred and averaging with those that die young is seventy five. If you have ten million children born a year and you multiply it by seventy five, that's a population of seven hundred and fifty million, not a billion. Four And so as people think about things, We've had more people dying in Japan now for a very long period of time than are born, and so they have decreasing population. In most of the developed worlds, the birth rate is below replacement. But this has not been going on for since the pandemic. This has been going on for a long period of time, and so when do you see it? And so about twenty thirty years ago, became quite concerned because it appeared to us that the future where the children were going to be born was in Sub Sahara Africa, and the rest of the world as a whole might be decreasing in terms of population. So what were the opportunities going to be for the children of Sub Sahara Africa? And today, in twenty twenty three, more children are born in Nigeria than all of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, throw in Russia by a substantial amount, and more than twice as many children are born and Geria than the United States. So people are looking at where you are here now. When I had my little ALMANACX, I was too young to know that if you matched one almanac against another almanac, you were actually getting the first derivative. You were measuring change, and then if you had a few of them, you were measuring the rate of change. And so I think when answering your question, you have to look at the broad social implications and what is occurring. Then you have to ask yourself to the systems that currently exist fit where the world is going. I then if I had four almanacs, could calculate the second derivative, the rate of change, and I would say this is prevalent. In medicine, you could be diagnosed with cancer, is it a slow growing cranzer or instead of fast growing And the case of melanoma, it doubled every month if it was advanced. So a billion cancer sales ten months later are a trillion. Other cancers are very slow growing, so you could take your time to address it. And so understanding the rate of change and today what's happening in the world and where the children are born, and the facts that they're going to need opportunities, they're going to need jobs, or we're going to see one to two billion people on the move. So the question is when how early do you see that? And one of the exciting things about medicine today is in the nineteen eighties, there was this idea that everything was in your blood. Well, you didn't know what to look for, you couldn't sequence, you couldn't do anything. So might be there, but I can't find it. Now today, we now have tests that can measure the waste, the DNA link leakage in your blood, So you can find a life threatening disease today when there's just a very small amount of cells in your body, long before you could ever find it in a mammogram or a CT or an MRI. And so therefore dealing with these life threatning diseases today at their infancy is so much easier. But this was a dream until computers were a million times faster and data storage costs were one billion. It was an idea, It was a dream, but it wasn't a reality.

Absolutely, thank you for sharing that I wanted to before we dive into all the incredible work you've done in healthcare. I definitely wanted to talk about this part of your Jenny, which we've talked about personally. But you making all these shifts and changes and pushing the boundaries. You ended up going to prison in nineteen ninety after pleading guilty to several felony charges related to securities violations. But to me, I'm fascinated by a how that happened for you, but be more importantly how you use that time because the comeback now looking backwards, it's it's incredible. But to live that Steve Jobs famously said, you can always connect the dots looking backwards, you can't when you're moving forwards. I just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo. Ends about it to go to prison, walk us through first of all, how did you.

Absolutely, thank you for sharing that I wanted to before we dive into all the incredible work you've done in healthcare. I definitely wanted to talk about this part of your Jenny, which we've talked about personally. But you making all these shifts and changes and pushing the boundaries. You ended up going to prison in nineteen ninety after pleading guilty to several felony charges related to securities violations. But to me, I'm fascinated by a how that happened for you, but be more importantly how you use that time because the comeback now looking backwards, it's it's incredible. But to live that Steve Jobs famously said, you can always connect the dots looking backwards, you can't when you're moving forwards. I just can't imagine someone who had such a vision, someone had such incredible ideas to challenge the status quo. Ends about it to go to prison, walk us through first of all, how did you.

End up there?

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.

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, well, I think that issue there was an unusual period of time and once again complete revolution and finance. There are many points in history where you've had people that were presidents went to prison Brazil today and are now the president of the country. You again, So when the president gave me a pardon, he commented that these things were never crimes before. They've never been crimes since they related to bookkeeping and things like that, but I had to find a way to bring it to an end. And if you fought for ten or twenty years, to me, I had to find a way to live again. And so I think if you're true to yourself and you know the issues and the individuals know you, I viewed this as going to be a short period of time and I had to cut it short and make a decision for my family, etc. To live again. And it was a short period of time and the scheme of things. When I think of the diversion of less than two years, if I go back to World War Two, you had people that volunteered and were gone for four years fighting for freedom and what they believed in. And so I think my view was that I had to find a solution to bring it to an end, and it didn't really change who I was, what I did. The financial systems we built are now adopted throughout the world, whether you're in India or Singapore or whatever it might be. And yes, there was disruption in the force. I would say to you if you think about a country. You and I first met in the UK when the mercantile class rose up in England, who was under threat the nobility, and so the mobility would go to the king or the queen and say, well, we can't compete anymore. What are we going to do? But the old financial system didn't really meet the future needs the world. And so yes, I spent time thinking. I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education.

Now looking backwards, well, I think that issue there was an unusual period of time and once again complete revolution and finance. There are many points in history where you've had people that were presidents went to prison Brazil today and are now the president of the country. You again, So when the president gave me a pardon, he commented that these things were never crimes before. They've never been crimes since they related to bookkeeping and things like that, but I had to find a way to bring it to an end. And if you fought for ten or twenty years, to me, I had to find a way to live again. And so I think if you're true to yourself and you know the issues and the individuals know you, I viewed this as going to be a short period of time and I had to cut it short and make a decision for my family, etc. To live again. And it was a short period of time and the scheme of things. When I think of the diversion of less than two years, if I go back to World War Two, you had people that volunteered and were gone for four years fighting for freedom and what they believed in. And so I think my view was that I had to find a solution to bring it to an end, and it didn't really change who I was, what I did. The financial systems we built are now adopted throughout the world, whether you're in India or Singapore or whatever it might be. And yes, there was disruption in the force. I would say to you if you think about a country. You and I first met in the UK when the mercantile class rose up in England, who was under threat the nobility, and so the mobility would go to the king or the queen and say, well, we can't compete anymore. What are we going to do? But the old financial system didn't really meet the future needs the world. And so yes, I spent time thinking. I got to tutor individuals, help them get their education.

How did you spend your days for those two years?

How did you spend your days for those two years?

I spent my time thinking about the world. I would write sometimes ambassadors around the world, suggesting what I think they should have done, or should do, or what the country should do. So it didn't it didn't interrupt those interactions, it didn't stop our philanthropic efforts, etc. I did get 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. I think anyone that's separated from their family, and when I think back to those people that went and fought in World War Two in the nineteen forties, that might have been separated for four years, their only way of communicating with their family was through a letter. You know, the telephone was invented and in long distance call. When I was young, no one made long distance calls because it was ten to twelve minutes to call another country. So in the nineteen seventies, if I wanted to speak to Mumbai, I had to be prepared. It was ten dollars to twelve hours a minute, so those calls had to be short. And that was a period of time. In that period of time when a person's salary was hundreds of dollars a week, not thousands of dollars a week. Today people have a hard time relating to that because it's free on WhatsApp or on your phone. But I could communicate with my children, my family, and so when you're separated, the first thought is is your family going to be okay? Are your relationships? My wife and I had known each other since we were twelve. She knew who I was, I knew who she was. My business associates, thousands of them knew who I was, knew the issues, and so it wasn't a situation where I felt separated from the world, you know, And therefore communication still existed. A telephone existed. You weren't allowed to have a cell phone, but you could make a call on a payphone, so it wasn't the same separation. When I think of many people that were sent to the gulag in Russia, there's you know, whether it was soul Needsen or others or Shermansky. They wrote about how they took away their communications, they took away their visits. They even took away pencil and paper, they took away books. And one of them wrote that he knew he had won then because there was nothing else that they could take away. And so I think having inner strength is extremely important during that period. When when I think about my challenges relative to the tens of millions of people that have gone off to fight in wars, my parents' generation that lived through the depression and World War Two so that we could be free, my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.

I spent my time thinking about the world. I would write sometimes ambassadors around the world, suggesting what I think they should have done, or should do, or what the country should do. So it didn't it didn't interrupt those interactions, it didn't stop our philanthropic efforts, etc. I did get 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. I think anyone that's separated from their family, and when I think back to those people that went and fought in World War Two in the nineteen forties, that might have been separated for four years, their only way of communicating with their family was through a letter. You know, the telephone was invented and in long distance call. When I was young, no one made long distance calls because it was ten to twelve minutes to call another country. So in the nineteen seventies, if I wanted to speak to Mumbai, I had to be prepared. It was ten dollars to twelve hours a minute, so those calls had to be short. And that was a period of time. In that period of time when a person's salary was hundreds of dollars a week, not thousands of dollars a week. Today people have a hard time relating to that because it's free on WhatsApp or on your phone. But I could communicate with my children, my family, and so when you're separated, the first thought is is your family going to be okay? Are your relationships? My wife and I had known each other since we were twelve. She knew who I was, I knew who she was. My business associates, thousands of them knew who I was, knew the issues, and so it wasn't a situation where I felt separated from the world, you know, And therefore communication still existed. A telephone existed. You weren't allowed to have a cell phone, but you could make a call on a payphone, so it wasn't the same separation. When I think of many people that were sent to the gulag in Russia, there's you know, whether it was soul Needsen or others or Shermansky. They wrote about how they took away their communications, they took away their visits. They even took away pencil and paper, they took away books. And one of them wrote that he knew he had won then because there was nothing else that they could take away. And so I think having inner strength is extremely important during that period. When when I think about my challenges relative to the tens of millions of people that have gone off to fight in wars, my parents' generation that lived through the depression and World War Two so that we could be free, my difficulties were very small relative to theirs.

This episode is brought to you by eight Sleep. Did you know that temperature is one of the most important factors in improving your sleep quality? When you wake up in the middle of the nine or feel extra groggy in the morning, temperature is almost always to blame. Why while traditional mattresses trap heat throughout the night, science has shown that your body temperature actually needs to drop in the early and middle part of your sleep and rise in the morning so that you can fall asleep fast and get more deep sleep. The pod cover by eight Sleep fits on any bed like a fitted sheet. The pod cover will improve your sleep by automatically adjusting the temperature on each side of the bed based on you and your partner's individual needs. It can cool down and 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 with the eight sleep pod. Go to eight sleep dot com forward slash Purpose and save one hundred and fifty dollars on the pod cover by eight Sleep. That's the best offer you'll find, but you must visit eightsleep dot com forward slash Purpose for one hundred and fifty dollars off eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. I think it's an incredible amount of in his strength, not only to be able to navigate those two years, even though you are saying you didn't feel that long in the biggest scheme of things that I still believe that there is such a resilience there. But the way you came back.

This episode is brought to you by eight Sleep. Did you know that temperature is one of the most important factors in improving your sleep quality? When you wake up in the middle of the nine or feel extra groggy in the morning, temperature is almost always to blame. Why while traditional mattresses trap heat throughout the night, science has shown that your body temperature actually needs to drop in the early and middle part of your sleep and rise in the morning so that you can fall asleep fast and get more deep sleep. The pod cover by eight Sleep fits on any bed like a fitted sheet. The pod cover will improve your sleep by automatically adjusting the temperature on each side of the bed based on you and your partner's individual needs. It can cool down and 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 with the eight sleep pod. Go to eight sleep dot com forward slash Purpose and save one hundred and fifty dollars on the pod cover by eight Sleep. That's the best offer you'll find, but you must visit eightsleep dot com forward slash Purpose for one hundred and fifty dollars off eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. I think it's an incredible amount of in his strength, not only to be able to navigate those two years, even though you are saying you didn't feel that long in the biggest scheme of things that I still believe that there is such a resilience there. But the way you came back.

Well, let's just talk about n Della. You're talking more than twenty.

Well, let's just talk about n Della. You're talking more than twenty.

Years, Yeah, twenty seven, okay?

Years, Yeah, twenty seven, okay?

And did he come back bitter? No? Okay? And in South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe as Rhodesha went, so he instead of being bitter, and when he got out, I had a chance to visit with him. We came to see each other. And so my view was revenge or bitterness is an unproductive emotion. If you have something to give and focus and build, you have to focus going forward. You can't sit and focus on the path. And I had thousands of people that had worked for me who could carry on our mission in 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'm sure you know the current president in Brazil, who spent a short time in prison, you know, has certain views, but he has so many responsibilities and things he has to do for Brazil. If he was stuck in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.

And did he come back bitter? No? Okay? And in South Africa became quite different, let's say, than Zimbabwe as Rhodesha went, so he instead of being bitter, and when he got out, I had a chance to visit with him. We came to see each other. And so my view was revenge or bitterness is an unproductive emotion. If you have something to give and focus and build, you have to focus going forward. You can't sit and focus on the path. And I had thousands of people that had worked for me who could carry on our mission in 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'm sure you know the current president in Brazil, who spent a short time in prison, you know, has certain views, but he has so many responsibilities and things he has to do for Brazil. If he was stuck in the past, Brazil wouldn't have a future.

I'm so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela. There's a beautiful statement Inze where he said that when I walked out of the gates of the jail, I realized that if I was to hold on to that resentment or bitterness, that I would still be in prison and along those lines, and I think that's such a powerful statement of his that he believed that resentment and bitterness and revenge with the actual prison that would hold and limit him moving forward.

I'm so glad you brought up Nelson Mandela. There's a beautiful statement Inze where he said that when I walked out of the gates of the jail, I realized that if I was to hold on to that resentment or bitterness, that I would still be in prison and along those lines, and I think that's such a powerful statement of his that he believed that resentment and bitterness and revenge with the actual prison that would hold and limit him moving forward.

Well, as you know well and your viewers know well, there are so many people in the world that have mental health issues today, and in many ways they're all traced to something in their past. And so being free, being free of your past, not forgetting it, not reflecting on it, not having it be part of your decision process, allows you to go forward and to fly from that standpoint.

Well, as you know well and your viewers know well, there are so many people in the world that have mental health issues today, and in many ways they're all traced to something in their past. And so being free, being free of your past, not forgetting it, not reflecting on it, not having it be part of your decision process, allows you to go forward and to fly from that standpoint.

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

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

I would say to you, I probably had one of the least healthy diets in the world until that day I was diagnosed. But I experience this with my father's death in the nineteen seventies, and it was the first time my economic theories were tested during a period of time from seventy three to seventy seven, which I would call my financial clinical trials, all the ideas that I had developed, and by the mid nineteen seventies I had become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas, and most of them, ninety percent of the people believed we were headed to this financial depression again, and my views were, No, we weren't in history, but I could not save my father's life from melanoma. And it had a significant view here that it was the first time in my life that I could not solve a problem. I could help rebuild a company, I might be able to help rebuild a country financially, but I could not find a decision. I visited all these senior people, and I went to the major medical centers travel with my dad, and I concluded by nineteen seventy six that science could not move fast enough no matter what I had done or could do to save my father's life. So I had made the decision then to move back to California so that my two children, my wife Laurie, and I two children at the time, would know my father before he died. And he died about nine months after we moved back to California, and then I moved families, et cetera, thousands of people back to California, And so this has stayed with me. I've lost ten relatives to cancer, and my diagnosis was worse than theirs. So obviously I'm now reflecting what am I going to do and when it looked like I had eighteen months to live. You have to figure out what could I do different than they did. And the first decision I made is I would focus on anything that's reversible. So for two years I did not eat anything except fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. I had no idea whether it would benefit me, but I figured it wouldn't hurt me, and none of my relatives or friends who had died from life threatening diseases had ever changed their diety. And as I explored the world of the Chi medicine in China, or eire Veda medicine in India, or witch doctors in the central part of Africa, or Indians in the northwest Amazon, or healers from Russia, it came to me that I would really focus on ora Veda medicine and then five thousand year history. The belief was your gut, your microbiome was your second brain. So everything you eat, everything you drink, everything you exercise, everything you're experiencing is going into your second brain. So I was going to change my second brain, even though there was no proof you couldn't sequence at the time. And so that was a focus that I focused on, and I think The other thing I was very focused on is that most people diagnose with a life threatening disease do the least they can do at day one, and if it reoccurs later in life, they do everything they can to stay alive. But if you had done more at the beginning, then you have had a better chance. And so once I had driven my cancer burden to 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? So first I could try to change my body. And at this time we weren't talking crisper. We weren't talking about a technology that could change your genes that is still not wildly to deploy, because we don't know as we create a new human race whether this is good or bad. And so I set off on this journey of how to accel rate science. But that journey in science is not much different than my journey in finance or the journey, we took an education in what we did. I was going to try to attract the best and most talented people in the 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. If you were Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would change and we could drive the cost over time from twelve dollars a minute to talk to India to zero, you needed billions of dollars. So the same focus of 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, 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, providing them capital and advice and helped create teams for them. So that that was the revolution that began in ninety three 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 nineteen ninety three, you couldn't prove anything. I could show you antidotal evidence that in places of the world where people were plant eaters China, not meat eaters, that the incidents of hormone driven cancers or diabetes was far less, and in places that we had different diets, fast food diet, it was far more. So. Yes, there was anecdotal evidence, and so they said, well, prove it well. You couldn't sequence the human genome. You couldn't do anything in nineteen ninety three, and Francis Collins, who I met in I twenty three, set off on a journey to sequence. It wasn't till many, many years later, and billions of dollars that they completed that. And I'll never forget. In nineteen ninety four, I had one of our scientific retreats with the world's leading clinicians in cancer and science, and I wanted to get a doctor David Heber, who had founded the Center for Human Nutrition PHDMD at UCLA on the program. And the people in charge of the program said, you know, Mike, we're going to lose credibility if we have this soft science ideas that there's some relationship between what you eat and whether you're getting cancer. And they fought me and told me it would degrade what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer research group in the world. And I eventually reached a compromise with him. He would get to speak at linfe I wrote about it. He would not be on the program, he would not have a microphone, and if you wanted to listen, you had to sit close. And if you didn't want to be infected with this idea that there might be a link to how you live your life and what you eat and what you drink and your health, you could just sit far away and worn't have to. Twenty five years later, Jay, twenty five years later, I went to our scientific retreat. I was not in charge of the programming, and maybe twenty percent of every session over four days was cancer and your microbio. So initially putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo, whether it's finance, whether it's education, or whether it's medical, are challenged. Later they're accepted, well accepted in anyone could have thought of that idea.

I would say to you, I probably had one of the least healthy diets in the world until that day I was diagnosed. But I experience this with my father's death in the nineteen seventies, and it was the first time my economic theories were tested during a period of time from seventy three to seventy seven, which I would call my financial clinical trials, all the ideas that I had developed, and by the mid nineteen seventies I had become independently wealthy with the success of those ideas, and most of them, ninety percent of the people believed we were headed to this financial depression again, and my views were, No, we weren't in history, but I could not save my father's life from melanoma. And it had a significant view here that it was the first time in my life that I could not solve a problem. I could help rebuild a company, I might be able to help rebuild a country financially, but I could not find a decision. I visited all these senior people, and I went to the major medical centers travel with my dad, and I concluded by nineteen seventy six that science could not move fast enough no matter what I had done or could do to save my father's life. So I had made the decision then to move back to California so that my two children, my wife Laurie, and I two children at the time, would know my father before he died. And he died about nine months after we moved back to California, and then I moved families, et cetera, thousands of people back to California, And so this has stayed with me. I've lost ten relatives to cancer, and my diagnosis was worse than theirs. So obviously I'm now reflecting what am I going to do and when it looked like I had eighteen months to live. You have to figure out what could I do different than they did. And the first decision I made is I would focus on anything that's reversible. So for two years I did not eat anything except fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. I had no idea whether it would benefit me, but I figured it wouldn't hurt me, and none of my relatives or friends who had died from life threatening diseases had ever changed their diety. And as I explored the world of the Chi medicine in China, or eire Veda medicine in India, or witch doctors in the central part of Africa, or Indians in the northwest Amazon, or healers from Russia, it came to me that I would really focus on ora Veda medicine and then five thousand year history. The belief was your gut, your microbiome was your second brain. So everything you eat, everything you drink, everything you exercise, everything you're experiencing is going into your second brain. So I was going to change my second brain, even though there was no proof you couldn't sequence at the time. And so that was a focus that I focused on, and I think The other thing I was very focused on is that most people diagnose with a life threatening disease do the least they can do at day one, and if it reoccurs later in life, they do everything they can to stay alive. But if you had done more at the beginning, then you have had a better chance. And so once I had driven my cancer burden to 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? So first I could try to change my body. And at this time we weren't talking crisper. We weren't talking about a technology that could change your genes that is still not wildly to deploy, because we don't know as we create a new human race whether this is good or bad. And so I set off on this journey of how to accel rate science. But that journey in science is not much different than my journey in finance or the journey, we took an education in what we did. I was going to try to attract the best and most talented people in the 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. If you were Bill McGowan and believed fiber optics would change and we could drive the cost over time from twelve dollars a minute to talk to India to zero, you needed billions of dollars. So the same focus of 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, 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, providing them capital and advice and helped create teams for them. So that that was the revolution that began in ninety three 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 nineteen ninety three, you couldn't prove anything. I could show you antidotal evidence that in places of the world where people were plant eaters China, not meat eaters, that the incidents of hormone driven cancers or diabetes was far less, and in places that we had different diets, fast food diet, it was far more. So. Yes, there was anecdotal evidence, and so they said, well, prove it well. You couldn't sequence the human genome. You couldn't do anything in nineteen ninety three, and Francis Collins, who I met in I twenty three, set off on a journey to sequence. It wasn't till many, many years later, and billions of dollars that they completed that. And I'll never forget. In nineteen ninety four, I had one of our scientific retreats with the world's leading clinicians in cancer and science, and I wanted to get a doctor David Heber, who had founded the Center for Human Nutrition PHDMD at UCLA on the program. And the people in charge of the program said, you know, Mike, we're going to lose credibility if we have this soft science ideas that there's some relationship between what you eat and whether you're getting cancer. And they fought me and told me it would degrade what we're trying to build here as the leading cancer research group in the world. And I eventually reached a compromise with him. He would get to speak at linfe I wrote about it. He would not be on the program, he would not have a microphone, and if you wanted to listen, you had to sit close. And if you didn't want to be infected with this idea that there might be a link to how you live your life and what you eat and what you drink and your health, you could just sit far away and worn't have to. Twenty five years later, Jay, twenty five years later, I went to our scientific retreat. I was not in charge of the programming, and maybe twenty percent of every session over four days was cancer and your microbio. So initially putting forth ideas that challenge the status quo, whether it's finance, whether it's education, or whether it's medical, are challenged. Later they're accepted, well accepted in anyone could have thought of that idea.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

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

So I had entered the field in the early nineteen seventies for twenty years, but I was primarily a donor, etc. And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life. So I in ninety three designed it. I couldn't help others if I couldn't help myself and I first had to survive. But there were those three elements one teamwork, partnership, so I wrote about I went to this MD Anderson, and the two leading cancer centers off and on rated in the world were either MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, one in Houston, one in New York. And I noticed there was no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering at the cancer conference in Houston. And I told the person putting the conference on, why is there no one here from Memorial Sloan Kettering here if we're trying to accelerate research, and he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan Kettering as a competitor, and I told him not to the patient. So, therefore, once we promised funding for research in this field, we would only find if you shared all your data. And I eventually gone on my board Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and we worked on this is early technology with computers and connecting, that we would connect all of our researchers digitally together and it might be easier for someone at MD Anderson to talk to someone at Memorial sloan kettering via technology than someone else to find at MD Anderson. But we told them that we 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. And I wrote in the book a little bit about an individual who was being recruited to make better apples, and I was successful in convincing him that we could live and still eat the same apples for maybe the next twenty years. But people being diagnosed with cancer throughout the world, and the fact it was going to be increasing, not decreasing, we couldn't wait for solutions and so and then the other element I would say to you was government. There is no individual there is no foundation my family foundations which were created, and today there's with our centers more than ten of them, nor Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus Warren Buffett, which is is my largest foundation today in the world. The amount of money they have is small relative to the government. So if you can redirect the funds of the government, you now have access to hundreds of billions of dollars that could be redeployed. And so we spent two to three years making the economic argument of what the elimination of cancer was. But one of the challenges, when you talk about challenges, we are not able as a country to increase significantly our investment in the National Institutes of Health, the largest medical research group in the world. And I discovered in my analysis that one of the reasons was there were five hundred different diseases constantly appealing for more funds, and so unlike a laser, you had all these voices out there, whether it's Parkinson's, whether it was Alzheimer's, whether it's diabetes, and there wasn't a focused request. And so beginning two years later in ninety five, I went to the various disease specific groups and said, if you will stand down, we will have a combined effort focused on cancer, all cancers, like a laser, to double the NIH budget, and we will work on that, and when it's doubled, all medical research will double, not just cancer. And they agreed, and so we put on a March. It took three years and all this data, etc. To show and interacted with our political leaders that this would be one of the best investments the country could make and the leaders in the world in the twenty second century will be the leaders and the twenty first century in bioscience. And so with the March concluding in ninety eight, the President of the United States shortly thereafter signed into law what became the doubling of the NIH budget. There's been an incremental five hundred billion dollars in basic research spent. It laid the groundwork for what we did to get a quick solution for COVID nineteen. Every disease has benefited from it. The financial commitment was ten million dollars in the March. Today there's a five hundred billion dollar hour payoffs. So the first efforts of individual philanthropy, the efforts of recruiting young scientists, to work in the field, which is probably the highest rate of return in any philanthropy that I've seen. The cause of teamwork was coupled now with the increased benefit of getting the government focused on this area well.

So I had entered the field in the early nineteen seventies for twenty years, but I was primarily a donor, etc. And as I mentioned, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life. So I in ninety three designed it. I couldn't help others if I couldn't help myself and I first had to survive. But there were those three elements one teamwork, partnership, so I wrote about I went to this MD Anderson, and the two leading cancer centers off and on rated in the world were either MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, one in Houston, one in New York. And I noticed there was no one from Memorial Sloan Kettering at the cancer conference in Houston. And I told the person putting the conference on, why is there no one here from Memorial Sloan Kettering here if we're trying to accelerate research, and he told me he viewed Memorial Sloan Kettering as a competitor, and I told him not to the patient. So, therefore, once we promised funding for research in this field, we would only find if you shared all your data. And I eventually gone on my board Andy Grove, who was the CEO of Intel, and we worked on this is early technology with computers and connecting, that we would connect all of our researchers digitally together and it might be easier for someone at MD Anderson to talk to someone at Memorial sloan kettering via technology than someone else to find at MD Anderson. But we told them that we 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. And I wrote in the book a little bit about an individual who was being recruited to make better apples, and I was successful in convincing him that we could live and still eat the same apples for maybe the next twenty years. But people being diagnosed with cancer throughout the world, and the fact it was going to be increasing, not decreasing, we couldn't wait for solutions and so and then the other element I would say to you was government. There is no individual there is no foundation my family foundations which were created, and today there's with our centers more than ten of them, nor Bill Gates and Melinda Gates, the Gates Foundation, plus Warren Buffett, which is is my largest foundation today in the world. The amount of money they have is small relative to the government. So if you can redirect the funds of the government, you now have access to hundreds of billions of dollars that could be redeployed. And so we spent two to three years making the economic argument of what the elimination of cancer was. But one of the challenges, when you talk about challenges, we are not able as a country to increase significantly our investment in the National Institutes of Health, the largest medical research group in the world. And I discovered in my analysis that one of the reasons was there were five hundred different diseases constantly appealing for more funds, and so unlike a laser, you had all these voices out there, whether it's Parkinson's, whether it was Alzheimer's, whether it's diabetes, and there wasn't a focused request. And so beginning two years later in ninety five, I went to the various disease specific groups and said, if you will stand down, we will have a combined effort focused on cancer, all cancers, like a laser, to double the NIH budget, and we will work on that, and when it's doubled, all medical research will double, not just cancer. And they agreed, and so we put on a March. It took three years and all this data, etc. To show and interacted with our political leaders that this would be one of the best investments the country could make and the leaders in the world in the twenty second century will be the leaders and the twenty first century in bioscience. And so with the March concluding in ninety eight, the President of the United States shortly thereafter signed into law what became the doubling of the NIH budget. There's been an incremental five hundred billion dollars in basic research spent. It laid the groundwork for what we did to get a quick solution for COVID nineteen. Every disease has benefited from it. The financial commitment was ten million dollars in the March. Today there's a five hundred billion dollar hour payoffs. So the first efforts of individual philanthropy, the efforts of recruiting young scientists, to work in the field, which is probably the highest rate of return in any philanthropy that I've seen. The cause of teamwork was coupled now with the increased benefit of getting the government focused on this area well.

And I want to read out this is on page one to eleven of the book where you talk about a new type of organization, and you've lay out these very clear principles that you're just speaking about right now. So, as you said, recruit the best and brightest scientists and physicians, focus on the career paths of these young investigators, require collaboration in place of competition, build cross sector ties, Identify the most promising research not funded by the NIH. Eliminate needless bureaucracy. And the list continues. And I mean, you make it sound so easy when I'm listening to you right now and when you read it like this, But I'm imagining that each one of these items took a lot of time energy. I mean, you make it sound so seamless, But I would love to know how challenging is it to galvanize at such a large scale and level.

And I want to read out this is on page one to eleven of the book where you talk about a new type of organization, and you've lay out these very clear principles that you're just speaking about right now. So, as you said, recruit the best and brightest scientists and physicians, focus on the career paths of these young investigators, require collaboration in place of competition, build cross sector ties, Identify the most promising research not funded by the NIH. Eliminate needless bureaucracy. And the list continues. And I mean, you make it sound so easy when I'm listening to you right now and when you read it like this, But I'm imagining that each one of these items took a lot of time energy. I mean, you make it sound 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 try to increase funding. But it was like there was a zero sum game. If I increased funding for diabetes, I had to take it away from someone else. And so getting them to accept that they were unsuccessful and to stand down and have faith. It's somewhat based on past performance in the financial investment they want in business, they want to know what's your past performance? Do you have a track record? So we had a track record of success to build on, and we didn't ask them to stand down for their lifetime. We just asked them to stand down for a few months here so we could focus like a laser our attention on this issue. Eliminating cancer is a cause of death. And bringing in the leading economists in the world was worth fifty trillion dollars to the US economy in the early nineteen nineties, multiples of what the economy and so we could show the results. And so, yes, you have to have a past track record convincing a person not to change their career. I remember one of the world's leading chemists has been about to be given a job as the dean of the most prestigious universe in the world, but he would leave the laboratory so I went and asked him who's running Warner Brothers. At the time, it was two friends of mine, Terry Simmel and Bob Dailey. He had no clue who was running. I asked him, has he ever heard of Stephen Spielberg? And he says, yes, he's heard of Stephen Spielberg. I said, well, if you become the Dean, no one will ever hear of you, because Steven Spielberg took years to make movies and product You're working on breakthroughs here in bioscience that might change the world. You becoming a manager of others might never change the world. And so luckily he decided to stay that. When you think of young scientists, the hundreds or thousands that I've dealt with, you graduated in high school, you were seventeen or eighteen years old, you're now thirty one or thirty two or thirty three years old. You've gone to medical school, you got a PhD. You had fellowships, residencies, internships, 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 one hundred thousand dollars a year for three years, you've changed the career. And whether it's in our Melanoma Research Alliance, or whether it's in our Faster Cures Group for All life threatening Diseases, or whether it's in the Prostate Cancer Foundation. If we have twenty five young scientists and they each are going to work for forty years, by funding them at two and a half million dollars for the first year and each year, you've bought one thousand years of their time. And when I look back over the thirty years to all these new therapies that have been created, you will find a young scientist, a young person there. It's very interesting. At the National Institutes of Health, the first age that you get an award is forty three. If you look at who's won Nobel Prizes and science, most people have won for an idea they had when they were within a few years of school. James Watson was in his twenties when he put forth this idea we have genes, etc. You know so many Einstein I think was twenty three, and so the idea that you're going to school and you're studying, and you've now spent fifteen years after high school and now we're going to tell you can wait another twelve years. It's ridiculous. And so the system really was not prepared for the fact that we needed to get the best and brightest and divert their careers younger. And so I have spent more than thirty years working on this, the same thing we had worked on forty years ago with educators to try to get them to stay as an educator. When you go to India today, people are so confused today that think India is like China. There were twenty three or twenty four million in children born last year in India. There were nine to ten million born in China, more than twice as many children. Today, there are more than two hundred million more children in India than in China. China is more advanced digitally, but there's very few countries where the competition for education you know today is more significant. And they also have a belief in healthcare not based on modern technology but five thousand years of anecdotal experience. So yes, our theory is that your gut have been proven to be true with modern sequencing technologies. And this year they've just approved giving the microbiom own of one person who responded well to treatment to another person that didn't respond well, admitting that because they have a different gut, they're going to respond well, and how their genes are expressed or how the therapy they're given is going to be expressed differently. But in India, you had five thousand years of experience of if you did this, that happened when I went to the Northern Amazon, Northwest Amazon. Here, I am dressed head to toe and I wrote about it all in black. And our Indian guide has a pair of shorts on and that's it. He's immune to everything. I'm not immune to anything. And he takes me over and he says, well, we use this bush against malaria, and we use this for this. And he shows me this, and he said, if we ever get separated, you can hack this bush and drink the water inside. But then he goes and he tells me, but don't drink the water in this bush. It could kill you. So they both look the same to me, Okay, both of them. So I got a rope and we tied it around his waist and my ways so we would never be separated as we are hacking through the jungle. And so I think the world today is adjusting to what have 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.