These sees Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio. Our next guest known certainly first time on Wall Street, the Highs and Lows, and for changing how Wall Street finances deals. A high yield pioneer. Much reporting has been done on his life, A very private individual who has created very public forms via his Milk and Institute and more to shed a lot of light, conversations and action on the global challenges of our time.
He's got a new book out. It's called Faster Cures, Accelerating the Future of Health. He wrote it with Jeffrey Evansmore Joining us is Mike Milk, and Mike joins us via zoom in Los Angeles. Mike, nice to have you here on Bloomberg. How are you. I'm Greg, Carol, looking forward to seeing you at the Global conference later this month. I am looking forward to it, and I have to say my first Milk and Institute there. I assumed it
would be a lot of financial types. I was surprised by the wellness and the healthcare component, but in your book you really bring it all together. I mean, you can't have advancements if you will in healthcare and R and D with also without not having that access to capital, you bring it all together. Talk to us about why you wrote this book specifically and why you wrote it now. I would say why I wrote it now is a very simple answer. We had geared up for COVID nineteen
and everything that went before it. An incremental funding by the federal government of a half a trillion dollars laid the groundwork, and it was nine weeks sixty three days between the sequencing the DNA of the virus and putting it in the first human We get geared up for emergencies,
and then we get geared down. So the reason I wrote this book was to reflect on fifty years of medical and healthcare progress, but also as a call to action now that the next generation the new technology is to be deployed and we have an opportunity to finally bring to an end many life threatening diseases. It was to keep the energy going, both financially and continuing to recruit the best and brightest into the field, landing it
wind down. Mike, I have to say one of the things that struck me in your book, and I really thought about this coming off the pandemic, the collaboration that we saw on some existing work that had been done years before, but just jumping on it and the coordination, if you will, that we saw. You talk about how medical institutions are competitors, not collaborator, especially when it comes to getting money for R and D. That system that
we still have inherently flawed. Well, it's changed dramatically in the last thirty years, where I would say today you have team science. So we just finished some major breakthroughs coming out of Melbourne at the Peter mccollumn, but it was coordinated in Europe, the United States and other parts of the world as a team. And so there has been but never have we seen cooperation as we did during this recent pandemic between for profit academic science centers government.
The idea that the government would put forth money to build factories before we knew if the vaccines work, or fun research and manufacture vaccines before we knew that they would work. So that one the cost of the country, just this country, maybe a trillion a month, was so great that investing in products and plants of a few billion dollars if it didn't work, was small compared to what was going on. Not just the United States, but
around the world. Mike before the pandemic, and I take you back to you growing up in the fifties, and you take us through your life and some of the health crises that your family has had to deal with. You talk about your dad, your mother in law, your kids, and of course yourself a first cousin as well. This
book is very personal personal. What was it about the crisis that your family, the medical crisis that you yourself went through in your family, the impact that that had that has gotten you to do what you have done over the last few decades. Well, I would say just the realization of my father's experience with polio and then with melanoma, our children's challenges. No family, There isn't any family that doesn't have these. Our family is not unique.
One and two men get cancer in their lifetime one in three women. But the fact that I really could not discuss with my dad what we've been able to do to create access to capit on in the financial world, make it available to millions of company and these great jobs, etc. Because of his own medical issues in many ways, he was not able to succuss his success with his parents, and they both passed away. But I think there was that very famous music and song that life gets in
the way. So you have a plan, but something happens in life, and I don't feel people in economic terms or in the financial world really realize that more than fifty percent of all economic growth in the last two hundred years can be traced to advances in health and medical research. And if we just reflect that at the start of the twentieth century, average life expectancy on planet Earth was thirty one and today, one hundred and twenty
years later, it's in the mid seventies. This dramatic, dramatic change not only in the extension of life, but the quality of life has driven the world's economy. In Southeast Asia, you've had a doubling of life expectancy in two generations, and now due to medical breakthroughs in Sub Sahara Africa, many countries are seeing a doubling of life expectancy and one generation. How that affects the economy, how it affects
relationships between generations is greatly underestimated. No, I think that you know, we talked so much about economic impacts, market impacts, and that is certainly clear when you think about it. That way. I want to go back to what you said you were quoting. I believe a song you have a plan, life gets in the way. Talk to us about you obviously had a plan and then life got
in the way. When you are forty six years old, and there's been much written about your terminal cancer diagnosis back in nineteen ninety three, I can only imagine how that felt. But reading about it in the book, you know, you got your diagnosis, and then it seems like you set about and got to work talking to a lot of different doctors to figure out that there had to
be a better way. Well, I think one of the things you learned that when people have life threatening diseases, and I had lost ten relatives by that time and my prognosis was worse than all of them, is often at the beginning they do the least possible, and when you have a reoccurrence later, they'll do anything to try to stay alive. And so I think one of the things we're trying to bring to bear here is that
technology afford you such a better chance today. And I would say, unfortunately, most of the people diagnosed in my condition thirty years within five years had all passed away, but I chose a different path that involved nutrition. Iervade a medicine. I went to China to visit with doctors Russia, healers,
witch doctors in Africa, Western medicine. But I found a lot of strength in Indian medicine at that period of time and continued with observing many of the things that have been around for five thousand years to try to energize my immune system. But the world is so different today than it was when I was diagnosed. Then they told me I had eighteen months to live. Today, if you were diagnosed in my condition, someone might tell you that you're not going to die from cancer. You're not
going to die from this disease. That we have solutions and the marrying of really three things, one access to capital to recruiting the best and brightest to go into this field. And three the tremendous advanced it's in technology with computers a million times faster and data storage costs one billion have brought us to where we are today.
That we have an excellent chance to find a solution for each individual who has a life threatening disease in their own lifetime, which is great to hear some optimism having some own family members who are dealing with some difficuent health issues, it does feel like there are a
lot more options. Hey, Mike. One of the things I was thinking about and prepping for our conversation was that when you got your diagnosis and you reached out to the healthcare network that you knew or were able to tap into various resources, you're already philanthropic and doing work when it came to healthcare and medical research. You know that access enabled you to I think open doors that maybe some would say we don't all have. And I feel like coming off the pandemic, we talked about the
inequities in healthcare. How do we get rid of the inequities in healthcare? Is it even truly fully POSSI the ball? I believe it's possible, and we're on the verge of making it happen. So when you just think it costs three billion dollars, took more in the decade to sequence the human geno now less than an hour and one hundred or two hundred dollars, and someday it will be ten to twenty. It's available for everyone. And now in terms of cost, the idea that we can get the
right treatment. So I was on a commission here in California number of years ago when the name was the Personalized Medicine Commission, and within six months or eight months, we changed the name to the Precision Medicine Commission so we could be precise. And when we submitted the report after a couple of years, it was the Precision Health Commission, so we could figure out not only to treat you after you or sick, but before. But as you pointed out,
during the pandemic, we learned a number of things. We knew there were food deserts where people couldn't access fruits and vegetables in their neighborhood. We then discovered there were financial deserts where people didn't have bank accounts, and when the government wanted to write funding to serve as a safety net, they couldn't get the money to people. And lastly, there were health deserts where people did not have a facility in the neighborhood they could visit to take care of.
But if we start with just the United States, the demographics in the United States and have changed so dramatically. So sixty years ago, seventy five percent of everyone that was not born in the United States was born in Europe and ten percent in Canada. Today seventy percent of everyone not born in the United States was born in Latin America, Asia, and almost eleven percent of everyone not born in the United States was more in Africa or
seven or eight percent in the Middle East. So the face of Americas changed dramatically, and we need to make sure for clinical trials and access to healthcare every individual has that opportunity, and that is one of our focuses that faster cures. The center is health equities and access because if we primarily have people of European ancestry going into clinical trials, we're not going to get the exact breakdown of the population, and so we need to find
a way to recruit and provide access. But the dropping in cost of getting the facts. The idea that we can change your genes, then we know we can do that today by Christopher, we're not going to do it because we don't understand all the ramification yet, but we do know that you can change how your genes are expressed by changing your micro biom and you can start to do that in seven days by changing what you eat,
what you drink, and your lifestyle. So there are numerous programs available today throughout this country that are now reaching out to a much more diverse population to make sure. What we learned during COVID is we have to find a way to get healthcare to our entire population. And
as you know, there's been a lot of research. The first thing that came out was that twenty minute subway ride from Manhattan up to the Bronx or so you reduce life expectancy by a decade or so, or if you look at other parts in Baltimore, I think life expectancy in the city is almost twenty years less than it is in the suburbs. So we know the problems, we have the data, and now we need to put the systems in place to take care of that shortfall.
In your book and the interr the early innovation and finance turned out to be a template for much of what you all have accomplished in the search for faster cures. Your financial background, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you, do you ever miss Wall Street or at least being involved specifically with a financial firm, either on Wall Street or out there on the West Coast in the day to day mind if you will. The Milk, the Milken Institute is heavily involved. Our Center for Financial Markets are
global efforts creating new financial markets. And you make a very interesting point in that the analogy holds. When I was a student at Berkeley, after the Watts riots had occurred here in Los Angeles, when I was visiting on August eleventh, nineteen sixty five, I changed my major to
focus on finance and access to capital. And then a many young an American man who told me his father didn't have access to capital because of the color of his skin in nor would he and it didn't make any sense to me, and so I switched and I went back to Berkeley, and what I discovered was I could access data as a student free that allowed me to look at the history and books that have been written about credit. And what I discovered is what everyone
was saying about credit was just wrong. The best credits happened to be entrepreneurs and companies. The worst credit was countries throughout all of history. But you couldn't access medical data. So today it's a totally different world than it was when I was at Berkeley almost sixty years ago. Today,
this medical data exists. There's numerous companies that have loaded the data of individuals, their DNA, their microbio homes, their biological history, their clinical history, and so today a young student such as I was at Berkeley could access this data as a medical student at a university today and test out their theories the same as I was able to test out my theories when I was both an undergrad and a graduate student. And that is why we're
seeing this explosion of advances in medical research. We don't have to guess anymore of what is the potential best treatment for an individual or what their disease is. We now can identify what is that disease, just like we identified the DNA of the virus and COVID nineteen and then created vaccines against it. And that's the big We just got about thirty seconds, Mike. That's really the big game changer when we think about what takes us to the next level in healthcare, and again just got about
twenty five seconds. Well, we're on the verge of our understanding of immunology to allow your own immune system to rehabilitate you to deal with disease. And the once again, the reason I wrote this book now is that we can seize defeat if we don't continue what we were able to accomplish during COVID. We are on the verge of a revolution that can eliminate many life threatened diseases for our children and our grandchildren if we just stay
with it today. Well, so appreciate getting some time and looking forward to being with you and your team out there on the West Coast. Mike Milkin, thank you so much. As we mentioned, the new book is Faster Cures, Accelerating the future of health. Mike, thank you.