This is before we get to your book. Twenty six years officially of this
conference, the first year. I don't know what you have a dozen or so
panels and now you have I don't know how many thousands of people walking around
here. I mean, this is quite a whirlwind.
Did you think it was going to last this long?
Well, I bet this is my fifty first year of putting on large conferences and.
The goal here is choose your own adventure that we put on finance, we put
it on health care, we put on tech. But here you're going to meet people you
would have never met in your life. As we try to get them to interact with
others in a different walk of life. So interesting thing.
Chris UHLMANN. Who's the CIO chief investment officer
of CAC stirs the second largest pension fund.
He's the head of our global capital markets.
Sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, pensions, endowments, large
family offices. He does not go to one finance.
He goes to see the world. Well, let's talk about some of those
panels. I sat in on one today about the future
of health care, about the research that goes in not so much into curing things,
but also the preventative measures as well.
You have a think tank focused on this and now you have a new book.
That kind of crowd really kind of chronicles your own battles and your own
desire to try to fix it. Well, everyone's life is affected by
public health and medical research. It is the number one driver of the
world's economy. And the session this morning, you saw
that in countries in West Africa. Life expectancy has increased 50
percent. And just 20 years, you now have
grandparents, great grandparents today. And it's really driven the world.
We'll talk a little bit about that, because there are so many elements out
there that in years and decades pass where if not a death sentence, certainly
the survival rate was low. So much has changed right now when it
comes to various forms of cancers. You obviously went through your own
battle with prostate cancer in the early 90s.
Nineteen ninety three, I believe you were supposed to be dead in about 12
months to a year. And you're still here.
I need they gave me 18 months. How did you get past?
I would say I was extremely focused on driving science, not just for me, but
for everyone. You never know when you launch programs
whether it's going to affect you or others.
But I was very focused on the microbiome.
In addition to Western traditional treatment, and we've recently had
approved for a cancer treatment and other treatments giving one's microbiome
to another. So you have a person that responded
poorly to treatment. Another person responded very well to
treatment by giving the microbiome of one to another and Indian medicine.
I've been in medicine five thousand years.
They considered your gut, your second brain.
So everything you eat, drink, etc. but we never could sequence anything.
And in 93, when we put forth these ideas, people said, prove it.
You couldn't prove it. And as you know, if you go back far
enough in time in medical school, you never studied nutrition.
Today, with sequencing, you can prove it.
How you can adjust your microbiome, it starts to change within seven days and
you could see it all over the world in West Africa today in Nigeria.
For example, there's an epidemic of diabetes, increase in hormone driven
cancers, prostate and breast, because they change.
And with the addition of thousands of fast food, they didn't use the.
In China, if you went to medical school 35 or 40 years ago, you never studied
diabetes. Now, China has more people with diabetes
than any country in the world and more people not treated who have diabetes.
So you change the food system, you change your microbiome and you change
the country. That was plant based.
To one that's meat based. It takes a long time of evolution to
adjust. Well, that's what I'm curious.
How do you do that? Because this isn't just about regular
people, about the science. You're dealing with just human emotions
and our own preferences for things. We know how hard it is to get off of
sugar or get off of red meat or things like that.
That's just not something we can just snap our fingers and do well.
There are over 3000 companies working on churning plants or vegetables.
Into something else you think they are. And the challenge is they look the same.
They taste the same on Saturday night. We had our global born made games.
This is where we serve 20 different. You have to guess what they are.
What's vegetarian, what's not. And the winning team generally gets
about 25 percent, right? So 25 percent.
So if you don't know the difference. Bowling ace that's made with tofu or
bowling is with blame and yarn. We can go plant based sand and you'll
see at this conference. There's a big new movement to bring the
environmental movement and efforts together.
Healthy planet, healthy human. What about the socio economic
differences? When we talk about making these
lifestyle changes, when we even talk about the medical science needed to
treat some of these diseases, a lot of this access to that has been for folks
who are well-off like ourselves. There's a whole class of people out
there that for the longest time don't have those resources, they don't have
the insurance and they don't have the money in order to be able to pursue
that. Well, we've spent decades working on
this. With us at this conference, Navy CEO
interview Owen, who is the head of health for Wal-Mart.
They have four thousand pharmacies and underserved areas.
One third of the American public visits a Wal-Mart or Sam's Club.
They've got two point two million of their own employees.
So there is a different ways. And what do we learn during the
pandemic? We have food deserts, we have health
desks and we have financial dressers. And so we're very focused on this.
And the other element that I don't think most people understand is there are
states in the United States today where only 15 percent of the children are of
European ancestry. So we just cannot have just Caucasians
and clinical trials or we're not going to deal with our population here in a
state here in California where more than 50 percent of the children are from
Latin American. And another 10 to 15 Asian.
And today in America, almost 11 percent of everyone not born here was born in
Africa. That's come so as our demographics
change, the people we got again. So it is depressing that if you were in
midtown Manhattan, get on the subway, go to the Bronx, you reduce the average
life expectancy by almost 10 years in a 20 minute subway ride.
It's interesting to see the evolution of this conference.
And of course, you mentioned the conferences that you put on at this very
same location prior to the Milken Institute.
This was the epicenter for really the growth of one new asset class that has
now probably dozens, if not hundreds of different asset classes.
When you look around this room today and you see these folks all invoking your
name, all invoking what you and a small handful of other folks built out here in
Los Angeles. Are you happy with the direction that
it's gone? The first 25 years was focused on
creating hundreds or thousands of new forms of security so you could finance
businesses and bringing those that were responsible for the creation of jobs and
building companies with access to capital.
Here what we've done is we've brought those around the world focused on access
to capital. With those in the health and medical,
with those in the philanthropic world, with those in the government world, with
those in the technology. Many years ago, I never hear Chernin.
Who is the number two person at what was NewsCorp?
Came here to be on a panel talking about Asia media debating Sumner Redstone.
He spent the entire day in a session on doctors from Uganda.
Malaria no more. And I'd say Peter's probably spent.
20 percent of his life since that day, focusing on malaria no more.
So it's kind of like then changing doors.
We hope someone, when they come here, will walk into another place that
they've never been and maybe change the world for.