Mike Milken
Chairman, Milken Institute
“I think that is the four letters we're trying for: hope today for anyone diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, that we might be able to cure it and cure you in your lifetime. Hope that if you're born into an extremely difficult situation and you're living in foster care, that you have hope to rise up and achieve whatever you can achieve in life.”
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan and Mike Milken sit down to discuss Mike’s lengthy and esteemed career as an entrepreneur, scholar, and philanthropist.
Mike serves as Chairman of the Milken Institute, Co-Founder of the Milken Family Foundation, and leads numerous other initiatives, including the building of the new Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream in Washington, DC.
As a child growing up in middle class America during the 1950s, Mike had a curiosity early on to answer and tackle some of life’s greatest questions. While he initially had dreams of being an astronaut and running the U.S. space program, Mike’s focus shifted later in life to advancing healthcare and opening opportunity in business.
With a deep family history of cancer, Mike has become a staunch advocate and supporter of young scientists and medical researchers, supporting a bevy of organizations including the National Institute for Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and discusses how he believes America’s best days are still yet to come.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Milken Institute – click here to learn more
Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream – click here to learn more
Milken Institute Covid-19 Treatment and Vaccine Tracker – click here to learn more
Prostate Cancer Foundation’s Home Run Challenge – click here to learn more
CaP Cure – click here to learn more
Milken Educator Awards – click here to learn more
Guest Bio
Mike Milken, chairman of the Milken Institute, has been at the forefront of successful initiatives in medical research, education, public health and access to capital for more than four decades. Fortune called him “The Man Who Changed Medicine” and Forbes listed him among “Visionaries Reimagining Our Children’s Future.”
In 1982 he formalized his philanthropy by co-founding the Milken Family Foundation. The Milken Institute hosts more than 250 events annually, including major conferences in Singapore, London, Abu Dhabi, New York, Los Angeles and Washington. The Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University was named to recognize an Institute gift.
As a financier, Mike revolutionized modern capital markets by pricing and rewarding risk more efficiently. The thousands of companies he financed created millions of jobs. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Milken earned his M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He and his wife Lori have been married since 1968 and are members of the Giving Pledge; they have three children and 10 grandchildren.
Learn more at MikeMilken.com and MilkenInstitute.org
Clips from this Episode
Mike opens up about the moving conversation that inspired him to help "democratize capital."
Personal experiences that influenced his leadership, during the covid-19 pandemic
The success of "the home run challenge" since its founding in 1993.
The Milken Center For Advancing The American Dream is a place of hope.
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
You're listening to Leadership Matters on SiriusXM. I'm your host Alan Fleischmann. My guest today is a world-renowned philanthropist who has revolutionized multiple industries, reinventing medicine and finance in ways that have greatly impacted the world. Mike Milken is chairman of the Milken Institute, co-founder of the Milken Family Foundation, and the leader behind a staggering list of other initiatives and philanthropies. In a cover story, Fortune magazine once called Mike "the man who changed medicine". The Washington Post has called him the most influential financier since JP Morgan, and his latest passion project tackles a subject no less important than redefining the American Dream itself. His Milken Center for Advancing the American dream will open soon in Washington, DC, just down the street from the White House and across from the Department of Treasury. And I recently joined Mike, who I will confess as a good friend, and someone I admire and have for years, I joined Mike for a hardhat tour, which was pretty amazing. For a leader as iconic as Mike Milken, no introduction could begin to cover everything. So we're going to drive right in and talk as much as we can. I was just telling Mike, before we went on the air here, that I have two hours’ worth of questions that we're going to try to get into one hour. But Mike, thank you for joining me and welcome to Leadership Matters.
Mike Milken
It is great to be with you, Alan, and your insight is also enlightening for me.
Alan Fleischmann
That's that means a lot to me. I want to talk about some of the stuff that I know matters so much to you and your life. Family certainly has been a huge part of your life, and how you lead your life. You grew up in Los Angeles, to a middle-class family, right? At a time in America when the middle class was especially upwardly mobile, we're going to be talking a lot about the American dream today. But let's start here. What was the American dream like for your family and for you growing up?
Mike Milken
Well, I think it was defined by my father, who lost his mother in childbirth, lost his father in an auto accident, and lost a large part of one part of his family during the Holocaust, with this concept of family, he kind of built in to my psychic at a very young age that there would not be great opportunities for my children or my grandchildren unless there were opportunities for everyone. So, that upward mobility of the American dream that everyone might not achieve it, but everyone had to feel they had a chance. And that's what defined America. Growing up in the 1950s, there was this television show "Happy Days," "My Three Sons," "Father Knows Best." And it was really a period of time of after World War II, and eventually, after the Korean War, of enormous growth in America and enormous opportunity in America, that really define how I grew up. I had a chance to ride my bike in the neighborhood and raise money for what was the American Cancer Society and something I think called the Community Chest that eventually turned into United Way. I went to a neighborhood school with everyone that lived in the neighborhood, rode my bike to school, it was safe. And the people in the neighborhood knew you. So if you were doing wheelies in the street, they might have reported it to your parents. And it was something that made this country very strong and this concept of community.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. And I know, you also met your wife, Laurie, when you were in seventh grade, if I'm correct about that. I know you were very young.
Mike Milken
Yes, that is correct. But you know, when I was growing up my favorite book, or one of my favorite books was the Almanac. I used to wait every year for it to come. And the data in the Almanac, the insights, the change in growth rates, I used to put it under my pillow when my mom was checking the room, and then I'd bring up my flashlight and read all those facts at night.
Alan Fleischmann
How old were you when you started to get the Almanac?
Mike Milken
Seven or eight.
Alan Fleischmann
Wow, so data, information, insight – this is your wiring. When I think of you, Mike, I think of you as someone who has an insatiable curiosity. You also mastered data. I mean, you don't do anything without understanding the background and data. Did that get nurtured by somebody or is that just in your wiring?
Mike Milken
I think sitting down at the dinner table at our house and discussing what happened during the day, or, you know, my parents had a bridge club, and once a month, you had 20 or 24 couples come and I got to quiz adults and see what they knew, what they didn't know, when I was very young, six or seven. Like most kids, I knew every capital, every state, every river, every continent. And my first surprise was how few adults knew every capital in the United States, or the speed of light, or other types of things, of course, you needed to know.
Alan Fleischmann
Things that you thought were just everybody's basic knowledge.
Mike Milken
I did, and I think the insight – so many people, that I sensed at a young age, made decisions, not based on facts, but based on emotion or other issues and so on. I also learned at a very young age, as my parents told me not to quiz every adult that came into the house, that there was a better way for people to learn. And that was to give them multiple choice questions, instead of you lecturing them, and that has stayed with me my whole life. If you want to present an idea, or get them to think about something, give them a question, and maybe on their own, so that they're not answering in front of you, and see how they do. And if they have curiosity, if they get it wrong, then they'll try to go study why they got it wrong from that standpoint. The education of girls in the world has increased dramatically, and most people don't fully realize that. And whether you're in India or Sub Saharan Africa, it's changed quite a bit in the last few decades. The tremendous changes in demographics, where a majority of countries in developed countries are actually going to be decreasing their population, their birth rates are so low. But in Sub Saharan Africa, they are significant. And so trying to get people to see the world as it is, not as they perceive it to be. The best way I discovered at a very young age was to ask them questions. The humility of doing that also is you're creating vulnerability, perhaps together, but you're not creating humiliation if the person doesn't know the answer. Well, and if you let them on their own. And I would say life was a "Happy Day" life (the television show) until the false winter of 1957 when Sputnik went up. And it was the middle of the Cold War. I had studied space. If you're good at math – and I had a gift for mathematics – eventually, you go to very small things or very large things such as space. I did write a letter to President Eisenhower in 1957 telling him I was dreaming of running the space program, and that I had never missed a science or math problem, and I had been reading comic books at a very young age, and I understood space travel. Unfortunately, I never was called upon at that time.
Alan Fleischmann
Did you get a response to that letter?
Mike Milken
I did not, but it changed my world. This really had a major effect on me, because when Sputnik went up in the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union thought it was their finest hour – that their system of economics and government had won, and they were superior in science. But their economy, it was a very small economy relative to the United States, and then they woke up the United States. DARPA was formed, and NASA was formed at that time, and there was the idea that the United States will never be behind in science again. This really was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and not this grand achievement, because it woke up the United States. But yes, I did meet my wife in seventh grade.
Alan Fleischmann
Yes, which is pretty extraordinary. You're also very close to your brother, too? How many siblings do you have?
Mike Milken
Two – I have a brother that's about two and a half years younger than me and a kid sister that's 12 years younger.
Alan Fleischmann
And do they live near you today?
Mike Milken
Yes, they do. I was really very fortunate. If I look back in time, I went to the only six-year public school in Los Angeles. So, in seventh grade, you are introduced to the 12th graders who are substantially bigger than you, and they had this tradition of putting seventh graders headfirst into trash cans. Number one of my negotiations that I failed on early was I was offering to do math tutoring or help with homework if they didn't put me headfirst in a trashcan. But I failed, and I did have that honor like many other seventh grade boys.
Alan Fleischmann
Even, yes, with that great honor that you had, you somehow that same year met Laurie, your wife.
Mike Milken
I did, and I think one of the real keys to Los Angeles and growing up in the ‘50s was the rich and poor went to the same school. Different socio-economic groups went to the same school, so you had a melting pot at school. I went to a very large school of about 4000 students, and it gave me a chance at a very young age to participate in things that if I had just gone to high school, I would have not been able to participate in until I was 14 or 15. One of these was something called the National Forensic League Debate on original oratory. One of the exciting things about debate – and I have encouraged our grandchildren to do – is you have to take both sides of an issue. When you compete in a debate tournament, you don't have just one side of an issue. You have to be able to make cases for both sides of an issue and develop counter arguments and do your research so that you could pull out cards with quotes. That experience, particularly at a very young age – I remember my debate partner, he was even younger than I was, and when we went to the state tournaments, I can't believe how obnoxious we must have been at 13 and 14 years old compared to the 18-year-olds in that we had learned every fact every statement, every counter argument. I remember after one round of the tournament, the people told us “Kids, get a life. The world is not just facts.” It was an unusual period of time for me, but really a period to sense how people react to see the world at a very young age.
Alan Fleischmann
You were such a precocious young kid. It's amazing. And yes, you were exposed to things because of the nature of the school you went to certainly, but also based on what you just described before, I can see this little Mike Milken raising his hand and asking questions, spending nights with a flashlight while reading these almanacs, memorizing and then challenging these opinions. It's so much about who you are today. You know, my daughters are both in the debate club. I could not persuade them to do it just because I loved doing it as a kid. I only did it after you, actually, one time shared with me the same insight, which is you have to learn both sides and your persuasion skills improve if you can think about not only what you're trying to get across, but what the others are trying to get across as well. I shared that and then my daughters decided that they would do it because it wasn't just me advocating.
Mike Milken
I think one of the keys to leadership is to see the world through other people's eyes. If you're only seeing the world through your eyes, it's not very persuasive because that other individual or the person you're visiting with might have a different picture of the world in it. If you can see the world through other people's eyes and express empathy for what's going on in their life, you'll be much more effective as a leader.
Alan Fleischmann
I don't want to skip any part of your life, frankly. I didn't want to forget to ask – what did your father do?
Mike Milken
My father was a lawyer and went to the University of Wisconsin where he met my mother, and he was also a CPA. To tell you about the times, after his father and mother died, he contracted polio. As a young boy, one of the few things he had from his parents was a Bulova watch, and he was able to pay for an entire year at the University of Wisconsin by selling his Bulova watch. So today, my Timex watch costs $17 to $19, and it lights up, etc. When you can compare that to the cost of a college education, that tells you a lot about what's happening with technology, but also the relative value of a watch and your college education.
Alan Fleischmann
Did your mother and father influence your choice to go to Berkeley, or did you just set out? Certainly, your parents must have marveled at their precocious young son and knew that you had a challenge because you were way ahead of your time. Education must have been everything when it came to you.
Mike Milken
At that time, Berkeley was rated as the number one undergraduate and graduate school in the world and had the highest number of Nobel Prize winners in science. I still had this dream, as I headed off in January of 1964, to run the space program, and I thought, if I went to Berkeley, it would accomplish two things: One is from Berkeley's campus, you can see the world because there are students from all over the world. Two, I could get an opportunity to interact with many of the leaders in science with new ideas and new theories, and I was always attracted to this concept of “how do we travel faster than the speed of light?” We can't get very far in the universe if we can only travel the speed of light, because the closest next star system is four light years and some are thousands of light years away, so you're going to have to figure out new ideas and space travel.
Alan Fleischmann
So, you went to Berkeley with the idea that that was going to be your future. But you studied different things that I want to share with our listeners, and then you graduated during probably one of the most epic times in American history. And certainly, when you think of how tumultuous that time was in America, Berkeley was right at the center of it. I’m curious how much influence that had on you and how involved you were? I actually credit you, Mike – and maybe with your humility, your children don't know it – but I credit you because of the work you did and the leadership that you provided that there wouldn't be a private equity industry or a venture capital industry if it weren't for the things that you put forward and created and then curated once you created them. I don't think people quite realize the impact you had. We’re also going to talk about the Center at one point, but when I was with you on that hardhat tour, I also saw the formula for prosperity that you started to develop and you think about what you just described – access to capital, access to mentoring, as well as access to an ecosystem that would not be available to most – it really is built on the idea that you figured out how you can create prosperity which goes back to the conversations you had with your fellow classmates at Berkeley. You decided that there had to be a path but that no one had it.
Mike Milken
Well, it was interesting, my classmates at Berkeley went in many different directions. I remember seen some of them at the Democratic Convention in 1968 in Chicago. My view was that we had to change the direction and access to capital in the country, and then I was headed to Wall Street. Because I was from Berkeley, not too many others were thinking of that. But if we were going to change access to capital, there's a very other really fun component and that is the individual. Chuck Dolman, he created the cable industry as we know it. Manhattan Cable created HBO, and he lost both of those companies eventually to Time Inc., and what became Time Warner, because he ran out of financial capital. His ideas exceeded his access to capital. But what a partnership that created. The same thing happened with Kirk Kerkorian who believed in content and MGM, MGM UA. The same thing with Bill McGowan – here was an individual that had 1% market share versus AT&T’s 99% market share, and he had 60 or 80 employees when I met him, and they had 1.4 million. But I told my firm, I didn't think it was fair. I think AT&T needed 2 million employees versus one Bill McGowan, or whether it was Steve Ross, or Ted Turner, etc. It was really the coupling with the individual. I had the honor of financing almost 3000 companies and some entire industries where I was right. I was right about the individual, and where I was wrong, it was the ability of that individual. You mentioned private equity – one of the things I saw at a very young age and in 1970 when I was 23 years old after I went to work, I went straight from Berkeley –
Alan Fleischmann
Before you went to work, then. You were so young, it’s incredible.
Mike Milken
Well, my own feeling is business schools today encourage you to go out and spend four years working before you go back to business school. My feeling – and we've done a lot of research on this – is the outlier, that 1-5% who has no ideas, would never go back to business school. And that one or 5% – I think one of the greatest compliments I've ever gotten in my life was Professor Mendelsohn at Wharton told me that all the professors knew if I was in the class, it would make them better. They had to be better prepared for that class. I consider that one of the greatest compliments I ever had, but it created that opportunity. So in the early 1970s, one of the clients of the firm I joined was Penn Central, and I noticed the CEO/Chairman, had 10 or 20 people in his office who really were focused on letting the world know that he was the smartest, most talented person in the world. And later that year, when Penn Central went bankrupt, no matter how many people he had working for him – in the communications era, even a person of your talent, Alan, I don't think you could convince people of that. So, it showed me that his utility curve was different from the shareholders. People don't realize in many cases, particularly in the ‘70s and subsequent years, sometimes the management and leadership of a company has a different utility curve than the owners of the company. So, the growth of private equity really mirrored that you could combine the management team’s objectives and the owners’, and together, they can create millions of jobs and millions of opportunities. The thing that people did not realize was the future is always risky and is always non-investment grade. The past is also risky. And so, when you invest in companies of the past, they quite often are disintermediated. If you look at the last 30 years of the 20th century, you'll see that the larger companies created minus 4 million jobs, and the younger, smaller non-investment grade companies created 62 million jobs. So, if you're focused on jobs, you need to make sure the Elon Musks and the Steve Jobs of the world have access to capital and that you can feel their visions.
Alan Fleischmann
When I think of you, I think of you as someone who obviously is a financial wizard and is a great leader. And the way you distinguish the difference between a leader and a manager is like what you're describing right now with the origins of private equity. The way you went about building your own firm and collecting the kind of talent you did, you knew the difference between those who were going to become the best at what they did in the lane that they owned, and then obviously, collectively, what that meant to the culture and to the outcomes and that output for the firm. Did you share that with others?
Mike Milken
Well, every afternoon or early in the morning between four and six I used to sit down and ask people “tell me your dreams.” So, you can have a person walk in and have a vision of the future that is so inspiring, and so creative, and therefore, they're a great partner in your efforts. Therefore to me, you have to listen to everyone, because if you're not listening to all socioeconomic groups, then you're not going to see the future. Yes, you can bring capital, but while I'm sitting in a trading desk or analyzing things or have a view of the industry, I am not executing the building of a plant or the hiring of people, and one of the keys of a leader is really to motivate people to follow them in their vision of the future. You take Bill McGowan – he had to go out every two weeks to raise money to make payroll. Why would a person leave Westinghouse or GE and join MCI? If it wasn't for how charismatic that leader is? Or how clear his vision was to be part of it? Why would a person leave a large pharmaceutical company and go to work for a small biotech company? John Malone and Bob Magnus built the leading cable company in the world – maybe every six months, their vision ran out of money. It was a fantastic partnership there, but you needed both. You needed to identify those that are leaders that people are willing to follow. When you look at what's occurring today in the world, where capital is available to most people who have good ideas, really the key element, as it's always been, is the management. Who is the management? What is their vision? Can they lead? Whether it's in government like Lee Kuan Yew, or whether it was in the military like with Patton during the war? Or whether it's business or whether it's a philanthropic group that has a vision of how medical research should be done? What's their approach? I think it’s about understanding the individual and what motivates them. It's interesting, out of those 3000 or so companies I mentioned now, only one CEO ever told me he was in it for the money. Now, whether they know me well enough that if they told me that I wouldn't want to support them, I don't know. But most wealth is a byproduct of creating value, creating something new. Whether it was MTV with Steve Ross and Bob Pittman and others, or Ted Turner with CNN. They had a passion, and that passion overrode their view of what they wanted to achieve.
Alan Fleischmann
Was there a work ethic there as well? Candidly when I think of you, Mike, even today as long as I’ve known you and the reputation people have about you, there is this incredible work ethic. You yourself have to master what you're doing before you share it with others. You're not known for sleeping in. I'm curious when you look at other leaders – those who have influenced you, but also so many that you've influenced – is there a common trait around that work ethic that you have and the long hours that you're willing to put in?
Mike Milken
I think one of the best answers I could give you came from a discussion I had with Abdul Jabbar. Now, he was playing professional basketball into his early 40s. And people asked him, “Why does he work so hard? Why does he practice so hard?” And he said, it's not work. If you enjoy what you're doing, you haven't had a day in your life that you've worked. There’s a passion of discovering the challenges that are in front of you, and we just had one of the major challenges that we're living in with this pandemic and COVID-19. I sat down with all 10 senators, leaders of the Milken Institute, and leadership in the Milken Institute in late February/early March of 2020, and told them, “we will all be judged, if only by ourselves, what we've done during this pandemic.” Our faster cure center offered to monitor every vaccine, every anti-viral, every antibody in the world today – almost 600 of them – and updated daily anyone wanting to know that was going on. The question was how can we accelerate science I had spent 50 years on? A person visiting me to fully understand my family – I lost 10 close relatives to cancer: a father, a mother-in-law, a stepfather, my first cousin, my sister-in-law, etc. My own children had significant health issues growing up, and so yes, there was this person at work who was focused on what I call the ‘democratization of capital’. But also, living was something far more important, and that is the medical challenges for your family. Whereas the mid 1970s – the ’74-’75 period – really defined my research and to me was my financial pandemic to test my theories which proved successful. I really never got to share them with my father. He had a reoccurrence of melanoma. I eventually concluded I needed to move from East Coast back to the West Coast in 1976, because no matter what I could do (and at this time, I had achieved financial independence in my late 20s) I could not save my father's life. No matter how many cancer centers I visited, no matter how many biotech and pharma companies, no matter how many days I had spent at the NCI, science was not moving fast enough to save my father's life. Therefore, I was thrust into the world of medicine and health prevention at a very young age. Whereas I was successful in almost everything I did, my mother let me know that a real problem is something that can't be solved with money. So, I saw at this time that the entire research system could not respond fast enough to save a person's life in their own lifetime, from a life threatening disease.
Alan Fleischmann
What you've created though, it is stunning to me. This is why this could be a two-hour show, to discuss how many people you've touched. Your ecosystem is the most extraordinary pioneers, leaders, thinkers, and doers from private industry to science, philanthropy, medicine, sports, you name it, not just in United States, but globally. You were a very young billionaire, and you turned to philanthropy at a very early age from your frustration and the horror of losing a parent at such a young age, knowing that you had all the resources are willing to help but there was no science to partner with you and it needed that kind of data and influence that you bring to everything. I have to imagine that people have been working with you now for decades – the pioneers we think of today in medicine and science probably have their origins working with you, and when you started becoming a philanthropist on the road around cancer, certainly.
Mike Milken
I would say over the past four to five decades, I've probably visited every head of the NIH or the NCI over the years. But the world is so much different today. I lost three parents to cancer in a short period of time, and it challenges you. One of the mistakes we made in the '70s and '80s in philanthropy was giving money to people at the peak of their career. As we analyzed what happened later in their career, we discovered giving people money and medical science and research in their early 30s made all the difference in the world. They went to high school, they'd spent 15 years in fellowship PhD programs, getting their internship residency, medical degree, and now they're ready to get their own laboratory. The very first one of our young investigators in this form of program was a man named Steve Rosenberg, who's still at the NCI today, and his ideas on immunology dominate much of the work today. But the movement of technology, the ability to sequence, the first sequencing of the genome, it took more than 10 years and $3 billion, now Illumina takes less than an hour and a few $100, and some day will be under $100. So, the age of precision health is here in 2021. On prevention: why were we spending 90% on care, and 5% on prevention or research? It's the old Fram oil filter ad of our year – you can pay me now or pay me later. Today, companies like Grail and others have finally answered the question that we asked 35 years ago: everything is in your blood, but we don't know what to look for. And now, they have these simple tests. They can identify 50 different cancers including pancreatic cancer in your blood before they could ever be found in a mammogram or a CAT scan or an MRI. In one of their tests recently, they found a stage one pancreatic cancer patient, and they have already cured that patient where most of the cases were at stage four. I just finished my 25th year of the Home Run Challenge, which is part of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. It was created 25 years ago to keep Dad in the game. Men generally don't get checked. Women do. And it's the idea of going to the ballgame, the American pastime, telling your buddy, your uncle, your brother, or your grandfather, your father, to get that simple blood test. This Sunday, I was one of 3.7 million men just in America, enjoying Father's Day with your friends and family and not worrying about whether you're going to live or die from prostate cancer. And by delivering a new program to the VA – which people would be so surprised has some of the best digital records in the world for health – in the last four years, we've been able to reduce the death rate for African American men by 50%, just in the last four years.
Alan Fleischmann
The numbers and death rate for Black males is so much higher than it is for white males when it comes to prostate cancer, right?
Mike Milken
Oh, it's 75-100% higher, and it's the same by the way for African American women in breast cancer – it's higher. We have really been able to make tremendous advances there, but it's the young scientists that have made young clinicians, lung translational sciences, and when we form these medical foundations – new ones called CaP Cure, which were created after I was diagnosed with cancer in 1993 and given 18 months to live. So I'm the happiest person to be with you today in 2021, Alan. But what we saw was we needed to bring more financial capital to the medical research establishment. We worked hard to eventually lead to the march in 1998 of a half a million people around the country, at cancer centers, and in Washington, and President Clinton signed shortly into law efforts of thousands of people to work on a doubling of the NIH, a tripling of the National Cancer Institute and an increase at the FDA and so on. The United States government has invested since that date more than $400 billion in incremental research, and this is just what occurred during this pandemic. The idea that we would manufacture drugs before we knew whether they worked, that we would manufacture vaccines before they work, that we would build manufacturing facilities before we knew if what they were going to manufacture work was a real breakthrough – this was costing in human lives, as we eventually saw in the United States, 600 million people and around the world, millions of people, in financial terms, $1 trillion or more a month. So, investing $20 or $25 billion to build things and manufacturing them before we knew they worked, if they worked, we could immediately put them into human beings. The reason I launched a podcast series at the end of March 2020 is I wanted everyone to have a chance to hear what the CEO of J&J was doing, or Pfizer was doing, or Francis Collins at the NIH, or what was Brian Cornell doing as the CEO of Target? Or Rodney McMullen at Kroger? What were these leaders doing? What were their decisions? And as the events in Minneapolis unfolded in May, I reached out to 20 people, African American leaders around the world as to what how they saw the world so everyone could hear their voice, not just a telephone conversation that I had with them. A lot of leadership is getting the word out. When you have these podcasts, as you know, Alan, sometimes you can get your ideas to become someone else's ideas. One of the things you learn as a leader is people do a lot better job of executing their ideas than your ideas.
Alan Fleischmann
It's what you do at the Milken Institute, which is an extraordinary institute, and then what you're now doing with the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. In many ways, what you're doing is spotlighting so many others. You do the work and come to the table with everything you do with all the rigor and data, but your ability to bring people together, Mike, you match EQ with IQ. Your love of people – I was saying earlier before the show started to one of your colleagues, you collect people, it's an extraordinary thing. Other people collect art, but you collect people, and you learn from them, but then you challenge them as well. And then you bring them together to catalyze their thinking by convening them and spotlighting them the way you do at the Milken Institute. I mean, my favorite event is to come to the global conference. Your conversations during the pandemic were your way of saying we're not going to stop the convening, even virtually, and learning from one another and giving people hope and understanding and insight. And, again, giving entrepreneurs an opportunity to speak up and speak out. But let's go to the centers that you've created.
Mike Milken
When we talk about the Center for Advancing the American Dream. Filming 10,000 people as to what they think the American Dream is. For me, in 1986 – I thought I achieved my dream. Committing $1 billion to Reggie Lewis, an African American entrepreneur who I have known for a number of years – to me, he was going to be the Jackie Robinson of finance. A role model where the world was your opportunity, you did not have to build a small company and sell it, but you could build one of the world's largest companies. I traveled the world with Reg for a number of years. Unfortunately, his life was also cut short, as many of my relatives were, by glioblastoma. He passed away in early 1993. Maybe the world would have been substantially different if he lived today and more African American men and women would have seen clearly that opportunity that was given to him, not because of his race, but because of his ability. I think that is our dream for this Center (which is now eight years in working) that people will analyze, "What are the barriers to entry to upward mobility?" Yes, many, many people have succeeded, but it's not even in our country. As research has shown, if you were born in Salt Lake City, so the lowest socio-economic group, you have one of the highest probabilities of rising up, versus other cities in America. But all other cities should be like Salt Lake City. We should make sure. So, we have really dedicated the last 30 to 40 years to this issue. There are a lot of ups and downs in one's life, but when you say hard work, I really call it determination and staying with persistence. Edison used to say, it was 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. When you see the Olympics this year and see an individual who wins the 100 meter dash, in 9-10 seconds, that individual prepared their entire life for that event, not 9-10 seconds. You don't see the hard work that went into it. But that is what exists out there, if we can create the opportunities for so many.
Alan Fleischmann
I want to say something about the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream. What I was saying earlier about your work ethic – it is unbelievable to me, when I see that you created something of enormous size, and the vision, and the pillars that you're creating around that vision around health and medical research and education and the educator, I think is what you always say, and about entrepreneurship and innovation and access to capital and economic freedom. Just the physical buildings, you must have been told for all those years "No." You had to think like a chess player, because you didn't probably ever reveal your ultimate dream. But for those who are listening, when you come to Washington, this is a living center around the American Dream that is absolutely breathtaking and right diagonally across from the White House. It is right there in the in the core of the most important buildings in Washington, and right across from the US Department of Treasury. It is stunning to me that you didn't just say at one point: this is impossible. That just says so much about you, Mike.
Mike Milken
Persistence, determination, and what you've learned since I'm really 700 years old, is I've seen the best of our country. I've seen the worst of our country. But I can tell you, for a person that's traveled the world. This is the best place to live. This is the best place for opportunity and people from all over the world. I want to finish, Alan, on one word that you said: hope. The Center is one of hope and accepting the fact that equal opportunity has not been afforded to everyone. We need to analyze why and put in place things that create that opportunity. One of our major programs at our family foundation over the past 40 years has been our National Educator Award winners – there are three thousand of them now. One was in Detroit and we were about to give this Educator of the Year award to a principal who had reduced teen pregnancy more than anyone else in the country. The TV cameras and everyone was there, and they asked her, "how did she do it?" And she said, "I found the world's greatest contraceptive." And now they're leaning in. And the answer was a word you said: hope. She told inner city teenage girls from the lowest socio-economic group that they could go to college, they could have a career, and just giving them hope that they can have a different life path substantially reduced teenage pregnancy in that community. I think that is the four letters we're trying for: hope today for anyone diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, that we might be able to cure it and cure you in your lifetime. Hope that if you're born into an extremely difficult situation and you're living in foster care, that you have hope to rise up and achieve whatever you can achieve in life. That is the reason for this Center, both to define and tell stories of people that did achieve the American Dream from all over the world, and to identify and open new channels for those that have such a difficult path in front of them.
Alan Fleischmann
You are doing such extraordinary work, Mike, this Center is going to be something that my grandchildren and great grandchildren will benefit from, even beyond that. This idea of hope, to think big, to have dreams, to imagine something more perfect than where we are today, that goes back to our beginning of this conversation, around the kitchen table with your own parents, that incredibly curious young Mike Milken, who understood the data matters, people matter, and science and math matter as well. You've changed the way we think of capitalism. But more importantly, perhaps, the greatest legacy that you're building is the way we dream. And I think the best is yet to come. For those who are interested more about the Center for Advancing the American Dream we're going to spend more time on the show talking about it. It is such a incredibly, not only hopeful center, it really is what we need coming out of this pandemic where we understand that science wins, and that racism and inequality cannot win. Together, we can create the society you've been building for so many decades. I wish we had two hours, as I said. We need to have you back on.
Mike Milken
I'll be there, Alan. Laurie and I took so much pride as we heard the words of Amanda Gorman – one of our young scholars, who we met when she was 16 or 17 years old, deliver her talk at President Biden's inauguration – reminding us that America is a work-in-progress, we're a young country, and the best for our country is yet to come in. As you know, you quite often learn from your own students more than you learn from books, as we've learned from Amanda.
Alan Fleischmann
You have redefined our society in so many ways. I consider you to be a great mentor and friend, and you have been a mentor to so many people, you inspire so many people to have that work ethic and dedication and devotion that you created through your work lives and your philanthropic lives. I know anyone who's ever touched you or worked with you feels connected to you. I just want you to know that I hope we can work as hard as you do. We strive for that. But, the best is yet to come because of all that you're doing. On that inspiring note, I just want to say thank you, Mike, and keep doing what you're doing and just know that there's so many people who admire you and want you to fulfill the dreams of all of us and be there with you as we do.
Mike Milken
Thank you, Alan, and good health to you and I'm very excited that Sirius is with us today. It was a challenge many years ago whether it would survive or not, and with John Malone's help and Mel Karmazin and others, today it reaches 30 million different locations in our country. So congratulations, and leadership – identifying human talent is one of the keys on leadership.
Alan Fleischmann
I looking forward to having you back on here. I think the best thing would be for people to learn how you identify leaders and how you help them live to their potential. You've got wonderful techniques, and I would love to see that be heard and understood by our listeners as well. So I'm going to try to get you back on here as soon as well.
Mike Milken
I'd be honored, Alan. I'd be honored. Good to see you. Good to hear you.
Alan Fleischmann
Thank you.
