 Hello, everyone. Welcome to my show, Looking to the East. I'm the host. My name is Steve Zurker. I'm a professor and Dean at Kansai Gaida University. Welcome to our last show of the year. So I guess I wish you a happy holiday period and also a wonderful new year as we move into 2022. Our show will continue again in January and look forward to having more exciting topics regarding Asia and Japan in particular. Today we're very, very fortunate to have Alan Minor, who I think has been my number one guest over the duration of the show. Alan, though there's going to be a plaque or some kind of award in the future for you. So I'll see if I can earn it. Alan is a well-known venture capitalist in Japan, a long history of working in the technology industry in Japan. It started with a degree from Brigham Young University, a dual degree in computer science and Asian studies. I have to imagine Alan, you were the only person at the school with a dual major of that sort at that time. I think that I probably was here. So with that he ended up working for Oracle, which is the number one database company in the world, a huge software success, leading to him becoming the country manager for Oracle Japan in the late 80s and going into the 90s. He continued to work for Oracle in a variety of different positions, vice president positions and so forth. And that went extremely well Oracle Japan is a huge success. So Alan eventually left Oracle and then decided to start an incubator venture capital company in Shibuya back in the glory days. The Bit Valley days in the early 2000s and that's how we got involved in venture capital and startups, the startup worlds in Japan and not just Japan but worldwide as well. It's a long, long history of technology and investments and management and over what I think you told me over 300 startups, potentially. All of my angel investments, friends fooling family investments, venture capital investments, yeah, we're getting pretty close to 300 companies now. But the topic of this show is lifestyle medicine and maybe some of you are not familiar with that term. It's certainly not something that's popular or well known in Japan. But Alan has pivoted in a sense away from his history of pure technology investments like Salesforce.com he helped to bring them into Japan, and is now focusing on this area of lifestyle, preventive medicine, diet quality and so forth. So that's what we want to talk about in the show. So again Alan thanks so much for participating. Maybe we can start with your own. How did this happen how did you move from what you have been doing traditionally over the last few decades to looking at this new area has an investment area area focus. Yeah, I've been a fan of Netflix documentaries for ages and I have one of the ones that remember being shocked and fascinated by a couple in the mid 2000s was cow spiracy and king of corn kind of talking about how damaging the American food supply chain is to the environment into our health. And as new documentaries would come with a space I've always been kind of intrigued by how the world works. And by what people are saying or thinking about food and health has been kind of just a background curiosity of mine. When when those documents come out I've tended to watch them. But none of them changed my own personal behaviors that well just was knowledge that I was accumulating and not leading to any particular personal or a business action. About seven years ago my mother had a near fatal higher heart attack switched from a normal American diet of fast food, steaks chicken, home cooking out door, you know eating restaurants, and she had asthma from childhood was had advanced her rheumatoid arthritis that made it difficult for her to get around accepting an electric wheelchair for a number of years. Had a very advanced type to diabetes was almost blind and on the verge of having to go on to dialysis for her diabetes, had asthma from childhood, and then had this near fatal heart attack. One morning about six seven years ago. Not a good situation. The consequence of that she immediately switched to on the advice of a doctor, and she says, you know, prayer in the bookstore to decide what book of all the hundreds of books on diet and health that are in the bookstore, which one she should read to do what she could to improve her health. She stumbled on the starch solution by Dr john McDougal who actually developed his practice in Hawaii. And his, his, his work and his practice as a cardiologist emerged out of the observation that the first generation Japanese working on the plantations were very healthy for their lives. He never saw heart disease, very few cancers, almost no chronic disease among the first generation immigrants. The second generation was less healthy and the third generation were most of his patients he was seeing people in the 30s with diabetes extremely obese and and looking into it. He observed that the traditional Japanese diet which is high in starch from rice, a little bit of fish, lots of vegetables and fruits, a lot of variety of foods. The only thing that he could observe that he observed in those generational differences was how the diet evolved over the generations living in America, and similar studies had shown an even more dramatic increase of chronic diseases of those that emigrated to the Americans that settled in San Francisco so there are a number of studies in the 50s and 60s that demonstrated that genetically they were very very close, but as lifestyles change to chronic diseases increased that the healthiest Japanese were back in Japan, the second healthiest were in Hawaii, the least healthy were on the West Coast United States. He began recommending diet changes and saw great results in his patients and ended up working in a cardiology hospital or the cardiology ward of a hospital in California and continued that research. Anyway, so my mother, my mother's journey began with reading that book and realizing it's important to get full that the fruits and vegetables on their own don't usually make you full fats can and starches can and anyway her journey began with that. And by two years later, her heart, her arteries had cleared up completely. She had two stents but then she no longer needed them frankly because her diet changes had cleared out her cardiovascular system. Her diabetes. She, she's now almost 80 went to renew her driver's license and they require for diabetes patients, three monthly quarterly checkups to make sure that you're not going to have a painting episode while driving. And her doctor gave her, you don't need to come in for those checkups so he she now has a driver's license with no limits because her diabetes is completely gone her eyesight is completely restored her eye quality is good. Her asthma is down from six times eating to rely on the spray every day to once or maybe twice a month, and her body her movement is great. So she had experienced this she's been telling me and I took my siblings to read these books live this way. She became an evangelist. We say we say yeah mom that we're so we're so happy that you're healthy and living getting out and enjoying life again but it's not for us. Very typical response. Yeah, so I've read most of the books that she read or had skimmed through them I was aware of the potential impacts. And I had seen, I'd seen interviews in the documentaries over the years about this person or that person curing cancer by changing the diet or getting losing a lot of weight, or other diabetes patients have been able to get completely off of medicines they've done for 20 years by a simple change of diet so I was aware that this kind of effect happened to people but somehow it didn't become personal for me until I was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma last November, hospitalized for it and the first in Japan, happily we have a national health insurance system so when you're going under treatment of chemotherapy you can have very serious side effects as it attacks predominantly cancer cells but we can cause other damage in the body in Japan. They keep you in the hospital for the first two weeks to just watch how you're reacting to the drugs make sure that everything is proceeding as planned with no undue side effects. And so I had a lot of free time. The doctor comes in once a day to check how you're progressing and other than that, you're pretty much on your own and during the lockdown, they did not want to be going out of the room and going on walks in the neighborhood or around the hospital so it was very quiet two weeks. You were like a solitary confinement. Almost. Yeah, yeah. It's like lockdown plus lockdown. So, the first day I was there, my mom who had, who had listened to talks on YouTube and read so many books of authorities in this diet health nexus said Alan you might really enjoy what Dr William Lee li has say he's a Chinese American pharmaceutical researcher general practitioner. And then the last 25 years has been studying individual foods and their impact specifically on a mechanism called angiogenesis, which is our body's ability to very rapidly create new capillaries at any injury site in the body. And when we are injured or cut ourselves or whatever. There is an intense amount of active very rapid activity to deliver blood and blood platelets and or immune immune effects to the side of the injury. And apparently, when a mutated cells are aggressive enough to to begin growing, they are able to trick the body that the body has all kinds of mechanisms to stop a mutated cell from developing into cancer. So mom recommended that I watched like look into William Lee I found a TED talk online, and his TED talk changed my perspective on not just my own health and and gave a much deeper understanding of how, how often we all have potential cancer in our bodies 10,000 times today. There are all kinds of reasons why cells mutate aging being one of them. There are chemicals that we encounter in the environment or consume all kinds of reasons why our cells might mutate, but the cells themselves have a mechanism for committing suicide. If if in when the DNA replicates if it is messed up the double helix system and other mechanisms the cell prevent mutated cells from replicating in well over 99% of the cases. We have potential cancer in our bodies 10,000 times a day, but it rarely ever develops into actual aggressive cancer, and that process from mutation to hospitalization can take seven to 10 years in in most cases. Anyway, so his work his work was what what does the body do when cancer cells succeed in replicating begin to grow that allows them to continue growing at infant item until they become dangerous. And the supply of blood and nutrients to the tumor site was is a key mechanism that was clarified and established in Harvard in the 70s when he was a student there. And the first 20 or so years of his career in pharma, developing new angiogenesis inhibiting drugs, they successfully introduced for new treatments that cost about $100,000 a year to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy and hearing cancer. And because he was also practicing physician and getting the question that my mother asked her doctor, what can I do to improve what can I change my diet what can I do with my day to day life to reduce my to increase my intensive curing healing my cancer or healing my diet diabetes or healing my heart disease. Dr. Lee got frustrated that he didn't have an answer for me so that why didn't learn anything about nutrition in college I don't just eat healthy I don't I don't know what to say. I've never been trained in this. And that began to be frustrating enough for him that in 1995 he shifted from pharmaceutical development to applying the same techniques of controlled possible clinical studies. To study what different foods might enhance angiogenesis capillary formation what might inhibit it. And is there is there a possibility that we can starve cancer so the title said that was can we starve cancer with a titillating title like that the answer obviously is yes. But and so I end watching his tetra in 15 minutes I learned a lot about cancer that I was not aware of before. I learned for the first time that there are research in the United States using clinical trial quality studies on on mice on live on human patients to confirm that diet. So bad diet choices are the root cause of most of our chronic diseases diabetes heart disease, many, many cancers about 86 around 70% of cancers have their roots in dietary choices primarily animal proteins. Anyway, so there is a huge body of research and being done at the same or better quality than is applied to new pharmaceuticals. And this was an eye opener for me. And there are hundreds of collaborators with Dr. Lee's angiogenesis Institute around the world of hospitals in restaurant around the world. And I thought I really want to meet the guys doing research with them in Japan and support their work and do what I can because I've never heard of this before. It's exciting to understand that the choices you make. You don't have to wait till you're sick and go to a doctor to pop pills or get hospitalized the choices you make can keep you out of the hospital. There's a good work on actually reversing and carrying heart disease which is my mom's experience that you can be in the advanced stages of an illness. And without dependence on drugs by making better dietary choices, getting a little bit of walking exercise and every day you can actually heal yourself. So all of the practices and space recommend doing it with a doctor to advise you, because sometimes our bodies react so quickly to the diet changes that we make that if we continue taking the same doses of the same drugs we have been taking in the past. It can cause serious side effects. For example, the reaction of diabetes patients to this change can take as little as a couple of weeks and that if you continue dosing insulin at the same level you were before you made a dietary change you can actually induce insulin poisoning and get rushed to the emergency room. So they always recommend that making the change with the advice of a doctor. I looked I could I could find only only two doctors out of hundreds in the world from Japan that we're doing work with him in this country so worried about cancer, the two doctors were macular degeneration, the loss of eyesight connected with diabetes, so nobody in the cancer space nobody in the heart disease space I could find doing work with the doctors in the United States they're on the forefront of this. And so that there that the fact that I had I had my mother as a very personal example of how someone's life can be impacted by this. My own cancer and hospitalization and discovery of how advanced the science is in this space in the United States and how, how rapidly the merge and a lot of the vegan movement in Japan which kind of overlaps with this lifestyle medicine had been driven by things like the cow spiracy and corn king corn documentaries around animal ethics and environmental ethics drove a lot of it so a lot of the vegans in the world. Begin from a point of what we're doing to the animals is horrific we need to stop or doing to the environment is horrific we need to stop and take care of the planet take care of the other living species is it's a very much it's an ethical issue for I discovered that the potential impacts for health are huge and and although in Japan, originally have a very Japanese have a very healthy diet. Right. Yeah, that's one thing I wanted to ask you is that there is a perception with my family in America that Japanese lifestyle is healthier and you read about the longest live people in the world and they're generally Japanese. But that doesn't mean for those of our viewers that are not living in Japan, I mean those of us that are here we know the diet in Japan is westernized significantly over the last 30 years. And as Alan mentioned the traditional diseases that are very prevalent in the West are now here in Japan as well diabetes for example is growing significantly in the country which is maybe surprising to some of the viewers. I want to reserve time for your investment strategy which is so fascinating but just very briefly, obviously you've recovered, thankfully, from your lymphoma, and you have taken what you have learned what you just described, and you're experimenting, I guess with yourself if you call it. Oh yeah. So why don't you briefly briefly talk about that you before we came on air, you mentioned that your Hawaiian Aloha shirts have gone from triple L down to L and maybe even merging into M so yeah, tell us what you've done since November last year. Well, as I, I obviously I'm not persuaded by my other example, or by my wife has been trying to get me to eat not to do other things that she thinks are a step too far. So I'm not there yet. But for me to take action I want to have an understanding of the logic behind it. So, the research that I was reading the I've done a lot of a lot of the reading now that my mom has done over the last seven years and watched a lot of videos and the evidence for me is compelling. The scientific underpinnings of links between diet and most of the Western chronic diseases, having their root cause and of course diabetes is caused by bad dietary choices and the food industry would like to have you believe it's because the kids are sitting at home playing Nintendo not getting running around playing in the outside but the calories we can, we can use up through exercise versus the calories we consume. Clearly diabetes is a diet centered problem. And we've come because obesity is associated with so many of these cardiovascular disease diabetes and other things we tend to think that obesity is the cause. And they all have their root cause and diet. So, as I was reading different books. One of the things that I really liked about Dr Lee's work is in his list of foods that promote the five bodies health reparation and restoration systems the microbiome and the gut and geogenesis, the immune system, the ability of the cells to regulate their DNA and avoid DNA alteration and the stem cell system. There are different foods that strengthen each of those. And so Dr Lee's approach for me was the right first step, because he said I'm not going to tell you what not to eat. He kind of he talked to he sort of talks about eating a steak as equivalent to catching the flu. Your body's repair system is enormously powerful. And as long as, as long as you're getting enough food that that enhances and provides nutrition to the five repair systems, your body can recover from a number of seasons. And so I, I think he mentioned that. And so I like to tell my friends. But why would you want to go out and catch the flu again just after you get over it. So, so, so Dr Lee's approach include the other thing about his diet that makes a think this could actually work in Japan is fish, and quite a large variety of fish are included as health promoting foods in his recommendations. And so the fact that I was suffering from cancer and Dr Lee had scientific research of clinical trial quality, supporting more than just a hardcore vegan diet which for me, he was going to be very difficult to adjust to that approach that fish run it and surprisingly chicken not breast but chicken legs are have a positive impact on one of the five body repair systems so chicken legs are on his list of things a glass of red wine for the polyphenol once a day one glass of wine today or one or two beers per day. So there's there's enough. There's enough familiar foods I said I could I could follow this recommendation, I could do it. But as I've continued to study. I've come to believe that a more strict whole plant food diet is a healthier one than Dr Lee's more flexible recommendation and so a little over a month ago, a book by a medical doctor is the son of the leading nutrition researcher of the last last half of the 20th century T Colin Campbell, his son Thomas had a book on diet and he recommended that if you were going to make this change that it's better to like, like you're trying to stop tobacco. You don't stop smoking by saying I'm going to only have to a day for the rest of my time and going to smoke on Saturdays. So, his recommendation for people who want to make a change to help your diet was to go hold hold war, and or cold turkey to use an ironic expression to, to basically completely stop eating animal protein foods. And his claim was that your diet, your taste, not your taste buds would change, but your diet preferences would change your reaction, or foods would change, and it become far easier for you to adhere to this diet. If you go all in, rather than trying to estimate roughly what percentage of diet is coming from different kinds of foods to just go all in. So I decided a little over a month ago to test his theory that our taste preferences change and to go 28 days straight with no milk dairy eggs, milk and dairy, no dairy eggs, meats, fish, which is the China study solution diet, which is what my mom is on. And see if it changes my taste buds and preferences. And I've now been. I finished the 28 days on Saturday. And then yesterday I found myself well now that I'm free. And part of my experiment is now going, but I'm going to go have a tip on yaki state, I'm going to go out for sushi, I'm going to go out for yaki tour I'm going to try all these things and going to have a bowl of ice cream. And test his theory about whether our taste preferences change my hypothesis is they do not my hypothesis I will still love a good tip on yaki I'll still love a plate full of yaki Tory, a good bowl of ice cream. But what I have realized is it's not that hard for me to adhere to a stricter healthy vegetarian diet. And I noticed yesterday now that I'm through with my 28 days that as I passed McDonald's I was noticing them for the first time and I was saying I want I bet I bet a big mac and fries and a coke would taste pretty good. But but it wasn't hard to resist and so I without without being in my 28 day mode I'm now 29 days I'll probably go quite a few. And it will be I'll I expect that I'll eat sushi or yakitori special I don't imagine I'll be going out for teppanyaki steaks much anymore. All right. And I have gone from your health metrics of the crew to an X I thought I knew I would put an Excel aloha shirt. So about an Excel and an L from Raines murders to see and I found that the L is actually bigger than I wanted. I have lost 44 pounds in the last year. Wow. Primarily, primarily just from shifting what I've been eating. And there are there are all kinds of effective ways to lose weight, some healthy some not so healthy, the keto diet effective but extremely unhealthy. Smoking is a good way to lose weight, not terribly healthy way being a heroin addict is a great way to lose weight. There's a lot of overweight heroin addicts and not and not sustainable and not not sustainable so. I hear this was going to happen. We were running out. I talked too much. I was okay. It was very interesting. Maybe we'll have to do a second show to talk about your just strictly your investment strategy but I want to close we do have some questions from viewers. We only have I guess time for one, but the second one here how is the pandemic impacted the investments that you have made or the industry overall since your experiment has been occurring right in the middle of the pandemic over the last couple of years. So the biggest thing that happened is when the pandemic hit. I was very skeptical of the claims were being made by the media, based on my own experience with respiratory infectious diseases over the years that it was a serious as was claimed in the public stock market crashed in April of 2020. I dove in, and I was seeing carnage across all sectors, especially within the travel and entertainment industry of course but stock prices were down so low, lower than I had the drops in spring of 2020. I have not seen in 20 years of investing in a public stock market as well as private so the big investments that I made was basically finding all the companies that have dropped more than 80% in three months. And they only have to come back halfway and when we're through with this, the business if the business is sound, and can survive the pandemic without going bankrupt, this is a good investment so it was the easiest investment strategy I've ever deployed and a lot of people who did it have made five, six, seven times their money in a year. So the pandemic as a triggering event for an artificial crash, frankly, of the stock markets and buying on the bottom was the smartest thing I did. The pandemic itself hasn't changed my investment strategy in private equity and angel investments, largely because I've always assumed that an investment in a startup is a seven to 10 year process to exit. And it is foolish in my mind to ever make a bet as an angel investor venture capitalist on what's happening in the market today, what's happening in the world today. And I need to be looking at what can that what value can that entrepreneur build over the next 10 years is that market going to is the opportunity that he's pursuing one that's likely to continue growing for the next 10 years so that the time frame is very different. What has changed, some of perhaps because of the pandemic, and it has raised my awareness of what's going on in the traditional medical pharmaceutical establishment, and how abusive that industry can be sometimes. As compared to the lack so I have shifted my angel investment focus and this is what you want to talk about me will do other session sometime from investing in it startups to investing in farms in vegan fast food chains and I'm looking to build a convenience store for a Japanese style convenience store which has delicious fresh food that are all adhering to this whole plant food diet paradigm the healthy food paradigm. I'm looking to I'm trying to find medical doctors who are interested in learning the state of the art of lifestyle medicine in the United States and bringing the practical medical practice of lifestyle medicine to Japan, and hopefully getting a number of experts going here sponsoring some research so all of my, the vast majority I should say of my venture capital and angel investments and over last year have been in trying to make connections in the space trying to move the needle in the space toward preserving the very healthy traditional Chinese diet, making access to fresh fruits and vegetables easier supporting farmer small farmers that are wanting to explore organics. And then looking at things opportunities on a retail end of things and in the medical practice end of things. What can I do with doctors what can I do with research what can I do with how people get convenient foods at a moderate price that are healthier than what's in the convenience stores here are the fast food industry today so moving moving moving the needle on the healthy parts of the food ecosystem in Japan to be healthier. And so, the biggest the biggest thing was was seeing was seeing a market crash, unlike anything I could I never seen before that was easily explainable and easily recoverable and diving all in at the bottom and marching. Well, yeah unfortunately we're up against it here I we do need a second show so you can go into more detail about investments that you've made over the last year and how that is a bearing fruit, no pun intended there. Just a fascinating topic thank you so much for taking time to talk about this transition and I guess we should thank your mom for her early advocacy with you on this topic and now you've come to a point where you're actively attempting to change Japan, not on the focus of technology where you historically have been doing and had had a profound effect but also now in this lifestyle area it's fascinating. Also thank you Alan for being a benefactor. I think that's why you made a donation to support this program and we all appreciate that very much. So my viewers again happy holidays wonderful happy new year to you all. I'll be back again in, I think it's on January 10 my next show will be will do a review of 2021 with the my posse of professors from consulate guide I that look at political happenings in the relationship between Japan and the United States that will be next month. Thanks so much Alan really appreciate it. My pleasure. Bye bye everyone.