Many years ago, for reasons I forget, I listened to an interview posted online with Charlie Munger, who for decades was Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway. One portion of Munger’s comments struck me as particularly insightful, so insightful, that I replayed that portion several times so I could write down a rough transcript of the comments. I am posting that rough transcript a few paragraphs below.
A lot of progress in healthcare, and in the world more broadly, depends on individual heroes who are willing to bear ill-will to champion truth and virtue, against the powerful special interests that benefit from falsehood and corruption. Those who speak out are often cancelled and have their careers ruined. We remember a few of the names of those who eventually were vindicated. For example Ignaz Semmelweis was cancelled by the medical establishment for arguing that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies. He eventually was vindicated and remembered, though long after he died of a beating in an insane asylum. Several much-more-recent examples can be found in Marty Makary’s thought-provoking Blind Spots. (Makary has been named by President-Elect Trump to head the Food and Drug Administration.)
Those like Semmelweis who suffered but were vindicated, are painful to ponder. How much more painful to ponder are those who fought the good fight but were never vindicated, and so are utterly forgotten? We justly honor the unknown soldier. We should find a way to also justly honor the unknown speaker of truth to power.
I cringe at Donald Trump’s occasional rudeness and bullying, but I hope that his occasional courage, and especially his willingness to bear ill-will, allow him to succeed in unbinding the entrepreneurs who create breakthrough innovations.
Below is my transcript of a small portion of Charlie Munger’s comments at the University of Michigan in 2010. My memory is that Munger made his comments in answers to expansive questions from Becky Quick as part of a celebration to honor Munger’s donations to the University of Michigan. Munger’s interest in health care led him to chair the board of trustees of Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles for over 30 years.
And so there’s a lot of abuse in health care. And one of the ways you fix it is to, is for the people who have the power, they exercise it to prevent the abuse.
In a lot of places you have live and let live, in the hospitals it’s live and let live, because nobody wants to criticize anybody. That’s a huge mistake, a huge mistake.
In our leading academic hospitals (I’m sure this isn’t happening in Michigan); [1:41:03 of recording] but I have a friend whose daughter is head of infectious diseases and something at a medical school hospital, a great hospital.
And of course the doctors there are fishing the patients out of nursing homes, and bringing them in so they can walk by the beds, and bill them. And they are bringing in these terrible infections. And that takes a lot of treatment, and a lot of walks by the bed, and so on, and so on.
Of course the parents of this particular doctor recognize that she is sort of risking her life going through medical school because of the abuse of the system by some of the doctors in a hospital where nobody is stopping the abuse.
It’s like Burke said, for evil to triumph in the world, all that is necessary is that good men do nothing. And all over America some people are intervening to stop some of these abuses. And, and you have to identify them; you have to rationalize them; you have to be willing to take the ill-will.
I have a friend, this is another wonderful story on human nature, chief of the medical staff, southern California hospital.
A bunch of non-board-certified anesthesiologists, who came out of, I forget the sub-branch of medicine; but it’s not, it’s not chiropractic, but it’s . . . anyway they got in control of the anesthesia department of the hospital.
[1:42 of recording]
And he could see that they had created three totally unnecessary deaths and had covered up every single one. And he knew that this was just gonna to ruin his life. So he got rid of them all. Changed the whole system. He ruined families, he ruined incomes, he cleaned house. And he told me the story 20 years later, and I said what happened. And he said, to this day none of the people I cleaned out and none of their friends has ever spoken to me. He was willing to take all that ill will to do the Lord’s work, and do it right.
And you can say, why did he wait for the third death? Maybe he felt he needed that much horror to accomplish the fix.
But all over America, there are stories like that. That’s a GOOD story about human nature. That’s a story about wisdom and virtue triumphing; and of course they don’t always win.
Even in a bull fight, the bull sometimes wins.
[1:44 of recording– relevant segment over]
The interview with Munger is:
(Note: at three places in the recording I roughly indicate the time into the posted recording in brackets, in case anyone wants to watch the video and check the accuracy of my rough transcript. Let me know if you find an error.)
The Marty Makary book that I praise in my initial comments is:
Makary, Marty. Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.