YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Bertolini

lines on the record: 129
first: 2025-08-19
most recent: 2025-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“She's still an amazing friend. And if there's any one accomplishment I could appoint to is he's alive because of my engagement and my advocacy for him in her partnership in it. That's the kind of sting today anyway's ever done for me.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Threw them out of the room. Ava lost her role as the head of that bone marrow transplant program, largely because that cost that hospital a lot of money to have him in the hospital for a year and a half in an intensive unit. And they tried to get me to do DNRs. They tried to put them into hospice. And they just tried everything. I had a doctor in the cafeteria one day saying to me, hey, Mr. Bertolini, have you thought any more about that DNR? I grabbed him, threw him on the floor. Next thing I have security over. I go, how dare you ask me that question in the middle of a cafeteria? What's wrong with you? Ava put herself on the line for him and she didn't know him or me for anything.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull me over because I would have appreciated the escort, is what I was going to be able to get. I walk in the room, I grab the attorney and said, this stops right now. I'm the adult. He can't apply for it without my permission.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Job as a head of that program, and they put her into research because the hospital tried to take him away from me because they thought I was being unrealistically expectant of his potential. I was halfway to Hartford to go get my daughter. And the nurse called me and said, an attorney, the priest and the hospital administrator are sitting with your son talking about emancipating him as a minor so he can make his own decisions. I flipped around one of the turnarounds on the turnpike and I headed back to Boston at 100 miles an hour hoping to catch a cop and say, you know, my son needs me.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had so many people be so kind to me. It's really hard to distinguish one thing Wow, when I was in the hospital with Eric, they gave me an ID batch, so I didn't have to go through security every time and get a pass to the room. And there was this Dr. Dr. Guyan who came up with this treatment. And every time a dark turn would happen, I'd get a phone call from her. She was not on the floor. She was the head of the program. But I get this call from her. And she said, I am really hungry. We would like to share some fries with you over at the McDonald's at the Longwood Mall, which was right next to Children's Hospital. And I used to go over there to work out every day. The only time I left Eric was from 10 to 11 every day. I went to the gym to work out. And they would do a sponge bath and all that other sort of stuff room. And she would sit down with me and say, you're an amazing human being. Here's what I would do next. Don't let them convince you that he's dead. Here's what I would do next. It cost her her.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They make you a better person, people that have known me my whole life, including my five buddies that I went to kindergarten, grade school, high school, and college with, I still see, they just could never imagine I would be who I would be, nor could I. I mean, my role was going to be working the plant, get home by three, head up to Northern Michigan to a little place I have up there and hang out and just be a good dad. And here I am and I have all these other things and a lot of wrinkles along the way that have been very disappointing and things that I've done that I'm not very proud of that I did and the analysis every one of them has been a learning opportunity that's made me a better person and the person that's come out of the other side what I've learned is every crisis you face you can't go back you can only go forward and you just have to pick up the pieces and start rebuilding”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never waste a good crisis. There's opportunity in everything that confronts you. It was actually Keno Reeves that said this. The challenges that come your way, the things that could break you are really gifts.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is that? I mean, it's my foundation rebuilding the libraries and the elementary schools in Harlem. We have created a reforestation plan for our five boroughs of New York. We're planting trees now and we're doing all these amazing things. Harlem Ground was one little farm and it's now 25 fireworks across all from 25 elementary schools in Harlem helping families eat and learn. We have students that go to the farms and work with the children after school until their parent comes to pick them up. They get food, go across to the school, build a meal together and review homework instead of watching TV with fast food. I mean, all really cool stuff. And I'm really proud of all that work, but I'm unsatisfied and I don't know why.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm going through this debate internally about why I continue to work? What am I looking for? What am I trying to find? And I don't know what it is. I know I'm not afraid of being alone. I love being alone. I'm an introvert by nature. You probably wouldn't recognize that, but I'm very introverted. I hate large groups. When I get up in front of large audiences, I'm sick to my stomach. It really is trouble for me. And it's not because I'm not confident in myself. It's just that I don't feel I need to convince others that I'm going to personally. I know who I am. My unfinished business is understanding how I can be much more effective with what I have.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leading the witness. And one day Ron Williams is sitting there, and this is in 2003 before the accident. He goes, it's really interesting the way you operate. He goes, it's very transparent to somebody like me. And I would offer you a suggestion. Just try it. Those questions you put together for everybody, why don't you actually listen to the answers instead of preparing the next question and come up with two more questions as a result of the answer? You'll be amazed at how much smarter you are. And now I know 35% of the time I'm right. And the rest of the time I got to learn by asking questions. So it changed my style completely. So I would tell myself in 2000 or in the late 1990s a lot more humility and a lot more interest in what others think is a far better solution and you'll get further along and you'll have support for it because when you tell people what to do and you stumble, the knives come out and you have no hope.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every night I get all my material before I go home for the next day. I review it all and I come up to the point of view on all of it. So when I walk into the meeting, I'm ready to discuss where we go versus having somebody read me PowerPoints. I tell people, do not read me PowerPoints. I will stop you. I have read them. So let's get going. So I always just say those were all the right answers. And how long will it take the people in the room tomorrow to get to the same conclusion I know is the right one? And then I'd start asking questions to try and steer them to the right decision.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Thursday nights I will go to Roloffs and we drink beer and party. And Friday morning was my class on corporate governance and building organization structures, which I slept through most of the time and just wrote a paper on it and sent it in and just got the grade I needed to get out. And so I never spent my time learning all the subtle sciences of social management of organizations and had to learn the hard way”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always thought when I graduated from the MBA program at Cornell that I knew everything I needed to know about running a business. I didn't know anything about running a business. I used to go to Ruloff's, which is a bar in Collegetown, and they have the largest brain collection at Cornell. And the largest brain they had was for Rulaff, who was an axe murderer in the late 1800s. I mean, he killed seven people and got electrocuted. And they used to take these brains of criminal minds and try and see if there was any relationship between size and shape and bad behavior. Underneath the computer lab at Cornell, they have this massive brain collection, all these brains. And somehow Roloff's brain got above the cash register in this bar.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says, we're taught to understand our patients deeply, know the science, do a great history in physical, and come up with a hypothesis and test it. And that's how I work. I figure out there's obviously something wrong. What are the possible ways of moving forward, testing a number of hypotheses to find out what's truly wrong, and then fixing them?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's number one. It would have been better to get a ringer's lactose IV early on had you known that. It would have fixed it a lot quicker. Two, smart water is for sweating. You have a bicarbonate problem. You had a bad gut thing going on. That's a bicarbonate. There's no bicarbonate in this. So you were actually making your electrolyte imbalance worse by drinking the smart water. There are two great sources of bicarbonate. There's Perrier. I can't afford it because you don't pay me enough. And I brought you a diet coke because you're 20 pounds overweight To lose Owen me a buck and a half go home.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've got you here, and I drink the whole thing. And after about 15 minutes, he goes, How do you feel? I said, I feel great. What happened? He goes, let me listen to your heart. It's gone. Let's do a quick EKG. It's great. Go home. I go, stop. What just happened? He goes, well, mark my last two years in medical school. My father was the dean of the medical school at University of Virginia, and his buddy was at NIH in London. And he had a son who wanted to come to the United States for his last two years of medical school. And he offered a swap for me to go and sit in the UK. So I worked in family practice in the United Kingdom where we don't have all these machines that go beep and all these blood tests that tell us all the answers. It's based on having a good hypothesis in your brain and knowing how to test it effectively to decide whether or not you're on the right track. Because we don't have all this stuff. So you've got one kidney. Your electrolyte balance takes longer to reset, especially after you have food poisoning.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This will end badly. I can see the stock price tomorrow. So get my driver and take me to my doctor. And I have this doctor, Dan Chilton. Love the man, family practitioner, general medicine. And his doctor, don't do that. And I call him that because I used to say, when I roll my shoulder back this way, it hurts. He goes, don't do that. So I go see him and I walk in and I tell him the story. He looks at me, listens to my heart, and he looks at the bottle of water. He walks out, he goes, wait a minute. He comes back with a 16 ounce bottle of Diet Coke. She says, drink it. And while I'm drinking, he's yelling at me about how screwed up insurance companies are and blah, blah, blah.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a man. She comes up and she goes, We're going to get an ambulance and take you over to the medical center. I said, you are not. Back in an ambulance up to this building and putting the CEO in it and going up to the medical center.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moving forward without perfect information or all the data, I always tell people 99 out of 100 people sitting around a table in a room or looking for somebody else to make a decision. And often people search for perfect information before they make it and then it's too late. It's a non-decision, which is as bad as anything. Let's make a decision based on a hypothesis. So another medical story. I am at a public health department dinner in Connecticut. I get food poisoning. I wake up in the middle of the night and I am by myself and I am sick for three days. I mean really sick. I finally crawl out of the bathtub where I just ran the water all day long to keep me clean. And I went to work and I realized I got heart palpitation, electrolyte imbalance. So I buy smart water. And so I'm drinking smart water. And after about a week, it's getting worse. So I said to Beb, my assistant, I said, Bev, get the nurse from downstairs in the clinic and have her come up.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are now able to thank God for the pandemic in one way, it taught us how we could do this all virtually a lot better than we thought we ever could. I worked with Andrew Wild down in Tucson, who on his way across the country after graduating from medical school was going to San Diego to open a practice. His car breaks down. It's going to take him six months to make the money in order to do it. So he starts working with the Indian tribes and learns that, oh my God, medicine in this form is an integrative way is far better. And so he stayed there. So I was working with him. We don't do virtual healthcare. We have to put our hands on people. That changed with the pandemic. Wait a minute. We can do something different here. And so I think the pandemic taught us a lot of things about how we could virtualize healthcare. Oscar is really a virtual company. We do virtual home assessments and all sorts of other things. So can we deploy?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buyer new sweater is buyer new blankets the next year, one year visit. So it was this learnings as we learn more. I said, we got to do more in the home. We got to get connected to the home. We got to be closer to the customer. We've got to make things more convenient for them.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is now into the lexicon, your zip code is far more important than your genetic code. Where you live matters more than what you are. And that makes a difference. And so we started building programs around in the home. We had a 72-year-old lady in Camden, New Jersey, $2.7 million worth of health care costs in one year, 405 ER visits in the same year, more than one a day. So we finally go to our house. Thermostat set at 62 because she can't afford a heating bill. She's got blankets and sweaters all over the house to keep herself warm that are made of her favorite material angora. She's allergic to Angora.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts with the mental hero stick in your head. We all have a model. And I remember sitting next to Bill Taylor, who was chairman of Cygna at the time, and he's talking about all these people. And I'm going, I will never know this stuff. How do I get this? I said to him, Bill, he goes, Bark, you have to have a network? You have to constantly cultivate that network, and you have to add to your mental heuristic in your brain. And all of a sudden, new things will happen. And you'll say, oh my God, I didn't see this, but now I see it. And that's how it happens for me. I constantly educate myself. I remember Sir Michael Marmont was coming to Columbia University and Linda Fried, who's the dean of the School of Public Health, calls me and goes, I'd like you to do grand rounds with Sir Michael Marmont on social determinants of health. Nobel laureate, I'm going to walk around with him talking about social determinants of health. I had nine months. I crash coursed it, talked to all the experts, and light bulbs went off my head going, oh my God, we're doing this all wrong. And that's when I came up with the saying.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I get to do at Oscar now. And Oscar's smaller and it's more nimble. And we're like this little pirate ship floating around among all these Spanish galleons filled with gold. And they just look at us and go, look at that little company. How will they ever make it? And most of our class of companies that came out when we came out are all gone and didn't make it. And here we are.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just give up. So, how can we get people engaged in improving their life and living the life they want by helping them be better?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my problem with my health. That's what bothers me. And that's what we found. Most people described it as a barrier to something they wanted to do. And so if you can have a conversation with a diabetic who had penal neuropathy and say, what is it about your feet that get in the way of the life you want to lead? And they say, I can't go to the senior center anymore and play cards or I can't walk to the senior center anymore or play cards or I can't take my grandchildren for a walk in the park and sit on the bench without my feet hurting Well, what if we got your diabetes under control and you could do that again? Now you have found a point of engagement with a patient that's far different than saying here's what a healthy person looks like you want to be this ain't happening so they give up and 41% of the American public actually has this attitude of my mother died of sugar I'm eventually going to get it as long as I can live my life comfortably when that time comes I'll deal with it”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, individual market. I'm looking at all these sides going, oh my God, we haven't accomplished anything in 32 years. We're not making any progress here. And the system's still broken and now it's 20% back then it was 14% or 15%. This isn't going to end well. And I thought maybe in the CVS deal was meant to do that. It was to create a presence in every local market and get people to come in and have a conversation in the stores that said, what is it about your health that gets in the way of the life you want to lead? Because I did work with IDO with George Blankenship who built the Tesla dealerships in the first Apple stores. And when we talked to people, they didn't describe themselves as a disease state. Like I never say, I'm a spinal cord injury survivor. I've got certain deficit. My handicap went from 12.7 to 21. Had to have my motorcycles modified so I could still ride them. I can't play the piano like I used to. I was classically trained. My fly fishing's just I can't tie flies anymore. I mean”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have the cardboard rim, and then they have the clear sheet and you have words on it or cartoons. Were from 1991, and I would do presentations of health reform and what the future could look like. And I had these acetates. And they were interspersed with Gary Larson cartoons to prove points. One person playing chess and the other person playing checkers at the same table. Or the one I always liked was a bunch of knights staying on the field. Half of them with the top of their armor going off. Why do we have to be skins today? It's so typical of how things get done in the healthcare system in negotiations. And so I'm looking through them. I'm going, oh, the Human Genome Project. I talked about it back in 1991. Oh, virtual healthcare. I talked about that in 991.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I left Hartford, I'm digging through these boxes, and I find this small flat box of acetates. You know what acetates are?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The culture is so institutionalized in that organization that causing any changes at the management process level about how we work was really difficult. People wanted to operate the way they always operated. And that was a bit of a struggle. Near wanted to make the changes as well, but it was just really the investors who run the business and make all the money, they call the shots. And that's how it works in those places. Ray was getting nervous getting out and he wanted to do other things, but he didn't want to be too far. And it was all of those sorts of machinations. And so finally, Nier was ready. I went back to the board. And then I had been working with Josh and Mario for three or four years. Last year, an hour a week. And they said, you're not co-CEO at Bridgewater anymore. I go, no, I'm not. And they go, well, could you come and run Oscar?”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of people pour 15 ounces, and I'm on Zoom and I've got a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle batch B. We did. We toasted at 4 15 a.m. We got the deal done. And then I'm hanging out in California. I spent time in the winter in California, Laguna Beach, and I get this phone call and Dave. We created a co chair role for the two of us to go with the co-CEO job role. And he calls me and he goes, Ray wants to talk to you about being the CEO of Bridgewater. And I'm going, hey, I don't want to put it in that kind of time because I got to learn the business. I don't know the business like other people do, but there was a young guy near Bardea, former IDF commando, and he was working there as the underling to Dave McCormick. I said, tell you what, all rideshotgun with Near until he's ready. So we did an 18-month deal. And I did that.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2018. It was fall of 18. So I joined in February and I'm provisional as a board member. And I start helping build the committee structure and charters and looking at the bylaws and working the deal. It was chaotic, to say the least. I mean, here's a firm that by computer trades all this money every day in 200 liquid markets around the world, it's fascinating. As I'm doing that, Ray one day calls me and says, I'd really like you to become chairman of the board. I can't make this transition as chairman, so I became chairman of the company. And we started doing more and more and we'd have these marathon negotiating sessions over the exit deal and all that sort of stuff. And there was no detail that was too small to consider. And we finalized the deal on July 15th at 4.15 a.m.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been largely me running the show. So I'd like to get the deal structured. I'd like to create a governance model that includes more independent directors. And I'd like to have a management process in the company that knows how to run the business while I'm gone without blowing the place up. Because I think they'll just spend everything if they can if I don't. He's got the typical entrepreneur founder kind of thing. If I'm not here, the place is going to just go to hell in a handbasket. So I said, sure.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I get a phone call from a guy that I know, Rusty O'Kelly, Russell Reynolds, and he says, I'm on this assignment in Bridgewater. Ray Dalia wants to talk to you. Would you go see him? I said, oh, who would not? Want to have a conversation with Ray Dalio, he's such an iconic guy, so I go to meet him and we're having coffee downtown somewhere here. He's got a townhouse down here. And he says to me, I got to get out of here Approaching mid 70s and I'm trying to create a deal where I can go. But I really worry that the company will go to hell in a hand basket when I'm gone because I've been at the table every day.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And whether or not we were worth what we were saying we were going to do. And that was driven by our employees. We created 2,000 new millionaires when we sold the company to CBS. Employees, it's about creating something that's valued. I've always finished everything I've started and I've made it valuable, how it gets valued and how people perceive it is up to them. One of my other sayings is what other people think of me is none of my business. It's their fault. They just don't know. So this idea of creating great companies is by building great teams. 60% of my time spent on people doing great things. Solving big problems.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investor conference one day, and I got a moan in the audience, and this young lady in the back stands up, and she takes her sweater jacket off, and she turns around and goes, No margin, no mission is on the back of her t-shirt. We believe this. And so what I tell people at Oscars, they say, are we going to grow or are we going to make money? Well, you know, socialism works until you run out of other people's money. So we have to make money so we can continue our mission, grow to more markets. This other thing going on with the stock market is a bunch of people trading with each other betting on whether or not that company knows what they're doing. And at Etna, when I had 652% total shareholder return over eight years, when we looked at the underlying, only a third of it related to earnings and two-thirds of it related to the price earnings multiple, or the streets belief, and whether or not the company generates a product that will consistently be valued by customers and it will continue to grow. That two-thirds of that gain was largely around the”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Created opportunity for the future. In my first company, sorry, my first company, Sister Joyce Deshano, was on my board. Sister Joyce Deshano ran the Providence Hospital in Detroit. And Sister Joyce was the ultimate chairwoman of the Ascension Health System. She created the Ascension Health System Daughters of Charity and Sisters of St. Joseph. So I went to see her because we were having a for-profit board and third was owned by management, third by doctors, third by hospitals. And I sat down and said, I want to just make you comfortable with for-profit governance. She goes, Mark, we don't need to do this. I said, why, sister Joyce? And she goes, add the Daughters of Charity. We have one very important mission. No margin? No mission. We don't make money. We can't continue to serve our people and extend our services to more people. So the only difference between a for-profit and a not-for-profit that are well run is the for-profit pays taxes. I don't. I said this at a...”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yeah. I have a servant leadership model. The important thing was that every day I woke up and I reminded myself that I had 50,000 families at Etna that relied on me to be a good leader and to make sure that what we did”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark, I'm here to help you. So, okay. He goes, You got two Sikorsky 76s here at Eden. And you know how they work? And he described everything and the redundancy and everything. He goes, you know how I know that? I walk the floor and I'm with the workers every day. They know me. Anybody who goes on an undercover boss should be fired by their board of directors. They know me. And when George left, he was banged out. And in a factory, in a manufacturing plant, when you get banged out, that's the workers banging on their machine. They never do it for a CEO, but he got banged out because of what he did for that company. And he made three times the total shareholder return that the guy at General Electric made without having a book and crowing on TV every other week. And so my view of the money part was it will come whatever it is I have a responsibility, according to my dad, to share it with others and make sure I take care of those that don't have it, what they have.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't expect it to ever be at $208 a share because I took over, it was nine dollars a share. But it ended up being a lot of money. And the vast majority of it went into a foundation called Anahata, which is the heart chakra on yoga, where I joyfully help food banks. I do environment education and community sustainability. And I give away close to 12 to $15 million a year doing that. And it's a great way for the federal government not to get it and for me to use it in ways that I think are more useful versus them having distributed through the tax system. And so every year I do that same thing. Whatever I make, I take a portion of it and I throw it into the foundation and it'll be generational. My son and daughter, I told him they both have a great responsibility to manage something that'll be generational. I don't have yachts and I don't have all those other sorts of things. As George David told me when I first became CEO of George David came over and spent days with me and he sat down and he said”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the money for me was always something that I got as a result of doing good work versus having to have it up front. As a matter of fact, when I became CEO of that and I didn't change my compensation, they said, we don't know you. We're going to give you a shot for three years. And I said, okay, well, at the end of three years, I want you to recognize what I've done. And I did a lot of good things in that time. And this is my guidance to most everybody that works with me. Your salary pays for the bills, your bonus pays for the baubles, and your stock is never to be touched. It's part of generational wealth. It's for the future. And to help others. So when I left it, I had 3 million shares of stock. I never touched them.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, This is a very important lesson for you. Never count anyone else's money. Never compare yourself to anyone else on how much money you have. You have it, make sure you share it for people that need it when you have enough. And never threaten to quit a job unless you got another one to go to. It's stupid. And you're going to have a family one day and that won't work really well for your family.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So go home. And we had one of these tables, we trestle tables, and we have the meal. There's eight of us around the table and the meal ends and I go to get up and my dad goes, sit down. Okay. He always looks at me. He goes, let me tell you about Jerry. Jerry's got a family. He's got a daughter and he's got a wife and he's got a house to pay for. And so I'm helping Jerry make his payments because he has a family race. He has responsibilities and he's doing a job as good as he can and probably not much better than he's going to ever be able to. So I have an obligation to Jerry. You, you're 14 years old. I know we take some of your money to help the family, but you have spending money in your pocket. I said, I understand. He goes, so do you get why I'm helping Jerry and why there's a difference? Were you happy before when you were making money? I was. Okay. Do you want your job back? I said yes. Okay, you start tomorrow at a dollar an hour. He cut my pay.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I never worried about the money. When I was 14 years old, I was working with my father and his plant. He was a foreman and a pattern-making plan. And I was painting walls, cleaning bathrooms, cutting the lawn and doing all this real stuff. And I was making a dollar and a quarter an hour. I went to high school where we had 7 a.m. to the 12 noon shift, and I was in that shift. I would catch the bus at 1.30, take it down to its operation about four miles away, and I'd go to work. And I'd ride home with him in the evening. And there was this other guy that worked with me, Jerry. He was 24. And Jerry was not the brightest bulb in the pack. And he would work with me, but I was always working circles around him. So one day Jerry and I are having a cigarette out behind the shop at lunch, and Jerry lets me know he's getting $4.25 an hour. So I go into my dad and I go, Dad, I mean, I work circles around this guy. I want a race. He goes, well, what happens if I don't give you one? I said, I'm going to quit. He goes, do you have another job? I said, no. He goes, good, you're fired. Go home.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it doesn't date stamp it. So it sits there until you work it out. So once I started doing that, I'm watching dog commercials. I'm crying. I'm going, what the hell's going on here? I had to go through all of these emotional and physical changes as part of it.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was my brain. It was all pains in the brain anyway, as you probably well know that it all happens in here, and that my brain betrayed me. I thought I was smart. And then the second thing I had was incredible remorse for my lack of empathy for people and how I treated people and how callous I could be because when I was in pain, it was like, I got to get this done. I don't have a whole lot of time here to argue with you. So let's talk about how we get it done. Now, as patient, but I was not tolerant. And it should be the other way around. It's okay to be impatient, but you have to be incredibly tolerant to get things done effectively. It was like going through the 12 steps of alcohol anonymous. Then I felt like I needed to reach out to everybody and apologize to them and say, I'm so sorry if I ever treated you in a way that I didn't intend. And then I had to start controlling my emotions because all of a sudden I had them again as my amygdala dumped out. Your amygdala stores all trauma.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no latency in your system. Something touches your arm, you're in pain. So they help me understand the system. Then they put me in transcranial magnetic stimulation and they zap my brain for 30 minutes to disconnect those pain centers. And they put me in a virtual reality lab with a helmet and they repattern my brain.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I said, here we go again. And I had worked with Mari to help get her through. That was going to work and what the plans were and all that sort of stuff. And so they go, I go, okay, well, let's start. So part of it was cognitive behavioral therapy. And I had to go back to my childhood and my concept I was not well treated as a child. And so I was constantly under threat assessment. And threat assessment is the worst thing you can have when you have chronic pain because you're always waiting for one cell to have pain and then all of a sudden it goes everywhere. And they said, and also your 42 pain centers in your brain have wired together from all this chronic pain over the years, so any touch feels like pain. So in essence, I was addicted to pain. And they had done MRIs on baseball hitters, and they said the best baseball hitters, their visual, cognitive, and motor cortices light up instantaneously. There's no latency. That's why they see the ball in slow motion. That's why they see how it's moving. That's how they hit so well. You have a baseball hitter's brain on pain.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas. It's an assisted suicide organization, but I had to prove I had intractable pain. And pain that can't be cured. And so I was sent to a doctor and the doctor evaluated me. And the doctor said, I wasn't doing on February 15th, 2023 was going to be my death day. I wanted to do the 18th, but it was a Sunday. What was the day I had the accident? went and this doctor sat down with me and they did a few tests and they looked at me and said you don't have intractable pain you have neuroplastic pain and we can fix it i go here we go again i mean i did seven days in the hanuman hospital icu 50 milligrams of ketamine in an hour iv to try and reboot my system i had a great time And it felt better for the first month afterwards, but then came back in a rush.”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would literally walk around in my room. The right side of my brain literally shut down. So my level of empathy was pretty low. And the left side of my brain was a machine. Like a super computer, so I could look at things and say, okay, let's get the group together, let's do this. Every morning I would get the run of the billions of reserves at Aetna at 6.30. We would run the reserves every night. So that was my key metric. My brain was like that”
2025-08-19 · Invest Like the Best · Mark Bertolini - Performance During Pain - [Invest Like the Best, EP.438] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source