Nine Years of the Wrong Kind of Listening
The professors knew everything about music. They understood nothing about it. I have spent fifty years watching the same mistake in healthcare
Issue 03 // Inside the Loop
New York City, 1948. A research library on the Upper West Side. Seven professors. Nine years of cataloguing music without once listening to it.
San Diego, 2025. A retired executive with a retired executive’s amount of free time. One 1948 Howard Hawks film, watched once, then again, then again. And a question that would not let go.
I want to tell you about a play I wrote.
I know. This newsletter is about artificial intelligence, healthcare outcomes, and the decisions that matter. We have covered a Duke University cafeteria in 1989 and an insurance executive who said the quiet part out loud in 1998. We are building toward a conversation about EMR adoption, diversion detection, and the architecture that might finally close the loop.
This issue is about a jazz play set in 1948. Stay with me.
The 1948 Samuel Goldwyn film A Song Is Born is one of the most unusual artifacts in the history of American cinema. Howard Hawks directed it. Billy Wilder wrote the original story. And Goldwyn assembled on a single Hollywood soundstage what may be the greatest concentration of jazz talent ever captured on film: Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell. Together. At once.
The premise is pure screwball comedy. Seven academics have spent nine years compiling the world’s most ambitious encyclopedia of music. They know every date, every tempo, every published fact about American music. They have never once listened to it. Then a nightclub singer arrives, running from a gangster who needs her not to testify against him. She needs somewhere to disappear. Two days in a library change everything.
I watched it once and could not stop thinking about it.
Not because of the comedy, though the comedy holds up. Not because of the music, though the music is extraordinary. Because of the central argument, which the film makes almost by accident and which I recognized immediately.
The professors know everything about music. They understand nothing about it.
I have spent fifty years watching the same mistake in healthcare. We know everything about our patients. We understand very little.
