How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update)

Summary

Freakonomics Radio: How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) – A Detailed Summary

In the final installment of Freakonomics Radio’s series, "How to Succeed at Failing," host Stephen Dubner delves deep into the multifaceted concept of failure, exploring its implications across various fields from infectious disease research to organizational psychology and education. This episode, released on May 21, 2025, weaves together expert insights, personal narratives, and innovative strategies to understand and harness failure for success.

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1. The Deadliest Infectious Disease: Tuberculosis

The episode opens with a surprising revelation about global health: tuberculosis (TB) is the world's deadliest infectious disease, surpassing more commonly recognized killers like COVID-19, malaria, influenza, and HIV.

Babak Javid, a physician-scientist specializing in TB, states at [01:52] DA:

"TB is a disease of poverty. It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria."

Javid highlights that TB remains a significant threat, particularly in developing nations, due to inadequate funding and lack of public awareness. Despite the existence of a vaccine and effective antibiotics, TB continues to claim over a million lives annually.

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2. Adaptive Mistranslation: A New Approach in TB Research

Delving into TB treatment, Javid discusses the concept of "adaptive mistranslation," a breakthrough in understanding bacterial resilience.

At [02:26], he explains:

"There's no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind, in everyday people's thoughts."

Javid recounts his research journey, emphasizing the resilience of TB bacteria against traditional treatments. The discovery that certain errors in protein synthesis can actually benefit the bacteria led him to coin the term "adaptive mistranslation," suggesting that controlled errors can foster bacterial innovation and survival.

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3. Pre Mortem: Anticipating Failure in Organizations

Transitioning from biology to organizational strategy, Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist, introduces the "pre mortem" technique—a proactive approach to anticipating and mitigating failure.

At [07:46], Klein describes:

"The pre mortem is designed to help people surface realistic possibilities and threats so that you can improve the plan, improve the product, and increase your chance of success."

Unlike traditional post mortems that analyze failures after they occur, pre mortems involve imagining a project has failed and identifying possible reasons for that failure. This method encourages candid feedback and uncovers potential issues that might otherwise remain unspoken due to team dynamics or hierarchical barriers.

Klein shares a poignant example at [15:33]:

"There was this young captain... he looked a little nervous. And he said, this tool that we're building, it's for people in the field and they have these low-powered laptops. The tool we're building runs on a supercomputer that takes 48 hours. I don't see how that's going to work."

This junior team member’s insight, elicited through the pre mortem process, led to a pivotal change in the project’s direction, underscoring the value of inclusive and anticipatory planning.

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4. Alto’s Resilient Business Model: A Discussion with Will Coleman

Will Coleman, CEO of the rideshare startup Alto, shares his perspective on resilience and failure in the highly competitive rideshare industry.

At [21:42], Coleman explains:

"Uber and Lyft, we think, are the contra of safe, clean, consistent. Our brand was always built to go head to head against the big names... we call it an accessible luxury."

Alto differentiates itself by employing drivers directly and leasing vehicles, offering a more consistent and high-quality service compared to industry giants. Despite Gary Klein’s suggestion to implement pre mortems, Coleman expresses skepticism:

At [25:07], he asserts:

"If you're constantly focused on the downside, then I think you're probably not focused enough on the upside."

Coleman believes that a relentless focus on potential failures can be paralyzing, especially for startups where the probability of failure is inherently high. Instead, Alto emphasizes incremental improvements and agile decision-making to navigate uncertainties.

Despite these efforts, Alto faces challenges as reported later in the episode, reflecting the harsh realities of the startup ecosystem.

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5. The Museum of Failure: Embracing and Learning from Setbacks

Samuel West, a psychologist and curator, introduces the concept of the Museum of Failure—a traveling exhibit showcasing over 150 failed innovations and products.

At [28:59], West humorously describes a failed product:

"It's golf club with... it's for us men when we're out golfing and need to urinate. So what you do is you unscrew the top of it, you clip it onto your belt, and then you fiddle under the belt and you urinate into this canister camouflaged as a golf club."

The museum aims to normalize failure, encouraging visitors to laugh and learn from past mistakes. West emphasizes that while the museum showcases commercial failures, the lessons apply broadly to personal and professional spheres.

However, recent internal conflicts have cast a shadow over the museum's mission, highlighting the complexities of publicly embracing failure.

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6. Academic Perspectives on Failure: Insights from Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School discusses the importance of acknowledging and learning from failures within academia and beyond.

At [32:40], she advocates for transparency:

"One way to think about this is we will be failing. So let's do it joyfully, let's do it thoughtfully and celebrate them appropriately."

Edmondson points out the pervasive issue of "publication bias" where only successful or positive results are shared, leading to a skewed understanding and repetitive mistakes in research. She proposes the creation of a "Journal of Failed Results" to document and disseminate null findings and unsuccessful experiments, fostering a more comprehensive knowledge base.

Her collaboration with Roy Shalem further explores economic models where failed R&D efforts are commoditized, potentially reducing future costs and accelerating discovery.

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7. Roy Shalem’s Market for R&D Failures

Roy Shalem, an economist at Tel Aviv University, presents a novel idea from his research: a marketplace for R&D failures.

At [34:13], Shalem explains:

"My paper proves that theoretically there is a potential for a market for R and D failure."

Shalem argues that selling knowledge of past failures can prevent redundant efforts and accelerate innovation by allowing competitors to learn from others' mistakes. This market could monetize failure data, turning setbacks into valuable resources for ongoing and future projects.

While this concept remains theoretical, Shalem's work opens avenues for reimagining how failure is perceived and utilized in the innovation landscape.

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8. Teaching Failure: Professor Teresa McPhail’s Approach

Teresa McPhail, a medical anthropologist at Stevens Institute of Technology, shares her groundbreaking approach to educating students about failure through her course "Failure 101."

At [43:28], McPhail outlines her teaching philosophy:

"I want to really get them familiar with the concept of failure and introduce it as a necessary and natural part of life and as a crucial component of a well-lived life."

McPhail’s course challenges the traditional stigma associated with failure, encouraging students to embrace it as a learning tool. She incorporates real-life tragedies, such as student suicides linked to perfectionism and fear of failure, to underscore the profound impact of societal attitudes on mental health.

Through candid discussions and reflective exercises, McPhail aims to redefine failure for her students, fostering resilience and a healthier relationship with setbacks.

Her approach has received overwhelmingly positive feedback, with students noting a significant shift in their perception of failure and personal resilience.

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9. The Psychological Toll of Failure and Strategies for Acceptance

Addressing the emotional aspects of failure, McPhail discusses the intrinsic challenges students face in accepting failure, rooted in deep-seated fears and cultural narratives that equate failure with personal inadequacy.

At [40:48], she shares a compelling student perspective:

"If you fail, you suck."

McPhail combats this by fostering an environment where failure is dissected, understood, and accepted as part of the human experience. She emphasizes that recognizing that "everyone is failing every day at everything" helps students realize that failure is universal, thereby reducing personal stigma and promoting collective learning.

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10. Conclusion: Redefining Failure for Success

The episode culminates with a synthesis of insights from various experts, advocating for a paradigm shift in how failure is perceived and utilized. From adaptive mistranslation in bacteria to pre mortem strategies in organizations, and from academic transparency to educational reforms, the narrative constructs a comprehensive understanding of failure as an indispensable component of growth and innovation.

Stephen Dubner closes the series by inviting listener feedback and hinting at future topics, leaving the audience with a profound appreciation of failure’s role in shaping resilient individuals and systems.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Babak Javid [01:52]: "TB is a disease of poverty. It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria."
• Babak Javid [04:12]: "I kind of coined the term adaptive mistranslation, that sometimes these errors in the right context and in the right degree can actually be good for the bug."
• Gary Klein [07:56]: "A wicked problem is one where there's not a clear right answer that people would generally agree upon."
• Will Coleman [35:07]: "If you're constantly focused on the downside, then I think you're probably not focused enough on the upside."
• Samuel West [28:33]: "Elizabeth Holmes. Do I need to say anything about her? No."
• Amy Edmondson [32:40]: "One way to think about this is we will be failing. So let's do it joyfully, let's do it thoughtfully and celebrate them appropriately."
• Teresa McPhail [46:24]: "No, I'm trying to take failure and put it on the table and look at it as a social object."

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Final Thoughts

This episode masterfully interlaces diverse perspectives to present a holistic view of failure. Whether it’s in combating deadly diseases, steering startups, curating museums, or shaping educational curricula, failure emerges not as an endpoint but as a critical juncture for learning, adaptation, and eventual success. By embracing failure, individuals and organizations can cultivate resilience, foster innovation, and ultimately thrive in the face of adversity.

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Stay tuned to Freakonomics Radio for more insightful explorations into the hidden sides of everyday phenomena.

Transcript

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by WhatsApp. On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. So the calls with your mom, chats about the latest work, drama, late night voice messages, and all those photos and videos of your dog. Every personal message stays private because no one, not even WhatsApp, can see or hear your personal messages. WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Discover. It's smart to always have a few financial goals and a really smart one. You can set earning cash back on what you buy every day. And with Discover, you can get this. Discover automatically matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year. Seriously, all of it. And we trust you to make smart decisions. After all, you listen to this show see [e-mail] credit card hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and you are about to hear the fourth and final episode of our series, how to Succeed at Failing, which was first published in 2023. If you missed any of the earlier episodes, they should be right there in your podcast app. For this version, we have updated facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening. If I asked you to name the world's deadliest infectious disease, what would you say? COVID 19. That was the biggest infectious killer for a few years, but not anymore. How about malaria, Influenza, hiv? Those are all deadly, but not the deadliest. So what's number one?

[Babak Javid]

Actually, TB for the last 20, 30 years has been the number one infectious disease killer in the world.

[Stephen Dubner]

Babak Javid is a physician scientist who studies tuberculosis or TB. You may think of TB as a 19th century disease when it was called consumption. It killed John Keats, Anton Chekhov, and at least two of the Bronte sisters. It killed the heroines of both La Boheme and La Traviata. And today it still kills more than a million people each year, most of them in the developing world.

[Babak Javid]

TB is a disease of poverty. It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria.

[Stephen Dubner]

TB is a bacterial infection. There is a vaccine for it, but it's not always effective. It can be treated with antibiotics, but it's a long and fairly complicated course of treatment. And as deadly as TB is, it doesn't draw the attention or the funding that flow to other diseases.

[Babak Javid]

There is no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind, in everyday people's thoughts. One of the reasons I was attracted to this field is I felt that infectious diseases in general and TB in particular is, you know, one of the mechanisms of injustice in our world. And I really wanted to tackle that.

[Stephen Dubner]

Javid runs a tuberculosis research lab at the University of California, San Francisco. He has also worked at labs in Beijing and at Harvard. His kind of research comes with a lot of failure.

[Babak Javid]

I remember in my graduate school, I went over a year and a half without a single experiment working. And it's very hard to get up in the morning and go back and expect to fail again.

[Stephen Dubner]

The first drug that was found to successfully fight TB is called Streptomycin. It was discovered in 1943. It won a Nobel prize for Selman Waxman, the main scientist behind it.

[Babak Javid]

And the way that streptomycin works is that it does two things. It inhibits the process of making new proteins. It's called a protein synthesis inhibitor. But that in itself doesn't kill the bug. What kills the bug is that in addition to that inhibitory action, it actually causes the bug to make mistakes when it makes these proteins.

[Stephen Dubner]

What interested Javid was this second function, the drug causing the bacteria to make mistakes as they are creating the proteins that produce the symptoms of. So he went looking for other ways to trigger those mistakes, and he found some. But it turned out this wasn't enough to thwart the bacteria.

[Babak Javid]

What was really shocking and surprising to me is the bug didn't seem to mind. It just carried on regardless. So I cranked up the error rate, and I kept pushing and pushing, and really, the bugs were kind of fine with it until eventually, when I had really cranked up the error rate an awful lot, and then the bugs died. It takes a lot of error to kill these bugs. I was reflecting on my results, and I was thinking, this just doesn't make any sense to me. The prevailing dogma at the time is that with a small amount of error, you induce what's called error catastrophe, where the errors in the new proteins make faulty machinery in the cell that then makes more errors and it just feeds on itself. And these bugs were extremely resilient. And that made me take a step back, and I thought, what if actually these errors aren't detri detrimental after all? At least an immoderate amount. And that was my, I guess, aha moment. I have to be honest, at the beginning, I had no idea why this was. We were coming up with lots of different ideas to explain it. But after a lot of experimentation and blind alleys and wrong turns, we figured out that what's happening is that this mistranslation is allowing the bacteria to innovate, and that was a really exciting moment. And I kind of coined the term adaptive mistranslation, that sometimes these errors in the right context and in the right degree can actually be good for the bug.

[Stephen Dubner]

Adaptive mistranslation. Think about that for a minute and let's think about it. Outside the realm of tuberculosis research, it's the idea that errors in the right context and degree can strengthen an organism, can make it more resilient, and lead it to. To innovate. Now, that sounds like a magic trick, doesn't it? But if it can work for tb, can it work for us? Today on Freakonomics Radio, the final episode of our series how to Succeed at Failing, we will hear about another counterintuitive way to fight off failure.

[Gary Klein]

The pre mortem is designed to help you do better. Rather than to shut off innovation, we.

[Stephen Dubner]

Ask if failure should be taught formally in the classroom.

[Teresa McPhail]

The whole point of the whole semester is going to be, hey, everybody fails, and we fail at everything.

[Stephen Dubner]

And whether failure needs a museum.

[Samuel West]

We have a Ford Edsel, we have Pepsi, crystal, New Coke.

[Stephen Dubner]

How to succeed at failing, the final chapter. Starting right now.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist who advises organizations on how to respond to failure. His latest research is around what are called wicked problems.

[Gary Klein]

A wicked problem is one where there's not a clear right answer that people would generally agree upon.

[Stephen Dubner]

And what share of problems in the world are wicked problems?

[Gary Klein]

Most of the major social problems we wrestle with are wicked problems. We have multiple stakeholders and there's no way to please all of them. And so there's all of this potential conflict and resource situations change or pandemics arise, wars arise, things that are unexpected that are gonna upset what you're doing.

[Stephen Dubner]

In any of those conflicts that Klein is describing, any of those disruptions, let's call them, we suddenly crash into a complex situation that's also fogged in by uncertainty. And now we have to essentially guess what's gonna happen next. And those guesses often turn out to be wrong.

[Teresa McPhail]

I actually went on Anderson Cooper during the early days of the pandemic to tell everyone how wrong I was.

[Stephen Dubner]

That is Teresa McPhail. She is a medical anthropologist at the Stevens Institute of Technology, one of the country's top engineering colleges. And yes, McPhail is an appropriate name for a professor discussing her own failure in a series about failure. But just wait, it will get even more appropriate later in this episode. Anyway, McPhail had studied the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza, influenza pandemic in 2009. So her expertise was in demand when Covid came along.

[Teresa McPhail]

I really thought, when we heard the first rumblings out of China in 2019 and early 2020, I was like, we have this, like, there's mechanisms in place. But what I hadn't really considered was what over a decade of cutting funding had done, and it had basically decimated a lot of public health. I thought we were more prepared, and it turns out we were not. And I felt badly because I had done an interview with Vice News in February and I said, calm down, you know, we're not China, we're better equipped. Here's why I had to go to the ER in March, because I got very sick on March 1st. I went to the ER and I remember the ER doctor saying to me that he had never seen a situation where they were so ill equipped with PPE or personal protective equipment. That's when I realized, oh, I was wrong.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now, what might have happened if Theresa McPhail, and not just McPhail, but let's say everyone in the realm of pandemic preparedness, what if they had all thought a bit differently about this wicked problem? What if before the failure happened, they pretended that there had already been a failure? You are probably familiar with the idea of a post mortem, or what the military calls an after action review. By that point, of course, the damage has been done. So what if you flip the order and conduct a pre? Mortem? That's what Gary Klein called this strategy when he invented it in the 1980s.

[Gary Klein]

The pre mortem is designed to help people surface realistic possibilities and threats so that you can improve the plan, improve the product, and increase your chance of success.

[Stephen Dubner]

At the time, Klein was running an R and D firm that studied decision making in organizations.

[Gary Klein]

You know, many of our projects succeeded, but not all of them. And we would occasionally have an after action review, those exciting things to do, because we were pretty disgruntled at one point, I said, why don't we do this at the very beginning? Why don't we imagine that it fails? Often in organizations, if you have like a kickoff meeting, there'll be a part where they say, all right, now, does anybody have any concerns? Are there any critiques? Does anybody see any problems? And nobody says anything either because they don't want to disrupt the harmony of the team or because they're not thinking that anything could go wrong because they're excited to get started. So to break through that mindset, I developed this technique of A pre mortem. And at the end of a kickoff meeting, we say, all right, imagine that I'm looking at a crystal ball. I'm dialing forward six months, maybe a year, whatever the right time frame is. And, oh, no, this project has failed. It's failed in a big way. We know that. There is no doubt this crystal ball is infallible. Now, everybody in the room, you've got two minutes. Write down all the reasons why this project failed. And it's amazing the types of issues that people surface that ordinarily they wouldn't say in public or even think about.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you explain from a psychological perspective why that works?

[Gary Klein]

Well, after I developed the technique, I read about some research on prospective hindsight. And so I think a big part of it is the certainty that it's failed. And so now that changes my mindset. So I'm not resisting. If I say, here's the plan. Are there any problems? There's all kinds of pressure not to think about problems. But by being certain that the plan has failed, by entering into that exercise, it just changes the whole valence, the whole experience.

[Stephen Dubner]

So interesting. I mean, we always hear about how humans perform poorly under uncertainty generally. So you're saying you're just removing the uncertainty of whether it will work. You're saying it didn't. Now tell me why it didn't. And that provides clarity.

[Gary Klein]

Right?

[Stephen Dubner]

So what happens next? After people voice these ideas, what happens now?

[Gary Klein]

Okay, so let me get. We never thought about this as a tool outside our company. This was just something we did. But then we had a big project we were doing for the Air Force. It was a software tool for identifying ways of using precision guided munitions. And I told my prime sponsor, I want to do a pre mortem. And he said, what's that? And I explained it to him, and he said, absolutely no way. We want everybody to be positive. This is such a depressing exercise. I don't want to do it. And I said, this is an important project. We want it to succeed. This is a way to make it succeed. And reluctantly, he agreed to do it. We were doing this pre mortem, and there was this young captain, hadn't said a word. The meeting had gone on for about two days. Hadn't said a word. And it was time for him to come up with his. What he had on his list. We go around one at a time around the room, and we do one or two or three sweeps. And he looked a little nervous. And he said, this tool that we're building, it's for people in the field and they have these low powered laptops. The tool we're building runs on a supercomputer that takes 48 hours. I don't see how that's going to work. And there was silence in the room because everybody realized he was right. And then somebody said, now I've got a back of the envelope technique that I use that could be a shortcut. And all of a sudden we were back in business. But if we hadn't done that, we would have failed. And he never would have said that if we didn't give him that space.

[Stephen Dubner]

And you're saying the person who spoke up was the most junior or among the most junior in the room?

[Gary Klein]

Yes, he was.

[Stephen Dubner]

So I've seen this myself many times. Not in a pre mortem, but just in a meeting generally where junior people, they have very little incentive to speak up. It seems like there's more downside than upside. It strikes me that American meeting culture is dominated by noisy people who have a lot of confidence, which is often unearned. And I'm curious if you have any advice for having better ideas come through in meetings.

[Gary Klein]

I have a couple of ideas, but one of them is the pre. Mortem. Because the pre mortem creates a culture of candor, People learn that they can voice unpopular ideas and not be punished for. Also creates an environment where I'm surprised at the ideas that you come up with or this young captain comes up with. Because a pre mortem really harvests the different experience and ability of the people in the room. I don't know what's in your head, so how can I appreciate your perspective? But in a pre mortem I realized, wow, I never thought of it that way. So there's a chance for the people in the room to start to gain more respect for their colleagues.

[Stephen Dubner]

I would think that anonymity would be a useful tool here. Why do you not use that?

[Gary Klein]

Anonymity could be useful in environments that are usually very punitive. But in terms of creating a culture of candor, it works better if we're all face to face.

[Stephen Dubner]

Does it sometimes get personal, even ugly?

[Gary Klein]

I have never seen that happen. Surprisingly enough, no. No, because everybody knows that this is a made up failure. So it's not life or death, although it could be. And everybody knows that the intent is to improve the plan.

[Stephen Dubner]

Can you talk about how to encourage candid feedback generally? Again, it may be the more junior employees, but whoever it is that might have a valuable insight, how can you float that insight up to leadership?

[Gary Klein]

I've wrestled with that issue for a while because most organizations say that they want insights, but they don't because insights are going to mean that we have to change. And if I'm a mid level manager now, I've got to change my supply lines, I've got to change my staffing. Can we just continue what we're doing and try to do it better? They'll say we want to be harmonious, so we're going to make decisions where everybody agrees. A harmonious decision is a terrible idea because that means that everybody has a veto and so your chance of coming up with an innovation has been severely compromised.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you ever have harmonious decisions in your personal life, maybe with your family?

[Gary Klein]

I am guilty of the delusion that we can have harmonious decisions and despite the personal experience, I hold onto this goal.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you personally routinely do pre mortems, even just a quick in your head one when you're about to make a decision?

[Gary Klein]

I do not do it when I make lots of decisions and so I don't do it automatically.

[Stephen Dubner]

Did you pre mortem this interview today, Gary? That was a no. After the break we asked the CEO of a startup if he would like to try Gary Klein's pre mortem idea.

[Will Coleman]

I guess I disagree with Gary.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Summer is just around the corner and the folks at Mint Mobile have a hot take. Getting a summer bod is out and getting your savings bod is is in. This spring and summer. Everyone wants skimpy wireless bills and fat wallets. And with premium wireless plans for just 15 bucks a month you can have both without breaking a sweat or the bank. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. This year, skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless [e-mail] freak that's mintmobile.com freak upfront payment of $45 for a 3 month 5 gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 per month new customer offer for the first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by stripe.AI. companies need to launch business models as revolutionary as their products and they need to do it fast. Stripe billing powers leaders like OpenAI anthropic and perplexity in fact, every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies that has a product on the market today uses Stripe to monetize it. So whether you're starting an AI company or just looking for advanced billing software, learn more at stripe.com billing@ Carl's Jr.

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[Stephen Dubner]

In 2018, Will Coleman left his job as a partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm, in order to launch a rideshare startup app called Alto.

[Will Coleman]

At Alto, we're elevating rideshare for both drivers and passengers. We offer a really differentiated service through W2 employees and company owned vehicles. So it also you always know exactly what you're going to get a safe, clean, high quality ride every single time.

[Stephen Dubner]

A lot of those words sounded as if they were chosen to be contra Uber and Lyft. Is that essentially the case?

[Will Coleman]

That is essentially the case. Uber and Lyft, we think, are the contra of safe, clean, consistent. Our brand was always built to go head to head against the big names and to compete directly against them in every major city.

[Stephen Dubner]

Are you also to some degree a luxury product?

[Will Coleman]

We call it an accessible luxury. We want it to be something that feels luxurious, but that is for most people, a couple dollars more. It might be because you really value your safety and type of vehicle that you're in, or the type of person that you're in the vehicle with, or that you just value the consistency, knowing exactly what you're going to get. So we see it a lot like a cup of Starbucks coffee. You can get a much cheaper cup of coffee, but most people choose that for that consistency and quality every single time.

[Stephen Dubner]

How many markets you in right now?

[Will Coleman]

Yeah, we're in six markets across the U.S. los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Washington, D.C. i did not.

[Stephen Dubner]

Hear New York City there. Why not? That's a big market.

[Will Coleman]

New York is a very expensive market. It's a very competitive market. It's very big and it's a huge opportunity. But as efficient and maybe conservative allocators of capital. We want to perfect the product.

[Stephen Dubner]

The rideshare market is tough to break into. Uber and Lyft dominate both the drivers and riders in most places. Coleman hopes that Alto's business model can set it apart. Instead of using freelance drivers who have their own cars, which is how Lyft and Uber do it, Alto employs the drivers directly and leases vehicles from manufacturers. Will that work? The history of the rideshare industry is already littered with firms that tried to challenge Uber and Lyft. There's Juno, Sidecar, Fasten and more. We asked Gary Klein how he might help Aalto Stay off that list.

[Gary Klein]

Okay, so there's a couple of things that I might do with them. First of all, we would want to run some pre mortems to inject a healthy dose of reality. Not that I don't think they have that a Second is, are they going to be able to pivot based on what they learn, or are they going to get locked into a business model and not be resilient or flexible as things develop? Because things will develop. Their plan plan is not going to continue as they've originally designed it simply because nobody is smart enough to come up with a perfect plan right off the bat. So you do want to make discoveries and you do want to be able to pivot and maybe even make massive changes in your business model. I mean, if you do some sort of pre mortem, you might say, what are the things that we might have to adapt for? In part to build a more resilient organization.

[Stephen Dubner]

We went back to Will Coleman to ask what he thinks of Gary Klein's suggestion.

[Will Coleman]

Yeah, we're not going to be running any pre mortems at all.

[Stephen Dubner]

Because why?

[Will Coleman]

I guess I disagree with Gary. I mean, if you're constantly focused on the downside, then I think you're probably not focused enough on the upside. I often tell my team, you know, the money making machine hasn't been built yet. If you're in a company like Google or Apple or Amazon, the money making machine has been built and you're just there to make it better. Here you're really building something from scratch. And so honestly, the proposition of failure is almost. I mean, startups fail every day, you know, probably what, 99% of them? So you're already going into this with an understanding that failure is the most likely outcome. So we could sit around and talk about that for hours, days, but we'll never make any progress. It's paralyzing. Instead, what we talk about and what I focus on is you know, how do we just get to the next decision point? How do we just get to tomorrow? How do we just make this incrementally better? Now, I hate to keep leading you.

[Stephen Dubner]

Down the road of potential failure, but I do want to ask, let's say this doesn't work and a couple years from now you need to close up shop. Can you envision what that would feel like for you?

[Will Coleman]

It would be devastating. Yeah. I mean, because we've been on the brink of that before in Covid, we, I mean, I'm not kidding, we lost 95% of our revenue in a day. We were more agile during that period of time than we had ever been. And the impact of that was that many of those products that we built that were the ones that succeeded, which was maybe a tenth of them, but the ones that did are now 20, 30% of our revenue. Incremental things that we didn't have before the pandemic have made our business more robust, more resil, resilient.

[Stephen Dubner]

A couple of months after we spoke with Coleman, we learned that Aalto shut down service in San Francisco. Later, they stopped operations in two more cities. This all came with significant layoffs. Does this mean they will join the 90 some percent of failed startups that Coleman mentioned? I of course have no way of knowing. But if they do fail and fail spectacularly, they might end up with this man.

[Samuel West]

My name is Samuel West. I'm a psychologist and I'm a curator.

[Stephen Dubner]

He is a curator and founder of the Museum of Failure. And how did that come to be?

[Samuel West]

So I was in Croatia, in Zagreb, the capital, just on holiday with my family and I stumbled into a museum called the Museum of Broken Relationships. So I'd been thinking about ways to sort of spread the ideas of accepting failure and how much room for improvement there is on learning from failure. And then I was in Zagreb and I just got this, you know, what do you call it, Hallelujah moment.

[Stephen Dubner]

And so it was that Samuel west invented the Museum of Failure. It's a pop up museum that has been traveling the world since 2017. Helsingborg, Sweden, Paris, Los Angeles, Washington DC. When we spoke with west, the museum was in Brooklyn. Oakland.

[Samuel West]

It's a sunny, nice day and we're about to open in a few minutes.

[Stephen Dubner]

As it turns out, running a traveling museum is not easy.

[Samuel West]

So here we have an example of failure. At Museum of Failure. Our wall panels are falling off the wall. I'm going to kill somebody.

[Stephen Dubner]

The museum includes more than 150 failures, most of them inventions and commercial Products, they range from trivial to fraudulent.

[Samuel West]

Elizabeth Holmes. Do I need to say anything about her? No. Come on, Gerber. Back in the 70s, they launched a product of adult food in a baby food jar. This is the euro club from 2008.

[Stephen Dubner]

In case you couldn't hear that. It's called the Euro club. Not €, just U R O.

[Samuel West]

It's golf club with. Yeah, it's for us men when we're out golfing and need to urinate. So what you do is you unscrew the top of it, you clip it onto your belt, and then you fiddle under the belt and you urinate into this canister camouflaged as a golf club. And then you screw it back up and you continue on with your golf. I mean, the criteria is that to be in a museum, it has to be an innovation and it has to be a failure, obviously. And then I have to find it interesting.

[Stephen Dubner]

The Museum of Failure will make you laugh, but west hopes that people walk away with more than that.

[Samuel West]

So the focus at the museum is on innovations, which is products and services. But in our personal lives, we fail also, and the same principle applies there. We're very bad at learning from our own failures because it's uncomfortable. So if we're willing to have those uncomfortable feelings and thoughts for a while, we can actually learn from them. I want people to feel liberated that failing isn't as bad as you think it is usually.

[Stephen Dubner]

We also got Samuel west into his studio to talk about failure more generally.

[Samuel West]

I think failure is far more interesting than success.

[Stephen Dubner]

Because why?

[Samuel West]

Because success is often sort of curated by whoever, whatever story the sender wants to present, whereas failure feels much more authentic, much more human.

[Stephen Dubner]

Do you think it's easier to learn from failure or from success?

[Samuel West]

I think it maybe feels better to learn from success, but I think we can learn much more from failure. It's a more natural way of learning. That's how we learn how to eat, how to walk, how to do anything is through a repeated trial and error.

[Stephen Dubner]

So here's the thing. I agree with you. But it seems as though most of the world, certainly the business world, thinks the opposite. We are addicted to, you know, success porn. People read the books written by successful entrepreneurs and they say, okay, that's what I'm going to do. People listen to popular music or watch popular films and emulate that. It seems that there's pretty much consensus that the best way to succeed is to copy success. What's wrong with that idea?

[Samuel West]

There's nothing wrong with it. It's just really difficult to do. And the thing is, it's really low effort learning, because sometimes listening to that successful entrepreneur or listening to that successful artist, you think you're just going to absorb the success by listening to the story. Just because something works for someone else doesn't mean it's going to work for you.

[Stephen Dubner]

Since we spoke with Samuel west, the Museum of Failure itself seems to be failing. West and his former business partner are engaged in a bitter public dispute. West has encouraged people not to buy tickets to the museum. He says the partner stole his collection of Failure memorabilia. Partner denies this. So if the Museum of Failure isn't the place for instruction at the moment, how else might you learn from failure? Throughout this series, we've been speaking with Amy Edmondson, a scholar of failure at the Harvard Business School. She argues that, for starters, we should not be hiding our failures.

[Amy Edmondson]

One way to think about this is we will be failing. So let's do it joyfully, let's do it thoughtfully and celebrate them appropriately.

[Stephen Dubner]

Talk to me for a moment about the ways in which failure is a good teacher, but we ignore its lessons. And I'm particularly thinking about the lack of publishing of null results and things like that.

[Amy Edmondson]

We don't in academia, we don't publish our null results. So that means not only do we not spend enough time on them to really learn what they're teaching us, but even more importantly, our colleagues near and far don't get to see them. So then they're at risk of trying the same thing. Which to me is the most wasteful of the wasteful failures is when we already had that knowledge, but somehow we aren't able to share it.

[Stephen Dubner]

Should there be a Journal of failed Results somewhere? Yes.

[Amy Edmondson]

And, you know, it's not as strange as it sounds. You could still have very high standards because you wouldn't publish things that were just nonsensical or didn't have thoughtful hypotheses or theories that led you to spend that time studying them.

[Stephen Dubner]

You want to be the editor in chief and I'll be your amanuensis or something?

[Amy Edmondson]

Let's do it the other way around.

[Stephen Dubner]

Oh, I failed in my request to Tom Sawyer you into painting the fence there.

[Amy Edmondson]

I like the idea, though.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, so that's one vote for a Journal of Failure. But Edmondson doesn't want to run it. Maybe we can persuade this person.

[Roy Shalem]

My name is Roy Chalem. I have a PhD in economics.

[Stephen Dubner]

Shalem teaches at Tel Aviv University, and he studies the economics of competition and regulation. He once published a paper called the Market for R and D failures.

[Roy Shalem]

So what I'm trying to analyze is a situation in which firms are competing head to head in kind of a patent race.

[Stephen Dubner]

Patent races are quite common. Think about when pharmaceutical firms are competing to find a disease treatment. But this goes way beyond pharma companies.

[Roy Shalem]

One of the most famous examples is when Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the Same Day in 1876. Bell won the patent, started a successful company, now synonymous with telephone. While far fewer people remember Gray.

[Stephen Dubner]

A typical patent race is winner take all. The competitors work hard, invest a lot of resources, but only the winner reaps the rewards. And the loser or losers are left with pretty much nothing. Roy Shalem, based on his research around corporate innovation, thinks this model is due for an upgrade. He thinks the losers should also have a way to monetize their efforts.

[Roy Shalem]

My paper proves that theoretically there is a potential for a market for R and D failure. When you sell knowledge of past failures, you are expected both to reduce the cost of RD because you're not doing the same mistakes over and over again. And you also reduce the time until a discovery is made. So that's also worth money.

[Stephen Dubner]

If Shalem had his way, there would be, as he titled his paper, a true market for R and D failures.

[Roy Shalem]

Basically, when you're doing something which is very hard, you mostly produce failures. And this is a very, very important part of the stock of knowledge. And so I think that it is possible to take all that knowledge and find the right price for a competitor to buy that knowledge.

[Stephen Dubner]

So far at least, such a market does not exist. So what else can we do? If we want to seriously consider the idea of learning from failure, maybe we learn from failure in the old fashioned way in a classroom.

[Teresa McPhail]

I mean, I'm old school. I'm talking about Hobbes.

[Stephen Dubner]

After the break. Failure 101. I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.

[N/A]

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[Stephen Dubner]

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Do you remember Theresa McPhail? She is the medical anthropologist who initially thought that COVID 19 wouldn't be a big deal.

[Teresa McPhail]

I said, calm down, you know, we're not China, we're better equipped. Here's why.

[Stephen Dubner]

McPhail's day job is teaching undergraduate engineering students at Stevens Institute of Technology.

[Teresa McPhail]

Right, right. They're all science and technology nerds and geeks. And I mean that in the best possible sense. My people, very driven, very type A personalities. I mean, you don't get into science and tech lightly. It's not an easy subject and the course load is quite hefty. At some point in their lives, probably the majority, like say 70%, will probably go on to get some sort of Master's or PhD.

[Stephen Dubner]

And then in terms of careers, what's typical? What sort of careers?

[Teresa McPhail]

Engineers. Engineers. Engineers and research scientists.

[Stephen Dubner]

And within engineering, is it software, mechanical, electrical, everything?

[Teresa McPhail]

The whole gamut. They're building your bridges, they're putting up your buildings, they're designing your sewage pipes.

[Stephen Dubner]

All things I don't want to fail.

[Teresa McPhail]

Exactly, exactly. They're designing your airplane engines, everything.

[Stephen Dubner]

Now, for someone studying engineering who sees a future designing things where the stakes are high, an airplane, a bridge, whatever. How do they think about failure generally in their work?

[Teresa McPhail]

It's the worst thing that can happen. It's the worst thing that can happen. They're all very high achieving students, so they're used to getting straight A's or close to it. They come in thinking that failure is bad and it needs to be avoided at all costs. And they have imbibed the cultural narrative of, oh, you must learn from your failures and fail better and fail faster. But they kind of don't buy it.

[Stephen Dubner]

Why do you think that is?

[Teresa McPhail]

I did a research project where a psychology professor and I designed a survey and just wanted to get a sense of how they define failure for themselves and what they think about it and what they think the American culture thinks about it. And they're all really aware when we ask them what Americans think about failure. Some of their answers are, you're not doing a good job. You must be lazy, weak, incapable, stupid. They say that if you fail, it's gonna lead you to poverty, perhaps a lack of social status. One person, this is a direct quote that I wrote down. If you fail, you suck.

[Stephen Dubner]

So McPhail got to thinking about whether there was a better way to talk to her students about failure, a more direct way.

[Teresa McPhail]

I know that business schools already teach case studies and failures like they'll teach what happened to Enron, what happened to WeWork. And that's great for business students, but that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to really get them familiar with the concept of failure and introduce it as a necessary and natural part of life and as a crucial component of a well lived life.

[Stephen Dubner]

And she felt the stakes were high, Higher than most of us are willing to admit.

[Teresa McPhail]

Around 2017, 2018, we had a year that had several suicides. And, you know, we're not alone. You pick up the newspaper and you're reading constantly about Penn, Yale, Cornell. I mean, you name a school and they're having a suicide problem. And one of the students who committed suicide in 2018 was my student. One of my students in a college class that I had. She was active, she was involved heavily in Amnesty International, which is how she came to me, because she took my global health class. She was very interested in helping others. She was cheery, she was a pleasure to be around. There were none of these signs when she was in my classroom, at least of outward struggle. So I really felt blindsided when I heard that she had committed suicide. And I had heard from friends of multiple students who had committed suicide in that same time frame, that one of the things they were all worried about is that they were somehow gonna screw up, that they had screwed up. That college was the last good years. And then everything else was just gonna be a series of failures. And I thought, my God, what is happening? And so as a professor, you know, I'm teaching and I teach depressing classes. Let me just be honest about this. I teach about things that can hurt us. I teach about pandemics, I teach about illnesses. I teach medicine, which is all about disease and death. And so my classes are pretty depressing. And I thought, what can I do to make a difference or, like, just provide a different perspective to try to help all of this anxiety?

[Stephen Dubner]

And that's when Theresa McPhail started teaching a course she calls Failure 101.

[Teresa McPhail]

So I start off the class with the ultimate failure, which is death. I really Think I'm an intellectual granddaughter of Ernest Becker, who famously wrote the Denial of Death. He was an anthropologist as well, and his take was that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, that we defiantly create meaning where none exists because we do not want to deal with the terror that the ultimate mistake is one that's going to get us killed. I start off the class saying, listen, life is terrifying because death is terrifying. And I think evolutionarily mistakes meant catastrophe. And that's probably why we don't like them, because if you make a wrong move in the savanna when you're hunting, you're dead.

[Stephen Dubner]

When I read your course description and you describe teaching about failures in all realms of science, then you write that death is the ultimate failure. My response was, well, that's not fair. My reasoning would be that failure implies at least some small level of un. Inevitability, whereas death has a perfect record, as far as I know.

[Teresa McPhail]

Yes, but if you look at biology, death is your system's all failing. See what I'm saying? But that's a perfect example to try to get them to accept that failure is necessary because the example of something that doesn't die is cancer, and that's not what we want. And so there's that tension that, yes, death is, if you think about it from that perspective, it's all your systems shutting down one by one in a cascade. And you can see that as the ultimate failure. But then I try to get them to embrace that because. And again, I'm just Becker's granddaughter because his argument was if we distract ourselves and we try to push down our fears of failing, ultimately that's a. About our fear of dying. That ironically, trying to push all of that down and not talking openly about it creates more problems. So that's my take is that, yeah, you have to embrace failure because you can't have a successful life without it. I basically tell them at the start of my classes that I need you to get comfortable being uncomfortable and I need you to be comfortable with uncertainty. And I really think embracing the idea that you're going to fail is the antidote to that anxiety.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, but Professor McPhail, I've gotten nothing but as the last 13 years of my life, and I'm not going to stop now. So would you please not say things like that and get out of the way and start lecturing and give me an A.

[Teresa McPhail]

No, I'm trying to take failure and put it on the table and look at it as a social object from an Economic perspective? What does it look like from a business perspective, from a science perspective? Because failure is a changeable object. Like one failure in one arena doesn't necessarily have any of the components of the same label in another. I mean, I'm old school. I'm talking about Hobbes. And we're going over things like what is the social contract and what does the social good look like, and what does Hobbes think failure will be?

[Stephen Dubner]

Give me an example of a culture that dealt with or deals with failure very differently than 21st century American.

[Teresa McPhail]

I mean, it's never good. I mean, here's the thing. So anthropologists often ask, what are the things that all cultures everywhere struggle with? And failure is definitely something that all cultures grapple with on some level.

[Stephen Dubner]

That surprises me. I would have thought there have been many cultures and societies through time where.

[Teresa McPhail]

Where it's fine.

[Stephen Dubner]

I don't know about fine.

[Teresa McPhail]

It's great.

[Stephen Dubner]

I definitely don't think great. But, I mean, here's the way I'm thinking. If you look at our track record, humans, we're pretty darn fallible. We screw up all the time in so many ways, right? And so it's surprising to me that we haven't developed a philosophy or science of failure that would be fairly timeless and robust and so on.

[Teresa McPhail]

You would think so, but not in my. I mean, maybe someone will listen to this and say, here's the book that answers it all. But the truth is there's something about the time you're living in that it's either hard to see what it is you're doing wrong, or it's hard to admit where that buck stops.

[Stephen Dubner]

I know that the researchers Lauren S. Krais Winkler and Ayala Fischbach have done work looking at why we hate failure so much. And it comes down to a pretty obvious point, which is that that ego is real and failure threatens our ego. And universally, it feels bad. So if we were to reduce it to that finite and concrete psychological response and emotional response, have you encountered any way to sort of take the sting out of that response?

[Teresa McPhail]

Not really, except for embracing it. So I would, I guess.

[Stephen Dubner]

Man, I came in thinking you were gonna have all sorts of all the answ. I went back to Amy Edmondson, the failure expert at Harvard, to ask what she would like to see taught In.

[Amy Edmondson]

A failure 101 class number one, distinguishing different kinds of failure. A failure is not a failure is not a failure. You know, we could be talking about a little mistake. We could be talking about a catastrophic accident. We could Be talking about a scientific hypothesis that didn't get supported. So providing the students that useful terminology and that useful. And then I think a second element that I'd love to see in the course is experimentation, best practices. You know, how do you think about good experiments versus not good experiments?

[Stephen Dubner]

Here's what Teresa McPhail writes in her Failure 101 syllabus. Some assignments will intentionally be set up for you to fail to complete them in full. But I expect you to cope with this as best you can and turn in something I will not warn you which weeks are impossible to complete. McPhail has now taught the course seven times. The only grades she gives are an A for passing or an F for failing. She's only had two students ever fail the class. McPhail says she has gotten positive feedback from students, their parents, and according to some students, they're therapists. She would like to see her course taught at other schools.

[Teresa McPhail]

I think they should offer a failure 101 course because it works. It changes the students perspectives on failure. It makes them embrace, completely alters their understanding of themselves in relationship to the norm. And I think that's worth it.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'm looking at your rate my professor rankings.

[Teresa McPhail]

Oh God.

[Stephen Dubner]

And you have a perfect score. I've never seen that before. Here's one review, quite possibly the best professor I have ever had. Confident and knows what she's talking about. She's enthusiastic about her lectures and that enthusiasm is truly contagious to students. She just loves what she does. Also, she is so cool. She's had such an interesting life. Low key, want to be her. All right, so what's your review of that review?

[Teresa McPhail]

Oh my God. If they could only see me behind the scenes, they'd. You know what though? I think they feel like that because I do show them my failures.

[Stephen Dubner]

For instance.

[Teresa McPhail]

Well, I mean, we're all human beings. There are gonna be days where I'm not entirely prepped for class.

[Stephen Dubner]

Ah, what do you do then?

[Teresa McPhail]

I announce it. I say, hey, guess what? I forgot my notes at home, so we're off the books. Let's do this. Or I also will. I mean, we live in the age of lightning Googling. So, you know, if I say something, feel free to fact check me. And if I'm not right, raise your hand. Because I want them to get the idea that you can be an expert, you can be highly knowledgeable, but there's no way I know everything.

[Stephen Dubner]

What is the upside of embracing or at least processing failure in the way that you're describing Freedom.

[Teresa McPhail]

Freedom and a lightness of moving through the world.

[Stephen Dubner]

Okay, but the people designing our airplanes and bridges, I don't care if they feel free and light.

[Teresa McPhail]

So here's the thing. Before any of us step on a plane, there's been so many prototypes and there's been so many tests. And the thing I'd like to see more is letting people fail. There has to be a space for people to accept abject failure. Failure that doesn't teach you anything.

[Stephen Dubner]

And in that space, what does one do? Does one grieve, for instance?

[Teresa McPhail]

I think, yes. I think one learns acceptance. And out of acceptance comes resilience. Resilience. I asked my students to reflect at the end of every class, and the answers I get back is that they've totally changed their definition of what failure is. Most of them will say, it's not the end of the world. It's a setback that you learn from. And all of them understand that it's subjective and a social construct. Simply having a class where you come in once a week for three hours and talk about failure just blatantly somehow made it okay for them to accept their own personal failures. And one of the things that shifts throughout the class is I ask them, what do you think the rate of other people's failures is compared to your own? And before they take the class, they say, oh, I definitely fail more than other people. And then at the end of the class, they go, everyone is failing every day at every thing. And I'm like, yes, that's right. Correct. You've passed this class.

[Stephen Dubner]

I'd like to thank Teresa McPhail for teaching all of us a new way to think about failure. And thanks to everyone who spoke with us for this series, how to Succeed at Failing. I'm curious to know how you think we did with this series. One key ingredient of learning from failure is getting good feedback. Feedback. And I want yours. Our email is radioreconomics.com you can also leave a rating or review on your podcast app. Coming up next time on the show, let's play a guessing game. Who operates in the shadows of the global economy but often dictates the fate of nations? They're also involved at one point or another in the buying and selling of just about everything you touch. Wherever there is history being made, the.

[Will Coleman]

Commodity traders are there.

[Stephen Dubner]

Jack Farchi and Javier Blas have written a definitive book on the commodity trading industry. We're not talking about the desk warriors who trade financialized commodity futures. These are the people who buy and sell the actual petroleum products and metals and agricultural products.

[Roy Shalem]

You think about a commodity trader, they have to have a bit of the Wolf of Wall Street Street, a bit.

[Stephen Dubner]

Of James Bond and a lot of Pirates of the Caribbean. Just beneath the surface of the global economy there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom chaos, war and sanctions are often a great business opportunity. We'll hear all about them next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode and this entire Failure series was originally produced by Zach Lipinski and was updated with help from Dalvin Abuaji. It was mixed by Greg Rippon and Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnson. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly and Teo Jacobs. You can find our entire archive on any podcast, apple [e-mail] where we also publish transcripts and show notes. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

[Teresa McPhail]

I am a professor so if I'm talking too long feel free to nudge me.

[Stephen Dubner]

Will do.

[Teresa McPhail]

I try to keep track of it but sometimes, you know, I get enthusiastic as you'll see.

[Stephen Dubner]

So we have a safe work.

[Teresa McPhail]

Pineapple.

[Stephen Dubner]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side.

Of Everything.

[Teresa McPhail]

Stitcher.

[Stephen Dubner]

Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Morningstar where Data speaks what if data wasn't just a bunch of raw numbers, but a clear and decisive language to help consumers connect investment strategies with long term investor needs in a constantly evolving market landscape? Morningstar created that language bringing order and utility to insight rich data so you can prepare for your next opportunity no matter the asset class or Market. Visit wheredataspeaks.com to see what Morningstar Data can do for you.