Everyone makes mistakes. How do we learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease. (Part four of a four-part series.) SOURCES:Will Coleman, founder and C.E.O. of Alto.Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership management at Harvard Business School.Babak Javid, physician-scientist and associate director of the University of California, San Francisco Center for Tuberculosis.Gary Klein, cognitive psychologist and pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making.Theresa MacPhail, medical anthropologist and associate professor of science & technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology.Roy Shalem, lecturer at Tel Aviv University.Samuel West, curator and founder of The Museum of Failure. RESOURCES:"A Golf Club Urinal, Colgate Lasagna and the Bitter Fight Over the Museum of Failure," by Zusha Elinson (Wall Street Journal, 2025).Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, by Amy Edmondson (2023).“You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It,” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2022).“The Market for R&D Failures,” by Manuel Trajtenberg and Roy Shalem (SSRN, 2010).“Performing a Project Premortem,” by Gary Klein (Harvard Business Review, 2007). EXTRAS:"The Deadliest Disease in Human History," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2025).“How to Succeed at Failing,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).“Moncef Slaoui: ‘It’s Unfortunate That It Takes a Crisis for This to Happen,'” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2020).
Full Episode
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?
Actually, TB, for the last 20, 30 years, has been the number one infectious disease killer in the world. 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.
TB is a disease of poverty It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria 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.
There is no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind and 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.
Javed 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.
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.
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