Bob Langer
speaker
32 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Bob Langer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 2: Life and Death (Update) · 14 May 2025
podcast
is you put all the data in, even if it makes for a very long thesis. So not only are the graphs there and the papers, but there's even the raw data that people can look at and analyze. And I try to get people to do as much of that as possible. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the failures and successes are almost intertwined.
Yes, yes, and I do, whether it's my own talks or just meeting with students and brainstorming with them about those things. But to me, that research, scientific research, I mean, you just fail way more than, at least I do, way more than you succeed. It's just part of the process. I mean, that's experimentation, and that's okay.
Obviously, the easy criteria is a successful company having a good financial exit, I suppose. But I don't necessarily think of it as just that way. I mean, that's certainly going to be important. You know, I've been involved in things where you've advanced science and you learn some things and there's degrees of success. You just don't know
I've been pretty fortunate in the companies we've started in terms of the exits that they've had, but I just think there's no simple criteria.
I feel like we've turned out a lot of great scientists and entrepreneurs, and not all their companies have had great financial exits, but I think they've also created products that can change people's lives, and that to me is also very, very important, obviously. That's why we do it in the first place. I have never done it for money, and I don't think they do it for money.
They do it to try to make a difference in the world. Yeah.
I would say yes, I think it is. But I also think, you know, there's different cultures, too. I think the good thing about the United States culture, maybe in contrast to some cultures, is failure is widely accepted. I'll give you one of my examples actually in the business sphere. So I'm a big fan of chocolate. Of eating it or making it or researching it? Probably any part, but mostly eating it.
But at any rate, one of the books I read, and I'm actually not a fan of their chocolate, is a book on Milton Hershey. And so this really gets to your point on failure. Milton Hershey, he had this idea when he was young, very young, of starting a candy company. And I remember the first candy company, he went bankrupt, you know, and he tried to raise more money, started another one.
I think like the first six or seven totally failed, but not the last one, obviously. And he became a millionaire at a time when there weren't very many. Was that really failure or was it just being an apprentice to trying to learn how to succeed? And I think that's true in a lot of things. The reason I brought it up is I don't think there's a shame in failure necessarily.
In either area, or I hope there's not, I think you have to feel it's okay. And then you keep going on.
He dumped me when I was 70, and I married him again at age 75.
I'll try to remember what I said. Stitcher.
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