Theresa MacPhail
speaker
80 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Theresa MacPhail’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) · 21 May 2025
podcast
The whole point of the whole semester is going to be, hey, everybody fails and we fail at everything.
I actually went on Anderson Cooper during the early days of the pandemic to tell everyone how wrong I was.
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 prepared.
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.
I mean, I'm old school. I'm talking about Hobbes.
I said, calm down. You know, we're not China. We're better equipped. Here's why.
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.
Engineers, engineers, engineers, and research scientists.
The whole gamut. They're building your bridges. They're putting up your buildings. They're designing your sewage pipes.
Exactly, exactly. They're designing your airplane engines, everything.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 the 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 going to screw up, that they had screwed up, that college was the last good years and then everything else was just going to be a series of failure. 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?
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