Theresa MacPhail

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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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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) · 21 May 2025 podcast

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.

Yes. But if you look at biology, death is your system's all failing. See what I'm saying? But that's the 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 system 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 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.

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?

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. That surprises me.

I don't know about fine. It's great.

Right.

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.

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

All the answers.

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

Oh, God.

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

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

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.

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