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
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.
Freedom. Freedom. And a lightness of moving through the world.
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.
I think, yes, I think one learns acceptance and out of acceptance comes resilience. I ask 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 asked 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 everything. And I'm like, yes, that's right. Correct. You've passed this class.
I am a professor, so if I'm talking too long, feel free to nudge me.
I try to keep track of it, but sometimes, you know, I get enthusiastic, as you'll see.
Pineapple.
It's bad. It's one of the reasons I can't tell you how many people actually have an allergy.
He used to fight with people to get them to recognize that their issue is food allergy. And now he fights with people to get them to recognize that their issue is not food allergy.
Medical anthropology is looking at all the social and cultural factors involved in healthcare systems. We think about how all those beliefs and politics and economics, how all of that factors into the choices people make about their health and how they view their health.
I'm associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology.
That's been a puzzle as to why an immune cell will take a look at something that is otherwise harmless and decide that it's not and do it after sometimes years of tolerating it just fine. And suddenly now it's a problem.
My father died of a bee sting. He died from an anaphylactic reaction to bee venom. He had had a reaction in the past, but it was fairly mild, just swelling at the site. That's mostly what happens to anyone who gets stung by a venomous insect. And he died on the second sting.
We really don't know how many times he was stung because he was a Vietnam vet, so there's a chance that he was stung prior to that. And I got curious about my own susceptibility to such things. Years later, I was diagnosed with allergies, but I am one of the rare people that do not react to skin or blood tests. I have low levels of IgE, the antibody that is driving the allergic response.
So there's no way to tell what I'm allergic to, except that clinically you can see the signs and symptoms that I am allergic to something.
I think, based on my years of detective work, that I'm allergic to grass and probably ragweed and maybe dust mites.
Oh boy, how much time do we have? This is part of the problem. There's a lot of confusion about what an allergy is and isn't. The easiest answer I can give you is that an allergy is when your body responds to something that is otherwise harmless and triggers an immune response. If your immune cells are not involved in the response, then it is not an allergy.
The classic example is milk allergy versus milk intolerance. On the surface, if you have a mild milk allergy, it's going to look the same, perhaps an upset stomach, feeling kind of gross, some gassiness. But the difference is with the intolerance, there's something else going on. In this case, you're not able to digest lactose because you lack an enzyme.
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