Mistakes Were Made
6/14/20261 hr 1 min
It’s the late 1960s, and a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death with the new science of cryonics. But freezing dead people isn’t easy. And apologizing for the mistakes you make along the way? Even harder.
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Prologue: Host Ira Glass talks about the way most political apologies go, and chats with a man named Derek Jones about similar sorts of apologies among preteen girls and King David, in the Old Testament. (7 minutes)Act One: In the late 1...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Ira Glass· Host0:23
Okay, this just in. People don't like to admit it when they mess up. It's true for little kids, true for adults, and maybe especially true for politicians. The rare instances where politicians do apologize, you know how it goes. It's usually the kind of insincere, "I regret the error. I meant no harm," kind of thing. [jazzy music] I remember a classic from the prime minister of Hong Kong years ago, after two million people took to the street to protest how cozy she was with mainland China. "As a chief executive," she said, "I still have more to learn and to do better to balance diverse interests and listen to people from all walks of life." Just imagine for a second your partner or your spouse [chuckles] saying something like that to you, like, with that tone. Like, you would not feel reassured that they were really sorry. Okay, so years ago, I was interviewing this guy about something else completely, and somehow we got onto the subject of this whole apology business. And the guy has two daughters. They were both around 13 years old back then. And he told me that whenever