354: Mistakes Were Made
This American Life
06/14/26
•60m
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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 1960s, a California TV repairman named Bob Nelson joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology called cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he'd screwed up. Sam Shaw reports. (42 minutes)
- Act Two: There's a famous William Carlos Williams poem called "This is Just to Say." It's about, among other things, causing a loved one inconvenience and offering a non-apologizing apology. Producer Sean Cole explains that this is possibly the most spoofed poem around. We asked some of our regular contributors to get into the act. Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Starlee Kine, Jonathan Goldstein, Shalom Auslander, and Heather O'Neill all came up with their own variations of Williams's classic lines. (7 minutes)
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Previous Episode
888: Not Today, Hades!
June 8
•58m
Regular people trapped inside Greek myths.
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(00:00:00) Prologue: When a mysterious, ripped-open package arrives on Pablo's doorstep, he takes it as a sign. (4 minutes)
(00:04:47) Act One: Pablo flies closer to the sun. (14 minutes)
(00:18:29) Act Two: In Greek mythology, a three-headed dog named Cerberus guards the gates to Hades, making sure only those who are actually dead get in. This story is about a real person who had that job in America — a 25-year veteran of the Social Security Administration who was asked, in a secret meeting with DOGE, to declare 6,000 living people dead. He said no. Then the list grew to 2.7 million. (24 minutes)
(00:43:15) Act Three: A mortal gets the assignment of a lifetime — to go interview an actual god who is living on earth, traveling under the name of Lionel Messi. (11 minutes)
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Next Episode
889: There’s Something About Hail Mary
June 22
•66m
We spend an hour in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter, behind and desperate, with people trying any damn thing they can think of.
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(00:00:00) Prologue: Five years after Ora first started experiencing mysterious and debilitating health problems, she decides to try a treatment that she knows very well might kill her. Host Ira Glass talks to her about the experience. (9 minutes)
(00:10:50) Act One: Two lawyers have just three months to stop their client's execution. In Texas, where this story takes place, these kinds of appeals to get people off death row fail 94% of the time. (38 minutes)
(00:48:09) Act Two: At the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, migrants figured out an ingenious way to communicate with the activists gathered outside of the detention center’s walls. (13 minutes)
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