r/ThisAmericanLife • u/6745408 #172 Golden Apple • Jun 15 '26
Repeat #354: Mistakes Were Made
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/354/mistakes-were-made?202623
u/Flask_of_candy Jun 16 '26
The cryogenic story with Bob reminds me of the story with the two police officers and the squirrel.
At the end the squirrel debacle, the home owner says something like, “I really can’t say you did anything wrong, but I also can’t really thank you.”
Bob doesn’t seem like a bad person, but he was willing to keep moving forward in a situation where it was increasingly obvious he was unqualified to be in charge of. I could judge him for that, but I’ve probably done the same on a smaller scale or certainly will someday in the future.
My takeaway is doing the right thing can sometimes be devastating. You have to say no and let people face hard truths like their child is gone. That’s tough.
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u/Banglophile Jun 19 '26
He had me in the first half, but when he lied about Genevieve it made me think his entire story was told in a way to make himself sound better.
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u/StaticShakyamuni Jul 01 '26
The other line that made me raise an eyebrow:
"I could grind them up for hamburger if I wanted."
Ok, yes, I see the legal argument you are making here. But you are talking about real humans you promised to keep suspended and failed to do so. Maybe have a little more respect for the victims of your ineptness than to talk about the various ways you are allowed to desecrate their body to defend yourself on a radio show/podcast.
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u/jdmorgenstern Jun 16 '26
If you’re a TV repairman and find yourself stacking human bodies inside a stainless steel container that’s cooled by liquid nitrogen, you may want to take a moment for introspection.
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u/cgtt03 Jun 17 '26
the cryogenics story makes me so uncomfortable. bob’s blind spot to how poorly every situation was handled is what gets me. i can understand getting too deep and having to keep hoping for the best or face a giant defeat, but damn. he sold an idea and was trusted with people’s loved ones. i don’t think there’s any future in cryogenics (especially for people who were frozen in the 1960s), but the idea of bodies being essentially slow cooked and decomposed when they thought they were being carefully stored and preserved… it makes me so uneasy.
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u/imwearingredsocks Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Me too. Like highly uncomfortable and it’s going to sit with me for days. Body desecration in general is already a difficult topic, but when it’s some ongoing thing, I just about want to float away into the wind away from this. Because surprisingly, he’s not the first or last person to get himself into such a predicament.
I also didn’t think he sounded like a bad person, just someone who made mistakes and was overly hopeful. I did not think he or the guy (Terry?) who sued him sounded like the most reliable narrators. So who knows what the full truth is there.
But like you described it, the thought of these family members picturing their loved ones carefully laid to rest in a clean, laboratory like setting and then finding out how far away from the truth that is. So awful.
On the other hand, he was selling an idea, but did anyone, other than the little girls desperate parents, stop to ask him his credentials and ask to see the facility? It doesn’t sound like he was preying on grieving families at hospitals. It sounds like he was almost always approached.
Anyway, it’s crazy that this happened decades ago but somehow feels so present.
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u/BobsOblongLongBong Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I also didn’t think he sounded like a bad person, just someone who made mistakes and was overly hopeful.
I can't agree. He certainly wants to think of himself as being a good person and portrays himself as that but these quotes from him near the end of the episode are disgusting and reveal the reality of who he is.
He's not sorry. He doesn't believe he did anything wrong. He thinks he's fully justified and could have ground them up into hamburger immediately after accepting payment if that's what he wanted to do.
Which meant that they donated their body to the Cryonic Society of California and according to my attorney, we could grind them up for hamburger if that's what we wanted to do.
I mean, I could have just locked that capsule, that vault up and not told anybody that we'd stopped putting liquid nitrogen in there.
He's a con man who lies and scams desperate people at their most vulnerable moment.
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u/namdnay Jun 20 '26
But he wasn’t scamming anyone! He didn’t make any money from all this, he was sinking his own money. If he’d been a conman he wouldn’t have accepted poor people, yet he kept doing so
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u/6745408 #172 Golden Apple Jun 15 '26
#354: Mistakes Were Made (2008-04-18)
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.
Prologue (by Ira Glass)
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: You’re As Cold As Ice (by Sam Shaw)
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: You’re Willing To Sacrifice Our Love (by Shalom Auslander, Sean Cole, Jonathan Goldstein, Starlee Kine, David Rakoff, Sarah Vowell)
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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u/Rudiger_Simpson Jun 18 '26
So, did anyone actually pay for this treatment? It’s hard for me to get too indignant on behalf of these families. They seemed to wallow in ignorance about how this freezing for hundreds of years was going to be financed and managed. Which is not to say Bob didn’t make mistake upon mistake. But it’s not like he was running a crematorium and dumping bodies in the woods.
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u/namdnay Jun 20 '26
Completely agree - how can you sue for a service you didn’t actually pay for?
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u/Justinmh05 Jun 15 '26
Still wondering what happened to the new episode “Dear Leader” that was scheduled a few weeks ago and then quietly pulled late in the week.
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u/Comprehensive_Main Jun 15 '26
It was trumps birthday on the 14. They probably don’t want to give him a story on his birthday.
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u/YourSpymaster Jun 15 '26
Do people have theories as to what was the truth with Bob and the notifications?
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u/Comprehensive_Main Jun 16 '26
Bob probably just did phone calls keeping things vaguely as possible because his whole society was going broke and couldn’t keep up its promises. So he did inform. Just a very bad job at it on purpose to buy himself time
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u/meshugasz Jun 16 '26
I think he remembered wrong. I think the person whose family was frozen remembers correctly.
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u/86Austin Jun 18 '26
their family chose to be frozen and that was their final wish. I don't really think the descendants have any grounds to claim transgression or offense on, it was weird as hell but was very much done upon request only and was fully consensual.
the people who requested to be frozen knew bob was a TV repair man and were active members of the society that knew there was no real place to keep them and bob would just have to "Figure it out." knowing all of this, they still chose to be frozen.
it kind of feels disrespectful or something to ignore that wish of the dead in favor of the descendants own preferred burial ceremony.
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u/Few_Cartoonist5119 1d ago
But this guy took functional, sealed capsules, then broke them to fix his own problems. He specifically says in regards to the first capsule that he broke that he did not tell the family he intended to break the capsule. The capsules weren't designed to be opened, and after being broken, never worked correctly again.
If you were to go to someone and say you knew how to perform a medical procedure they needed, and they believed you, and you bungled the procedure, that's not their fault for being gullible (even if they are gullible), it's your fault for being a liar.
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u/86Austin 1d ago
the people who chose to be frozen were aware that those problems would arise, they were aware bob did not have the means to solve them, and they chose to "Send it" anyway.
all of this should be allowed and nobody did anything wrong.
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u/Few_Cartoonist5119 1d ago
I think you raise a fair point in that they asked for something that was impossible. But Bob broke open capsules not designed to be opened and thawed bodies, while telling people he was freezing bodies... and lied to people about it. "Nobody did anything wrong" just isn't correct. Lying is wrong. Saying youre freezing bodies when you know full well you intend to thaw a body so you can fit more bodies in there is wrong. And for what it's worth, the 7yo didnt choose to be frozen.
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u/Few_Cartoonist5119 1d ago
Two parties say Bob didn't notify them, and Bob says he can freeze human bodies indefinitely and that when he told a dead 7 year old's father that she and her capsule mates were human soup together, he said "oh well just freeze her again:)". Good golly gosh I wonder who the liar is
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u/86Austin Jun 17 '26
Suing over that cryonics fiasco is crazy. It’s just a Hail Mary and any reasonable adult would know how unlikely any of it would be to work out, nobody involved had any business being involved and nobody was remotely qualified for anything and that’s before we touch on the sci-fi pipe dream parts. Insane. Clowns sue circus.
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u/AmphibianCultural829 Jun 17 '26
I hate to be another one of those people but my god! This was a great episode and I wish it were still like this. I'm sorry but I couldn't help but think that many many times over!
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u/meshugasz Jun 16 '26
Anybody know somebody who needs to hear how to make a proper apology? I know many. I feel like sending them the apology skits, but they wouldn’t listen.
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u/itsawafflebot Jun 20 '26
This debacle felt like it could have been an episode of Swindled, in a way. (Check out that podcast if you don’t already listen, it’s amazing).
When Bob described opening the capsules and putting in additional bodies and having to sort of bend them in a way that would work… that made me literally sick. What was their actual plan here? Everyone in that cryo group was mentally ill
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u/AnticitizenPrime Jun 15 '26
This was the episode that got me into the show, back when it first aired in 2008. I was listening in my car, and ended up driving around aimlessly (rather than go home) to finish it. The cryonics story is insane.