354: Mistakes Were Made
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What political apologies are discussed in the prologue?
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Who is Bob Nelson and what is his connection to cryonics?
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. There are rare instances where politicians do apologize. You're not ghosts. It's usually the kind of insincere, I-regret-the-error, I-meant-no-harm kind of thing. I remember a classic from the prime minister of Hong Kong years ago. After two million people took to the streets 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 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 into 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 one of his daughters does something to the other, and he tells them to apologize, you know, as their parent, usually the apology is fake. Just pro forma, fake, the kid version of the politician's non-apology apology.
And what do you do with that? Because how do you make somebody actually feel sorry for something they don't feel sorry for? I mean, there they are, and you're like, say you're sorry, say it like you mean it. And they don't mean it. They're not going to. They don't yet have the empathy. Trying to explain to one of them, look, the way your sister feels is they go through life, they share with you, and then when you aren't generous with them... that makes them you know you're trying to explain it like this and you can see the look on their eye like this cold steely look you know like i hear what you're saying i hear your little fable i'm just not buying it you know And I don't know. They'll do lip service to it.
They'll kind of sigh and shrug and sort of, in a sense, allow that perhaps that's the case. And then they take another shot at the apology.
But as a parent, don't you feel like, well, okay, if all I'm going to get is lip service, at least I'm going to get the lip service.
At least they recognize a moral code. Even if your heart's not in this, I want to watch you go through the motions. This is what people do when they really are sorry. Right.
See, but that makes me feel more sympathetic to politicians or to this act, which actually usually fills me with contempt. I feel like at least the politician is pretending and acknowledging, yes, there is a moral code. Like they don't feel sorry, but they'll acknowledge that someone should feel sorry.
What challenges did Bob face in the cryonics process?
And if that's what we're going to get out of our politicians, well, OK, I guess it's not what I want, but I can kind of live with that. Yeah. I just want to jump in and say here, this conversation happened years ago. This was back in 2008. Today's show is a rerun. This was so long ago that we talked about this. The politicians actually still felt obliged to apologize when they screwed up. Sometimes anyway. Like back when we recorded this, I remember Barack Obama had just apologized for some remark that he made about small town America. And Hillary Clinton had just apologized for saying she flew into Bosnia under sniper fire. You remember this? It did not happen. It was a different time. Not like today. When the president does stuff like, you know, posting a photo of himself as Jesus Christ.
Or remember when he posted a video of the Obamas as apes. And lots of people called on him to apologize.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What political apologies are discussed in the prologue?
0:00–0:26
2
Who is Bob Nelson and what is his connection to cryonics?
0:26–3:09
3
What challenges did Bob face in the cryonics process?
3:09–4:05
4
How did Bob's first cryonics case unfold?
4:05–8:04
5
What mistakes did Bob make with subsequent cryonics cases?
8:04–13:14
6
How did Bob's decisions impact the families involved?
13:14–17:41
7
What legal repercussions did Bob face for his actions?
17:41–22:31
8
What reflections does Bob have on his cryonics journey?
22:31–58:54