Episode 245: The Self-Believer, or Hasting by Musket and Sextant
the memory palace
Nate DiMeo
4.8 • 7.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Music
- The Barr Brothers play Static Orphans
- Resavoir plays Facets
- We hear Le mort de l'enfant from Hikaru Hayashi's score to The Naked Island.
- South Seas by David Pike
- Trust in Me from Sould Flutes
- Flowering Jasmine from Gidon Kremer
- Tesko Mi Je Zabrovit Tebe from Branko Mataja.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is Eric Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? |
| 0:04.2 | Okay, well, either way, I'm going to tell you about it. |
| 0:06.7 | We make stories, old-fashioned stories that hopefully pull you in at the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, |
| 0:14.3 | and then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. |
| 0:18.6 | That's right. I'm talking about stories to make you disappointments |
| 0:21.4 | and ignore your loved ones. |
| 0:23.4 | This American Life, every week, wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:29.6 | This is the Memory Palace. |
| 0:31.5 | I'm Nate DeMaio. |
| 0:33.2 | Somewhere in the unknown west, |
| 0:35.6 | at some unknown point in the summer of 1842, somewhere in the plains, |
| 0:40.3 | Nebraska, Kansas, possibly eastern Wyoming, a wagon train was in revolt. |
| 0:46.3 | Its members had had it with Elijah White, the man who had organized the Westward Party back in Missouri, |
| 0:52.3 | a doctor and federal contractor tasked with bringing people |
| 0:56.2 | safely to the Oregon coast. White wasn't the guide. There was a famous trapper that did that, |
| 1:03.0 | man named Fitzpatrick, seasoned and sunburned, but the doctor was their captain, made decisions |
| 1:09.1 | about what to bring, how and when to use those things. |
| 1:12.6 | And it seems he kept screwing up in ways that have now been lost to time. |
| 1:17.6 | But there in the unknown west where water and weather and wolves and people who already lived in that land that these new people were attempting to cross |
| 1:25.6 | could kill you at any time in any number of ways. |
| 1:29.3 | Screwing up was less than ideal. |
| 1:31.3 | And so somewhere at some point at some unknown location, |
... |
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