S1 Ep21: A Call From Beyond

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Astonishing Legends. The views and opinions expressed by hosts and listeners on the Astonishing Dead Letter office are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Astonishing Legends Productions, the Astonishing Legends Network, or any affiliated entities or guests. When something unexplainable happens to you, it can make you feel isolated or alone. But trust us, you're not. For over a decade, you've been sending your strange stories to Astonishing Legends, and now it's time for our fellow legenders to hear them too. Join us weekly in the vault beneath Blanket Fortiana, which we call... The Astonishing Dead Letter office. Tonight's episode, A Call from Beyond. Well, this week's dead letter comes from a longtime listener, Patreon supporter, and friend of the show, Michelle, who, as a child in the 80s, received a mysterious phone call while waiting for her father to return home from the hospital. A seemingly ordinary event, but with a twist that makes you question the nature of reality itself. Yeah, the caller identified himself as Uncle Bill, a relative the listener had never heard of before, and the connection was poor, the voice faint, and the conversation kind of brief. Yeah, that's usually how they go. You know, the connection is never that good, but, you know, consider where it's coming from. But the impact of this fleeting interaction was anything but brief. It left a lasting impression on the listener and her family. Yeah, Michelle's insistence on the caller's identity, Uncle Bill, triggered a stunned reaction from her parents. So, back in the early 80s, growing up in Indianapolis, I was in fifth grade, and my dad went to see the doc for a fairly routine procedure. Because they were going to have to anesthetize him, they did a routine chest x-ray. The doc found a spot on his left lung and ordered a biopsy. Back then, that meant a large chest incision and rib cracking. If it was something bad, they would take part of his lung. I don't need to tell you, it was a tense time waiting for the surgery and the consequential results. Turns out, it was nothing to worry about. Yay! However, the recovery was a long few days in the hospital, and Mom twisted her ankle one day going back and forth to visit. It was a pretty stressful time for all of us. In addition, lots of family and friends were calling, and sister, brother, and I got really good at taking messages. On the day my dad was coming home from the hospital, us three were home waiting. The phone rang, and I answered it. I noticed the connection was not good, and the caller's voice was soft and sounded elderly. The volume faded in and out between the static. I thought, the caller must be calling from far away. The conversation went something very close to this. Hello, Cordomaz residence. Hello, is Tony there yet? No, he's not back from the hospital yet. He's still on his way. Can I take a message? Sure. Tell him I called to check on him. Okay. Who is this? This is his Uncle Bill. I'm sorry. I didn't hear you very well. We have a bad connection. Did you say Uncle Bill? That's right. Uncle Bill. Okay, I'll tell Dad you called. Do you want to leave a number? Oh, no. Just tell him I'll call back. Before I could finish saying thank you and goodbye, he was gone. When I hung up, I felt a compulsion to tell both my siblings to remember Uncle Bill called because I had never heard of him before. I was aware of an Uncle Bob, but not Bill. No exaggerating here. We all said Uncle Bill out loud to remember. Shortly, my mom arrived home with my dad and we ran to help them come in because Mom was still on crutches and Dad was still in a bit of pain and they both needed help walking. As soon as my dad stepped foot in the front door, arm around my struggling mom, I blurted out from the top of the stairs, Uncle Bill called. I felt kind of a relief to throw it at him. Now, I remember that moment crystal clearly. It's engraved in my mind. The look on their faces. The fact that they both froze for a moment. My mom was a bit annoyed, obviously focused on my dad. A quick glance up at me and she said, No. That's it. Just a no. Dad looked up at me, curious. You mean Uncle Bob. It was not a question, rather a statement. Mom said, Uncle Bill is dead. I looked at my brother and sister, both with quick, confused faces. There was some grumbling about. She said, Uncle Bill. It was Uncle Bill. No, you mean Uncle Bob. Finally, as they were mercifully getting in the door, I asserted, It was Uncle Bill. I made sure. Mom stared at me. Dad shrugged his shoulders. Maybe it was him. He is my godfather. We didn't really talk about the phone call after that. Maybe it was that paranormal malaise that Scott talks about. While my belief about ghosts and guardian angels, etc., was probably born then, I didn't really hold the actual memory dear. So this reminds me of that famous Twilight Zone episode for folks who are in the know on this. If you're not, if you're younger and you've never seen the Twilight Zone, go find it with as many channels and platforms and apps as there are now. You can find just about anything in about five minutes. But there was an episode on the Twilight Zone called The Night Calls. It came out in 1964, where there was a phone call coming into the house. I believe it was a widow who was getting phone calls, and they traced the phone line. And the big payoff at the end is like, I'm pretty sure the phone line, there's a shot of it coming down off the telephone pole and going down into the grave of her husband. You're going to spoil it? The guy who hates spoilers. I mean, people are going to know what we're talking about, right? Based on this letter. But yes. Yes. No, I'm rassing you. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert after the spoiler. That's a novel of the answer. I'm totally fine with that. Just don't get on my case when I do it. No, I'm always going to get on your case. That's what we do. But no, to your point, they run that one quite a bit. It's one of the Twilight Zones that you'll see occasionally. Not the one of the more popular ones, of course. Right. Writer Richard Matheson, who's just terrific. We've talked about him on the show a lot. We've talked about him quite a bit. Yeah. Because he's written another, one of my favorite episodes called Little Girl Lost, where really the little girl falls into another dimension. And that is fascinating as well. Oh yeah, you were just talking about that one. Yeah. You can hear her, but you can't see her. Yeah. As a kid, I was just spellbound by it. Because like, what, is that possible? Is that really a thing? Yeah. That's like, I mean, that's the whole Carol Ann thing comes out of that probably in a way, you know. It has to have been inspired. Yeah, I believe so. There's a connection there, but there's another world. And what is this world like? And can you fall into it? Are there thin places, literally, that pop up on the earth? And what I liked about it, though, that always stuck with me is that they didn't really freak out. The father and mother, of course, are quite concerned. They can hear her. But who do they get to help them? A physicist. That's right. Yes, we're getting science behind this. Well, you know, and his stuff was like that. Because, you know, he also wrote the book, or excuse me, the novel, I should say, I Am Legend. Oh, yeah. Which, if you guys have ever seen that adaptation, that movie's pretty cool. And actually, he adapted a 1971 short story, Duel, into the screenplay that was Steven Spielberg's first movie. Also an excellent film, by the way. Yeah, Breakout. Dennis Weaver, I believe. Well, to your point here, rounding it back again, this is also based on a short story, originally titled, Sorry, Right Number. Great title, by the way. Yeah. Wrong number. And then when it was anthologized, the title was changed to Long Distance Call. And I think the endings are a little different than what you see on TV. But in this case, it appears as the title Night Call for the Twilight Zone series. Yeah, which that's a great name. Great call on a title. And as you said, it appeared in 1964, and it centers around this elderly woman who has a caretaker. And she gets these calls in the middle of the night. Nobody calls her. And so, of course, she picks up right away. She was played by Gladys Cooper, I believe. And one of the best things about it is that voice on the other end. And a lot of times you'll see in shows from the 60s and 70s, they can make these really cheesy, but the voice on the other end was so creepy and just chilling. Yeah. And the way that it came across, and it hats off to Richard Matheson and directed by Jacques Tournier, because they got kind of the crackling, faint, long distance aspect of it. Because, yeah, I mean, what's longer than calling to the other side of reality or life and death or the supernatural? So it's coming from a long ways, or really just another plane of existence, but it's coming through. It's usually broken up and crackly and fragmented. And a lot of times it doesn't make sense. There's a long tradition of ITC or basically communications through modern devices or old-timey devices from the other side by the departed. And another great example of that is a young guy had passed away. His brother took over his Facebook account. And, you know, he'd locked it up, of course. Yeah, but he was still getting messages. And he realized it was from his brother who had passed on. And the fragmented sentences, the partial communications, he really couldn't communicate well. But he figured, like, no one else on Earth has this login. You know, who else could it be? And he realized it had to be his brother still communicating. Somehow I had the password in the afterlife, but he was able to log in. But the departed spirits are able to utilize electronic devices to communicate or manipulate energy in such a way that they can still make that connection. In this case, it's a phone line. And, you know, phone lines run on, I think, about six volts, very low voltage. Yeah, very low voltage. Electricity to run a landline. As you'll see in the old shows, and I never understood this as a kid, like radar on MASH, he would crank up the military radio. And then you'll see old phones, too. There's a little bit of a crank. And what you're doing, you're generating just a little bit of electricity to carry that voice message across wire lines. Yeah. Old ranchers figured out they could communicate from ranch to ranch, long distances on the barbed wire and the fencing wire with a little bit of electricity and could talk to each other before phones. So before there was, you know, well-established phone lines between ranches and long distances. You're kidding me. I did not know that. That's pretty fascinating. Like, if I love Old West stuff, I had no idea. Look, I learned something new from you tonight. Well, there you go. I think it came around, you know, when telephonic technology had come out, but like before you had a phone and then the old days, what people don't realize is that it's a party line. So you didn't have an individual. You just picked up and said, operator, can you get me so-and-so? And they would connect you to whomever. But a lot of areas would have a party line. So like if you just picked up the phone line going to make a call, you could be hearing a conversation of your neighbors. That's how it was on the end of Griffith show. They would be, you know, all right, Floyd, get off the line. I need to talk to Sarah. You know. Exactly. So in this case, something is making that connection. And what stands out in this story by Michelle is that it's so clear and it's so complete both ways. I also want to remind people, we're talking about analog technology and you used to hear these stories a lot more when analog technology was the norm, which, you know, everyone had landlines. There was nothing digital involved in placing these phone calls back then. Like you said, it only took a little bit of voltage, which some people say that power is the barrier to entry for communication, for transmitting communication. It's fascinating. And also what's fascinating is that it doesn't matter really what the technology is. I think if it's electronic in some way, it could be mechanical. Of course, if you believe in any of this kind of stuff, there's things like automatic writing, Ouija boards, things can move that are just physical and not electrical, but somehow the electricity is a medium that can be manipulated. And you'll see this on the go shows all the time, of course, like REM pods and, you know, proximity and lights lighting up and K2 meters and electromagnetism being charted with this activity. So, hey, we're all just energy. We're just meat bags that are running a battery internally. What's fascinating is that the Uncle Bill part of it was so normal that Michelle didn't think anything of it. It wasn't like, right, right, just some uncle that she doesn't really know. Yeah. It wasn't a creepy prank call or something that kind of freaked her out. It was just some guy calling himself Uncle Bill. And the reaction from the parents, though, was great because it's like, this should not be happening. And then you get a little eternally creeped out and you don't really want to talk about it. Like, just, this can't be. Yeah, it seemed like it was a red flag for dad, maybe. It's just like, are you sure? I don't think, and it's not clear what happened to Uncle Bill. Michelle doesn't say. Right. I wonder how he passed away. I mean, you know, personal family questions, but the fact that they reacted the way they did, I think is pretty typical and to be expected. Yeah. What do you make of that? And what does that say? Wait, am I that close to the other side that should I be concerned about this? Are they waiting for me? By the way, that's something that's interesting about Michelle because we know her, we've had a relationship with her as a listener for quite a long time now. She's very active on our Patreon, which, by the way, folks, it's a great place to get more content from us, patreon.com slash astonishing legends. One thing that I know is that she has had a lifetime of paranormal events. So she's one of those folks that things happen to her a lot. She's got a lot of stories. Some stories have even been written into books that paranormal authors have written. And there was one connected to this, actually, that she mentioned near the end of the email. And I took it out of the reading because I want to talk to you about it possibly being a full episode for us this year. Oh, yeah. Definitely on board with that. It's very interesting. It's connected to where she was living at the time of this story, Indianapolis. But I digress. So, well, let's talk about what other kinds of things might this have been? I mean, could she have been mistaken? I'll do respect to you, Michelle. You know, we always explore the mundane to the fringe. Could it have been someone else? But it seems like in the follow-up in the family history, there was, you never heard from somebody later who said, oh, yeah, that was me. I called. Right. Because they would know that. That would have come out. It was like, how come you guys never called me back? Well, Uncle Bill said he was going to call back. Right. And then I don't think he did, did he? No. As far as we know. No. Exactly. Well, again, we always say it depends on your perspective and point of view on these things and your personal beliefs that if it's not possible at all, then it had to be a coincidence. Quite a shocking one and a weird one. Right. But a really strange coincidence and it's just some guy and he knew of the family maybe. I mean, it's a weird thing to be playing a prank about, especially if you care about the family and know that the father is, you know, undergoing a, or enduring and recovering from a very serious procedure. Right. It's not the time to joke around with something like that, even by some other family member and never to reveal themselves as well. So if you're like me and you do believe in an afterlife and that there can be communication with spirits, then it makes sense, right? There's no, for me, there's no question. It's just that what's remarkable about it again is the clarity of it and the interchange back and forth was a solid and not fragmented or sketchy. It was just very clear and I also believe if you do like myself that you hear this quite a bit in that if there is communications, often the spirit or the person who has departed will say something like, I only have a little bit of time. I can only do this for so long or I have to go or I'm allowed this one interaction. We'll talk about movies again. You see that in the movie 2010, the follow-up to 2001, a space odyssey. Yep. Seems like even when you slip the surly bonds of Earth, you can still run out of pocket change to make a call. That never changes. Yeah, exactly. Or are you in some kind of purgatory? It's like, you only get one call. Well, as we always say, we've been saying this since the beginning, there are rules apparently and in this case, is it a God, a divine power, or just the limitations of whatever kind of, you know, otherworldly technology is going on here? Because you see it, as I was going to say, in the movie 2010, the year we make contact with the return of a spirit of sorts of Dave Bowman, played by Kier DeLay, where he says, I've been allowed to give you this message in order to save the spacecraft and Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren and the Americans and the Russians, as they were exploring Europa and it's going to explode, so it saved their lives, but he was allowed to communicate with them and then it was limited. Right. And then they get an inspiring, but chilling warning, but also a message of hope. But it's also like, you're being watched and things are being controlled, so don't mess this up. You have a great opportunity. Use it wisely. I think the desire to reach out to a loved one, we see that all the time. I'm sure most everybody in the audience has a family story where somebody who's passed has a little bit of a communication. It could be in a dream. Yeah. That's very common, a very vivid and lucid dream. I've had a dream like that with my mother-in-law, actually, long after she passed. That's right. But it was different from every other kind of dream I've ever had in my life. It was unbelievable. Oh, really? Yeah, really interesting. The lucidity of it. Yeah, it was just crystal clear everything that was happening and easily remembered when I woke up and the details are all still well-remembered by me. Unlike other dreams, it's like, if you don't tell them right away or within a few hours, it's wild because I'm sure everyone can relate to this. You don't remember it at all or you wake up and you'll be like, oh, wow, and it's in your head and then 10 seconds later, it's completely gone. Right. Or maybe you remember it and you have the wherewithal and I learned this from a writing professor I had in college who was big on dream journals as inspiration for writing short stories and scripts and stuff. So if you get up and you write it down right that minute, that's a good thing to do. Or the other thing that happens sometimes is you remember it and you don't know when you had it and it feels like it could have been years or months ago, although it might have been that night before, but you can't really tell. There's no time frame reference. But yes, I did have a dream like that. It was highly unusual. So what she said to you in the dream that stuck with you and me, it was something like, oh, the things I could tell you. There was an omniscience to it and the other thing that happened was that it became clear that it was time for her to go and she turned and went and I wanted her not to go. But I was also in a very serene environment. I was with my family. It was a beautiful, very much like a white picket fence, I don't know, like over the top, like not something I would prefer in the real world. But it was a very relaxing, comforting place where I felt comfortable and I felt like my family was taken care of and safe and happy and then she was walking away. But like, I think what she said was connected and I've got to find that journal actually because I'm not sure where I wrote it down. But it was partially connected to her having a good deal of knowledge about everything which is something that would have appealed to her because she was very much of a person that liked to know everyone's business and what was going on and talk about what people were doing. And she seemed to be making a joke about how I've got it all now. I've got everything. I fully understand it all. Which is funny and frightening depending on what you've got going on. But it wasn't in a like, you know, evil kind of way. It was just like my priorities have shifted and I have acquired the knowledge I always sought, you know, kind of thing. But also making a joke about her earthly personality a little bit. Yeah, I got that. I mean, I didn't know her very well but I did know her some in the sense that I got when you told me that was that not so much that she knows all your dirty laundry or everyone else's it's that I have more insight now and I know what's going on. Yeah, and bigger fish to fry in terms of the knowledge that she wanted. She got better knowledge. That's what it felt like. More like I kind of see the big picture now. It's more clear to me and the things that I could tell you about that. Yes, exactly. So I guess then, you know, we've talked about the possibility maybe it was a mistaken identity. It doesn't seem like that to me. Of course, I'm having confirmation bias because I love this story. But the clear like lifelong impact that this has had on Michelle and her family it seems like but this event really stuck with her in a lot of poignant ways which is that stands out because it seems like something more than just a simple misunderstanding and also it gets you past sometimes the paranormal memory loss you have. Well, yeah, it made a huge impact on something that most people would say was just a coincidence. Right. And I don't believe I'm not a big believer in coincidences. I think even the ones that are probably the most mundane or just like not connected to anything important still have some kind of connection to something. Yeah. And you may not know for years later well, this is it could be just the mere fact that life is eternal that there really is no death just transition in another state and sometimes that transition can be bridged and here, you know, when people say like, oh, it was just some guy maybe he guessed it's like, yeah, okay. But obviously Michelle's taken meaning from this and it's affected the whole family and it's hard to say what the other relatives thought about it but I think eventually they believed her that something was going on even if you don't believe in any of this at all it's just enough to make you wonder about it and maybe that's the point. Yeah. You know, I have always wanted to experience something like this. Yeah. Of course, last time I said that I wound up having problems in Atchison but anyway, I have a record here by Constantine's Rodeve or Rodeve R-A-U-D-I-V-E he's a Latvian gentleman who was communicating with the dead a very long time ago and made vinyl of it. I had this vinyl and I've only listened to it once because it creeped me out so bad. Really? It's a vintage record of these communications with the dead and I've always thought, you know, oh God, it would be so interesting to get a phone call but I'm one of those people too. I mean, you can capture things digitally I believe that are paranormal but I feel like it's a lot harder than it used to be when we were using analog technology for everything like old phone lines or record players carving a needle carving something into wax. Have you ever had any kind of ITC communication or experience for us? Yeah, of course. You were talking about Rodeve. I mean, the thing that I like about his experiments and the device that he eventually created, at least one of them, was that, you know, people will say like, oh, your microphone's picking up some radio signal from, you know, that's what it's getting or, you know, you're getting a walkie-talkie from somewhere. So he took the microphone out of the equation. The way it was recording is really, you could say, direct-to-tape or direct-to-recording medium. So to help eliminate that, you know, because that's what people say with the DR-60, you know, and talking about our communications ITC from the other side is that, oh, that thing's just malfunctioning. He's making up sounds. And so my response to that was, I've certainly, by this point and since pre-Atreson and since those days that I've had many, I would say, EVP experiences not only with that but with other devices and have been witness to ones that other folks have captured. I think the most recent one that I thought that was the most clear was taken in the balcony at the Canton Theater when we went to Monster Fest this last time. And I don't believe we ever, we played that but it is one of those things where it's easy to doubt if you weren't there but we were in the balcony and people were conducting little experiments with the moving cat balls you know, the little lighted electronic balls that light up when you touch them and they were lighting up without anybody touching them. The REM pods were going off so something was triggering that proximity sensor and then with our friend Roger's digital recording kind of simulating a DR-60 he's called it the ER-70 app so look that up folks. It's a basically just a digital recreation of a DR-60 I got a pretty clear one when I asked somebody their name and I said is anybody here with us and can you tell me your name and clearly we got back the name where I did Anthony and I was there nobody said Anthony nobody with us was named Anthony. Just quickly for our listeners if you're not familiar with our main show or what a DR-60 is that's a Panasonic digital recorder that came out I believe in the 90s we have one it's kind of famous for getting EVPs and so when Forrest is making reference to the DR-60 that's what that is we have a bunch of stories about it on our main show and then the app that our friend made it's available from Streamside Software as he said that's the ER-70 app which is significantly similar in terms of its programming to how he ascertained that the DR-60 actually worked it's not just a bunch of bogus code so right no no it's I've gotten some pretty good stuff with that and there's a lot of people that have problems with EVPs electronic voice phenomenon as it's called just because they just think it's random it's picking up something else it can't be trusted or it's misinterpreted I think that's one of the biggest ones it's like I didn't really hear that I think the fact that you're hearing anything and here's my point about that leading to a larger point is that it's in context right if I'd gotten a he says is everybody here can you tell us your name and I get back the word refrigerator well that okay that's something else maybe that is somebody just chit-chat and then I just picked it up accidentally but the point to me is that you get it in context so when you ask a question and you get a relevant and coherent answer that to me carries more weight than some random radio transmission right and it's also something entirely different to have an interactive coherent conversation as Michelle did in this story exactly that's what I'm saying it wasn't just like this is Uncle Fred like well nobody in the family has ever heard of an Uncle Fred there's nobody named Fred in the family so that's less weight you know when there's a connection to their story and something that kind of that nobody else knows that to me says pay attention and so this is a roundabout way to get to my short little anecdote about some kind of ITC thing happening to me and aside from me actively trying to record something this I didn't ask for and I've told this anecdote before but it's been years now so I don't mind telling it again and frankly I would tell it again if I told it last week so you're just going to have to yes you would that we know yeah but the deal is here is that I think it's the only time that I've had some non-solicited electronic I wouldn't say it's a communication but it's an indication of activity so what happened is most people have smartphones and we have texts and iMessage that's I have an Apple iPhone I have iMessage on it and a few years ago my good friend Carlos unexpectedly passed away he suffered a major heart attack at a sporting event and they were unable to get him out of the stadium before he could get some help so it was very unexpected I didn't realize he had cardiac problems I'm not sure he did either but that's what happened and I had worked with Carlos we used to hang out occasionally but mostly you know we worked together and we were we're friends and friends outside of work and you know so it was a bit shocking and when we were working you know we'd text each other because he'd be in one part of the building I'd be in another he'd you know we'd just text back and forth like what's going on or hey you want to go to lunch and prior to his passing it was at least at six months it could have been a year and as we all know when you have iMessage or whatever the newest messages get pushed to the top and when you write a new message like oh maybe you hadn't texted somebody in a year and you can't scroll down that far so you just start punching in their name and iMessage program will bring it up to the top and then once you place your message or you send a message now that newest one is pinned to the top as the latest one right so it was either the next day after his passing or the day after that no more than like two or three days I look at my phone and a new message comes in and it's just the last text message he sent me was now at the top of my phone and I just made me think what that shouldn't happen I didn't send his phone a message obviously I knew he passed away the day before right and no one else has his phone and why would they be texting me on a thread from six months or a year ago when I didn't know many of his close personal family members so we just we were all a group of work friends it's like that's really odd and it just made me scratch my head for a bit like because and it was such a mundane text I think he said like you know where's that box of brochures in the basement or something like that it's like oh downstairs to the left check the other shelf you know it was just something mundane and that was the last time we spoke and then I think we you know we'd hung out or so there were no more text messages from him that was the last thing it's like suddenly that gets bumped to the top after his passing and like I said if somebody had gotten his phone and just said like oh Forrest this is so and so you know mutual friend of Carlos like I have his phone now I'm just letting people know he's passed you know thank you I could expect that but there's no message it just refreshed the last message he sent from a long time ago yeah buried under 100 messages so to me it was like and like I said if that happened while Carlos was alive like hey dude did you message me like no well that's weird the fact that it happened the day after he passed and that we were good friends to me that's the message it's just hello just saying hi I'm okay I'm on the other side wish we could have hung out more and it didn't need to be any kind of garbled text or just a random string of letters or numbers it's just saying hello after he's gone and let me know he's not really gone he's just far away from me anyway so but actually on my phone and very close so keep those that you love and cherish close by you because they'll be around but you can't see them for a while well put well was it Uncle Bill a figment of memory or something else entirely sometimes the most unsettling mysteries are the ones that remain just out of reach leaving us to ponder the strange echoes of the past maybe just leave a message for Uncle Bill just in case The Astonishing Dead Letter Office is hosted by Scott Philbrick and Forrest Burgess and is executive produced by Tess Feifel the show is edited and mixed by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound the theme is based on the Astonishing Legends theme by Judson Crane at Founder Music arranged by Alan Carissia who composes all the other music in the show Tommy Beaver Design created the logo the announcer is John Bolton that's me stories are lightly edited for length content and readability but otherwise presented as they're sent to us we're always looking for more dead letters so if you have a story of your own you'd like to share email it to deadletteroffice at astonishinglegends.com please include how you would like to be credited first name only first name last initial anonymous a pseudonym let us know due to the number of emails coming in we often cannot respond but we do read them all no part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission copyright Astonishing Legends Productions protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition if it tastes good you flip it over only to discover it's made with a whole paragraph of ingredients you've never heard of or artificial sweeteners are doing all the heavy lifting it's basically dessert in disguise you shouldn't have to choose between tasty and nutritious and that's what makes Aloha stand out Aloha protein bars nail the delicious and nutritious they're USDA organic and made with ingredients that actually grow somewhere it's their whole taste that grows philosophy plant-based ingredients grown in the ground thoughtfully sourced and built to keep you satisfied their peanut butter cup bar has 14 grams of protein 10 grams of fiber and only 5 grams of sugar which is wild considering how delicious it is made with no artificial ingredients or fillers just something that tastes good and works the way it's supposed to so if you're in the mood for something truly craveable and nutritious try any of Aloha's protein bars grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com hello hello I'm Malcolm Gladwell host of Smart Talks with IBM I recently spoke with IBM's new director of research Jake Embatta we discussed his vision for the future of quantum computing at IBM research what we always do is answer what is the future of computing whether it's coming up with new algorithms coming up with better AI coming up with quantum or coming up with just how do different accelerators go together it's our DNA to answer the question of what is the future isn't it a perfect problem for IBM because you kind of need to have a legacy of building stuff yes building actual physical machines yeah it's why I came to IBM I wanted the experience the culture of building hard things that others have not done before where do you imagine we are in the timeline of this technology there will come a point when it will mature right yeah my cell phone is a mature technology at this point how far are we from that point with quantum by 2029 we'll build the first fault-tolerant quantum computer that is one that can run a very very large large problem to learn how IBM is building the future of computing visit ibm.com slash quantum if data management is slowing down your business you need the Intuit ERP if one entity is here and one here and one here and one here you need the Intuit ERP if scaling your business feels like start starting starting starting starting over you need the Intuit ERP Intuit Enterprise Suite is the AI native ERP solution that consolidates migrates and automates all in one place learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town really now fortunately with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app you can get answers diagnosis prescriptions even speak live with clinicians anytime anywhere so maybe there's never a good time to be sick but at least the best care is always there download the Aperture app store or HHC 247.org success starts with your drive and American Public University is here to fuel it with affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward whether you're changing careers starting fresh or pursuing a lifelong passion our programs are designed for people who never stop you bring the fire APU will fuel the journey learn more at apu.apus.edu ever notice that feeling your worst also seems to happen at the worst time in the worst places like sudden nausea at 9pm when you're out of town really now fortunately with Hartford HealthCare's HHC 24-7 app you can get answers diagnosis prescriptions even speak live with clinicians anytime anywhere so maybe there's never a good time to be sick but at least the best care is always there download the Aperture App Store or HHC247.org success starts with your drive and American Public University is here to fuel it with affordable tuition and over 200 flexible online programs APU helps you gain the skills and confidence to move forward whether you're changing careers starting fresh or pursuing a lifelong passion our programs are designed for people who never stop you bring the fire APU will fuel the journey learn more at apu.apus.edu for delicious meals you could go out to eat or spend hours in the kitchen or you could just make a Marie Callender's meal yeah you heard me Marie Callender's classic chicken parmigiana bowl is delicious with scratch made marinara sauce creamy mozzarella cheese and no preservatives it's high in protein with 30 grams per serving Marie Callender's what having it all tastes like you