The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce Part 2

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Same-day delivery valid in select zip codes. Subject to driver availability. Details at Lowe's.com slash same-day delivery. Astonishing Legends Network. Listen to the Astonishing Junk Drawer exclusively at Patreon.com slash Astonishing Legends. Pandemonium, riots. LTV ads living together. I am going to be fired by Forrest, probably, because we gave Ed the night off. All this technology can be weaponized, and then we're talking about the ultimate weapon on the Earth. And that was all tied to Bob Bigelow and Bigelow Aerospace. Highlighter and regular pen? I don't think so, Forrest. I would know about it. This upends everything. This breaks the world. And what was allowed to be in the book is what he knows he can safely say. Did you ask it if it believes in aliens? If you are feeling suicidal, thinking about hurting yourself, or a concern that someone you know may be in danger of hurting himself or herself, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK, 1-800-273-8255. It is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is staffed by certified crisis response professionals. Astonishing Legends would like to thank Wild Grain, Squarespace, our contributors at Patreon.com, and you, our listeners, for making tonight's show possible. Last week, in part one of our series, we explored the life of Ambrose Bierce, a man of many talents and a cynical wit. We left him on the precipice, his final purported journey into Mexico a mystery. It was late 1913, and a celebrated American writer had vanished without a trace. His last known communication, a letter to his friend and confidant, Blanche Partington, placed him in Chihuahua, Mexico. But what happened after that? We may never know for certain. Tonight, in the final part of this series, we delve further into the mystery, adding some additional context to the world he lived in at the time and diving into the theories about what may have happened to him. We'll be exploring the context of Bierce's final days, his mindset, and how those things may have contributed to his disappearance. We'll take a look at how the Mexican Revolution and the chaos he may have found himself in could have swallowed him up. Was he caught in the crossfire, or did he become another victim of the conflict? Or was he, as some suggest, executed by the forces of Mexican Revolutionary General Pancho Villa? Maybe his journey was a meticulously planned exit, a final act of defiance. The theory of suicide in the Grand Canyon persists, fueled by his own writings on the subject, and his known disdain for growing old. Could there have been a more clandestine motive? A missing letter referenced by his secretary, Carrie Christensen, sparks questions about hidden agendas and secrets. There are even whispers of fringe theories, of crystal skulls and ancient ruins in the Pekime region of Mexico, perhaps the key to a portal that, at the urging of a friend, Bierce may have passed through, entering another reality inaccessible to the rest of us. Perhaps that's all that death is, after all. The truth may be hidden in the details, or lost to time, which, as you'll learn tonight, is just the kind of ending he wrote about in his own short stories again and again. Welcome back to Astonishing Legends. I'm Scott Philbrook, and this is Forrest Burgess. A man enclosed in such a closet can neither see nor be seen, neither hear nor be heard, neither feel nor be felt, neither live nor die. For both life and death are processes which can take place only where there is force, and in empty space no force could exist. Charles Ashmore's trail from the complete short stories of Ambrose Bierce. Join us tonight for part two of our intriguing look into the mysterious disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. And we're back. That we are. Hey, everybody. We got a great show for you tonight, so thank you again for joining us. A couple of very quick notes. The first one being we are planning a good deal of additional content for our main feed this year, so be looking out for extra episodes and specials. Ooh, yes, folks. We're really trying to get the word out about Astonishing Legends, so whether you're a long time fan or you've just discovered us, we'd be thrilled if you could spread the word about our shows to anyone that hasn't heard of us before. Absolutely. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave reviews when you can. There are so many people out there who would love our shows if they only knew where to find us. Well, that's a little presumptuous, okay. I know, I know. Well, before we wrap up tonight's housekeeping, I've got to mention our Patreon. If you're not already a patron at patreon.com, you're missing out on more bonus content and early access perks than ever before. I'll actually be doing a reading of Bierce's occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and another one of my favorite short stories of his for Patreon this week. And again, presumptuous to think that that's some kind of bonus, but there it is. Yes, that'll be posted to Patreon in just a few days. Patrons also get commercial-free versions of the main show and enjoy early access to commercial-free episodes of the Dead Letter Office, as well as our Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Drawer. So tell your friends about Astonishing Legends, our Patreon, and the Patreons of all the other shows on the network, like the Midnight Library, Scared All the Time, and Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. Look for all those shows. We promise they're all very good. They're all very different from our show, too. If you don't like us, you will like one of them, for sure. That's not being presumptuous. They are so good. Well, sign up at patreon.com slash astonishinglegends for even more cool bonus content. Also, folks, I mentioned a few weeks ago that I guested on my friend Rachel Dratch's podcast, Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch. That episode is finally coming out this Tuesday, January 29, 2025. I really had a fun time talking to her. Most of you, I'm sure, know who she is, but for people that don't, she was a cast member on Saturday Night Live for seven years, playing a ton of iconic characters, including the infamous Debbie Downer, and she's hilarious, one of the funniest people I know. But her podcast is her having her friends on to talk about paranormal stuff, and it's excellent. There are some amazing episodes. My wife, Emily Spivey, was on a month or two ago as well. So find and subscribe to Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch wherever you get your podcasts. And after this coming Wednesday, look for the episode with me. So, Forrest, you had one other thing, too, right? There's a correction from part one, and I think I may have said this. It's usually me screwing up, but Patty Hearst is the granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst, not the daughter. Yes, not the daughter. Yeah, did I say daughter? That's what one of our dear listeners said on Patreon. Yes, that's right. Yeah, so my apologies for that, of course. Way, way, I should have recognized it. I just forgot the word grand, but a grand family, nonetheless. All right, man, let's dive in here tonight. And by diving in, there could be, I'm positing, an actual dive into a cool, dark place. This is getting good. So last week, we talked about Beers' life and the circumstances surrounding his vanishing. And we're not trying to make him out to be just another mysterious literary death like Edgar Allan Poe, where they at least found the body. Right. Beers' story is different, partly because his disappearance closely mirrors his work as a writer. Yeah. I mean, life imitating one's own art? I don't know. Yeah. You're right about that. But before we plunge back in here and work our way towards the theories, let's do a little recap from the key points of part one. First of all, Beers was a Civil War veteran, like we said, who served in the Union Army. And he wasn't just a soldier. He was a topographical engineer, which is a fancy way of saying he was good at making maps of dangerous places, namely battlefields and their surrounding territory. Yeah. Now, that journey all the way to San Francisco, I mean, what a treacherous endeavor for all the dangers out there in the entire territory that you're going to have to cross just to make some maps. And it's wild to think that a guy known for his poetry and writing was also a brave soldier. Not that the idea, we're certainly aware of the warrior poet or the warrior philosopher. You can mix those. The warrior monk, the Knights Templar. You can have hybrids of those kind of things. It doesn't mean you are a lesser of anything. But in Beers's case, he was promoted for his valor during the Battle of Laurel Hill in 1861. So he wasn't just making maps there too. This guy fought and showed a lot of bravery on the battlefield and also saw a lot of horror, which infused and informed his later writings. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure that he suffered from PTSD. And I know that he was wounded at least once. But I think he was probably wounded several times, honestly. As I mentioned in part one, it was notable because it was some kind of traumatic brain injury. And I don't know if that influenced him creatively in any way. He seemed to carry on after, I think, like a six-month convalescence. But he returned to duty and to his normal life. But I'm sure, yeah, they didn't have a word for it back then. But like all of our older generation, at least with my grandparents' generation, you did have some after effects. They just didn't call it PTSD then. They didn't have that word. But shell shock, yes. Nervousness, sweating. My grandfather had malaria. So he would still have bouts of malaria coming back. Sweaty, shaking. Didn't like loud noises, except when he was lighting them off like firecrackers or shooting guns. But anything else, squeaking. He did not like squeaking. So anyway, those things last, not to make light of it. Those things carry over and inform the rest of your life as you go on. Well, after the war, he became a prolific writer and influential journalist, known for his dark and cynical style, writing for the San Francisco Examiner for the majority of his career, as well as other publications. And he was not afraid to criticize anything. And he was known for that. Government, religion, you name it, everything. It was open season. And he's known for having written the first Civil War fiction, as amateur historian Leon Day says, quote, included the terror and put the glory in its place, end quote. So I thought that was well put. Yeah, no, and I understand why H.L. Mencken, another literary great mind of his time, identified with him because he was quite similar in that cynicism and not afraid to criticize whoever he thought needed it. That's right. Didn't stand on ceremony there. Well, and also he was a master of the macabre, having influenced a lot of horror writers, as we said before. His most famous works include An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, of course, a short story about a man's final moments before execution that plays with time and the experience of time. And of course, The Devil's Dictionary, which was his satirical dictionary or lexicon. And one of my favorites, Charles Ashmore's Trail, which appeared in a different form in the San Francisco Examiner originally. But that's the title in the complete short stories of Ambrose Bierce. And I haven't read that one, but that's the one you said was about the farmer disappearing, right? Well, yes. And so it's kind of like, you know, in my youth, having a formative kind of story that you hear about, kind of like seeing that Reader's Digest article about the money pit in Oak Island. I'm like, wait, wait, this exists? This is a real thing? This is a mystery that's right there and can be explored? If only one day there is such a thing as a cable show with two guys ready to go in and spend some money on it and film the whole thing, that would be terrific. And it is entertaining. But no, this is one of those short stories. Again, it's been many, many years, you know, since I had first come upon it. But you hear about it like, whoa, that is a different story than the usual claptrap that they're giving us at grade school. And when you read it, it's like, it just opens your imagination and you never forget it. So the background on that is that, you know, the main character sets out from his farm to get water from a spring nearby for his family. And they set out looking for him when he doesn't come back. And then they only find his footprints in the snow, but the footprints just stop. In the middle of nowhere. Yeah, right. So kind of like Bigfoot. Okay. I'm not joking. A lot of people have claimed, or there's the weirdest thing is that, okay, it's one thing where you see a set of footprints in the snow and they just stop like, okay, that's strange. And they leap up 50 feet into a ledge somewhere or into a tree and we just didn't notice. But a weird thing about Sasquatch, they're related, I guarantee, is that they'll come across a single footprint as they're making fresh prints in the snow, like one footprint, like it just popped out of a portal, took one foot down and popped back up. Maybe, who knows? As Bob Gimlin claimed of the Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin famous Bigfoot film, he said that there was one, the last footprint he saw was half of a wet footprint on that rock before it just stopped. And the only thing was really thick brush that had not been disturbed. And that freaked them out because that should not happen. But yeah, in the middle of a field where the footprints just stop, again, that captured my imagination. It set you thinking because you hadn't read anything like that before and you never forget it. So anyway, and then also as another little aside, I had heard, you know, the adults talking about, you know, have you heard that story about somebody in England just started hearing the clanking of armor and men shouting and hoof prints on cobblestone, but there was nobody there. That's like a stone tape echo kind of thing where it's reverberating or they're actually still there in some kind of time space continuum that's a, or parallel reality, but you can't see them, but they're there. In any case, this story here, the guy's footprints disappear in the middle of a field. It gets even stranger though, when later his mom hears his voice near the spot in the field, but can't see him. And then a bunch of his other relatives hear it too, but they can't figure out where it's coming from. And eventually his voice fades and he's never heard from again. Yeah. So this is a really cool story. It's the one our opening quote came from tonight. But the other thing is the meta nature of this when you connect it with Bierce's own disappearance. So he clearly has an affinity for mysterious endings like this, mysteries that can't be solved. Listen to this. The last line of the narrative portion of Charles Ashmore's trail is, quote, if anybody knows the fate of Charles Ashmore, it is probably his mother. She is dead. End quote. Which I mean, there's a finality, but it's also, it's hilarious. And that's like his cynicism coming through. And here's my look, you're not going to figure this out. I made this guy disappear in my story and that's the end of it. And his mom's dead. She's the only other one that knows. Move on. Time to read the next story. It's a device. It's a little blood. As you used to say on the show all the time, Forrest, live with the question. There's two things about that, Scott. One, sometimes you just have to, because there's no more questioning. And I think the other part of that, what that statement means to me anyway, is that your life will be better, easier. You'll find more personal peace if you're able to let things go. Maybe there is an answer. Or like the Mothman prophecies, don't pick up the phone at the end. I would have. I always tell Rich that. Like, yeah, I would have answered that last call. Wait, that's the Mothman? They know where my wife is. And his point being is that don't answer the call, Mr. Gere, because you're not going to get an answer, just more trail to follow. And so it's kind of what he's saying here. Like, just give it up. There's no answer to this. His mom might know, but that's going to be the end of it. You're going to have to be satisfied with that. And speaking of mothers and their children, I'm reminded of another tale that we've told about on the show. I just want to mention it here in case I forget, because I love this little anecdote. I can't remember at the moment where it came from, but a little girl goes out playing in the woods or the brush out behind their farm or house, and she goes missing. And of course, after a while, the parents start missing her, and they're desperately looking for where she could have gone to. I think it's a small village. Everybody starts looking for her. It's not that big of an area. They don't know where she possibly could have gone, but she's missing. And missing for like two or three days. You know, everyone's frantic, of course. Then they find her back in her bed asleep, I believe. And so they're like, well, what happened? They're questioning her. Where have you been? And she seems perfectly fine. Her clothes are muddy. And apparently what she said was, well, I seem to go somewhere else, and I could see you all looking for me, and I could hear you shouting my name. And I tried to shout back and tell you where I was, but you couldn't hear me. I could see you, but you couldn't see me. And so that's also something, you know, not related to De Beers. This is apparently a true story or an anecdote. So is there something like the upside down, the underworld, or the slipstream, where you just kind of slip into another place, and maybe you come back and maybe you don't? Any case, Ambrose was known for his dark humor, his love of unsolvable mysteries, disappearances, all of this being right down his alley. And it turns out he has several other short stories about the same kind of thing. Yeah. So maybe that gives us some idea about what was going on for him when he disappeared or maybe a grander plan he had. Now, we know he vanished in 1913 while traveling in Mexico, or at least that's where he said he was going. The circumstances are murky, however, and that's why the two-part series from us on it. Right. Well, so a quick refresher on some of the key figures in his life we talked about last week. Blanche Partington was a close friend and confidant. Walter Neal, his publisher and friend. And then there's Carrie Christensen, his secretary, who is also the sole beneficiary of his will. Yeah. And she spent the latter part of her life in a state asylum in Napa before committing suicide in a particularly painful way, which we talked about. It's very sad. And finally, in part one, we also outlined three of the main theories about his disappearance. Yes, we did. So, one, those being in, I think in a particular order here, death in the Mexican Revolution, or a fake death or suicide, and of course, the paranormal like the Pekime Theory. But those aren't the only ones out there. There's even one that said he turned up in France. Yes, later. So, we're going to talk about that and all the other ones here shortly. And last time, we didn't go too deep into how influential Bierce was as a writer, and it would be a crime not to do that. He really was. He was a pioneer of what we now call weird fiction. True. That term is thought of differently. Remember when it was not cool to be called weird. Yeah. And so, back then, you can be turning heads and pricking up ears and just getting people's attention was something that they've never seen or heard of before. And that's kind of how, I think Charles Fort was similar in a way, in that what he wrote about it, like people were like, this is weird, and I can't put it down. And I love that description of people in the bookstore, they were being noticed like, oh, what's this stack of books, Charles Hoyt? Right. And they'd kind of flip through it, and they'd chuckle, or their mouth would be a gape, and their jaw would drop a little bit, and they'd secretly keep reading a few more pages. They'd either put it down because they didn't want to be seen buying it or reading it, or they would quietly tuck it into their jacket and then take it up to the counter and purchase it quietly because they had to keep reading it. It was like nothing they'd seen before. But absolutely, he was an influence, and he influenced a lot of writers who came after him, like H.P. Lovecraft. A lot of our listeners loved him, and Ray Bradbury, of course. And his writing really shaped the way people thought about death, war, the absurdities of life. And something we did touch on is the possibility of his influence on our supernatural father, again, Charles Fort, who we did a series on in, when was it? Was that March of 2022? Yeah, so a lot of you diehards know who Charles Fort was, but for those who don't, he is the namesake of the term Fortian, and even our recording studio and offices, which we call Blanket Fortiana. Right, and it's not to suggest that Fort wasn't his own originator of the kind of stories he collected. But he was, I mean, he was a great writer, I think. But also a collector of stories in that, an archivist, I think he would be fair to say. And so they differ a little, but also a lot in the cynicism part of, like, we're just some huge forces experiment here, and just weird stuff happens to us, and that's just the way it is. But yeah, it's not to suggest that Fort was not originating the kinds of stories that he collected or had any influence on that. But the difference is Bierce's weird fiction work, it could have influenced him, I think, or vice versa. So I think there's a valid interplay there between Bierce and Fort. And, you know, the reality is that, you know, for this time period, they were both part of the literary, well, I'll let you say it. Zeitgeist. We have to stick that in. That's been a minute since I've been able to say it. I know, I know. But I think it's applicable here. Yes, and it should be on a mug. I'm sure it is already. But we've also talked about this because this would also, I think, maybe overlap a little in such notable figures as the Count of St. Germain, if you believed he lived, you know, hundreds of years after his first appearances and stuff. It was a time of wonder and also a time of horror just about to happen with the Great War, World War I, happening in 1914, I think in June when it starts. Yes. But there was something in the air, just electric, kind of violent, dangerous, new thinking is happening. The old ways are going. The gay 90s are kind of fading out when that little, that short 10-year period of time, the 1910s, they have their own parlor music. They have their own era and clothing like every other era. But it was a time of great change. It was the turning over of the century here from the 19th to the 20th. And so there were some driving factors in this. And the feeling at the time was very introspective with people. Also, I don't know if we mentioned spiritualism. Right. And that happening and people turning to, again, a lot of people dying from the Civil War were about to enter another one with even more horrible death and people not coming home and more time of revolution and war. And so, yeah, cynical writers were documenting things that defied conventional storytelling. It was a time for new ways to document new ways of thinking and realities. So, truthfully, much of Ford's work, like Bierce's, was rooted in cynicism, which I think in Ford's case might be considered ironic since his writings tend to drive skeptics up the wall. Yeah. And so you would think cynics and the skeptics would be hanging out on the same team, but it's a little bit different, I guess. Well, there are different ways of looking at stuff, I think, is that I think a cynic, like with Ford, the difference here, maybe superficially for me, is that a diehard skeptic, well, let's say the debunker type back then, where it's like nothing, even for that day and age, there's nothing magical. It can all be explained. Every age thinks they have the handle on science, I think. So for a skeptic, that doesn't jive with the cynical aspect of Bierce and Ford, where they seem to accept and embrace the fact that weird stuff is possible and does happen. Yeah, but are they doing that to troll us? Are they just, are they doing it to troll us or do they believe in those things? We might be digressing a little bit here, but I guess when I think about a comparison between Bierce and Ford, and they were contemporaries, there's no indication that they ever met or knew each other, but they did live. They were alive at the same time, we can confirm that. It's just the idea that Ford was, you know, collecting these stories and then commenting on them, and Bierce was telling stories in his own way. You know, there might not have been an intersection of belief there, but they both had a cynical note to their writing for sure. That's what I'm getting at. That's the flavor. But they both dabbled or were familiar with the style of nonfiction. Of course, Bierce being a journalist, which hopefully that's nonfiction. And you have Bierce, of course, then writing a lot of fiction and Charles Ford, also from the journalism background, remember he used to write, well, he would fake reviews. He got bored with writing that theater reviews, I think at one point was just saying like, I don't even need to be there. I can tell you exactly kind of, I can write a review and just kind of guess what happened and it usually turns out right. So again, that's a little bit of cynicism there. You know, so they both dabbled in different types of genres, but you know, when you have Fort writing his books, those are supposedly nonfiction. We're like, okay, these events really did happen. They're very strange. Kentucky meat shower, blah, blah, blah. And you know, why did they happen? Well, there's a great Sargasso Sea where just weird things come out of or where someone else's experiment or the weird stuff marches on, whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, because the critic would say like, they're not happening. These are people just, you know, they're trying to get a laugh, sell some books, sell tickets to their Kearney show. These things aren't really happening. We're just, if they are and their people are genuine, they're just misinterpreting something. Weird stuff does not happen. Stuff does not fall from the sky. People don't go disappearing. They're somewhere we just haven't found them. So that's what I think is the difference. Whereas Fort would say like, yeah, the weirdness marches on, you know, whether you like it or not. And with his wild talents of just like, okay, if you want a critical eye, maybe it's just evolution that people have developed some kind of psychic ability. Or these strange talents. And it's just part of biology and science. It's just that you, it's just so far out there and we don't understand it. But one day we might. And I think that's a logical approach. But yes. Anyway, back to Beers. Back to Beers. It wasn't just the dark themes that Beers was exploring. It was also how he told the stories. He had this unique style. To this day, still really his own brand that combined his experiences with his cynicism. His journalism was just as biting as his fiction. And I want to take a moment to quote an amateur historian I'm going to be referencing later tonight because I love his perspective on Beers. Leon Day. Yeah. Day wrote that Ambrose Beers was a San Francisco newspaper columnist in a time when, quote, the writer stood behind his work with a gun, not a lawyer, end quote. Yeah. It's a little rougher. You think now people are reactionary to mainstream media in a sense. Well. Yes. No, it took a fair amount of bravery and you had to stand behind what you said. Yes. Because people reacted, it could be violently. Anyway. So yes, absolutely. A real man of action in his time. And as we said in part one, his short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, has been adapted into many films and even an episode of The Twilight Zone. Oh, I'll give a little shout out here to our good friend Bradley Netherton. And he said that that's his second favorite episode of TZ, Twilight Zone. The first being, he says here, Walking Distance. Oh. Yeah. And then he covered it on a Twilight Zone podcast he co-hosts called Entering the Fifth Dimension. Oh. So there you go. Give that a look-see. But somebody in our Facebook group, and please forgive me, but I don't remember who posted it, but they reminded me of the Kurt Vonnegut quote, I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Beers. It isn't remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like Sophisticated Lady by Duke Ellington, or The Franklin Stove. Yes. That's a quote from Kurt Vonnegut. So he just thought, like, this is really the best thing ever. H.O. Mencken, in addition to Vonnegut, you can see how respected Beers was. Mencken called the Devil's Dictionary, Beers's lexicon, the true masterpiece of the one genuine wit that these states have ever seen. Right. End quote. It's a collection of cynical and satirical definitions that show just how misanthropic he could be when he wanted to be. He really embraced that darkness. Right. Remember Rich's, oh, Sniglets. Yes. Quick update. What is it? It was made-up words that he covered from a show called Not Necessarily the News, which was one of the first sketch comedy shows on HBO, I think. Rich Hall. Yeah. And it did so well. It's like David Letterman's Top 10. It did so well. It became its own book and kind of thing. And yeah, just I think in the same vein of just being sarcastic and funny. Yeah, that was it. I'm right. I just had to look it up real quick. That was HBO. Not necessarily the news. Mid-80s Sniglets. There were even books that came out where you could buy- That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. And I remember a few of them. One of them was, I'll just say quickly for people that don't know, and this is similar to Beers. So Beers did this first a long time before Rich Hall. But there were two Sniglets that I remember. One was film, F-I-L-N, which is the crust around the top of a ketchup bottle. Film. And then the other one was L-acceleration, which is you get from, if you press the elevator button over and over and over to get it to arrive sooner. Right. And then I think also, I think Palminetics was one too, which is what you do with your hand out the car window. Palminetics. Nice. See? Yes. Definitions for things that actually happen that we all do out of human nature. But the thing with the Devil's Dictionary by Beers is it was real words with cynical definitions. It wasn't made up words. Exactly. Exactly. Right. Right. So, right. A little twist on that. But, you know, hats off to him for one of the first, you could call it toilet reading books, I think. Just a good gifting book. A page a day calendar before there was such a thing. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. 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Grab one at your local grocery store or head to aloha.com. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef-designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. With over 100 recipes to pick from every week, there's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley's Spoon adapts to your life, from breakfast to dinner, and even those in-between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule, no matter how busy things get. Go to MarleySpoon.com slash offer slash pod45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's right, 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's MarleySpoon.com slash offer slash P-O-D-4-5. 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. Forrest and Scott, thank you for supporting their sponsors. I'm Melody. Now, back to the show. So we know the story that he supposedly ended up in Mexico, apparently. But what exactly was happening there at the time? Well, as we said quite thoroughly, it was the Mexican Revolution. And it was a really complex and dangerous time with a lot of different political factions fighting for power. It's important to remember that this wasn't a simple conflict. It was a very turbulent period. And as we said in part one, Bierce had intended to follow Pancho Villa's progress. So he was right in the middle of the action, or he wanted to be anywhere. This historical backdrop makes the theories about his death or disappearance in Mexico all the more plausible. I agree. Yeah. It's not like he was on a leisurely vacation, let's say, or just on the continent. Well, at the beginning of the 19th century, a lot of the well-heeled, it was the popular thing to do to go tour Europe. I'm thinking of Lord Byron and his ilk and those folks. And if you're especially, yeah, if you had the money, you took a year off from your studies before you got serious and you toured the continent and you soaked up art, the culture, and you saw different things. And you didn't look that up on the internet. You had to go be there. So they did. Yeah. It sounded like his tour of the battlefields that he fought at and were made famous during the Civil War was a reminiscent kind of a thing. But this is a little dangerous. I mean, it's like war reporting here. So he knows he's in a war zone and he's looking for action. And I think if he caught a bullet, it wouldn't be the worst thing, like he said. He was expecting it. And so that adds a layer of danger to his disappearance. Yeah. And that sets us up for our discussion on theories about what happened to Beers. Now, again, we gave a broad but distinct overview of the Mexican Revolution in part one, but we need to dive just a teeny bit deeper to understand why it was so dangerous and how it relates to what could have happened to Beers if he successfully embedded himself in the conflict. Absolutely. You know, it wasn't just a simple matter of good guys versus bad guys as so many of these conflicts play out. Or as people were, oh, I'm sorry, I have to do another movie quote here. I'm sorry, but it was Three Days of the Condor. And it was Cliff Robertson talking to John Houseman, who's like the senior old fellow at the CIA who's in charge of everything. And of course, he was with the OSS during World War II. And Cliff Robertson asked him, like, well, do you miss anything about the war? And he goes, I miss the clarity. And I think what he meant was we knew who the bad guys were. We knew who the good guys were, at least from our side. And what they were doing, they gave meaning and definition to it where it wasn't a gray area. It's like these people, the access has to be stopped. And that's the clarity. So in this case, though, the Mexican Revolution was complex and multilayered as a conflict with various factions and motivations. And as we said in part one, it all started with Porfirio Diaz, who had been in charge for a really long time. That's right. Diaz was a dictator. He held power for decades. His rule was called the Porfiriato. And while he brought some economic growth, it was mostly for the benefit of the wealthy elite. The vast majority of Mexicans at this time were living in poverty. Yeah, you know, there was a huge disparity between the rich and the poor, which led to widespread discontent. And that's where Francisco Madero enters the scene. He challenged Diaz in the 1910 elections. And Diaz even had him jailed and suppressed the election as much as he could. I think we're seeing that, or there are claims of that in South America currently. Yes. In Central America. That's right. So these things don't change, of course. Yeah, and also Russia. But he suppressed the election as much as possible. That then ticks off Madero's supporters. And then the revolution begins with various groups rising up against Diaz. Right. And so that's when things get more complicated, because it's not just Madero versus Diaz anymore. You have other key players and factions like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. And it was a power struggle with different revolutionary groups. And then there's the constitutionalist faction led by Venustiano Carranza, who wanted a new Mexican constitution. So you have all these competing factions, and sometimes they would wind up fighting each other, as if you didn't have enough to worry about from the government. Violence was widespread. It wasn't a single unified revolution. It was a series of conflicts involving different forces. It was chaos. Yeah, total chaos. And into this chaos then steps Ambrose Bierce. And he was looking to attach himself to Villa's progress. Now, you've got to remember, in his letters that we shared last week, he said things like he'd hoped to witness some, quote, good fighting, end quote. And be where, quote, something worthwhile is going on, or maybe where nothing whatever is going on. Again, this reminds me of Hemingway. Just like, he wants to be in the fight. Spain, okay, send me there. I'm looking for a good fight. Right. We're just a bar of poets beating each other up in Paris at some point. But these guys, they stomped on the terra, and they want to mix it up. And that's where Bierce is looking to go to. So when you look at all that, you see a guy who is not into mediocrity or a mundane existence or going gentle into that good night. He was more complex than that. And he may have been seeking what he perceived as not only meaningful, but maybe a mysterious end to his life. Well, he did say that being a gringo in Mexico was euthanasia. So you have to wonder, is that a hint at either what happened to him or at the very least what he wanted to happen? Right, right. I don't know. Maybe it's not too different from suicide by cop. Well, in some respects, okay, I see what you're saying. But suicide by cop, as they say, as the term goes, it's usually someone facing mental health challenges. And they're leaning into an aggressive confrontation and pretty much indifferent to collateral loss of life. I think in that instance, it's somebody who they want someone else to do it. And it's a little more dramatic, I guess, or just like, you know what I'm saying? That's a specific way to go. And yeah, you don't really care about harming others or other officers or innocent bystanders. It's like, no, that's a, I want this to end and it's going to be violent and showy and a big, a big to do. And you're not thinking straight, but yeah. Okay. Just back to your quote about euthanasia. Euthanasia. I will say though, there's a lot of, at least throughout history, a lot of times where people say something kind of prophetic and it turns out by some coincidence that that's what happened to them. But it's merely a coincidence or there's no coincidences. There are connections and there's just no conspiracies. It's just like, there's just no coincidences. So it's just, it happened, you know, or somebody saying words in that effect that led to their own death and more perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps. Well, if Bierce was looking to go out in a blaze of glory, it wasn't necessarily talking about taking anyone else out, but more about choosing his own terms, maybe in a blaze of glory. Yeah, you're totally right. It's not the same thing. I guess I was thinking, well, maybe he's going where the bullets are flying because in his mind, it's a more glorious way to leave this world. But we're not really seeing anything in his writing about being out to get any particular party or group. If anything, his cynicism is more aligned with the idea that killing in general is ridiculous. Yeah, I'll agree with that because he'd seen enough of it. And that's usually the people who, or the politicians who send people into war, they don't have to fight the war. As my grandfather's generation said about, and they loved Patton. A lot of them did, or most of them did perhaps. He was called Old Blood and Guts. And then I think my grandfather, you know, what the soldiers said underneath him was like, even though they liked him, it was like, yeah, that's great. It's his guts, our blood. So you send people out into battle and yeah, it's the people like Bierce who end up getting their blood spilled or seeing a lot of it. So, you know, whatever that action might be, I think he wanted to participate in that action. And now, as far as specific battles or events in Mexico, anyway, it's hard to say for sure what Bierce may have witnessed. He was last seen in the city of Chihuahua in January, which is where Villa was operating. And Bierce had expressed his intention to go to Oinaga, a border town that Villa was closing in on. And that would ultimately see a decisive fight waged by Villa's forces in early January of 1914, which is just 16 days after the date of Bierce's last known letter. Could Bierce have fallen at the Battle of Oinaga? By the way, we have to note something important here that I don't think we pointed out in part one. And that's that a lot of scholars will tell you there are numerous sources that suggest Villa's troops, the Vistas, engaged in massacres, looting, and rape. He also apparently hated the Chinese people and apparently would kill them without hesitation, unprovoked. Hmm. All right. Well, yeah, that's a, he's a nuanced character, but a lot of Chinese immigrated to Mexico and a lot of the Mexican people felt like the Chinese were taking their jobs. So that's the motivation. If you think that's out from left field. So they became vilified and like everything in war, it's not all black and white. It's much more complex than that, especially with the leader of a rebellion. And ultimately historians will say Zapata was a far greater and more just leader, but Villa's reputation, even to this day, seems to overshadow Zapata. I'm sure a lot of people have heard both, but yeah, Pancho Villa, that's just, it rolls off the tongue. So does Zapata, I think for my money, but for my peso. But there are far better historical podcasts that we're sure will go down that rabbit hole with you folks. But tonight we're just trying to add a little context to what Bierce told the world he was planning to do. And that was to track Villa and observe his military progress. And that is what makes the theories about his disappearance into Mexico so plausible. So it's a good setup. You know what I'm saying? That, I get that. That's maybe we have the most leads on. Yeah. And I'm not going to say it. Yes, I am. Occam's razor. There you go. The one that's most direct. But, you know, the revolution was extremely dangerous. And so he could have been caught in the crossfire or executed as a spy or even murdered for other reasons, all before he may have caught up with Villa, who could have been an exceedingly dangerous man. You never know. Like, you think you're on the side, like, I've come to help you. I'm going to kill you anyway. Yeah. And some of the research we did indicated, and I hadn't sourced this yet, but it indicated that he also traveled with a lot of money, a lot of cash. So that right there, in a war zone with all these different factions fighting each other, they stumbled across him. He doesn't speak any Spanish. Right. He's carrying a ton of cash. It's like, I mean, you may as well be on a boat in the middle of the ocean and meet the pirates. No, that's a dangerous recipe just going down to Tijuana. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. For a fun weekend. For a fun weekend. Yeah. So, I mean, it's totally possible he was killed by federales, or as we talked about last time, maybe Villa himself did it because Villa had a pretty strong personality and didn't seem to suffer fools lightly. Right. And given what we know about Bierce's personality, who knows? Maybe he did catch up with him, and he was embedded, and they had some kind of falling out. You could see that happening. Yeah, absolutely. Anything was possible. And again, not a lot of record keeping there. If somebody gets wiped out for a little bit of coin, who's the wiser? And certainly this worked, if that's the case, because there's no proof one way or the other that we know of. And it makes sense that there are so many different theories about his fate, since the truth is so hard to pin down in this case. The lack of reliable information just feeds the mystery. Right. So that's the political climate of the Mexican Revolution. It was unstable. It was chaotic. And it was incredibly dangerous. A perfect setting for a disappearance. Well, now that we've trekked across the United States in a wilderness of backdrop and context and history, dodging arrows and wildlife, bears, coyotes, stampeding buffalo, we have now arrived at the section where, what do we think happened? Or what are the prevailing theories? And then we'll just make dumb comments about each one. I have a favorite. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited to share it. Well, I do too. I think we started off and we, I may not know yours as well as you may know of mine because I kept pinging you with it and it might be a little obvious, but I think when we cover each one, you're going to see that in my case here, I think each one, unlike a lot of paranormal ones, you know, some are just outrageous and silly to me. More so when we cover other paranormal stories of like, okay, this supposedly rational explanation is more ridiculous than the irrational explanation. Here, I can see each one of these happening. All right. Well, the first one we're going to talk about is the Grand Canyon suicide theory. And just to reiterate, we are in no way advocating suicide here or standing behind Ambrose Bierce's controversial point of view about it. If you are feeling suicidal or know someone who is, refer to the announcement at the top of the show or call or text nationwide suicide and crisis lifeline at 988 to connect with suicide prevention and mental health counselors. Help is available 24 seven. Absolutely. And of course, I at least have had more than a few people I know take their own lives and it's awful for everyone involved. And it's something I wanted to say about when you think about like, oh, Ambrose Bierce, he glorified it. He did a great plan. It leaves a lot of mystery. There's no rhyme or reason to it often. The people that I know that were close to me that have gone from that seemed fine. A lot of them did. Some just made no sense. You couldn't figure out why, because you don't know what's going on in their head with their emotions. Obviously their closer family does spouses, children may have had an inkling, but many times again, they were shocked and didn't know why it happened or what the motivation was. So I'd be careful in applying those outside theories of people looking into this and like, well, there you go. That's got to be what happened. He said this and that, and he wrote this and that, and it makes sense. And he was like this. You don't really know. That's right. Be cautious with that. You don't really know what's the motivations of a person in that state when they're ready to do that, what they are. Yeah. Everyone just remember you are loved. Yes. Trust us on that. There's always somebody out there who really, really wants to keep you around. Yes, indeed. Well, this theory, it is intriguing because you got to ask, did he fake his trip to Mexico as a cover for his true plan, which was to commit suicide in the Grand Canyon? Well, you know, it originates with Bierce's own friend, Walter Neal, as we mentioned before. But one of the more modern proponents of this theory is Joe Nickel. We've talked about him quite a bit during the show over the years. Dr. Nickel is a senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and has a PhD in English. And as a part of his doctoral dissertation, he researched Bierce's disappearance. So that I did not know. Yeah, he did. And the facts he presents are pretty compelling. You can find them in the article we cited in part one called Incredible Vanishings and the Case of Ambrose Bierce. This is from the Skeptical Inquirer, volume 45, number two, March, April 2021. One, it's part of the Investigative Files series, which I think he probably writes all of, but I'm not positive. But you'll need a subscription for access to that. There is a paywall, but it's very, very much worth having. We have a subscription. We love reading it. Absolutely. And just for background, we've talked about this before because it's in the nature of, I think, people who are not just skeptical inquirers, but you could say also, and not to be negative about the term, but just debunkers, like that's their thing. It's like, no, no, there's a rational explanation. And what I believe personally, I think you do too, perhaps, is that you see a lot of these folks had some background in stage magic. That's right. Same thing with the amazing Randy. Well, he made a career of it and a pretty good one. And I think because my view is that they know how the sausage is made, to coin a phrase here. They've seen the tricks happen. And so it's like, no, no, it's not magic. There's a reason for this. And you'll be surprised and amused when you find out as they have been. So it's their mission to like, I'm just going to show you what's underneath the black velvet cover here. What's in the top hat. What's up by sleeve, literally. Well, Joe is also, he's a private detective as well. That I think informs you on how people behave and their motivations, perhaps. So, you know, because that's, you're tracking down mysteries involving people and their motivations. So he knows how distraction works and he's got the chops to look into strange mysteries, let's say. And we have a great deal of respect for him. But let's look at this Grand Canyon thing right now. It's a less dramatic ending for such a flamboyant character and perhaps a bit anticlimactic given all the possibilities of exotic locales and cloak and dagger scenarios. But on the other hand, it's not entirely implausible. Now, as we said before, Scott, you know, he did write about to Blanche. They had a little heated discussion back and forth in a letter about, she was saying something about the South America and the Andes. And I think, you know, Machu Picchu and things like that. And he's like, you know, you're getting me wrong here about how spectacular they are. And perhaps you're too enamored of them because you just have not traveled. A little dig there. Well, anyway, this all actually fits pretty well with his personality. As we've pointed out from his numerous short stories, Bierce seemed to enjoy crafting his own narratives and controlling the outcome. Well, you just talked about, you're going to have to be okay with this mysterious ending because that's how I wrote it. Live with that question kind of a thing. Exactly. Right. You know, and so disappearances were also a recurring theme in his stories. And Joe Nichols mentions that in his article, citing a particular trilogy of stories. But there are several more of them to boot. That's right. And let's remember, Bierce was incredibly direct about his feelings about death. He didn't romanticize it. He faced it head on. He was very clear that he wanted a quick exit, not a slow decline into old age and infirmity. He had a deep-seated fear for that kind of deterioration. And as Dr. Nichols points out, Bierce wrote an essay that argued that suicide can be a courageous and rational act under certain conditions. It was titled, Taking Oneself Off. And in it, he said that suicide was, quote, always courageous and, quote, an assertion of personal liberty. This wasn't just a fleeting thought. It was a philosophy he appeared to embrace, which, of course, leans pretty hard into his cynicism. Yeah, yeah. But he did qualify his feelings, writing that it's an act of personal liberty and courage rather than weakness and despair. Right. But also, you could argue just that foundation of cynicism about life. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, yes. But it's not a cut-and-dried approach to it, okay? It's a case-by-case thing, according to him, Bierce. As it may relate to his own disappearance, though, he suggests it could be a way to end suffering or avoid a life that's lost all meaning. And I can understand that. I can see that point of view. But we have to remember here, Bierce's entire journalistic and writing career is centered on a fascination with death and the macabre. A lot of scholars will tell you that Bierce believed life was meaningless. Yeah. And one thing that bugs the crap out of me, Forrest, is when folks say that someone who's long gone had a specific philosophy or believed something as specific as life is meaningless. Yeah. I always want to see the quote where the person said that, where it was verbally or in writing. I just don't care for folks making that kind of deduction if it wasn't clearly indicated by whatever author, filmmaker, poet, or scholar that's being discussed. Right. I actually remember one of my teachers in high school telling me everything F. Scott Fitzgerald was thinking when he wrote passages X, Y, and Z in The Great Gatsby. And that was all conjecture. None of it backed up by Fitzgerald himself. He never stated clearly what the things in the book meant. I think that's also human behavior. We study so much of one thing or one person or persons or the groups, and we think we'd like to get a handle on it all. Like we think we know what's going on here. But there is still value in discussing that kind of stuff and debating the meaning behind things. So, you know, especially in literature. And it's a good exercise in learning how to think and evaluate art and literature. Of course, I completely agree. But it's not right to categorically state that somebody you've never met who's never specifically said something like, I think life is meaningless in the case of Beers, thought that life was meaningless. That's just not true. Yeah, I'll go with that. And a lot of people say that. I'm just saying that in a lot of the research we did, time and time again, you come across this scholar, that scholar, this person who wrote a column or whatever. Well, Beers thought life was meaningless. He hated this. He hated that. And for me, even just reading the letters that we read in part one, you can see joy in there. I mean, there are some that are angry, like that particular one to Blanche. But there's a lot of them. It's like, hey, I can't wait to see you again. I look forward to hooking up with you here. Let's do this and that and the other. It's like that doesn't track with a guy whose whole philosophy was that life was meaningless. No, exactly. Tying to what I was saying just minutes ago. Because if he felt that strongly about a quick exit, wouldn't he want to orchestrate the exact time and place? You know, why leave something so crucial up to chance? His entire life was about control through both his writing and his personal conduct. Right. And that's what some people, particularly Walter Neal, his friend and biographer, have proposed. Neal stated that Beers had visited the Grand Canyon about a year before he vanished and that he had chosen a specific spot in the canyon to be his, quote, last earthly habitat. And this wasn't just a casual visit. Neal said that Beers showed him a photograph of the location, emphasizing that it was protected from vultures, ensuring his remains wouldn't be desecrated. Now, to me, this paints a picture of man not just contemplating suicide, but actively planning it down to the last detail. And I believe it was a picture that Beers supposedly took on his own Kodak camera. But, well, okay, just a quick point on that. If you're that cynical about it, like, why would you want to leave, you know, die fast, live hard, leave a good-looking corpse in a spot you're not telling anybody about? That's true. I don't know. Not that anything about this makes sense. I'm just saying it's like, okay, maybe, but the vultures specifically, it's like, why would you care? Anyway, but, you know, a photograph, well, okay, that is incredibly specific and pretty calculated. So imagine if we could find that photo of that spot, but then if it's a close-up photo, how would you know? We wouldn't know what it was, though. Just be a cave in the canyon. That's what I'm saying. Unless it's a- It would have to be the context that it was found in. Yeah, it's just a bunch of rocks, unless you're, you got a wide angle and you're far away, then you know- Unless there's a note on the back that says, look, this is where I want to die. Yeah, in the Grand Canyon. And then it's like, there's no, you know, there's no visual context for it. It's just, okay, that could be anywhere, really, in the Southwest. Well, it does change the narrative, though, from someone wandering off to disappear into someone with a seemingly very well thought out plan, okay, you know, a deliberate act that he had been contemplating for a while. 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. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef-designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. With over 100 recipes to pick from every week, there's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley's Spoon adapts to your life, from breakfast to dinner, and even those in-between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule, no matter how busy things get. Go to marleyspoon.com slash offer slash pod 45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's right, 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's marleyspoon.com slash offer slash P-O-D-4-5. 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. This is Vivian, and when I'm not looking for mermaids, I'm listening to astonishing legends. To add layers to the mystery, another level of control, and that's where Joe Nichols' analysis becomes important. Nichols argues that Bierce's final communications, that last letter from Chihuahua in particular, were fabricated, designed to mislead everyone and throw people off the scent. Now, it's important to know that the American consul in Mexico couldn't verify that Bierce had ever actually been in Chihuahua. And Nichols suggests that the letters and reports were all just a smokescreen to make it seem like he had disappeared in Mexico while his plan all along was to die in the Grand Canyon. Okay, well, so he intentionally created this whole elaborate story about going to Mexico when all along he was planning to end his life in Arizona. Seems a little overly complex, perhaps, even for someone as complicated as Bierce. And another note, we talked about this in Gobekli Tepe and the ancient cultures around Lake Kiddy Kaka. A lot of these cultures believe that when you're eaten by the ravens, that's a form of ascension into heaven or the stars, and they wanted that because it's the circle of life and that's speculation. I'm not even speculating that. I'm just saying that we don't know what he knew about that prospect. Again, I just hung up on the ravens. Yeah, well, no, I thought about that too, actually. But then I also thought he probably wasn't exposed to that culture because that archaeological idea came along later. I feel like if he would have been, he might have embraced that. You know, who knows? Because it wasn't just about going back to the heavens. It was about returning to the earth and that sort of thing too, just like being part of the circle of life, which is pretty interesting. It's not John Muir. I get that. It's like, you know what I'm saying? Like the vultures completing the cycle there, picking your bones clean was, again, it'd be foolish for me to say anything about that. So I won't, or I did, but I'll stop. Okay. Well, I mean, maybe this whole thing, maybe it's about making a grand finale for his story. He was a writer. Maybe he'd have felt that the ultimate disappearing act was orchestrated by himself. This would be his final masterpiece. And Nichol also highlights the fact that Bierce gave all the rights to his work to his secretary, Kerry Christensen, just before he left. And that's not just a coincidence. It looks like a man settling his affairs before going on a trip from which he didn't expect to return. But notably, that doesn't say anything about where he was going, only that he didn't plan to come back. Exactly. Which leads to several other theories which we're going to hit on next. Again, not expecting to come back doesn't mean, well, it at least owes to one, my theory here, my way out theory, that it doesn't mean taking your own life. It means a journey from which no one will be able to find you and you're still alive somewhere else. Okay. So, but yeah. Okay. True. But it doesn't specifically indicate it's all going to end in the Grand Canyon, right? Now, what we just talked about here, it's almost as if he was writing the last chapter of his own biography. Now, I'm on board with that. He knew how to tell a good story. And I can't help but wonder if that's what he was doing in this final act here. But why the Grand Canyon, you ask? Well, it's such a dramatic location, very public while also being secluded and hard to get to in certain areas. So, you know, why not just pick a quiet corner somewhere, a remote location that wasn't a national landmark? Just, like I said, if you're really wanting to do that and just kind of disappear, it's a pretty public place. Yeah. Where he must have known somewhere at some time somebody's going to find them. You know, just somewhere to be left alone if you don't want to be disturbed. Like, well, Edward Abbey did. Remember? You were a big fan. Yes. Or still are a big fan of Edward Abbey. I still am. One of my favorite authors, he wrote an amazing book called The Monkey Wrench Gang about some extreme environmentalists centering around George Hayduke as one of the coolest protagonists of all time. He even left behind the instructions for some final words of his for the world that he wanted them to know after he died. And those were no comment. Now, that is a cynic right there. Yeah, that's a cynic. Right. Okay. Well, here's an excerpt from an article in Outside Magazine from September 2003 by Jason Daily about Abbey's final resting place. We grabbed this off his Wikipedia page. Quote, the last time Ed smiled was when I told him where he was going to be buried. End quote. Says Doug Peacock, an environmental crusader in Edward Abbey's inner circle. On March 14th, 1989, the day Abbey died from esophageal bleeding at 62, Peacock, along with his friend Jack Loeffler, his father-in-law Tom Cartwright, and his brother-in-law Steve Prescott, wrapped Abbey's body in his blue sleeping bag, packed it with dry ice, and loaded Cactus Ed in a Loeffler Chevy pickup. After stopping at a liquor store in Tucson for five cases of beer and some whiskey to pour on the grave, they drove off into the desert. The men searched for the right spot the entire next day and finally turned down a long, runned road, drove to the end, and began digging. That night, they buried Ed and toasted the life of America's prickliest and most outspoken environmentalist. And I just got to say a quick thing here. There's some tones here that remind me of the ending and the cremation of Graham Parsons out at Joshua Tree. Oh, right, right. It's a very similar kind of thing. And this is a controlled vanishing. It's a lot easier for either the main character, if it was Beers, or the main character's friends in Abbey's case to navigate. And on his list of instructions, it said, I mean, they followed it pretty much to the T. He wanted to be buried in an old sleeping bag, taken out to the desert in the back of a pickup truck, and for people to eat, drink, and be merry, and celebrate his life, and bury him in the desert where he could fertilize the plants, the desert flowers, and that kind of thing. Sure. Well, again, clearly relayed instructions, whereas in Beers' case, we do not have. But still, the Grand Canyon is a wonderfully mysterious place, of course. And to think of being secretly buried there somewhere where no man, or Vulture, for that matter, can ever find you, it's pretty cool. I mean, for an ending, I guess, for a natural kind of a thing. Yeah, well, maybe Beers wanted his end to match his persona, a location that was as dramatic and imposing as his writing style. It was, in a way, an acknowledgment of his own larger-than-life persona, a final statement. But it was also a promise he made, according to scholar Paul Fuddout, that Beers either wrote or stated at some point that, nobody will find my bones. And maybe choosing a remote and dangerous location in the Grand Canyon would fulfill that. He knew it was a place that would be hard to get to and hard to search, and maybe that could guarantee a lack of discovery. Or a real and true disappearing act. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about death in the Mexican Revolution. So now we're going to dig into another really prominent idea, that he actually died in the Mexican Revolution. It's a broad theory that also has several different versions, which we hinted at last time. And it's important to note here that we're not looking at a single straightforward account here. There are multiple possibilities. So let's begin with the broadest version here, that Beers was simply killed in battle, caught in the crossfire. It's a fairly straightforward explanation, considering the circumstances. He was in a war zone, after all. So being caught up in a skirmish or major battle is entirely possible. Well, it's completely plausible, too. And he went to Mexico seeking adventure and to experience the revolution firsthand. As he said, he wanted to be where something worthwhile was going on. Right. And as we covered already, he had a rather fatalistic view and had stated that, quote, to be a gringo in Mexico, that is euthanasia. Right, right, right. So maybe he intentionally put himself in a dangerous situation. He was following Pancho Villa's progress, which would have placed him in very volatile areas. Because it seems to me a likely outcome that he just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, keep in mind, as we said earlier tonight, he didn't even speak Spanish, and he may have been traveling with a good deal of cash. You know, but he's a thrill seeker in a way. You know, so he knew the risks. Again, that's the, as you mentioned earlier, the suicide by cop idea, the concept here. I don't think it's that. But it's more like, well, it's very dangerous, so it's kind of, maybe so, maybe no. 50-50 chance here. Might come out of this scrape and have a good story. If I don't, that's also fine. But then again, if you think about the thrill seeker part of it, we have to consider the idea that he wasn't just a random casualty of war. There's also the possibility that he was executed by Pancho Villa himself. Okay. So he wasn't intending on getting killed. It just happened. Right. In that dangerous setting, this version casts Villa as a suspicious leader, maybe somebody who believed Bierce to be a spy or an enemy combatant. Yeah, that theory definitely adds a layer of drama. It's a little more sensational than the wrong place, wrong time scenario. The idea is that Villa or one of his commanders would have seen Bierce as a threat, interrogated him, and then ordered an execution. And it's a story that's been around for a while, but it also feels a bit like a convenient narrative that has a lack of any corroborating evidence. It would also, as some have pointed out, imply that Villa had a better grasp of who Bierce was than was probably actually the case. Yeah. It makes me think of Earhart. Yeah. You get captured. It's like, why are you in a plane with cameras in the belly? We're not cool with that. And then they find out who she is. And it's like, it's just better if she just went away. Right. And we don't have to explain this later or now. Well, anyway, yeah, it makes a good story and it's hard to find supporting evidence, but not impossible. But this end for Bierce seems more like a dramatic embellishment of some historical event. It gives a disappearance of kind of a Hollywood ending, you know, a famous writer being killed by a famous revolutionary. It's very dramatic here. The execution by Via Theory makes the story bigger than it might've been. And it also reinforces the image of Bierce as a tragic figure, you know, a man who went looking for death and found it at the hands of a notorious figure. For a novelist, it's a grand exit, but we're stating here or positing that that wouldn't have been planned. He didn't go there like to Via himself, like, I am a spy. I don't know what you're saying, but please shoot me. Yeah, right. Okay, but that's where the story from Tex O'Reilly comes into play here. He's the one who provides a pretty specific account of Bierce's death at the hands of the Federales. O'Reilly claimed that Bierce was shot by Mexican federal fighters while he was having a drink at a cantina in a place called Sierra Mojada. Yeah, so O'Reilly's story is the most detailed of the bunch. He said they assumed Bierce was a spy and since Bierce didn't speak Spanish, he couldn't clear up the misunderstanding. He was dragged to the local cemetery where he was shot. O'Reilly also claimed that he later went to where Bierce was staying and found two envelopes with Bierce's name on them. That detail about the envelopes is interesting because it adds a level of specific information, so we have a little more clues to follow here. Even if O'Reilly never claimed to have seen Bierce's body. Now, he claims he got the story from locals. A little more hearsay here, but I notice in cases like these, people often pick the hearsay they want to believe. That's right. It gives the impression that the story, though, was grounded in something that had really happened despite the fact that we have no other accounts, but it could also be something O'Reilly just made up to add to his story. He was an American soldier of fortune, and his account had been called into question, and it has that ring of, I don't know, what would you say, a ring of a tall tale to it? Well, yeah, but, you know, Tex was a pretty amazing dude. He fought in a war- Okay, yes, but you're starting off with the name Tex. No, well, that's his name. He was born in Texas, believe it or not, so he actually came by it honestly. He fought in a war I never even heard of until yesterday when we were researching him, the Riff War, R-I-F. I thought it was something from Back to the Future. This is a war between Spain and France, and for that, he fought with the Spanish War and Legion because he was a mercenary. In fact, part of his lore is that he actually fought in 10 wars. It's time to make a modern-day movie about this guy. Oh, yeah, seriously. Well, on top of all that, like Bierce, he was a journalist for the Associated Press, and Lowell Thomas even wrote a book about him called Born to Raise Hell, which will come up again here in a bit. By the way, Lowell Thomas is the journalist that made T.E. Lawrence of Lawrence of Arabia fame a household name with his coverage of him. Yeah, so long story short, this guy has the street cred to know what happened to Bierce, maybe. Yeah, okay, but he's also one of those dudes, and I think I'm using that slang word right here for possibly the first time in my life, who might have only amounted to one-third of the stuff he said he had seen and done, but on the other hand, he really could have been there in Mexico at the right time. And just another note that's come up with me and World War II is that we had somebody, again, getting back to Amelia Earhart, somebody said, I don't believe any of those soldiers saying that they saw her playing there or took the coded message. You know how guys make up stories about how I won the war. And I just, at the time, a listener said that, and I thought, I don't know if you know any World War II vets. All the ones that, you know, from my grandfather's age who I hung out with, they don't goof around with that. Yeah. It was extremely serious. They didn't talk about it at all. If they did, it was true stuff that, you know, like I said, there was no, like, I did this and I stormed up the hill and took the whole company. You know, that's not like most people. Sure, there are folks that are going to do that, but like, that is just not anyone I knew. Well, as far as we can tell, not a lot of biographers have followed up on this scenario about Tex O'Reilly. But one amateur historian, whom I've alluded to several times already, did, Leon Day. We're going to come back to Mr. Day here in a little bit, but in the meanwhile, there's also that priest, right, Forrest? Yeah, James Leinert, an American priest in Mexico who also believed Bierce died in Sierra Mojada. Now, Leinert is a key figure because he was so convinced by local accounts that he installed a headstone in the Sierra Mojada Cemetery. Here's what it said on the headstone. So you have to imagine this being hammered into stone. And this is translated from the Spanish. Very trustworthy witnesses suppose that here lie the remains of Ambrose Winnett Bierce, 1842 to 1914. A famous American writer and journalist who, on suspicion of being a spy, was executed and buried at this place, 2004. And that's not the date he was buried. No, no. No, that would be even more woo. Yeah, that would be amazing. No, that's when they put that monument up, yeah. But Father Leinert was so convinced, he went out of pocket to erect that gravestone. Yeah, and it's big. We'll provide a link to the picture. I don't know if we can get the rights to it, but at least we'll provide a link to it. Yeah. It's a big monument. It's large. It's not just your typical little gravestone there. We don't know who ordered that supposed execution, if it was ordered at all. But Leinert lived there, and he believed the locals when they said, a gringo was killed there, and it sure sounded a lot like it might have been beers. Now, sadly, Leinert passed away in 2010. I would give anything if we could have spoken to him, but his search in the gravestone add a lot of weight to this particular version of events. And we'll dig into it more deeply here in a bit, because I'm particularly intrigued by this theory. Yeah, right. Me too. Also sounding like Jesse James. Yeah. And the guy who can prove that he had the same wounds on his body as Jesse did. Well, all right. Enough of that. We've got the random death in battle here, the execution by Villa, and the federal troops from a story from O'Reilly. But we've also got Leinert's confirmation of the Sierra Mohada story. But it appears, at this moment anyway, to be based entirely on hearsay, and the details seem a little all over the place. Yeah, it's true. It's hard to know how much to believe and what not to believe. But we do have some more about this angle that we're going to come back to in a minute. Yes, of course. And now we're on to the Adolf de Castro theory. So there is a story that corroborates Leinert's idea that Villa either killed Bierce himself or had him executed. And it's the account of Adolf de Castro. And this is where things get really interesting, because it involves not just the circumstances of Bierce's disappearance, but also a complex history between Bierce and the Castro himself. Yeah, so de Castro was an associate of Bierce's, and he claimed to have met with Pancho Villa some years after Bierce vanished. Now, this meeting is the source of some of the most intriguing and controversial details surrounding Bierce's fate. Yeah, and our source for some of this is an article from 1991 in the Los Angeles Times by Gary Abrams. And in this article, Abrams states that de Castro, a relatively obscure San Francisco dentist, presented himself as an enemy of Bierce to elicit information from Villa. De Castro claimed he told Villa that Bierce had taken a woman from him and that he wished that he had shot Bierce when he had the chance. Yeah, so that was all a cover story. De Castro's story is that when he told Villa Bierce's name, Villa responded, quote, I knew him, he will not bother you and your woman anymore, he has passed, end quote. Villa also supposedly told de Castro that Bierce had criticized officers in his army and was a loud mouth. He added, quote, an American who drinks too much tequila soon loses himself, end quote. That should be on a headstone somewhere. I'll agree with that. Anyway, so anyway, after the dinner with Villa broke up, Villa's brother, Hippolito, was even more direct, saying that Bierce, quote, sat for days drinking tequila and in his drunkenness criticized my brother. Imagine this, end quote. So, according to de Castro, Villa was certainly not a fan of Bierce and may have had him killed. Exactly. Now, this account, if true, suggests that Bierce's outspoken nature and perhaps his drinking led to his demise. It implies he was not a quiet observer, but a critic who might have made enemies even within Villa's forces. Yeah, it wouldn't take much to peeve somebody off to get them to shoot you back in these days, and in that circumstance as well. But Abrams says in his LA Times piece, de Castro was a known fabulist and a self-promoter. Okay, now we're back to that. Yeah. Did the hearsay, and he's writing a book about it. Well, he had been arrested for impersonating a physician in Los Angeles. So, you know, his history doesn't exactly paint him as someone to trust. Also, de Castro's 1928 biography of Bierce was described as, quote, almost unreadable. Boy, that's a steep assessment. And, quote, so bad that one Bierce expert reportedly couldn't finish it. Quote. Oof. Yeah, that's right. Abrams also characterizes Bierce at the end of his life as essentially a broken-down, bitter old man who is still relatively obscure as a writer. And he says that, you know, this disappearance was likely orchestrated by him to secure lasting fame. Okay, stretching it even thinner. No, I know. And that's another one of those situations. And I read this from a few people, and they may know. They're the experts. We're the, you know, we're temporary experts, or we come to this late in the game. But a lot of people are like, oh, he was just old and angry, and he was dying, and he's pissed off. Right, right, right. He had toiled away in obscurity. He's famous now, but wasn't then. But, like, it was my impression that when he was working for William Randolph Hearst, he was pretty well known, especially after the railroad thing. But maybe he wasn't as known for his short stories. But it's because that's one thing when you do the research on a person like this, it's not clear when they became vaunted always. It's you don't always, you can't always tell if that was in their lifetime or after. Right, right. So that's an interesting question that I wish I had the answer to now. But DeCastro's account is a mess of unreliable information at best, which makes the whole idea of what happened to Beers even more difficult to ascertain. But there are other reasons to suspect that something shady was going on behind the scenes. So to summarize, the DeCastro account, while intriguing, is unreliable. As probably all of these are. So now we're on to one that I find the most entertaining, intriguing. Yes. And no less possible in my realm here, my worldview, Pakime. Now, is it Pakime or Pakime? The accent is on the E at the end here. I'm not sure. I can't remember how he said it just was an hour ago. Yeah, Pakime. I have to admit, when you first mentioned this one, I thought, well, this is going to take us out there. And I mean, it's out there. Oh, come on now. No, listen, it's no more out there than Beers's writing. OK, we're staying in the wheelhouse here. So what would the show be, though, if we didn't mention one of the known, well, maybe lesser known, but it's out there nonetheless. What are the paranormal theories on this or hypotheses? Because that's a little bit of our wheelhouse there. Yeah, and Pakime fits the bill there. All right. So here's the deal. This story suggests that Beers didn't just vanish into the Mexican Revolution or a cave in the Grand Canyon, but that somehow he crossed paths with F.A. Mitchell Hedges, the British adventurer who is known for his, shall we say, enthusiastic approach to archaeology and has claimed to have discovered the Mitchell Hedges crystal skull, which I think for the story goes, his daughter actually did. But they took their young daughter, the parents, with them on these expeditions. And she was the first one, I think, who saw a glint of something shiny and pointed it out. Then they found the skull. OK, now I see why you think this is a wild ride. Crystal skulls. That's definitely a leap from the other theories. What are the crystal skulls? Well, obviously, one of the latter installments of the Indiana Jones franchise. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, or some kind of other new age thing. Well, they didn't pluck that out of thin air. No, of course not. Obviously, all the movies are based on something that's part of that archaeological lore here that is out there, because if they didn't, the movies would be more boring. So there you go, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls. So, OK, but that could be a three-parter in itself, at least, because it's fascinating, no matter what you believe about it, just the discovery, what people have claimed, and what people have claimed to have discovered scientifically upon study of the skull. So we've mentioned them a few times throughout the years here, and the idea of them is kind of central to one of the more out-there theories about Birch's disappearance. So I want to make sure you're up to speed. Everybody kind of knows. I'm sure you've heard of it. Hey, come on. Dan Aykroyd's vodka. Yeah, comes in crystal skull. Is bottled in a crystal skull. That's no accident, obviously. Come on. Plus, it's a cool bottle. So has anyone heard of them before? I'm sure they have. They've certainly popped up in pop culture. But the real story, or I see, well, this is the claimed real story. It's a lot more involved than you might think. Basically, what we're talking about here are human-shaped skull carvings made out of quartz crystal. So like a decorative item that you put, a tchotchke, a giant tchotchke. No, because it's more than that. Okay, that would be the mainstream thing of like, it's a table decoration. You put it up on your bookshelf, and somebody carved this more recently in the modern era. But the proponents of them, and that's what keeps me going about them, is that some of the claims, and again, yeah, I mean, that's okay, that's what they are now. Not tchotchkes, but they are artifacts, and they are somewhat taken seriously because I think of the debate about them. But the story goes that they're ancient artifacts, possibly from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, like the Aztec or the Maya, or even earlier. Some people claim that these skulls were found in old ruins, and that they have all sorts of mystical powers. Mystical powers? Okay, like what? Yeah, you know, the usual. So it's like the obsidian mirror, which is a real thing. Again, that's in the British Museum there, to look at in the future. That we talked about, I think, I'm trying to think. Scrying? We talked about John Dee. Oh, you know what? John Dee actually ended up supposedly owning that Aztec that belonged to one of the Aztec or Mayan or Incan kings used for divination. So back then, obviously, if you're John Dee, easier to get your hand on that kind of stuff. Well, in this case, though, it aids in divination, can help with healing. They allow for psychic communication. And as we're going to see here, or poke at, maybe even interdimensional travel. Ooh, interdimensional travel. Okay, so now you're talking my language. Well, let's talk about the most well-known crystal skulls out there. Okay. So, but before that, the idea is that people think that, oh, well, these were just carved in modern times, but it's a solid piece of crystal. And as it's claimed, there are no cut marks or scratch marks. They don't really know how they were carved. On some of them, yes. On some of them. Yes, exactly. So, of course, like any other artifact, some are probably fake. Some are probably genuine in being that they originated with the ancient peoples. And we don't know the technique or the method of which they were made. And that's true when we talk about Tiwanaku. Yeah. They're there. You can see them. We just don't really know how they were made. And people say like, well, they carve them like, yeah, but we don't know. You don't really know that. That's like the most obvious theory. Like, yeah, hammer and chisel. We don't know. That's the answer. I believe in some of these crystal skulls. And as you said, some are more popular or more lauded or more mysterious than others. So this one, though, is relatively straightforward. The most well-known one. It's in the British Museum. It's the British Museum skull. It showed up in a Parisian antique shop in 1881. Also love that story. It's got to show up in a cabinet of curiosities. And it eventually ended up in the British Museum. And it looks similar to the others, but it's less detailed. So there's no movable jaw. There's no discernible jaw in it. The museum's assessment there, probably European, probably 19th century, not authentic pre-Columbian. It was basically a fake and then one of the more run-of-the-mill fakes. Yeah. Yeah. And the Paris skull, a similar story. Sold by the same guy who sold the British Museum skull, Boban or Bowman, the Parisian antiquarian. That one had a hole drilled in the center. Modern tools used in its creation again, not ancient. And the Smithsonian skull, that one was mailed anonymously in 1992. And it's claimed to be Aztec, of Aztec origin. It's the biggest of the bunch. But they quickly determined it was carved using carborundum, which is modern abrasive. So it was another fake, but a really big, impressive fake, but still a fake. Yeah. And then there's the Mitchell Hedges skull, which ties into the beer story in a way. It's probably the most famous one. The story goes, it was discovered in 1924 by Anna Mitchell Hedges, his daughter, in a Mayan temple. A single block of clear quartz, a detachable jaw. Sounds impressive, right? Yes. And it sounds like a great story, of course. But the problem is, evidence suggests F.A. Mitchell Hedges bought it at a Sotheby's auction in 1943. And investigations show modern tooling by some who claim to have studied it. So, so much for the ancient Mayan artifact story. Now, here's the thing, though. If you go with the mainstream theory, it's probably just another fake. But I have read a lot about this. We have still not covered it. I think it's worthy of its own episode because there's enough there to not summarily dismiss this as a fake. I think there's enough there by people who claim to have studied it in a lab. Okay. And that it changes temperature when placed in water. It has a specific harmonics to it. It does these interesting things that a chunk of crystal like that should not do. And that, no, there aren't modern tooling markings on it. So this is very much debatable. And I think that's where the debate is fun, but it's also frustrating. But I think there's enough there to say, wait a minute on this. So that's kind of my theory. But the mainstream scientists will not bother to look at this any further. Like everything else we've come across in our paranormal journey here, they don't bother with this stuff because obviously it's a bunch of balody. So you're saying they're not necessarily all fake? I personally don't believe that they are. I personally believe like anything else. Yeah, obviously some of them could be faked because you make money off them. But not all of them have been tested. There are still people who claim that even if the ones we have are fake, they might be copies of originals. That's also likely to me. Yeah. And they may have been made by a much older and more advanced civilization. Now we're getting into the ancient astronaut, ancient aliens territory here. Right, right, right. Ancient alien theorists say yes. I got to have that made into a t-shirt. Right, right. Favorite repeated line. Well, it's interesting too because, you know, we're talking about these museums. These vaunted museums all over the world have them in their collections. And it's like, well, if they're known fakes, why did you even take them into the museum? But maybe these modern ones, maybe they're not ancient or magical, but people still believe in them, which I think makes sense. But the real question is, what does this have to do with Ambrose Bierce? All of this stuff played out way after he vanished. Yes, indeed. But it's also what kind of showed up on my radar here that maybe it was time to cover this story once again about Bierce because of this connection here. And that's where we get into the Pakime theory here. Yes. Now, the idea is that Bierce may have been involved with people who believe that these crystal skull legends, they were real, and they might have been experimenting with some technology that caused him to disappear. But it was well before anyone came forward claiming to have actually found a crystal skull, including Mitchell Hedges. Yeah, I get it. It's a fringe theory, but it's definitely interesting, and it does involve the kind of themes that Bierce was known to explore in his writing. That's another connection I would make, okay, where it's not like, he said he hated skulls. He hated crystal. He would never have gone down there to do that. Also, it's not really about the crystal skull. Yeah. That is a red herring here in this story, okay? But both Hedges and Bierce were intrigued by the unexplained, if that's fair to say, I believe. The mysterious, the weird, Bierce, as we've established, wrote stories involving time travel, astral projection. There it is. Once again, I cannot get away from astral travel and astral projection. It keeps coming up. It must mean something. Yes. And they were also very much interested in mysterious disappearances. And Mitchell Hedges later alleged that the crystal skull he found had the ability to communicate or even time travel, or just travel, to other dimensions. So, this theory proposes that Bierce and Mitchell Hedges met up at the ancient ruins of Pacquime in Mexico, and Mitchell Hedges assisted in Bierce vanishing. Now, before you ask about Pacquime, I will just say, again, what tipped me off about that is that episode, Ancient Aliens and the Civil War, and the mention of Bierce, in that, well, of course, the skulls were mentioned, I think, but it was not about that. It wasn't going down to see the skull that apparently had not appeared yet. It was just the fact that Mitchell Hedges knew Bierce, they were acquaintances at least, and Mitchell Hedges had claimed to know of a cave where communication and interaction with another dimension or interdimensional beings was possible. And Bierce went down to go check that out. Okay. That's kind of the setup. Protein bars often feel like you're choosing between taste and nutrition. 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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. Hello, everyone. I'm Vivian's grandma, and this is Astonishing Legends. Let's get back to the show. So what is Paci-Mai? Paci-Mai is a largely unknown civilization, also known as Casa Grandes. Casa Grandes, and it's just outside of Chihuahua, where Bierce's last letter came from. It was a thriving urban center, a sophisticated city in the middle of the desert. And it flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries, a time when the area wasn't exactly known for its lush vegetation. So we're talking about the northern reaches of present-day Chihuahua, an arid and semi-arid region. And the sheer scale of this city is what makes it remarkable. The architecture is mind-blowing. Massive, multi-story buildings made from adobe bricks. Not just simple huts here we're talking about. These were complex structures, meticulously planned, indicating a high degree of social organization and advanced building techniques. Yeah, and like you said earlier, we've covered some ancient civilizations in the past, like Abekli Tepe and others. I hadn't heard of Casa Grandes, but I'm looking now and I see they basically had full-blown apartment complexes, hundreds of rooms, intricate designs. It's a testament to their engineering skills and their ability to adapt to a challenging environment. I can just imagine the labor that must have gone into constructing these buildings. Again, like Pumapunku, Tiwanaku, think about it. It wasn't some accidental settlement here. This is a planned city by very smart people who understood engineering, a sophisticated urban center in a remarkably harsh environment. So there's this idea, though, that maybe Mitchell Hedges and Bierce met up there and they were looking for ancient secrets related to multidimensional travel. And maybe stumbled upon a way to pass between dimensions or time itself. And again, that was Hedges, Mitchell Hedges, relaying this to Bierce, who became intrigued. And that's how Bierce disappeared. So he didn't die, didn't fake his death. He went somewhere else. All right, so let me get this straight. Bierce, the cynical writer who hated to fuss about genealogy. Right. Gets caught up in a quest with an adventurer, later known for chasing crystal skulls or forging them anyway, and poof, he's gone by a portal at Pacumet. Well, essentially, yes. But here's the deal about it. I can see why this appeals to you. Yeah. The reason we're doing this show and have been for, I don't know, 10 years now. Yeah. It's because of these angles that shoot off. I mean, I love archaeology. I love ancient cultures. I love all the studies, sociology, archaeology, and I love just the mainstream aspect of it. But it's these things that are, you know, that's the caramel on top of the ice cream. And I was like, that is what gives this stuff flavor to me, is the what-ifs and the strange things that cannot be put aside easily, even though many would like to. And what I'm talking about here is that it's not so far off. Again, think back to what Bierce was writing, what his themes were. At the time, it was way out. Yeah. At the time, what he was writing about, he blazed new trails in literature with his ideas and his concepts. Same way that Poe did, especially with crime novels, you could say, or true crime or investigation and horror. These were groundbreaking ideas. And what we're talking about here is a groundbreaking idea. Yeah. So it's not that far out for me. Yeah. If he had heard of something like that, like, that's how I'm going out. Right, right. If he wanted to go out. Or what a perfect way to kind of disappear and leave even more mystery, they will never find my bones. Yeah. It's definitely thought-provoking, but it also may be the hardest one to back up. Well, none of the stuff we've ever talked about is easy to back up. Yeah, yeah. That's not why we do it. That's true. That's true. Look, that's another podcast where it's like, okay, here's the nuts and bolts of it. I can disprove this right away. Yeah. And that's the fun of the show has just evaporated. Yeah. Not that it's not fun. I like to learn mysteries. I want to know if there is a rational explanation. And I've bought into many of them in our journey here. But what I'm talking about is that if you are given to the fact that there may be something out there more than just your sack of meat and potatoes, that everything can be figured out, that maybe there is some mystery to this, then why not entertain this? Certainly, I believe that Bierce thought that as well, that, you know, cynicism doesn't transport for me to being a debunker. That's what I said earlier on. Yeah. Is that it's not just a cynicism is like, okay, there's no magic in any of these. He talked about, he wrote about magic in life. Yeah, that's true. The other thing I wanted to say about this is when, of course, I have to leave this mortal coil, what better way when you're infirmed or let's say you have something terminal rather than to fade away or suffer that, I'm going to just pop into this other dimension and see what that's about. I'm kind of done with this anyway. Not of my choice. Yeah. Old age, infirmity, disease, just as Ambrose Bierce said, or falling down the cellar stairs. Why not see if I can pop into some other place? Well, maybe that's what's happening to all of us when we die. We don't know. No, it also goes into my, like, people say, like, well, how would you like to, if you could choose it or you had to choose your own death or disappearance or where you want to be buried? Well, several ideas come to mind. And one that we've talked about, getting sucked into a black hole. Yeah. Some people say, oh, jet engine, it's instant. Like, ugh, that's disgusting. No, I don't want to do that. No, black hole or just traveling, spinning out in space like John Hurt in Alien, just forever, like, traveling, and then maybe eventually sucked into a black hole. Or ending up on another planet like Interstellar where you're on that water planet where every 30 minutes there's a massive 500-story wave. Why would you want to go there? Because it's so far away and you're just like, you're just kind of like in a perpetual. You're only going to be there a minute. Those other people that got there right before were dead already. It's just the fact that they had traveled into an Einstein-Rosen bridge of some kind. Or you're so far away. You're just out there. Like, people on Earth point to a distant star or maybe not even see it and say, that's where he is. Hey, you know what? Speaking of which, last night, thanks to the planetary alignment that just happened, when I went out to walk my dogs, I was able to see Mars, Venus, and Saturn all with the naked eye. It was very cool. Yeah. No, it's a rare occasion, folks. Get out there and see it if you can in the night sky. It's an alignment. It's pretty awesome. And maybe why this year so far has been so wacky. I don't know. Yeah. By the way, folks, a quick fact I learned from LeVar Burton on his Calm series. It's called Journey to the Stars. It's one of my favorites. And it just goes through all the planets. And this, I thought, was pretty interesting. Saturn has less density than water. So if you could put it, as LeVar says, in a giant galactic swimming pool, it would float. So I thought that was pretty cool. There you go. I'd be fine with floating around on Saturn. Yeah. There you go. Just rather than somewhere more interesting than a moldering in the grave here on Earth. But, you know, I'm serious about that. I know it sounds crazy. But, like, I once asked Rob Christofferson of the Our Strange Skies podcast if at any point there was a somebody was being abducted and they were an old person because I don't want to be experimented on. I've had a lifetime of that by that point. But was there anybody that was infirm or had a terminal disease and got abducted? And he said he heard of one case where the aliens took this older guy and I think he had some kind of condition. But they were saying, like, I'm sorry, you're a little too old. They rejected the abduction. They're like, what? Come on. I just... Oh, that's a bummer right there. Fix me up. You can't even get abducted. You can't even get abducted. It brings a whole new meaning. I can't get arrested. It's like, I can't get abducted. Right. But the point is that it's just another adventure, another journey, not that death isn't. Okay. So of all the theories, though, Scott, what's your favorite? Well, for me, they're all intriguing and they're all paradoxical, too, because they each have their long shot absurdist components. But they also have their head scratching, as you said earlier, Occam's razor kind of things to them. I mean, maybe he just got randomly shot trying to find Pancho Villa. Maybe he, at 71, and with asthma, tripped and broke his leg in the middle of nowhere, died, and some bandits or locals found him and his money and called it a day. Okay. Well, if he did, in fact, go into Mexico and that wasn't a smokescreen for the Grand Canyon, all of that seems possible, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it's like lost treasures, which we've covered on the show before. Not everyone who finds a lost treasure is going to be the type to report it. So it can be taxed or taken or put in a museum. Some folks are just going to fence it, as they used to say in Lafitte's mornings. And that ain't a nice callback to one of our earlier topics. Also makes me think of Lost Dutchman's Mine and Rebel Gold. Oh, yes. We've covered the KGC. Look for that series if it's pretty fascinating. And you can't mention Treasure without thinking of the pirate Lafitte, whom we covered in a multi-part series back in April of 2020. But I digress. None of these theories were truly grabbing me until I found amateur historian Leon Day's account of his search for Ambrose Beers. Ah, yes. So you've mentioned Mr. Day numerous times now, sir. So, okay. What's the background there? This goes back to a website we mentioned in part one, Don Swaim, S-W-A-I-M dot com. Now, Don Swaim is a novelist, journalist, and broadcaster. He's a prolific writer, and his website is the definitive modern-day Ambrose Beers website. He is also the founder of the Bucks County Writers Workshop, which is in some of my old stomping grounds in Pennsylvania. But as I said in part one, taking the Beers satire moniker very seriously, when I stumbled across Mr. Swaim's website on Beers, I wasn't sure how much of it was nonfiction and how much of it may have been satire in the tradition of Beers. Although the more I poked around there, the more it seemed like the satire was labeled as such. Now, I'm a rube, so I need those labels. On sophisticated satire, I need it to have a label right on it, or I might fall for it. I'm always reading the Onion headline and being like, oh my God, really? Oh dear. I don't take you... Well... On some of them. Maybe. That happens to all of us, I believe. And I, you know, but we're also going back to, you know, that was what Beers was known for, labeled as one of the great satirists. Yeah. Like Swift, and some of the most notable ones. And I will abide by some satire here, but it's a great website. And yeah, it's, again, when it gets real finessed, that's something I remember a surrealist filmmaker, Luis Boonwell. I knew it was going to be Boonwell. I almost said it. Well, yeah. No, because, no, he made a documentary. On Shenandoah. Those Olvidados, the Forgotten, I think they're just about... And people said, this is really insulting to these people. And he made up a lot of it because his thing was like, when satire or, you know, farce gets close to the truth of what things really are, you can't differentiate. That's when it's the most effective, I think. Yeah, that's right. And he said, if I showed you just a sad documentary about these poor people, like people are like, oh, that's too bad. Well, what are you going to do about it? Well, nothing. Yeah. And so he wanted to outrage people. Right. It's like, how dare this filmmaker do that? This is an outrage. This is an insult. It's like, okay, you're fired up. Now do something about it. Go help these folks. Yeah. Yeah. As far as the website there, Don Swaim, it's interesting. I get you on the satire. I was digging for more history on beers there and this mystery of his disappearance. And when I stumbled across an in-depth piece on Swaim's website titled, quote, quote, My Hunt for Ambrose Bierce by Leon Day, end quote. So we have a link to it in the show notes, of course. But the thing was, when I was reading this piece, it was obvious that this Mr. Day, if that was his real name, had done so much diligent work and he had such a wit to his writing and an approach to historical research that I thought maybe he wasn't real. And? Well, I started cross-referencing some of the details in it, like the painful suicide that Bierce's secretary committed after spending time in a mental health facility in Napa. I hadn't seen that fact anywhere else and we dug up a lot of sources for this series. So I went digging for her death certificate and I found it. It's posted with the images for this episode. And there, right on it, it said, Poisoning by bichloride of mercury. Suicide due to despondency. Which is an old-timey way of saying depression. Now, it wasn't hard for me to find that certificate, but I never would have thought to even look for it because we hadn't even seen anywhere that she had committed suicide. We're talking about Carrie Christensen here. So, but for the fact that this obscure information was true, that made me wonder if Leon Day was a real person. I had already looked for him once and I found a famous black baseball player who played from the 1930s to the 1950s named Leon Day, which wasn't the same guy. But then I finally had success when I found an article in the Austin Chronicle by James McWilliams. And this was from May of 2002. It was titled, Devil in the Details. Why is talented amateur historian, in quotes, Leon Day obsessed with the death of Ambrose Bierce? Turns out Leon Day was real, super real, and also amazing. It's a fabulous article. We have a link to it. You should read it if this astonishing legend interests you at all. But the sum up is this. Leon Day isn't your typical tweed jacket wearing academic. He's got an army GED and a year of college, and he spends his days at the IRS tracking down creative people, which frees up his time to dive into history. At least, this is what he was doing at the time of this article. And Day is obsessed with Bierce's disappearance, and he's not afraid to challenge the so-called experts. He thinks most historians are, quote, too lazy to look up the details, end quote. And he takes issue with how some biographers have portrayed Bierce's last days. He's particularly critical of Kerry McWilliams, a biographer we haven't touched on, but known for falsifying Bierce's supposed last letter, and Walter Neal for his insistence on the Grand Canyon suicide theory. Leon Day is all about primary sources and reading other people's mail, literally, in order to uncover the truth. And he's found some interesting stuff. He traveled to Mexico himself investigating Tex O'Reilly's story, which we covered just a bit ago, who, as we said, claimed Bierce had been killed in Sierra Mojada. And while that didn't lead to the immediate discovery of a body, Leon's persistence paid off when he got a letter from Father Leinert, who knew a local man named Don Chewy in Sierra Mojada, who claimed to have witnessed Bierce's execution. Now, it's important to note that Don Chewy's testimony is still up for debate. But here's the thing. Leon wasn't done. At the time of this now 22-year-old article, which I think may have been older than the post on Don Swain's website, I'm not positive, he had convinced forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow to help him with an exhumation in Sierra Mojada, so he could find out if Bierce was actually buried there. So now that you know Leon Day was a real person, and his work is not only real, but should probably be paid attention to, what is the crux of the article he wrote that Don Swain posted on his website? Well, I thought you'd never ask for us. It's a long piece, and I would encourage everyone to read it, but the crux of it is this. And keep in mind, Day ran down sources on this. Bierce left Washington, D.C. in October 1913 and traveled south. We knew that. As we said in part one, he visited Civil War battlefields and kept in contact with his secretary, Carrie Christensen, sending her letters along the way. He stopped in New Orleans, then San Antonio, and finally Laredo, Texas. From there, he crossed into Mexico, which was in the midst of a revolution, and this is where things get murky, and the many theories about his fate begin. Now, we already told you that Tex O'Reilly said Bierce was killed in the town of Sierra Mojada in the early months of 1914. Well, according to O'Reilly's account, Bierce was asking questions about trails and making maps, which made local federal troops think he was a spy. Now, this completely tracks with what we know about him. He was a mapmaker. That's what he did for the Civil War. It's what he'd been known to do his whole life. They allegedly took his pistol and shot him. O'Reilly said he saw Bierce's grave and even put up a wooden headboard or a simple grave marker. He also said he sent a report to the American consul about Bierce's death, but no one has found such a report. That would be really cool if we could track that down. Day then dug into the issue of O'Reilly's account. Texas story came out 14 years after Bierce disappeared, and some facts were wrong, like where Bierce fought during the Civil War. Despite these problems, many of O'Reilly's details checked out with other evidence. For example, the records of the American smelting and refining company confirmed that work had stopped at the mines in Sierra Mojada when O'Reilly claimed in his story. And a letter to the Secretary of State showed that the federal forces were stationed at Sierra Mojada. In addition, O'Reilly told a story about a cannon he used in battle. Now, remember, he was a mercenary, but this cannon was verified by photos to have been there. Day points out that all of the other stories we've covered so far tonight didn't always hold up under scrutiny. The theory that Bierce died at Oenaga is too simple, for example, and there is little evidence he was ever there, and that Adolf de Castro's story was so many years after Villa's death that it just didn't really add up. Day notes that many of these stories were likely politically motivated, designed to smear or defend various figures in the Mexican Revolution. He also notes that there is a long history of using hoaxes as entertainment and news, which might account for some of the stories out there about Bierce, which, and I love this because we've noticed the same thing over the years with topics we've covered on Astonishing Legends. In the midst of all these conflicting stories, Leon Day did a lot of searching. He went through archives and old letters. He also tracked down the descendants of people connected to Bierce, such as his secretary, Kerry Christensen. He tried to find Bierce's last letters, which most people thought were destroyed, and found that some of Bierce's letters were sent to Laura Bierce. He also discovered that Bierce's will, which had gone missing, had turned up in the recorder's office in Washington, D.C., years after his disappearance. Now, earlier, we mentioned Tex O'Reilly's biography, Born to Raise Hell, by Lowell Thomas. In that book, this is the account that Tex heard about this mysterious gringo's death in Sierra Mujada, quoting, I began to inquire about the American, and several Mexicans told me about him. They said he was an old man who had come riding in there on horseback, alone. He spoke only a little broken Spanish. He asked questions about the trails and made notes and maps, and they thought he was a spy. When the Federals heard that he was asking how to reach Villa's army, they decided to kill him. One afternoon, he was drinking in a cantina with three federal volunteers, and they decided to kill him then. They borrowed his pistol, and when he left, they walked out there to the edge of town. I talked with two eyewitnesses who had seen the whole thing. Apparently, he suspected nothing until the three men turned on him and began shooting. The first shot must have struck him in the leg or belly because he dropped down, squatting on his heels. He squatted there in the dust of the road and began to laugh heartily. The Mexicans were amazed because he was laughing as though it were a tremendous joke that he was being killed, end quote. So, that's Tex's account. Hard to corroborate, but because Day had been coordinating with Father Leinart, Leinart secured the account of another local named Don Chewy, and Chewy passed this account along to Day via Father Leinart, again from the Austin Chronicle article in 2002, quote, I got a curious letter from Father Jaime, or James. Turns out, an old Mexican man named Don Chewy recalled witnessing the execution of an old bearded gringo in 1914 when he was a small boy. The graveyard location matched O'Reilly's, and Chewy was even able to point to the spot where he remembered the man being buried. Chewy recounted a story that had beers drinking in a cantina with some soldiers when one of them suggested that the group step outside to shoot targets. Bierce was asked to hang the target against the cemetery wall. When he turned around after doing so, the soldiers riddled him with bullets. He fell to his knees, as O'Reilly said, laughed, and died. Naturally, Day remained skeptical of Chewy's account. Nevertheless, he admits, it was hard to pick holes in Chewy's memory. And while Chewy remembered something a little more formal than O'Reilly reports, their stories hardly contradict each other. It would have been unlikely, finally, for Chewy to have heard of, much less seen, O'Reilly's article. All of which leads Day to conclude that, unless somebody could say Bierce died somewhere else, Don Chewy's incident had to be investigated, and I am ill-qualified to dig up bodies. To be a gringo in Mexico. Ah, that is euthanasia. Not that Ambrose would have said that with a crummy Mexican accent. But yeah, that's the line again. There you go. Great performance, sir. Well, Don Chewy said people called the gringo El Pompeo, and they thought he was Russian because he had blonde hair. Leinert also told Day that someone had come looking for Bierce's grave in the 1960s and had been given a bag of bones by the local deacon just to make him go away. In the end, Leon Day says he can't definitively say what happened to Bierce. He concludes that it's possible that O'Reilly's story is true, that Bierce was killed by the Federals and Sierra Mojada, but it's equally possible that the truth is something else entirely. But for me, this story rings true. The most important detail here for me is that in both of those stories, the man who was shot laughed as he fell to his knees. In that moment, he knew he was going to die. And whatever all of Bierce's plans were for his timely, untimely end, this is what it might have come down to. And I could see him thinking that it was funny because it was death by impromptu firing squad while possibly being tricked into drunkenly hanging targets on a cemetery wall. I could see him being satisfied with that ending. So did anyone go down there and check the gravesite? Well, here's the thing. I don't know where Leon Day is now. I couldn't figure that out. And as we said, Father Leinert passed away several years ago. So did the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who Leon Day was lining up to go down to Sierra Mojada and possibly exhume or try to identify Bierce. So dead end. Well, there's an article from as recently as July of 2021 at a website called Alta Online. We have a link to it in our show notes. It's called Finding the Bones of Ambrose Bierce or Not in parentheses. And it's written by Jeffrey Gray. But these guys, Gray, the author and a radar engineer named Arturo Martinez and antenna operator for the radar, Manrique Venegas, went to Sierra Mojada. The town historian Carmelito Torres took them to the alleged gravesite of Bierce and they did a sophisticated scan and they did find what they were pretty sure were bones in the spot that was supposed to be his grave. But it's a cemetery. There's lots of bones in a cemetery. So that's not conclusive, really. But one other thing that's interesting is that these bones were buried without a coffin, which tracks with the story of what happened to Bierce. They pointed out that a political prisoner or someone shot by a firing squad would not have had a coffin. Well, again, enough there to make a plausible theory or hypotheses, I guess, hypothesis, but not the whole enchilada. Well, here's the thing. I have coordinates for this. I figured it out on Google Earth based on a description of where the monument is in the cemetery, which you can find. And for my money, barring some other discovery, that's where I think Ambrose Bierce is. And I also think he's happy to be there and maybe even happy as life ended. Pancho Villa's last words are considered pretty famous, but also completely made up. But when you hear them, there's a chance you'll recognize them. Supposedly they were, don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. I mean, that's pretty funny. And a lot of people have heard it. It suddenly came back to me when I read it. I was like, oh yeah, I remember that. I just, I didn't connect it with him. Villa was a legend in his own time. But I think Ambrose Bierce might have one-upped that when he died laughing after having been shot by a firing squad in Sierra Mojada because he realized that he'd crafted the perfect ending to his own life story. That's going to wrap up part two of our series on the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce. We're dark next week, but we'll be back in two weeks with a new episode of our main show. Look for new episodes of The Dead Letter Office weekly on Tuesdays. Astonishing Legends is edited by Sarah Voorhees-Wendell at VW Sound. Our co-producer is Tess Feifel, who also leads our research efforts and manages our social media. And we're grateful for the hard work of our technical producer, Ed Vakola, behind the scenes. Special thanks to our announcer, John Boland, for lending his voice to our shows. Hi, I'm Vivian's grandma. V-I-V-A-M-E-L-O-D-Y. Present or future compensation. G-R-A-N-D-N- Our theme, which is available as a ringtone, was composed by Judson Crane at FounderMusic.com. All other music and sound design for the show is composed and created by Alan Carestia. Our logo was created by Tommy Beaver Design, and our animated graphics for social media and YouTube are done by Joshua Sloan at DeadStreetProductions.com. Many episodes have transcripts available. For ones that don't, you can request them by emailing transcripts at AstonishingLegends.com. Astonishing Legends would not be possible without you, our listeners. Visit our store at AstonishingLegends.com or interact with us and other listeners on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, Discord, and YouTube. You can also visit us at Patreon.com slash AstonishingLegends, where patrons have access to commercial-free versions of both the main show and the Dead Letter office, as well as additional bonus content, including the Patreon-exclusive show, The Astonishing Junk Door. No part of this show may be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. Raise your hand if you want your nails to look perfect all the time. Me too. So, I'm Sarah Gibson-Tuttle from Olive and June, and this is exactly why we created the Manny System. We wanted to make it possible for everyone everywhere to give themselves a beautiful manicure at home. With our tools and our long-lasting polish, each manicure with our Manny System comes out to just $2. That's right, $2. 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If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit IBM.com slash Smart Talks. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community, because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at CVS.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. 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. Exploring the unknown is what makes Astonishing Legends so much fun. But when it comes to dinner, nobody wants surprises. Marley's Spoon helps you eat well without overthinking it. Each meal is chef-designed, made with quality ingredients, and balanced so you feel good about what you're eating. With over 100 recipes to pick from every week, there's always something new to try, whether you're in the mood for a comforting classic or something a little more adventurous. Marley's Spoon adapts to your life, from breakfast to dinner, and even those in-between snack moments. The subscription is simple and flexible, so it fits your schedule, no matter how busy things get. Go to marleyspoon.com slash offer slash pod45 for 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's right, 45% off your first order and free delivery. That's marleyspoon.com slash offer slash P-O-D-4-5. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna, and I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example? If anybody has more than 10% of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30% more productive today, with the goal of being 70% more productive. Yeah. Wow. So we are not asking our clients to be the first experiment on it. We say, you can leverage what we did. We are happy to bring out all our learnings, including what needs to change in the process, because the biggest change is not technology. It's getting people to accept that there's a different way to do things. To listen to the full conversation, visit ibm.com slash smarttalks. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at cvs.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location. 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 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. I'm U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. We all seem to be in a rush these days, from work to driving our kids around. But when you're behind the wheel, please, do not speed. A few minutes saved by going faster is never worth the risk. So follow the speed limit, enjoy the drive, maybe bring some snacks for the kids, and know that along the way, you're getting quality time with your family. Paid for by NHTSA. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other, means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment, and more. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Do more stash, get more cash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms at venmo.me slash stashterms. Max $100 cash back per month. At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded. It matters that CVS is here to fill your prescriptions and here to fill your craving for a tasty and, yeah, healthy snack. At CVS, we're proud to serve your community because we believe where you get your medicine matters. So visit us at CVS.com or just come by our store. We can't wait to meet you. Store hours vary by location.