Hey everybody, tonight we're debating evidence for Bigfoot and we are starting right now. With our skeptic team's opening statement, thanks team and PHD Tony for being with us, the floor is all yours. Hello everybody, hello hello hello, this is Team Skeptic and I'm here with my prehistoric dinosaur friend, I'm sorry, my PHD friend, PHD Tony. I'll turn it over to him to let him kind of explain himself, most of the people know who I am, but we are going to be taking the skeptical side of the evidence to suggest that Bigfoot actually does exist and after we make our opening statements, we'll let Ernie and Pat have the floor to present their evidence.  Hi everybody, I'm PHD Tony, I'm a geophysicist from Australia and my expertise is actually far removed from this, but I'm just here to sort of present the attitude of science. Cryptids like Bigfoot are actually very romantic notions and I personally would think that there was nothing cooler than if people could demonstrate that Bigfoot was real. I'd love for them to be out there and for them to exist and be able to study them and learn from them and better understand our universe. And I think that everybody has that romantic notion that there exist these things slightly beyond where humans can see that are there, if only we look hard enough. And the problem with that is that as much as I want to believe, we only make progress scientifically when we apply very strict barriers to what we accept as proven, which is to say that science is not about proving that something doesn't exist, right? Science is about assessing the evidence available to us and saying, okay, what can we deduce from this evidence? What can we resolve from the evidence available to us? And sadly, from my personal perspective, and I think from the perspective of cryptid hunters everywhere, the evidence at the moment just isn't there. And furthermore, there is such a lack of evidence that it doesn't really warrant a huge amount of funding to search further because we've exhausted a lot of our opportunities. You know, I will cite the Sykes et al 2014 paper in the Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society that analysed, I think, about 57 hair samples and found and were able to explain all of them and none of them were unknown and none of them were any not previously encountered species, the most exotic that they had encountered that they found was a prehistoric descendant of the polar bear. And similarly, we don't find any traces of DNA in stool samples. We don't find any, it's unclear how they can mate or sustain genetically diverse populations without being able to communicate with one another, without being able to travel and call to one another. Do we hear these? Do we see them doing this? There are a lot of zoological studies that are, you know, examining biospheres. What exactly are these things eating? Where are their remains and the remains of their food? Are they producing middens in the way that ancient humans did, which are piles of sort of food refuse like seashells or that sort of thing? None of the physical evidence that we would expect is there. And there are also other reasons to be sceptical. In order to sustain a viable genetically diverse population would require a minimum number of individuals. And it doesn't seem like there are that many big foots or big feats, whatever the plural is, let's say sasquatchers. There don't seem to be that many of them around. So how are they maintaining biogenetic diversity? How are they maintaining their viability as a species? And, you know, again, we get back to what are they eating? The environments in which they live are not that productive. If they were that productive, they'd be humans, they're farming. But these things are actually very difficult to survive on. And you've got to wonder, you know, exactly where in the biosphere do these things fit? What are they eating? How often do they eat it?  And how much do they need to support their allegedly gigantic frames? I was going to say, can I step in and make a point about what Tony is saying? If you look at the evidence across the world for primate habitation, almost exclusively there's primate habitation between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. And it appears that only humans are the only primate to have actually traveled outside of the tropics to inhabit all of the lands. And Bigfoot has been reported on every continent except for Antarctica. Not to say that if Bigfoot does exist that there's not a chance that he could exist on Antarctica, but to say that it has not been reported in Antarctica. But we do know that we do not find other species of primates outside of humans that have migrated and made home of anything outside of the tropics. Yeah. Well, I've babbled for long enough. Why don't I hand over to Tim? Yeah. Now, let me say, part of the science position is that there is this persistence of the myth. And Tony made a great point about the lack of physical evidence. But there is a persistence of this myth.  They're real cheap to produce. We've known this to be a common occurrence in the human species to find things like aliens and Bigfoot and to go out of their way to make replicas of what they know or what they believe to be true to help perpetuate their audience or to perpetuate the myth, I guess, would be better to say. We have a built-in confirmation bias, in fact, that strengthens that argument. That says that if I as a human know that I can present some shoddy evidence to Tony, who also believes the same position I am, he has a higher degree of confirmation bias of agreeing with my evidence simply because of his confirmation bias. The other thing is that there's this idea that the Bigfoot community, the cryptid community, the alien community, they're all very anti-science, anti-authority. Tony and I could speak to a blue one in the face about the scientific support for certain things or the lack of scientific support for cryptids since we're talking about cryptids. And then you have this group that's, you know, very much against anything the government, anything science says. And you'll find this, these are fringe groups. The cryptid community is a fringe group. It's a fringe community. And it's very common in these pseudoscience communities that they take strongholds in countries that have more freedom of speech like the US. Again, you find Bigfoot sided heavily in the United States where no other primate other than humans have been able to migrate into and to make home. Just to quickly put in, these are general observations about anti-science movements. Having had the opportunity to talk with Pat before the show, he seems like a very level headed guy. So I don't want any of these generalizations to be assumed to apply to our opponents this evening. Yeah, these generalizations go to the cryptid community, not the individuals that we're actually speaking with tonight. And Pat was a great conversation piece before we got started. Ernie seems to be a really nice guy, too. And I look forward to a good conversation. I don't want anybody to think that I'm speaking of these two individuals right here. But there's also an undeniability about the profitability of cryptids like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster. I mean, look at all the TV shows that are on TV right now. Bigfoot Hunter is looking for Bigfoot. Monsters of the sea, all these different shows that come on channels like the Discovery Channel and Nat Geo that are built for entertainment. And there's a reason why they're built for entertainment. And that's due to the human condition. We seek things that we don't know for sure, because it's the search for knowledge, the search for something else out there that we do not yet understand. It's a very, very, very profitable venture for people to do that. Like I said, I'm not saying that Pat or Ernie are here in it for the money. But there's no point in denying that fact. In fact, I've seen videos where people say, I'll do this for free because not all of the times is the profit monetary. Sometimes that profit is emotional. Sometimes the profit becomes, you know, it's a brain driven profit where you have now where someone who was a little bit more in the fringe of society now finds himself in a position of importance. So we must not deny that all of these things exist within our society already. And I think that when you combine all of them together, it makes it really hard to say that Bigfoot is not just a myth that's perpetuated by people who may be looking to feel important, maybe looking to make some money, maybe completely against the scientific or government narrative, amongst other things. So that's where I'd like to end my portion of anything.  I'd just like to add that my position is slightly different from Tien's. My position is that I don't think that the evidence available to us allows us to conclude that Bigfoot is anything more than a myth, okay? And that's just a nuance of phrasing. We're not trying to say anything definitive here. We're just saying based on the evidence that we have and our best understanding of it, we cannot conclude at the moment that Bigfoot is anything other than a myth. Bigfoot is impossible, not impossible. Yeah, exactly. And so that being said, I, for one, would be really excited if Pat and Eric can change my mind on that. Well, I would like to speak up really quickly. You bet. One sec. What I want to mention. Oh yeah, one sec, Ernie. I promise I'll give you a chance. I want to mention, folks, before we kick it over to Team Bigfoot for their opening statement as well, which you were really excited for. I want to let you know all of our guests are linked in the description, folks. So if you'd like to hear more from our guests, they are linked below and that includes if you're listening to modern day debate via podcast as we're thrilled that we are now available on podcast. So pull out your favorite podcast app and find us. And if you're listening via podcast, again, you can find our guest links in the description box for that episode. So thank you very much, Ernie and Pat. The floor is all yours. Okay, great. And Ernie, if you don't mind, do you mind if I go first? No, go ahead. Cool. And then I'll turn it over you to address, you know, the things that were kind of like in your court. Thanks, guys, for those opening statements. Actually, Team Skeptic, I actually agreed with you on a lot of those points. You might be surprised by that. And for PhD, Tony, yeah, we do have some evidence. There is evidence and we will discuss that when we get into open discussion for sure. And some of the questions that you asked about, you know, their rarity or how rare are they and their ability to communicate, we definitely have some pretty good evidence of that. But you're right. In your opening statement, Team Skeptic, the only thing I would say to that is, yeah, there is a big foot online community. I swim those waters. I actually swim those waters pretty deep. And I consider myself a skeptic. And I am. I'm a critical thinker, a skeptic. I catch a lot of flak for it, honestly, in the big foot world. You know, it comes down to that thing where, you know, when people start getting into cherished belief, rather than evidence towards, you know, an explanation, then once you start messing with people's cherished beliefs, you start catching flak. And I know you guys understand that. So I deal with that, too, in the big foot world. But I swim those waters for a reason. And here's why. I can separate the online big foot community, which is no different from any other online community, online alien or online, you know, uh, sewing community. I can set, set aside that from the actual phenomenon, which is the better way to describe it in my opinion. It's not a myth. This is an actual phenomenon. It's happening. There's tens of thousands of documented anecdotal accounts that are that are very reliable. And a lot of those are from, you know, very respectable, reliable people as well, not schizophrenics or what have you. And that's a huge body of anecdotal evidence, even though I understand anecdote is not evidence. If you want to apply it to actual science. But I kind of use that phrase anyway, in a non scientific term. So, so we haven't an actual phenomena that has no actual explanation yet. And because of that, it kind of like leaves this void of knowledge that people in the online community like to fill with their own worldviews, their own beliefs or cherished beliefs, even religion. And so that void gets filled and that's why the Bigfoot world gets so convoluted from people from the outside looking in, see it as this convoluted thing and might would go straight to a mythical sort of explanation. And it's anything but there's a legitimate phenomenon that is worth some kind of looking into from any kind of open minded person. Because that's what I am. I'm a skeptic critical thinker open minded. I have a willingness to consider new ideas. And I found that this this phenomenon is worth looking into and I've looked into it. And there's something to it. And I believe it in the best explanation so far would be some kind of undiscovered hominid. I'm not willing to just start marching down the road of paranormal, supernatural things. And of course, that happens in the Bigfoot world too. So I just, I think it important say yes, Tony, we can answer a lot of your questions in open discussion. And everything that Team Skeptic addressed is completely fair. But I would like to flip that script a little bit and say, you know, I'm going to remove the actual phenomena from the online community. So Ernie, I'll turn it over to you. Okay. I also agree with the last statements by each of the skeptics here. But again, Pat and I are both skeptics. And I for one, I do not believe in Bigfoot. I'm a skeptic. And if it's simply a question of, well, if someone says there's no evidence, well, there is evidence. There's physical evidence. And there's also anecdotal historical cultural with Native American legends, Tibetan legends. So all of these similar areas with similar habitat, with very deep remote forests for centuries and millennium, millennia with different, like say, Native American culture, Tibetan culture. In certain areas of the world, this legend persists. And the description of the creatures that Native Americans describe is the same physical description that people in North America, for example, over the last 200 years have described, which is documented not just in Bigfoot reports, but in newspaper reports over the last 100 years, at least, is rife with those reports, a giant ape-like creature walking on two legs. So you have all these correlations. And then there's the fossil record, which is littered full of ape men. The fossil record is full of Bigfoot, Sasquatch type breaches. So you, as a person like me, I'm not part of the Bigfoot community. I don't want to be. I don't have any interest in it. So I look at it as a completely neutral person with a huge interest in the topic. And so I'm looking at it from a 40,000 foot perspective. And I look at it from a long timeline perspective also. And so I didn't get my information through the Bigfoot community. I did a lot of research, a lot of reading on my own over a period of years. And I have only been interested in this since 2005. And I've been an outdoorsman my whole life. And all of a sudden in 2005, I saw a series of documentaries on the subject where scientists were on camera being interviewed about it. I thought, wait a minute, I didn't think that anything like this was still going on. I'd heard the Bigfoot legend. I'd heard the name, but no, I thought that no one ever took it seriously. So the more I looked into it, the more research I did, the more books I read by scientists like John Napier, who at the time, you know, was skeptical of the idea all the way to scientists like John Benernagel, who was an advocate of wildlife biologists. So there are now, you know, over the last several decades, been several scientists with an interest in this, like Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Dr. John Mainchinsky. Of course, you've got Dr. Grover Krantz was probably one of the first professional scientists to kind of be public about this. And so to date now, I mean, there are more legitimate scientists who have an active interest. But, and yes, there is physical evidence. So as a person who's neutral, like I said, with no dog in the fight, just wanting to know what is this all about. The further you look, the more you realize there really is a phenomenon that is quantifiable, it's measurable, a phenomenon of credible people who know the difference between a bear and anything else. They know the difference between a moose and a bear, even if they've just seen them on television their whole life. And all of a sudden they go from the city into a national park and they see a bear, they know what it is. So you have to look at all of it together and if you're going to be truly logical about it on paper, every single thing that you look at points to there being a physical species, a very rare reclusive species of hominid that has evolved over millennia to avoid human beings. Because the general, the accepted theory is that scientific theory is that the reason all of these other hominids no longer exist is because largely, because humans out-competed, homo sapiens, sapiens out-competed. And so that's why we don't have a paranthropist, boy's eye, or homo erectus just for example. There are no other hominids walking around except modern humans. So when you look at, like I say, it's all of the evidence combined that leads to this quantifiable phenomenon of credible people citing giant apes in the forest who have no reason to lie at all. They're just as adamant as they can be and they're describing the same thing that the Native Americans have been describing for centuries. So I'll kind of, oh yeah, and then with physical evidence, yes there is, there's a lot of physical hair evidence. And we can talk about that in detail later, but there's that which cannot be attributed to any known species, but it is known to be wild primate hair. It's all similar to itself, but it is not classifiable. It's all been found in remote forest areas of North America. Then of course you've got the foot evidence, the foot print of evidence. 30 seconds left. Foot prints, foot prints, okay, foot prints that cannot be hoaxed. So I'll stop there. Thank you. You got it. Thank you very much and want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here, we are thrilled to let you know that Modern Day Debate is a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion and politics, striving to give everybody their fair shot to make their case on a level playing field. And folks, if you haven't yet hit that subscribe button as we are absolutely pumped, you will see on the bottom right of your screen sometime this month we are thrilled to host for the first time a JFK conspiracy debate regarding who really killed JFK. You don't want to miss that. So do hit that subscribe button and that bell notification. And with that, we will jump into open discussion. So thanks gentlemen. The floor is all yours. Yeah, I'd like to first just ask a question real quick. Is this going to be completely philosophical in nature or will you actually be showing us evidence during the back and forth? Because as of now, and not to, you know, to integrate your position, but there has been nothing more than anecdotal. This is why I do it. This is why I am in my position, which is fine. That's fine for you guys. But for a debate, it's going to be hard to convince someone like myself or someone like Tony, unless you provide evidence that we can verify for ourselves and, you know, and ensure that there's some kind of validity to it. Yes. Yeah, there's evidence. I mean, we have evidence to bring to the table to discuss. I don't I don't I don't have a dead big foot sitting next to me that I can drag on camera. But yeah, we we there's evidence. There's been evidence collected. We all be presenting the evidence, at least at least links or links or anything. I can cite for you. I can cite for you who who's first began to catalog this evidence. It involves Dr. John Meinchinski, Zawella biologist, and Dr. Henner Ferenbach, a primatologist, I believe. And if you will just simply you can Google it, you can look for any seminars that these two scientists have given or interviews that they've given, and then you can look at their microscope, the photograph or the morphology of all of these hair samples that lack something called a central medulla. So if you can, I'm citing it, but I can't I don't have the hairs here with me. No, no, no. Yeah, I'm not I'm not expanding citations or just as well as showing me on camera. Actually, I'd like to I'd like to address that. So if a scientist gives a seminar or gives an interview or writes a book, that has absolutely zero scientific validity, right? You guys understand that, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the only the no, it's not evidence. It's not anything. It's a it's an individual who happens to have a PhD expressing their opinion. No, no, no. Yes, there may be more than one. But that's not the point. The point is that science is not the opinions of any group of individuals. It is what is accepted by the scientific community. And that comes through publication in accredited journals through a peer review process. I agree. Yes, any of these results have been published in an accredited journal after undergoing critical peer review, then they're not science. And while these people are credible, while these people are responsible, they work for universities or what have you, it needs to be well understood that when they express their private opinion in a book that they wrote in a in an interview in a seminar, they are not actually doing science.  And other people will go well that's a scientist they must know what they're doing.  What I care about is what's in the literature. And so if you want me to accept the opinions of scientists, you need to point me to their publications to their relevant publications in accredited journals. Okay, fair enough. I'll address a couple of you of your points there. We do have reputable scientists who have have published some of this information. It's it's not it's not extremely common, of course, because we're talking about the colloquial bigfoot, right? But it does happen. Some things have been published.  Are these are these scientific journals? Dr. Meldrum has published in journals, many different, you know, things dealing with this subject. So it has some of this stuff has been published again, not a not a whole lot, but technically has been published. Can you give me one example of it so I can look it up? Not on the top of my head. I did not come prepared to start raffling through the semantics of scientific journals. Because I honestly prior to this debate, I did my best to find scientific journals that were were doing peer reviewed papers from credible scientists on this topic. And there's not very many out there. Zero, in fact, go ahead, Ernie. If I may. Yeah, you're right. There are no there are no, you know, papers that say yes, Bigfoot exists. Of course there aren't. And no, to my knowledge, there are no papers that have been about the hair samples. Journals are all about ideas. What I'm what I'm getting at is that the hair exists. And well, the scientific is that and I'm not telling you that it's Sasquatch here. I'm telling you that these hair samples exist and they're just one of this of this collective total of things of evidence, both physical and anecdotal and cultural and historical weight that lead anyone logically who's neutral beforehand who sees it all reads it all knows what's there knows what's known and what is not known in this field study. Then you realize, yeah, it does. It all does point toward that. But there is no absolute evidence and I'm not telling anyone that the scientists are telling you that it's Sasquatch here. They're not. They're telling you, Hey, we have these hairs that defy description. They're wild. They're tapered ends that have never been cut. Okay, can I? So in my opening statement, I cited the study by Sykes et al in 2014 that looked at 30 hair samples as attributed to anomalous primates. And they were able to find genetic matches for all of them. So all here that has all here that we have found that has genetic genetic markers included included can be explained. Now, if you've got hairs for which no no genetic evidence is available. Okay, then what I want is for a for a qualified biologist to publish looking at these hairs and saying they don't match any known animal.  I was gonna say even go ahead. I'll let you finish but I want to add to that. That's what I want. That's what I want also. Let me let me add to that right. So these hair samples while Tony is absolutely right. And he says that they may not be able to identify a specific DNA sample that they can match up 100% to a known sample that we have. There are ways of determining what common ancestors are still shared with these with these these hair samples like with humans like we can go and take a chimpanzee hair and we can take the DNA of that hair we can take the DNA of the hair that the samples that are being brought in and then we can find commonalities in HERVs or in ERVs in that in that situation just be an ERV. But we can find commonalities in the ERVs to to determine at what point did we break away from a common ancestor with these things. This is this is science that we use today to determine when we have a physical animal in front of us and we say oh that's that's an undiscovered animal. We can take the DNA DNA sample and get an idea of when it broke away from a common ancestor and know the common ancestors that are involved. So why is there no published information in a scientific journal talking about the shared DNA between maybe they can't identify exactly what species it is but why is it not talking about the shared DNA with other known hominids? First of all there's no DNA has been yielded. No DNA was yielded from those hair samples. You've got to have the following on the end of the strand in order to get DNA. Yeah so maybe possibly so it is it is it is a challenge to get DNA from hair samples but it's doable. But to answer your question directly Team Skeptic is that there's no desire or funding to do so with anything you know related to Sasquatch. They geneticists just won't do it because it's actually extremely complicated when you're when you're talking about looking for a hominid that's close I'm just going to say close to us close to humans in the in the way that Neanderthal or even Champagne Z might be but undiscovered. So geneticists just won't do it they won't waste I mean there's a funding issue for one you know they're not they're not going to throw their interns into something that's a taboo subject so so there's another there's a totally another realistic actual realistic side to that story which is why you don't get you know what you guys are looking for it's like show me some good published materials nobody's doing it well well okay I'm going to say it for a third time there is a study by Sykes et al from 2014 that appeared in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society now this is one of the most prestigious journals in the world right this is the this is the Royal Society this is one of the most um this is one of the most highly esteemed scientific research organizations and they published a genetic sample of 30 hairs that have been attributed to Bigfoot and they were able to positively identify that all of them they were able to positively identify the species of origin for all of these samples so so so the argument the argument yeah there is a problem in that in that um in that funding is scarce and people don't want to throw it away and they also don't want to um they also don't want to um they also don't want to let their graduate students go down rabbit holes and you know flush their academic credibility down the toilet by looking into by looking into you know um uh questions that may may discredit them at the same time you know there's the discussion of things like homoflorensis um that um you know the the famous hobbit species um in in indonesia um that made those researchers famous and has opened up you know entirely new branches of research so it's a risk reward scenario but if you you know if somebody were able to identify a new species of hominid you know they're they're scientifically important yeah their reputations would be guaranteed so you know I agree it's the problem it's the problem with Sykes's study is that I literally could have walked down into the woods behind my house picked up some hair from a deer put an envelope and sent it to him and it would have been included in the study uh so he was collecting data from big footers not professionals not one professional was it was involved in collecting any samples that Sykes studied so all right important thing to note about the prestigious nature of his study is that not one professional collected any samples one thing that I would like to say is there was a whole lot more than 30 samples sent in Dr. Jeff Meldrum has spoken about this he was very familiar with what was accepted what wasn't how it was processed and because the uh sort of what's what would be called the golden standard of these hair samples that have they lack the central medulla they're naturally tapered they are primate but they're again they're being found in these remote areas in North America uh lots several samples like that that he considered you know the gold sample were sent in but if they didn't immediately yield BNA uh in other words they were they were destroyed without even being looked at first so that morphology that similarity of morphology that might be like hey wait a minute we've got a whole bunch even more I mean there was over a hundred samples of various things sent so I'm not telling you that anybody thinks they were sauce what cares but lots of them were destroyed just in the process because they didn't yield BNA well um so DNA extraction can physically harm the can physically harm the sample but what you're describing there seems to be a slight misattribution so you can you can dissect a you can you know analyze a sample dissolve it in the appropriate reagents to try and extract and polymerize the the RNA samples um but um it's um you may do that and you may not end up with a usable DNA sample at the other so when you say they were destroyed because they didn't yield DNA the samples may well have been used up in the sampling process but failed to yield usable DNA and that's a very different and that's a very different um sequence of events than they were destroyed because they didn't yield DNA um now those samples may not be and I would be surprised actually if they didn't preserve that in those words I misspoke one sec just to be just to hear the last from PhD Tony and I promise we'll come right over to you Ernie um so just to um uh uh I would be surprised if they didn't set aside at least some of their subsample and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who sent those samples in set aside some of the subs and subsamples because you know you typically when you're handling evidence like this you keep a portion of it so that if something happens in transit or whatever you're not completely screwed sorry well that's speculation purely on on your part and we're really going down an unnecessary rabbit hole again as I said I'm very familiar with the site study and you should perhaps educate yourself on what Dr. Melvin and some other contributors to that has he published had to say about it has he published his misgivings about it has he replied to this study has he published his own comment no oh has he published has he published well he's just interviewed if you'd like to know what he thinks about it then you can look into it well can I can I step in there I don't think me or Tony would like to know his personal opinion on it I think the fact that we're asking for peer reviewed journals where he's been published is because it's already gone through a process of scrutiny by scientists in that field now what I I want to bring up something you you brought up Homo erectus and another species that you know we eventually found and whatnot I want to say that you know the reason why we understand what we say to this day that Homo erectus existed is because we know they existed we have empirical evidence to support that they existed bones other things that tell us these things actually walk the earth and at some point left remnants of themselves for us to find in a future date bigfoot is not a phenomenon that is described to have happened 30 000 years ago it's something that's ongoing today people are making sightings today so it would be much easier in fact we should expect to find as Tony said in the intro we should expect to find this evidence we should expect to find bones we should expect to find blood and hair and urine and scat and all of these things and yet all of these things seem to elude us no matter how hard we look but we can find evidence of species that existed hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago that's very telling on the bigfoot myth well I mean I agree with what you said how do you mean it's telling yeah we you know many fossils of chimpanzees you can fit into the back of a truck not many we have very few fossils of chimpanzees yet we know they exist so that's that's a correlation that's uh that that isn't uh it doesn't exist it's not important now as far as finding a dead body or remains I mean there's there's a lot of different reasons that you could that one could theorize we don't do that they're they seem to be a rare species uh they live in very remote areas although they interact with us sometimes because we go to remote areas so that's where those interactions tend to happen so as far as them dying and finding a body I mean there's so much remoteness to North America you know you could hide you could hide 10,000 human bodies that would never be found people go missing all the time their bodies are never found so it's it's not extraordinary that a rare species that their remains would not be found it's a little bit different to look for an individual versus to look for a member of a species looking for a member of the human species in you know 10,000 years let's say humans had a catastrophic event we all died massively and suddenly a new life new intelligent life came up there would be evidence to suggest that we actually existed because there would be remains there would be buildings there would be all kinds of things that were standing that that would maybe not test the time to be reused but would at least show that that we existed and we left our our footprint on this earth I'd like to address I'd like to address a logical issue with what Pat just said so not everybody who goes missing gets found that's true but a lot of people who do go missing do get found their remains are found and you know the fact that some people go missing and aren't found does not explain why all bigfoots go missing and are never found right you're talking about something you're talking about something that sometimes happens to humans but for some reason always happens to bigfoots and you know and again sorry I just wanted to what actually I should let you respond sorry yeah I mean there's a big difference when one human being goes missing we send a hundred to go look for them and and sometimes never find them so so that that's a big difference nobody's looking for dead bigfoot bodies maybe some shit all the time there are people whose lives are dedicated to this they're they're absolutely looking all the time no no no no you're you're you're definitely confused they don't go looking for dead bigfoot bodies that's not what they're looking for they're looking for interaction they're looking for evidence they're looking for evidence dead bigfoot bodies are considered evidence and if you ask one of those guys what let's say you you found a true bigfoot researcher and you said what would be the ultimate evidence there would be two one would be a live bigfoot that would be the number one and number two would be a dead bigfoot because when you get a live dead bigfoot or a dead bigfoot you have you have a complete physiology there that you can begin to construct and understand okay even if it's just a hair sample that's good enough if we can get a hair sample like Tony said that excludes every other species we know then that's something to talk about unfortunately there's no peer reviewed publications that say we have exclusive evidence that this hair came from a not a species that is not known to humans already well true but just back to the point of do do bigfooters go looking for dead bigfoot I assure you they don't that's not their goal they they don't go into the extreme vast remote areas just wandering around hoping to stumble upon a bigfoot what bigfooters do is they go out looking for interactions they want they want live bigfoots you know that make their presence then why bother taking foot casts why bother sending hair samples in why bother doing any of this if all they're looking for is an interaction okay fair enough all all I'm saying is that like they don't go out into the woods with the frame of mind if I'm going to go find a dead bigfoot laying around like that's like I said they're they're looking for evidence and under the purview of evidence is a dead bigfoot that would be a set that would be substantial evidence in fact if somebody brought a hominid of nine feet tall that had no DNA to comparison to what we already know okay here's the point dude they understand that the chances of that happening is virtual zero and why I can't explain why we can go out and find dead bears we can go out and find dead or anything if we go looking hard enough why can't they go well well you're assuming that you're assuming that big bigfoot has a bear population you know they're much more rare than the bear okay okay but that you know and and I accept that you know it's it's not likely but there are a large there are a large number of people who are out there looking for any sort of tangible evidence and they have been looking for some time um and so while it's you know while the bear population is much larger and therefore you know bear findings should be much more common it's it becomes increasingly difficult to justify why no one has ever done this um you know and in in addition to all of the people who are actively out there looking for bigfoot there are people hunting there are people camping there are um lots of people going through going through the wilderness and absolutely none of them you know no no bigfoot has had an accident and fallen down a waterfall or um accidentally eaten something poisonous or had their um or um had their um appendix burst at the wrong time or you know just gotten on the wrong side of a brown bear um because um and and yeah well at least it um and and this is the thing and that's and and this is where I draw the line okay so um it's science is not about what's possible okay is it possible that bigfoot yet exists yes yes you can you can make you can explain away the lack of evidence you can explain away the um everything but that's not science's role science's role is to look at the evidence as impartially as we can and say what can we determine from the evidence that we have um and and you know um uh I am sure you know I I I I I I just looked at Dr. Meldrum up um he's got some publications relevant to um relevant to um to this uh to this particular um topic that have gotten into peer review but none where he's claimed that it's um that it's real and he um you know he seems to be a responsible academic with a deep conviction but just because he's an academic doesn't actually give his convictions um his opinions um undue weight I'm certain he's a reasonable responsible person um uh but he has to accept that if he wants me to share his opinion he needs to get a past peer review um and he would agree with that he would agree yeah yeah I'm I'm certain he would any any responsible academic would and this is a man you know as you say with a with a with an academic reputation um and you know actually I I didn't know what to expect coming in and so I want to say at this stage uh Pat and Eric um this has been fantastic Ernie Ernie Ernie Ernie sorry I keep on getting it wrong I've been calling you Eric all night sorry I have been meaning to step in I apologize okay sorry I'm sorry um sorry sorry Ernie my apologies but I wanted to say I think this has been a fantastic conversation I really enjoyed um discussing this with you guys you guys are um uh are really um you know uh you're exact you know when when I had my worst case to best case scenario about what was going on you guys are above the best case scenario well thank you thank you now can can I direct that real quick yeah sure uh yeah again I tried to look we're trying to bring some kind of reasonable discussion to the table when it comes to the big fight and we understand that people outside the big foot world you know skeptics which are good skeptics that skepticism is healthy I'm I'm all on board um and even people watching we're trying to bring something different that they may not expect you know the the the kooky well it's alien so you know right you know or some weird flat earth kind of like chair's belief like I told you guys yeah so yeah I appreciate that 100 and this is a good discussion I want to open it up even more you know and talk about other different you know tracks and facts um and and we do have visual evidence recorded on film so you know we can we can get out of the minutiae of the freaking DNA and hair yeah yeah I would like to bring up something that's actually a relevant point here that we've you guys have touched on but we haven't addressed yet and you said that the the the mythology of bigfoot or the yeti or the one of the millions or hundreds not many you know I'm exaggerating the hundreds of names that they've given them cross culturally make up a you bring up a good point go ahead in Australia they in Australia it's the yaoi the yaoi yeah so what I want to I just want to say to that argument the cross cultural argument is that even in all cultures we've always had giants in our myths look at the Christian culture it has the story of David in Goliath the pharaohs of Egypt the first giant they say was the pharaoh son son not kept I think is how you say his name we've had we've had giants in our our storytelling for ages for long times in fact we've had giant people because they've they've they actually have bones of the pharaoh son a cat so they there are stories of people that are larger than we are then we then we are on average for instance average I think we're about six foot tall as as a human species so nine foot tall if you were to say yetis were nine foot tall or eight foot tall that would be a class that we that would be some kind of explanation would needed to be given there that might be something genetic that allows them to continuously grow to that size where we have a different genome that prevents us from getting to those sizes so the idea that there are giants and storytelling giants across all these cultures that's that's totally understandable but you have to accept the fact that that's part of the human condition we are going to talk about things that are larger than life we are going to make up stories to describe why we have thunder when it used to be that the gods were angry now it's due to you know due to the the storm systems you know we used to say oh it rains because the gods are crying that's not necessarily true anymore either now we know it rains because of you know thunderstorms and storm systems again these these are just things that we become we understand now we've always told stories that are larger than life to explain things I think if you see a huge shadow in the forest and your brain interprets that as some scary being that you're going to go around and tell people hey I saw this huge scary being out in the forest might have been a manipulation of shadows but it might have looked real to that person yeah and that does happen I would like to address that but I'm actually Ernie I'm going to turn this that that over to you go for it bro which part exactly anything that teams get to just well something I may have missed in the beginning I'm just curious what exactly is the debate tonight what is the debate is it evidence for the existence of Bigfoot yep okay all right well again Native American legends you know again there's all these correlations uh the long distance howling which is theorized by uh Bigfoot advocates to possibly be uh how they communicate over long distance being that they're rare and there's not a ton of them around if they exist that would make sense but that's what people have described hearing and seeing um it's all been consistent over millennia long before there was internet or television uh where people uh and other parts of the continent other parts of the world could not have been talking to each other to compare details and say hey I'm gonna I'm gonna tell my newspaper guy that it's a purple felt part so you better make sure you tell I'm yours purple too and then we'll start this big thing it's just no way to to think this started from a hoax the the legend the story of this exists far predates any known hoaxing and you can't hoax eight feet tall you can't do it run running through the forest and leaving uh impressions that what would require something to be around 600 pounds or more going straight up a mountainside over logs you just can't hoax it so there's I don't say that that means Bigfoot exists I say there's a lot of very interesting evidence and once you're aware of all of it even though none of it's conclusive even though none of it's in a peer-reviewed journal uh obviously none of it's in a peer-reviewed journal because if we had you know proof then bam it would be there yeah there is no there we don't there is no proof not enough proof in any way to have some peer-reviewed journal that says Bigfoot exists we all know that we would have seen the press conference by now well I'm anecdotal go ahead that's not that's not a debate well if we not up for debate of course it's not proven if we listen to just anecdotal evidence and not took in the scientific evidence we would all be convinced that we are living on a flat earth because to our senses we look out it looks flat if that's all we had to go off of went off of personal experience these are the type of rabbit holes we'd be led to believe and they would be incorrect at its fundamental uh description well I go ahead Tony yeah I'd like to I'd like to make a general point so you um any um uh correctly points out that there are a lot of similarities in in the structures of these stories across across different regions but the common element to all of them is that they're all told by people and so it's not a question of whether or not the people are influencing one another it's a question of whether or not you know in what ways is human perception limited and if you've ever seen you know there's a particular there's a particular illusion that has a bunch of blue dots and one red dot and if you focus on one of the dots that other dot will suddenly turn blue because your brain is your brain is aware that there's a blind spot and it's filling it in for you from the information it has available so your brain is actually doing a lot of processing of visual images that you're receiving without you even being aware of it and it is trying you know and your brain is trying to interpret its surroundings in the most efficient way to keep you alive so it it will be inclined to identify something as menacing and as a threat with very little provocation whatsoever and you know and so the idea that somebody somebody says well I saw this it was just out you know it was in passing out of the out of the corner of my eye but I got out of there and you know that story gradually gradually grows that's the process that I'm imagining but humans and you know when you talk about humans who are reliable steady you know no history of mental ill health no history of drug use no history of fraud etc etc you know particularly now that we do have this body of law behind us that is making us more suggestible you know at whatever level it's working on if we see something and our brain is slightly confused as to what it might be it only has to be slightly outside of our experience the other aspect that I would point out is the existence of outlaws which is to say individuals who for whatever reason end up existing outside of the local social structure these people can exist and they can wear for instance bare skin cloaks and they can you know they are not something that you're used to seeing they can behave furtively they can behave there are a number of explanations that can be put forward to explain the body of evidence available to us and so interpreting all of this anecdotal evidence we need to disentangle it some people are definite frauds some people are prone you know some people are definitely mentally ill some people are neither but you know that doesn't mean that what they've seen or what they think they've seen is necessarily an accurate interpretation of that sorry and before we turn it over to you guys can I I want to send I'm sending a link in the chat for everybody this is a publication Scientific American talking about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony which is partially what you're bringing up here Ernie I just want to show the relevance to it and it's just to Ernie and I both read it already okay great yeah years okay it's it's an older publication yeah um yeah I will address that real quick because there's again there's I'm trying I'm trying to bridge some kind of gap here between you know skepticism and people that don't like they don't swim in the waters that I do and I'm again I'm a skeptic okay so I swim in these waters and I'm here to tell you as a skeptic open-minded critical thinker is what I am you guys heard me before the shows like I was like oh man you know I'm 9-11 and you know so sorry to interrupt you but I've I've not heard anything in this discussion that contradicts that at all I would not listen to any criticism of you that says you're not a critical thinker okay and and I'm just here to tell you as a guy that swims in those waters and explores this phenomena to some degree I don't consider myself a what they call a researcher so I don't go traipsing around in the woods looking for bigfoot um but for some reason Tony and team skeptic this this goes beyond a corner your eye uh flashing the pan uh there are at least 10,000 at least probably more but at least 10,000 I don't know I'll say just 5,000 documented accounts of a class A sighting where a eight foot tall monkey man steps in front of a human being at five to 30 feet and it's very clear what you're looking at you're not looking you're not looking at a bear you're not looking at a pink dragon you're not looking at an old lady standing in front of you you only see one thing an eight foot tall monkey man uh with human features hooded nose it's not a hermit it's not a hermit in burr it's not it's not it's not a person in a gilly gilly suit yeah well again I would say that those people are perceiving that I'll I'll grant them that you know let's take away all the crazies and all the frauds well that sounds like a hallucination to me though I mean you're talking about uh how so no no because a hallucination is a little bit different you're manifesting something that's not there other than misunderstanding what you're looking at remember you do have to perceive this in your head still it's your eyes aren't cameras your eyes aren't taking pictures and storing those pictures for like memory that anybody else can access you're actually having to retell your story having to put the puzzle pieces back together given an amount of time since the event happened number one number two if you're in a scared state and you're pumping a your adrenaline begins pumping through your body you are going to perceive things slightly differently than if you were just watching it on a camera go ahead not slightly I'd like to address that yeah go ahead when people see a bear in the woods and they're frightened hell it's it could be just a deer and they're frightened because maybe they're not used to being in the woods they don't have to suddenly uh mistake the species of the thing they saw if the bear is scary then be the people were gonna run away and run into a house go oh my god I was almost eaten by a bear the bear is scary enough yeah why why why do they why do so many people over thousands of years you know why in the I've seen so many bears I've studied this South Squatch topics and so five I've spent so much time in the woods and yes of course I would love for it to be real but I don't believe that it is I'm looking for any any explanation that comes down the pike I'm interested did you make a mistake four foot wide shoulders standing on two legs eight feet tall hairy no clothes uh a hooded nose um big eyes four again four four wide shoulders like these are consistently consistently described by numerous people from different parts of the country who don't know each other I mean maybe maybe here's the theory maybe we have a cult of liars maybe okay fair enough but it's the consistencies are all there and man they are not they're not seeing bears they're not seeing shadows my well that you you bring up you bring up the point that I was going to make so if I take a familiar object to you um and I cast a um and I cast a a random pattern of shadows on us I can make it look unrecognizable okay your interpretation of what what you're looking at depends on the light that is reaching you and your brain is trying to piece it together in a fraction of an instant and the brain's ability the brain is not a perfect tool for doing that and we need to accept the limitations that it has now you bring up the number of sightings well we can also we can bring up the number of sightings of angels that existed during the middle ages or we can bring up the number of sightings of aliens you know there's lots of anecdotal evidence of of all of these things you know we can bring up that there's the the the you know the various sightings of Loch Ness for instance the anecdotal evidence and I mean if we're talking about cryptids that have been completely debunked you know Loch Ness there's zero chance it is actually physically impossible that there is uh that there is um any sort of exotic wildlife in Loch Ness don't break my heart Tony don't you break my heart they went through they did DNA samples of the water for Neil multiple um yeah it's a Neil um and um so you know all of these sightings all of these reports all of these what have yous um you know as much as as much as there's a consistency about them you know we we have to be skeptical of um of this because humans it turns out that humans can be made quite suggestible particularly if they're in a remote location and feeling um not feeling unusual there are also there are also physical phenomena that can impact the human being's perception there are subsonic um and uh electromagnetic effects that can actually convince people of things that simply aren't true um uh there are also infrasonic effects that can cause vibrations in the eye um uh that um well I mean you know if you've got a that sounds like a good published journal to explain Bigfoot um so I mean it's in the woods you can you may be able to get these um by um the passage of wind through various objects but yeah that's actually a very you know it's a very good I am not suggesting that this is actually the exact phenomenon I am merely pointing out that there are a bunch of exotic phenomena that we know about that can influence human perception I'm not trying to suggest that every bigfoot study is down to the is down to infrasonics or electromagnetic effects I'm just saying that sometimes um these things can influence people and you're right to throw skepticism on them occurring in the woods I bring them up merely because human beings are complicated machines our brains are really really complex they don't always work properly and I also want to add to that because this was kind of brought up earlier about the um hearing long distance howls and whatnot um I do want to point out there are certain natural structures that do exist in the world today and one of them in particular I can't think of the name of it but it's a literal rock formation where two people on each side of the rock formation can have a conversation and the only reason is is because sounds a wave and it involves the way the rock is naturally shape gives the constructive interference so that the sound will actually travel much further than if the rock was not there so there are natural explanations as to say why this is why is this possible that it could be could happen that don't necessarily need to rely on a cryptid that is using long distance communication to talk to another one of its mates or another one member of its species because it's not able to congregate together why would so many different but that's not true either that's not true either because there's there's many inconsistencies with yeti in bigfoot look at the abominable snowman he's all white yeti in in north america is all okay yeti in north america if he wasn't all white he'd be much easier to tell against the background that would be necessary for him there is no legend of the le yeti's being white yeti's are yeti's are commonly described as brown or pale brown that i did not then i'm wrong but the but the are you are you guys now suggesting that yeti's and bigfoot's are related to one another because i would i would suggest i don't have to be no no no so so the i so the the the discrepancy you know what the color of yeti's versus the color of bigfoot's is kind of a straw man here um it's a real yeah no i'm not i'm not going why i always always understood is yeti to be a the term used in a localized region i believe it's the uh the the tibetan mountains right is it like around the tibetan mountains yeah i always believed yeti to be just what they called their version of bigfoot so if i got that wrong that's that's on me i just from my understanding that's just the way i thought it was yeah there's a there are there are lots of local there are lots of local story cycles about you know large creatures in the wilds and you know the yeti is one from the himalayas um and sasquatch and um is one from you know north america um and and so on and and i think sasquatch is a regional term um from south west um south west canada perhaps i'm not sure um i wouldn't want to um swear to that but um uh but they're different ten there they're different they're different it's an anglicized version the other the actual word is shorter um uh and different um but and i'm not even going to try and pronounce it but anyway um but yeah there are these there are these regional stories with similarities and my my explanation of those similarities is that they're all being made by humans and humans are trying to identify the human brain is trying to identify anything that doesn't really understand as a threat and it will quickly latch on to and if my friend jim has said that he saw something um that looked looked so and so to him if i see something that i don't recognize then um i might attribute all of the stuff that i can see to all of the stuff that i don't really understand and coalesce it into something now that's um not only kind of you know our ability to perceive clearly um is also influenced again by lighting conditions and in a forest where there is light slanting through um uh a random collection of trees and leaves um that can produce some very exotic viewing conditions viewing conditions that the human eye is not necessarily um well used to and that can lead to some confusion in interpreting what we're seeing and the relative um distances between them um that's that would be my that would okay let me ask you is can it create the lighting conditions where you see uh big eyes with pupils and a hooded nose and a wide mouth and hair on a human like a hominid form bipedal shape um can it create because to me i'm sorry i always have to go back to this and this only that would be an actual hallucination not not a misinterpretation a hallucination no because that's what people describe so that's what people describe yes people describe it so um there are two aspects to what people describe i their personal experience um in in the sense of what information they had coming into this event so let's let's imagine this person walking into this clearing they have their body of knowledge stories that they've heard pictures that they've seen that you know they've got their entire world experience behind them and they use that to interpret the world around them every second every moment of their life they're constantly scanning their environment and trying to interpret it and make sense of it and make sure that there's nothing there that's going to hurt them are you aware that most of these people say that they had never put any thought into Sasquatch at all before their side um yep yep um i'm about to get to that so um uh so you step into a clearing and you see you see um something that you cannot that your brain is having trouble processing and your brain's instant response is to a pump as much adrenaline as quickly as it can into your bloodstream and b to start scouring every single experience you have ever had um to try and find something that can help you better understand and um better deal with this the the phenomenon you may have heard of the phenomenon of your life flashing before your eyes um uh if you're in a life or death situation and this is literally your brain just rummaging through your um your experiences try to find something that's going to help here um and your brain is actually really good at it and it will find it will find and make connections in an and it's not bothering to tell you know the the bit of you that is talking with me now it's not going to bother talking to you about it because it doesn't care about you um uh it's trying um to keep the entire organism alive and it kind of regards um conscious intervention as just something that will slow it down at this point um so it bypasses the the you know the frontal cortex completely um and just goes um and just goes straight through the memory vault um and if it can find something that even vaguely matches it'll it'll make a connection there and so you don't need you don't need to have gone in with a with you don't need to have dedicated a lot of attention to have heard stories of big foot sat squat scene you know the gimly is it the gimly um footage um yeah but you know um you know you don't um you don't need to have you don't know you need to have seen a lot of it to to to have that in your background and your brain goes aha there's a connection yep matches up well enough let's get the fuck out of here well that's why here's my question why does a bear hunter see his fiftieth bear and go oh my god i'm scared and well i have to attribute it to yeah what what yeah tony uh tony i would like to ask you personally right now what in the hell are people seeing to trigger their brain into that reaction you just described yeah why is he so afraid on the want to hold on i want to have i want to give pc 20 chance to respond and then we got to go to the q and a pretty soon go ahead okay so so my response to that is i don't know what they're seeing um but um neither today they're seeing something that cannot be easily processed and it may be a familiar object that they're viewing from an unfamiliar angle it may be um uh the lighting conditions that are contributing it may be um uh some sort of uh metabolic or optical effect um that is causing them to misinterpret it it could be a bunch of stuff but my my um you know there are a bunch of your brain will look at something and then it will go okay i don't recognize that and it could just be because you're looking at it from an angle that you're not used to or in lighting conditions that you're not used to or that it made a sound that you don't associate with what you're looking at or that it is somehow um discordant for instance if you're wondering you know a lot of a lot of cryptids for instance there's a there's a particular river monster um that is thought to be just a seal um which is something that people in the area don't see a lot of um uh and um uh and they would probably recognize it if they were in a different environment where they expected to see a seal but they're not in that environment and so this thing seems completely alien to them um so it could be uh it could be anyone and the reality is i don't know what they're looking at and can i say definitive and i want to i want to draw this back to where i started can i say definitively that they're not seeing a big foot no i can't i can't say that um what i can say is that um uh i would expect other evidence in order i need other evidence in order to accept that testimony because human testimony is often not a reliable um guide we are going to jump into the q and a and do want to say folks our guests are linked in the description we really do appreciate them and so you can click on those links and that includes if you're listening via podcast folks in the bottom of the episode description or i should say at the very top of the episode description you will see their links and so thank you gentlemen as we go into this q and a you've got a lot of juicy questions one coming in from soldier of science appreciate it says in 2020 in just the state of new york 1700 black bears were killed by hunters every year hunters are also shot by other humans on accident other other hunters they say how has no hunter killed a big foot given those statistics uh i say uh those those statistics don't matter in the way that you would think because there's uh again there's a disconnect of misunderstanding um they they avoid us um they don't they don't just come running towards us when we're shooting at stuff um they they would likely go the opposite direction they seem to know understand things in our hands or weapons and um and if you think you're going to go out in the woods and purposely try and kill a big foot i mean you might as well be saying that you're going to go 1v1 against the navy seal because they seem to be that good in their their environment they outclass us i've i've determined this much it it almost has to be can i i have a question about that so if they're if they're so good and they're so intent at avoiding us why are there so many encounters where they just god tony you stole my question yeah sure i mean that's that's a fair question it's um it's it's encounters are relatively rare there's probably there's going to be a million or more people that go out in the woods this week um maybe today yeah but but a lot of a good portion a good percentage of those people are hunters so why is it always that we're finding that these encounters are where people you know they can get a good idea of what they're seeing they're seeing a big foot but they can't make the motion to pull the gun up and and take the shot even a misunderstanding like saying oh i'm seeing a bear there when it's really a big foot and takes the shot it's always people who are unarmed i know with no cameras too oh no cameras either with the with the age of technology and information we have no cameras to even validate anything like this we should see this more it's okay i agree i mean you're again there's a misunderstanding here um because unintentionally i'll say you're oversimplifying it uh hunters don't shoot them because they they look big first of all they look big enough to go this gun ain't going to do nothing to this and number two it kind of looks human i don't know what i'm shooting at a responsible hunter doesn't shoot it something it doesn't know what it's shooting at so there's a lot of variables to that to be honest with you and i would love to get into that but i don't want to rob q&a well as the question suggested humans do shoot other humans i don't say they do it intentionally in hunting circumstances for instance but accidents happen so not we can't say that humans have the i cannot or not going to do this just because they're not going to do it because if that was the case and they wouldn't be shooting other humans accidentally okay how many how many owls are shot every year accidentally i have no idea okay probably virtually zero that's a new one so how many mountain lions are shot accidentally zero that's definitely zero many mountain lions are stumbled across as they're rotting in the woods yeah nobody shoots mountain lions accidentally nobody shoots bears accidentally that's not a thing we do have other questions yeah we'll jump into this next one from bitwise seven nine who says i've heard that the only way to stop a big foot attack is to whistle team skeptic what are your thoughts i say run because i can't fucking whistle then it will do it thank you very much for your questions that tony so science is only science if it's accepted so it doesn't have to be true but just accepted so it's science by majority um so there are a number of false um uh there's a there's a particularly profound of misunderstanding of what science is um in that question um uh no obviously there are things that are not currently except you know we understand that we don't yet have answers to every scientific question um so there are things that people can say that might turn out to be true we just don't have the evidence for them yet um and um and yes it's the it's the interpretation it is the interpretation of people who understand the topic well enough that counts as to whether or not this evidence is valid um so there was a huge um you know let's look at the one of the last paradigms in my field which was the eruption of um plate tectonics um you know at the beginning of the 1950s plate tectonics had about five percent um support within the academic community within the earth science community very few people thought that it was at all um possible um and you know that it was just completely physically implausible by the end of the 1960s um you know well by the mid 1960s completely accepted scientific um theory so in the course of 15 years um because the evidence became available we suddenly became better able to understand it um now it's not that the scientists previously were wrong when they said we don't have the evidence for this they were right they were right to be skeptical they were right to not accept it um you don't accept something until you've got the evidence um and that's how science works and um you know um please you know um uh please do not misinterpret um science as being dictating what is true or what is not science is dictating science is trying to determine what we can and cannot be be confident in um with the evidence we have that's what science is about got you and thank you very much for this question coming in from elden s who says what is bigfoot why bigfoot so uh they have a number of questions rolled in here they said what kind of creature is it so i think they're kind of like explaining what they mean in these first two questions they say so what kind of creature is it what does it live off of to survive is it an animal an alien or from a lost civilization what exactly would you say it is i think we lost um i can i i can only like answer that in uh what is a good starting point which uh it meets our definition of a primate visually so it's it would it would uh if it's a flesh and blood creature if you will of this plan it would have to be some kind of undiscovered relic hominid um it would be an omnivore so it would meet you know it would eat uh omnivore like scale of of different types of of things to eat um i think that's a good starting point um anything past that is uh is you start getting into hyperspeculation in the imagination and things that you can't explain we can explain we can actually explain an undiscovered hominid it would be an amazing discovery that would be easily explainable uh but you know you can't capture a ghost uh so or an alien right so uh so yeah what what is bigfoot some kind of a relic hominoid gotcha super interesting and this next question i'm focusing on getting the pictures back up folks so give me a moment and they'll be back in a moment but this one coming in from imran khan says if bigfoot exists how intelligent would it be by the way where by the way there's this interesting scp article that talks about bigfoot it's called scp 1000 lol i'm sorry what was the question it was how intelligent would bigfoot be do you speculate uh they would they well they would they would have to be extremely intelligent in their own way uh obviously they don't build you know they don't build spaceships and go to mars like we do uh but um as far as uh you know being in their environment and owning it uh and the intelligence that they have and the perceptions that they have they would have to be a fairly intelligent animal uh much more intelligent than a chimpanzee or gorilla more more like us gotcha yeah that was the case can i can ask him to expand on if that was the case why is there such a uh scattered population throughout the world why has not evolution and natural selection taken place with them to allow them to take over environments that would be conducive to them like the chimpanzee environment or the uh the ape environment i don't know i i can theorize that i mean it they avoid us at all costs they um they recognize that we are the most dangerous species on the planet and they want to keep themselves alive would you say they're self-aware do they do they plan things out absolutely in your opinion i know that this is all your opinion i don't want to misrepresent you or this is just your opinion but you believe them to be self-aware with the capabilities of planning out future shelter food and water yeah correct i mean they would have to be honest with you team skeptic they would have to be so um so what i'm doing is i'm doing nothing more than this i'm realizing that the phenomena is 100 percent real okay for whatever reason people are seeing eight foot tall monkey man in the woods we have some evidence of that we didn't get to half of that but uh so therefore yeah they i mean for them to actually exist to be a flesh and blood thing on our planet uh they would they would have to have that kind of intelligence and and and cognitive uh you know way of thinking that they would have to be absolutely and they they certainly behave that way uh uh it would seem yeah juicy and this next question coming in from flat earth guy says i support this channel thank you flat earth guy appreciate your support and also best in show by the way folks want to let you know whether you be flat earth globe earth bigfoot skeptic you name it we want to let you know we hope you feel welcome here we're glad you're with us and best in show says why would bigfoot know to hide from humans and well we'll there are four questions in there clumped together so well first we'll give you that one pat and urney to try to answer i think i just say some of that but go ahead and re yeah i would they could hide from us well the only way the general accepted theory of why we're the only ones that look like us still left walking around uh in other words the general accepted theory is to why these eight men we have found in the fossil record are no longer walking around the site this is because we think that modern humans just outcompeted you know outcompeted them with once we had language fire we could communicate we could strategize that's the that's the theory so uh over you gotta think over thousands of years thousands of years we can't even contemplate that let alone millions and uh so that's the idea and so in my opinion gotcha the only way something like that could still exist would be literally it had to evolve somehow to avoid human beings speaking of evolve they say wouldn't it need access to a large accessible water source in order to survive and i think they're implying you know if that's a case wouldn't it be easier to spot uh no there's waters everywhere north america yeah but that's disingenuous that's disingenuous hold on that's disingenuous to say that they're they're exclusive to a certain wooded area and then turn around and say that the area also has a large uh water source you know like all humans when they're in that when they're put in a survival instinct one of the first things you must find is a credible water water source that you can you can drink from this would need to be it's not hard to find survivalists would tell you differently i know they wouldn't at all if you were in the desert yeah and not in the woods dude what makes you uh this happens this happened like we go go watch any survivalist show where they're thrown into a jungle environment where they have to find a credible water source that they're talking you're talking about entertainment as your wild animals don't happen no no no this is not a hold on hold on yes this i this is this is on entertainment but this is not just from entertain find me a survivalist that doesn't tell you that the most important thing for you to do is find a water source if bigfoot and a hunter let's say or a survivalist or anybody that was in the woods who was lost let's say or had or was out there exploring they would need to find a water source and that would necessarily bring them closer together if it was water is everywhere then that wouldn't be a concern for a survivalist to go out and make sure that that was the first thing they found was water to drink and survive from okay i'm just saying this brings them closer together i'm not saying that it excluded i'm saying it should result in more confrontations that should be documented okay listen man yeah and me and Ernie are talking from personal experiences here and so in the areas that bigfoot uh the kind of areas that they're always seen them are wet uh forested in environments with all year yeah with terrain therefore there are creeks creeks and and and water sources everywhere i mean you can't you can't go up in the mountains here where we are in north georgia you can't throw a rock without hitting water i mean it's everywhere so you got another question yeah it's not it's not some some one body of water that exists in some certain place like swamps swamps are nothing but water you've got another question they say if they are being spotted by humans then they don't seem like they're actually that good at hiding it's on their terms um it's apparently yeah listen there's never been 30 people hanging out at a campsite and then a couple of bigfoot show up that's never happened not once you'll never find a documented account ever ever saying that it's always on their terms and usually it seems to be this kind of thing where we've tolerated you here for long enough now we're gonna just reveal we we tried to give you warning signs and now we're just gonna i'm just gonna reveal myself to you because i know you're out here by yourself and that's usually how these class A encounters happen is a 1v1 situation guys they've got another yeah they've got one more question they say and where did they die i think they're implying like why is it that we're not i don't know i don't know i would love to know the answer to that question it's it's hard to observe them we need to get better observations and be able to follow them with uh you know high tech technology people aren't doing that by the way this is not happening nobody's trying to actually observe them with the best available technology of the day um so if we can get observations we might could find where they die will steward throws his probably die where the where the mountain probably in the same spot interesting will steward says for both is it more plausible to entertain that big foot happen to be an alien species and that explains why it's so hard to find them i think it's less plausible um that that big foot are alien species i think there's too many commonalities unless we find evidence to suggest that intelligent life around the universe all takes our same bipedal form i don't think it would be uh intellectually honest to assume that a creature that evolved on it in another planet or star system would come here and look very similar to us so i think it's more plausible to say that if big foot did exist it would be a just an unknown hominid um it but that's the big thing if if i'm not saying it does but it's way more plausible than interstellar travel by a being that you know that looks like an ape looks just like a human ape hybrid and and i agree with my opponent team skeptic 100 ditto gotcha and this one thanks very much for your question coming in from bubble gum gun says vietnam big foot is real the squatch squad for the win i don't understand but robert summers also has a question saying do you have a source for a mountain lion or bear never being shot accidentally no way you could know that for sure that namely that there was never one that was shot accidentally yeah i'm willing to stick my my neck out there and say that and and if it was just one okay fair enough i mean what is it a hundred is a thousand probably not so probably we're talking about we're just trying to make the point that i don't even remember what point we were trying to make then but uh you know usually a big mountain lion is so rarely they're so rarely seen people that live in mountain lion country can go their entire lives still live you know living near or in the forest and never see a mountain lion their whole life and certainly never stumble across the mountain lion or any top predator carcass that died of natural causes just lying out in the woods in an area where someone could just stretch across and find it will will steward strikes again says tony so are you equally skeptical of all current scientific theories because new evidence could be found tomorrow therefore confidence in them is illogical that's uh that's uh those two statements do not um logically connect um yes i am if there's evidence that comes up tomorrow for instance that homeopathy definitely works or the you know i don't know for i don't know for certain that the sun's going to come up tomorrow it has every previous day but i cannot say with absolute certainty that that will happen tomorrow because i don't know the future um so yes you know um everything that we know is based on the evidence that we have to hand and and this is the difference between science and religion if we get new data we revise our belief structure um and we look at you know how can you know how can this be um and as a result we will be resistant to new you know if somebody's if a theory has performed well for a long long time and a new theory comes along that seems to contradict it it will be destruction tested it will be um driven into the ground it will have it will be picked apart um and it is only if it can sustain that sort of um concentrated attention that it can be accepted um and so yes um you know and this is this is one of the this is one of the uh rhetorical tricks that anti science people try to um try to uh try to play um saying oh well science is just as much a religion as religion is no because we will change our mind if we see evidence um religious people won't they will ignore evidence if it contradicts their um their position um uh you know so um science is not about dictating to you what is true science is about determining what we can on the basis of the evidence and if new evidence comes up we always have to be open to that opportunity um and this is why we're constantly observing and constantly asking questions um and our confidence in a particular theory um goes to show with how much evidence we have that supports it um you know but contradictory evidence could come up tomorrow tomorrow um you know Noah's Ark could be found um carbon dated and it could have Noah was here engraved on it along with a bunch of you know um animal fecal matter that could happen it's not impossible um and then we'd have to and then we'd have to say okay well you know um uh bugger me sideways um I wasn't expecting that but we done we'd have to you know if it turned out to be if it turned out to be real and um you know we we and authenticated then we'd have to accept it you know it science is not about just rejecting evidence because it doesn't fit with what we know and that's the you know anti scientists often claim that that is the case but it 100% isn't and we are every scientist should be every diligent scientist should be skeptical about um about um what they claim to know and what they don't know but they should also admit when they are opining on stuff outside of their core expertise biology primatology um zoology and ecology are not in my field of expertise and if I presented to anyone the mistaken impression that this is my field of expertise it's not the opinions I'm expressing here uh though are just as valid as teams and Pat's and Ernie's and anything James may choose to contribute um you know it's only in my field of expertise where I can publish where I can um where I can you know get my uh get my thoughts organized and accepted by my peers that's when I can claim some sort of authority um but I'd like to add to that I'm sorry I thought you were done I thought I thought you were done I was looking for an opportunity to finish and you David well I'd like to just add just quickly to that um if we're talking about scientific theories here we're going to also have to accept the fact that the scientific theory that's being replaced was valid based on the evidence so any new theory that came out that even if it was a paradigm shifting theory it would still have to be somewhat consistent with the previous theory even if yeah it was completely different it needed to it still needs to be consistent with all the evidence all the observations backwards it must have not just the same explanatory power but it must add something to it and I think science loves when a new theory comes out that adds to the uh adds to the knowledge of humanity yeah juicy and thank you very much for your question Robert Summers says besides any kind of quote unquote this person saw this unquote what is your go-to evidence for someone to look into for getting into Bigfoot existing start with John Green's books and then uh read John Bendernoggle's books got Jim anything for you Pat Pat are you there I think oh I think Pat's asleep I I'm sorry Ed I'm sorry no I I'm famous for putting people to sleep so you've done well to recover consciousness we'll jump into this next oh sorry Pat if you want to have a chat a chance to share uh whatever you had in mind go ahead oh no go ahead go ahead you got it this next question coming in from oh let me just reload this new one coming in from best in show says why would a Bigfoot only be seen alone by himself and not with his family or friends wouldn't his family or a lover be nearby well there's a um there's sort of a uh consensus of how you should think um if you encounter a Bigfoot in the woods which is to uh assume there are more um and and and some of that does come from anecdotal you know accounts where somebody encounters one and then next thing I know that they're being flanked by another um but you know we don't know I mean obviously again it comes down to observation and and I'm that guy I want observations I want to get better observations um that you know do they live in troops or are they more of a you know kind of a single male uh you know multi multi family different areas kind of uh you know work make your way arounds um obviously if they're they're undiscovered hominid they have to have a breeding population so there's some some kind of you know uh breeding happening between male female and then offspring um so you would at least assume that they are uh there are at least a female with offspring involved some kind of troop but do they have like family troops you know we don't know our cousins nearby like honestly these are the things we don't know and uh and and I would love to get the answers to Ernie I have a question for you um real quick uh how advanced do you think Bigfoot is you said they're intelligent but how advanced are they I don't know oh and and I'm sorry the names were switched I was trying to answer I'm sorry Ernie but this could be a question for Pat and Ernie I'm sorry I was trying to directly respond to something he was saying and and uh I'm sorry about that beginning you got you two guys confused but both of you can answer this how advanced you've you've both said that they're intelligent which for them to exist they must be intelligent but we're about as intelligent as the Neanderthals were we're more advanced than they were but our intelligence level is about the same as Neanderthals now we've advanced not just technologically but we have approximately the same brain size and it would appear as though any any factor that's gone into determining a being's intelligence is relatively similar to what we know about Neanderthals so our intelligence while we are more advanced I'm all for saying that we are way more advanced we've learned a lot how advanced are Bigfoot um man that's that's a good question that's a tough question and uh as far as advancement um they've mastered I would say this they've mastered their environment um in ways that we haven't and of course we are not good um so we're talking about wood you know uh wet forest woodlands with terrain and actually we're not good at that um we we have to cut trails um we use tools we take everything we need with us you know um we have a third appendage we like to put out there called a hiking stick so we kind of suck you know at that environment and they seem to not suck at it they seem to be very graceful in their environment very capable they're strong obviously uh with their their size and muscle mass um and so they're advanced physically uh in a way that we aren't out there that's why I the way I always try and frame it is that we're just outclassed and this is something I haven't told people in the Bigfoot world all this time but you also said that they have cognitive cognitive abilities to pick and choose when they are non-stealth and when they are stealth this shows a level of cognitive ability that yeah you know that that really gives them more of a you know an advanced an advanced thinking type uh type quality to them you know like apes apes and monkeys let's say really hard to find things species are usually hard to find because they exist in hard to find places not because they choose when to allow themselves to be seen and when not to allow themselves to be seen so I don't so if we're going to say that they have that cognitive ability they should also we should see you know why why have they advanced in cognitive ability but not social ability not the ability to form societies and and form protections against threats and things like things that humans do sure they I'd say this they have enough room to work with and I think that's a misconception so like they have enough room to work with in even in North America the Appalachian the Appalachian chain itself from from Georgia to you know up to Pennsylvania let's say even though the Appalachian trail goes all the way up to you know Maine uh yeah it's you know 100 to 300 miles wide unpopulated remote area uh for a thousand miles that's way bigger than the Congo um so so yeah they they always have enough room to retreat and that that seems to be from where I could you know my honest honest take on this dude again is a skeptic even a critical thinker like I've looked at the data I've looked at what people have to say I've looked at all the angles and and thought about it myself and they always put themselves in a position that when they confront humans they have a way out even though like most of the time it's them escorting the human out even though you know to to the Sasquatch back they always have a way out and dude they're eight feet tall they got an eighth of stride almost I mean they can run 30 miles an hour easy well you say that but I would like to know where the evidence of that where was the where did they take these measurements at well I mean I could well if they're that tall you know I'm just going on okay fair enough I mean they're not five feet tall um we're talking about eight foot tall thing their legs would be big enough to make an eighth stride so if you're eight feet tall you can run at 30 miles an hour that's that's what your stride but then you're adding mass too so you must convert this you must have energy to completely sustain you again we're going to be seeing evidence for all of these physiological features that you say there would be secondary evidence that should support that physiological feature you just said so I would like to have you a chance to respond Pat and then we're 18 inch foot okay but where I go ahead I'm sorry so the biomechanics of humans are actually fairly idiosyncratic we are the world record holders on covering the most distance over two hours because you know and that's critical to our survival why would bigfoots have the same evolutionary designs as we have given that they had they are not you know hunting stuff on the calahari plane um you know they didn't come from that environment so why would they be as good at it as we are uh because we we killed deer in the north georgia mountains not the calahari plane right so so do they um but we don't kill deer by ambushing them with our bare hands um so and each of them with tools and then we run them down so my question is why would a bigfoot be as good at running as a human is if they don't run because they ambush they have to ambush their prey I mean I don't know they've evolved the way that only that only that only that you know a tiger is ambushed their prey then they are very quick over 10 meters right um but they're not that good over two meters so you know um the design the biomechanical design elements that go into being an ambush predator are very different from um the design elements that go into a human um and my question so you're extrapolating uh the anatomy of a bigfoot as though it corresponds to that of a really large human but then you're making the argument that actually these things have evolved in a very different evolutionary niche than has applied to humans throughout their development and so I'm wondering why you think it is valid to suggest that it's just the same as a really big human because it's not I'm not saying it's a really big human I never said that well you are extrapolating their running speed and their ability you know their their um uh mobility um I know I I never say human stride well you're using their stride length um a biped yeah not not a human but a biped okay um how fast are gorillas how how tall are gorillas like stronger how tall yeah well how tall are gorillas but and how fast and how and how fast are they across the ground extremely fast for what distance for what distance they're not bipeds they're not bipeds they're not okay all right they're knuckled right can you name me another genuinely bipedal mammal living no I would theorize that isn't that isn't that isn't say a macropod I mean yeah that's a macro that's a macropod um but you notice that you you notice the kangaroos aren't very human like oh okay no the world's fastest bipedal animal is a bird I can't remember is an ostrich I would guess I don't I it's not an ostrich but something in that family yeah maybe an emu or a cassowary or something like that regardless regardless it's not a big foot and I'm wondering you know you just said that they run faster than they run significantly faster than an olympic sprinter based on their based on their on the length of their stride their anatomy is different than ours yes their anatomy is different than ours which makes me wonder how you can make any confident assessment of their running speed because they have they have long legs yes but that in itself does not yeah go ahead Tony I'm sorry okay so elephants have really long legs okay but they're that's quadruped again um yeah that size okay there are fast quadrupeds and there are slow quadrupeds right sure okay so you know there was a guy all right if you look at up on youtube the fastest man in the world and what he did was he took one of those birds that we were just talking about the emu family type birds he took that and put some extensions on his legs in in that design and I'm not saying that it's exact correlation but he put those extensions on his legs and that gave him an eight foot stride and he could easily run at 30 miles an hour with that eight tried yes so that shows you that a human being can do that with the right anatomy no it shows you that a human being that is that is augmented by um materials augmented by augmented with tools made of materials that are not biological in origin can achieve that sort of speed and what I said and that's anatomy is different than ours yes but that but they still so have you ever heard of the square cube law yeah I know it's square cube I'm familiar yeah okay and we're not talking about people so yeah you're right an eight foot tall person could never win like a a world record I get that um but it even even more fundamentally than that yeah the bigger you make something it's not necessarily the case that it can maintain the same thrust to mass ratio because it has to um because it yeah but six six to eight no I would going round and round on this one gentlemen I need to jump to the next one we do have a nice one this one's a fun and juicy one and uh I think it's also just relevant and interesting they said in 2020 so about a year ago a lot of the west coast USA burnt did the big foot flee at that time and none of the firefighters happened to see them while they were fleeing or did they die and happen to leave any bodies I don't know they have a lot of room to work with to get away gotcha well it's how did they respond to how did they respond to famine or um drought don't know I don't know okay so I mean so I'm like Pat says they've got a lot of room to work with and no no they know actually no actually no actually they don't so so you know there is a limit to how far a um you know organisms can migrate and still be in it still be in an environment that they understand a lot of being stealthy and um being able to be masters of your um your particular patch of land relies entirely on well understanding that particular patch of land when you move to a new patch of land you have to spend years familiarizing yourself with it whereas you need to eat tonight you need to drink well the um the um elephants um eat uh a couple of tons of food a day um you're telling me that these things weigh what 600 pounds which is pretty light um actually for an animal that that's tall Gigantepithecus is um thought who was 10 foot tall is thought to have been about um wrong that that's 1950s thinking bro yeah they Gigantepithecus was not 10 foot tall it was about 20 bigger than a gorilla okay um can you find to be the citation for that yeah I mean that's weak that's Wikipedia information okay well that's right just then John that's just where I got the information yeah they they were they were thought to be about 20 bigger than a gorilla uh the whole 10 foot tall thing about Gigantepithecus this is ironic conversation by the way or disagreement um is that um that came from 1950s thinking and was uh and was ironically uh regurgitated by I think Grover Krantz from the bigfoot world as he thought Gigantepithecus was a good candidate for uh Bigfoot and it turns out not so much because Gigantepithecus through sequencing now is you know it was more of a the orang family and uh knuckle drager big very big I'll grant you uh but not a biped and not 10 feet tall I mean maybe I mean maybe if it stood up on its legs but not a biped well okay so how much or so a lot of the gorilla ape species they're considered um like not habitual bipeds we are habitual bipeds right we actually do almost everything on two feet outside of lay down and do very few things in a daily routine that would require us to not be on two feet so we're habitually biped bipedal however gorillas apes all of these are bipedal they're called frequent bipedals which means that they use um or yeah they use the biped the frequent bipeds I'm sorry frequent bipeds because they use by their bipedal quite often they can go bipedal but they don't habitually do it they naturally walk around on their knuckles it's not to say that they're not bipedal in like their physiology because they are they can stand on two feet they can walk on two feet however they habitually walk with their knuckles on the ground I agree and again I'm not trying to get into semantics the the 1950s thinking of gigantopithecus was that it was truly bipedal that it walked on two legs and was this big giant thing and and again ironically the bigfoot world loves this theory and and still gobbles it up today very misinformed of current thinking of what gigantopithecus was they're they're stuck in the 1950s thinking it was not a it was not a true bipedal we we pretty much know that now more recent estimates suggest that it was nine foot tall um the it had a female length of 54 centimeters um so if it were to stand up um yeah I mean you know the um I I rather I mean that's certainly big enough to qualify but I think that you know you're kind of missing the point here that these things are actually quite massive structures because once you get up there you know once you get up to that height um because the cross sectional air but the the material strength of your bones um increases with cross-sectional area but the weight that is being put on them increases with the cube right yeah so I agree your bones need to get thicker your limbs need to get thicker as you get taller as you make the animal larger particularly if it's bipedal it's going to need thicker limbs so the so the weight distribution for a human is going to be very different from the weight distribution for uh um uh for uh one of these things and therefore the energy consumption that they go through and you know this was never adequately addressed their calorific intake what are they eating how much of it where are they getting it how are they getting it so reliably and how are they able to do so if they just move all the time you're now suggesting that these are highly nomadic species that aren't sticking to a particular hunting area or a particular grazing area no that they can move very that they're moving very easily without getting lost without for instance deciding that trash cans are worth um are worth uh you know a nibble or two um you know you're deciding that um do they where's the evidence and again that's all anecdotal I mean dude if I had a great video of one eating out of my cooler I'm showing to you right now we have a couple more questions we want to try to jump to this one will steward says Tony I'm sorry logic isn't partial you can't use bias against quote unquote anti science to dismiss logic both could be false tomorrow on new evidence how is that illogical gotta go back to their original question okay so the um uh uh this guy really doesn't understand how formal logic works um uh nor does he understand how science works um the science again and I will repeat myself here is not about dictating what is true and what is not true right science is about looking at the evidence and inferring from it what we can have confidence in and the degree of confidence we have in that conclusion depends on the strength of the evidence that exists to support it and the strength of the evidence that exists to contradict it and I fail to see how this relates at all to um uh to you know uh accepting anti science anti science is about ignoring evidence making excuses as to why particular branches of evidence should be simply disregarded because they happen to be inconvenient to the persons um to the person's ideology that is anti science anti science is about ignoring the evidence science is about um impartially assessing the evidence and to describe the um you know my position as a bias of science against anti science um is a logical absurdity because um bias intro bias is all about error right now what yours what you're implicitly saying is that the anti science is as valid as the science no that cannot be the case because the anti science works in divorce from reality and the science works in close connection with reality science is based on what we observe in reality and what we can infer from those observations right and how we can derive new observations that will expand our understanding anti science is all about making excuses for why particular fields of science are producing results that are incompatible with their belief systems like the deranged nonsense that anti um that young earth creationists come up with um you know well geochronology doesn't work because of this and blah blah blah blah you know um all of this nonsense that is obviously untrue but you you can confect this fantasy world in which observational evidence doesn't count for anything that is the opposite of science that's what anti science is and you cannot describe a preference for science versus anti science um as a bias anymore that you can say that a preference for being a live other being dead is a bias um you know it's it's an idiotic comment gotcha the bat man says tony claims gigantipithecus is 10 feet without giving citation pat claims this is false and tony demands a citation though he never gave one either well i was just looking at the i was just looking at wikipedia and we settled that um so i mean my my actual my actual and the estimates of its height haven't actually changed that much i mean it's down to nine feet there's no particular revision and again as pat has conceded that is and as i would concede that is them standing erect um the um suggest the thing that annoyed me about pat statement was um hand wave dismissal and if you're going to say that um i want to know exact on exactly what basis um but we hashed that out and um and we got through it fair enough again again um i will and and it's not an entirely invalid criticism because that is exactly what happened and again i am not uh an authority on this but if you're just going to um hand wave away something i say be prepared to um back it up um just like i would have had to back it up if i've been called on it and i was absolutely i'm not trying to hand weave anything gotcha this one coming in from will steward says i think this is i would guess for tony because it's the last ones for tony that they say so you can straw man me but i don't know how logic works i'm not anti science you stated i was you i understand you straw man me well um then uh if i'm uh you know if i am failing to engage with your argument perhaps explain it better and then he had another one where he said so you can straw one of the he said no i am stating that scientific consensus and anti science are equally invalid um then you're an idiot we yeah i think i think when they talk about scientific consensus and things of that nature and peer reviewed journals the the point of that is to assess the methodology by which the evidence was taken and the assess by which means the the research group came to their conclusions to make sure that everything was not let's say for instance uh someone putting forth an idea that was never tested and saying that it's true well if they tried to push that through a peer review uh through the scientific consensus of a field like we don't people don't people in the um anthropological world probably don't have a lot to add to the people in the anthropogenic climate change world there's probably a lot of you you know a lot of different differences in the uh too many differences in the field to make one qualified to peer review another's paper for instance but the scientific consensus doesn't come with the idea that we all get together and say this is what we believe we just the scientific consensus is is is there to validate or invalidate the methodology by which the evidence was attained and you know you can you know the um if you want to say that science is equivalent to anti-science um well just look at you know um actually throw you throw your computer out the window because anti-science didn't produce your computer it didn't produce the electricity that is powering your house it didn't produce any medical um procedures that you've received anti-science did none of that religion did none of that science did it and science achieved all this by applying the scientific method impartially so if you're going to if you're going to turn around and claim well you know science and anti-science are just as um invalid no the process of peer review um and moving via peer review and um uh can you know a consensual what consensus understanding of the um of the evidence that is available to people isn't getting us anywhere then you're living in some alternative reality because by doing this we have managed to vastly improve our understanding of um you know our understanding of the world around us and our ability to survive in it and our productivity as individuals and if you want to if you um uh suggest that science has no um particular validity um uh then you're an evolutionary throwback planar walk with his super chat says i'm sorry tony and team but if bigfoot doesn't exist then how do you explain gigantor the largest flat earther i'm gigantor the largest flat earth ever gotcha and the batman says tony demands peer reviewed sources yet cites wikipedia yep i think he just they just the yeah i'm not i'm not an expert i'm not an expert on i'm not an expert in this field so i went with the most convenient um you know i went with the most convenient reference um uh reference work available to me and i will admit that um i will admit that that is not a robust way to do this but i have come into this saying that this is not my area of expertise now if somebody is going to hand wave away um uh something then they better be kind of you know because i'm used to arguing with flat earthers who just turn around and will say well that isn't true um now pat had a pat had a superior understanding um that the that the um high estimates had been revised down but even so the um that was actually irrelevant to my point which was about calorific intake um now uh you know and these criticisms are fair you know what um i have had you know i have had uh uh postdocs uh get formula for off wikipedia and not even bother to notice that actually the units you know the dimension of what they were obtaining using this formula was completely inconsistent with what they were what they were supposed to be getting so i see that i see the difficulty here um uh but i feel like uh perhaps people are focusing a little bit um heavily on that but you know not out doubtless um uh you know i can expect to be uh to be punished on my channel next up this one from wil stuart says and this is probably our last one for the night hopefully we have ernie come back this folks i know the video is scrambled but once ernie i think comes back it'll go back to normal i'll be working on fixing the screen in a moment but wil stuart says again astra man scientific consensus didn't make my ipad technological development did the items in it are undeniably true um no they're not undeniably true we think we understand how the components of an ipad came together um but um at the same time our understanding of the standard model is complete and we can reliably we can reliably manipulate and arrange these components but we cannot say with full certainty that we um that we are completely right because at any point um uh contradictory evidence might emerge um you know the um it could be that the laws of physics that we've understood may change at any point so um and to suggest that the items in your ipad are completely unrelated to um the progress of science over the past several hundred years is again idiotic if you don't understand if you cannot be an honest interlocutor um please desist from bothering me um you seem this guy um seems completely intellectually dishonest um with absolutely no validity to what they're saying and i hope that they're not a subscriber of yours um and i hope never to have to encounter them again but um this is this is precisely the sort of specious drivel that i was dreading um and um you mr stewart should be ashamed that um your fatuous ramblings um have been allowed to infest what was actually a pretty constructive um conversation with um uh to to um bigfoot proponents and i don't agree with um ernie and pat but they were honest they have been honest and courteous and um entirely reasonable the entire way through um and you haven't with that we are going to wrap up and want to say folks no matter what walk of life you're from no matter what your view background christian atheist black white gay straight you name it folks we hope you feel welcome we're glad you're here i will be back in just a moment with a post-credits scene letting you know about epic upcoming debates at this channel and want to say a huge final thank you to our guests it's been a true pleasure to have you thanks so much for being with us tonight all right well yeah thank you uh james i i've told you at the beginning i am a fan of yours i i think what you're doing is great uh that the topics you take on are you know wide variety of topics i think that anybody subscribed to you is is doing themselves a favor to have conversations like these i do want to say thank you to both ernie and pat i know ernie's not here but pat it was great speaking with you like tony said we may not agree and that's totally okay um i i'm just glad that we could have the conversation i could never have with a flatter you know the one that where i can yes talk back and forth and make make you know get my ideas out and listen to actual thoughtful responses to those ideas i will say in final note you honestly haven't convinced me i need i personally would love for bigfoot to exist i would personally love for aliens to exist i'm a huge enthusiast of both of those of cryptids and aliens because they seem like the most mysterious things out there that to me sound plausible you know angels ghosts god all that doesn't intrigue me as much as cryptids and and aliens do but even with my own personal confirmation that's there my own personal biases that are there i still don't see anything that would convince me from your end to change my current belief into a belief that would be you know that bigfoots do actually exist but i appreciate the conversation and hey let's let's have another one one day like i agree and i do want i would love to expand on this conversation with you teen and uh and also uh tony um but it's not about belief that word doesn't belong in my vocabulary when it comes to this discussion because that requires faith and uh that's not what this is about i'm i'm i'm more i'm more like you guys than you might think you know and uh no no no not at all actually i i think you're very much i think you know i have full respect for you man um you know and i don't think that there's that much difference everybody weighs evidence slightly differently you just weigh slightly differently from us that's all yeah but again man that's because i swim these waters like i mean you you guys aren't here you guys aren't swimming in these waters and and so this is kind of an outreach program i'm like hey guys there's something here that is worth like it's worth more like looking at um so i can ask you a question uh and this came from the chat earlier it wasn't a super chat or anything but do we call are we are we off yeah we're live we're live but i want to ask you do we call bigfoot enthusiasts footies feeties or feetsies and that comes from jack guitar uh yeah feces feetsies all right good you got it well you you two are my favorite feetsies out there i'll be back with a post credit scene in just a moment want to say thanks everybody here hanging out with us want to remind you in the comments just as in the live chat want to encourage you to attack the arguments rather than the person so we do want to kind of work on cultivating a a place where people are attacking those arguments rather than individuals any sort of name calling anything like that and so i'll be back in a moment thanks everybody keeps lifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable and be right back thanks everybody for being here really excited as we want to say thank you everybody again no matter what walk of life you're from we are glad you're here and also want to let you know before i say hello to everybody in the chat which i am pumped to do so i it's hard for me to not already say hello because i just want to get to say hello because it's like i i also want to tell you both this upcoming huge event that you were seeing on the bottom right of your screen namely this upcoming debate evidence for god between matt dillahunty and dr kenny rhodes you don't want to miss it folks it's on june 5th and a lot of you if you didn't know so i know that a lot of you this channel in a lot of ways is like a buffet you know you just kind of you come when it's enjoyable and it's kind of like hey you know this topic it's fun then sometimes you're like yeah this topic isn't really uh it doesn't really do it for me and so we don't blame you it's normal not everybody's gonna like every single topic but do want to let you know this folks you do not want to miss out on this upcoming debate as we're excited to have matt come back to the channel and if you were excited to have matt come back to the channel or to have dr kenny rhodes on for the first time do want to let you know the link for this crowdfund that you were seeing on the far right of your screen is now both in our let's see our crowdfund link in the chat as well as in the description box and we absolutely want to say folks we're inviting you welcoming you to say hey if you believe in the vision of hosting debates on a neutral platform where everybody gets their fair chance to make their fair case then folks join us in this crowdfund which is on indiegogo and indiegogo is just like Kickstarter folks last time we had done a crowdfund debate we did it on Kickstarter and indiegogo is awesome it gives us a little more flexibility in how we do things and that's why we switched over and i'm really pumped though you guys i don't know if you're looking at the screen on the far right you see that meter it's already gone up at the very start of the debate it was at 1199 and now it's at 1241 so we are cruising we're at about 35 percent right now of our goal and for us we really matt and kenny we want to compensate them for their time as this is going to be an epic debate not just for their time to debate we also but yeah i mean i would openly say because sometimes people are like hey you know uh i don't know like why would you you don't pay a speaker and the truth is it's like well not only are they spending their time debating but the other thing is they spend a lot of time preparing for the debate and not only that but in a lot of cases like they bring a lot of new exposure to modern day debate and we're not shy about that we're not shy about the fact that we want to grow we want to have a positive influence on youtube and by the way thanks so much for team skeptic for that uh love at the end in in terms of encouraging us in that goal and also thanks to all of our other speakers we do appreciate the debaters as they're the lifeblood of the channel and so i want to say all huge thanks to team skeptic tony and ernie and pat we really do appreciate them and so folks you guys this is going to be epic and so let me just show you if you're new to this if you're like i don't know exactly like what are you talking about james like i haven't been here for a while on screen right now this is the debate we're talking about dr kenny rhodes very popular and an adjunct scholar with reasons to believe he will be debating matt dillahunty and the link for that crowd fund as i mentioned is in the description but also let me show you some other epic stuff here you guys so we have already done a successful crowd fund this is really encouraging like we're excited about this fact namely that you can see on the bottom right of your screen this is the last crowd fund we did in january on january eighth we hosted mike jones and dr michael schermer on whether or not christianity is dangerous it was epic and that had 143 backers which is super encouraging but also 3141 so we smashed our goal last time and so we were like hey well let's set up a bigger goal we can do this like we can absolutely make it and so you guys we've already done it believe me have no doubt we are going to make our goal so this debate can happen with matt dillahunty and kenny it's going to happen folks it's not a question of whether or not it'll happen we are going to make it happen and we're crazy i don't care if i have to do a car wash in here see where i live right now it is freezing cold in good old colorado we've it's like a blizzard out there right now seriously there's a ton of snow falling but i don't care if me and t jump have to do a car wash in it we're gonna meet this goal so folks you can believe me that we're going to make it happen and i want to show you this too because you might be like well i don't like do i have to like jump through a lot of hoops to like join in on this crowd fund well you guys it's really easy you don't even have to put in your email if you don't want to you can just if you want you can sign in through facebook and just you can i'll show you if you want to see the different perks for this kick starter is you guys it is so easy to jump in there and if you've never done it i would encourage you folks hey like this is a great time to do it for the first time if you've never been a part of a crowd fund it's a fun thing where it's like a community effort we're doing it together and here are some of the people you can see on the far right of your screen these are the amounts of people that have already signed up at each tier or perk level so for three bucks the price of a cup of coffee you can help make this event happen so we really do appreciate if people are willing to jump in there three dollars a piece and that's like a piece of cake right and if this channel has ever been entertaining you're like you know it's like it's it's fun you know i've spent a few hours here like it's all right well that helps us that really does help us as we want to host more high profile debates like this one and you can see at the second level help us make this event huge and that refers to the fact that if you give six dollars that helps us also put out ads to make this event huge as we want this to be a gigantic epic event we are thrilled about welcoming people from all walks of life it's a true melting pot of a channel a channel in which it's like hey no matter who you are we all agree on this we want fair debates that's something we all agree on and then if you go to the third tier you can see it there you can have your name on screen in the ticker for the big event or at the end at the fourth tier you can have your name read out loud which is cool because we like to give people the cred you could say the street cred as i say on the streets and then scrolling down just a bit so you can see your name read on screen there is now on the top and then your name read out loud is the next tier the fifth tier an embossed modern day debate postcard so it has like our little stamp on it and then hey but it just for 11 dollars more you could also get a t-shirt of modern day debate it's a beautiful t-shirt for real and you get everything not only at the tier or the perk that you sign up as or sign up at but also everything below that perk which is awesome i mean think about that so for example if you signed up at the next tier modern day debate hoodie you would both get a modern day debate hoodie and a modern day debate t-shirt and the embossed postcard and your name read out loud and your name on screen so really cool the next one up zoom chat with james and that's something that hey i mean it could be if you're like hey man uh let's do it it'd be really fun i could either teach you how do you software to create a channel or a like a show like modern day debate like we do here or it could be if you like want to if you guys want to grill me on something that could be fun kind of juicy for an hour you can record it you can put it on your own channel if you want and then meet and greet with the guests really cool that our guests have both agreed to it they're like yeah we'll do i'm willing to do that and so 20 minutes before the show you could come into the zoom chat and hang out with the guests and myself just kind of hey how was it going like glad to meet you and just like a fun little meet and greet and that's right before the show goes live so it'd be a really cool time and matt and kenny are both pleasant i've gotten along well with them like they're easygoing i really enjoy them and so i i think you would enjoy them as well and so those are the different perks that you can sign up for and so as an example remember if you sign up with the meet and greet with the guests you not only get that but you get all the perks below it too such as the one-on-one zoom chat the hoodie the t-shirt the embossed postcard your name read a lot on screen all of that stuff and so folks if you believe in the mission the mission that we have been trying to pursue on this channel from the start of providing a neutral platform a level playing field where everybody can make their case well we'd encourage you to join us in fulfilling that vision as we are bringing that to youtube and it's going to keep growing guys i mean that's absolutely our goal i am 100 committed to this channel and continuing continuing to try to host fair debates where everybody does get that fair shot and want to say hello to you though as uh thank you guys for i always i'm just excited about this you guys and it's super it's just honestly it's epic so starting with the twitch chat today pump to see you and thanks let's see did i just see are my eyes deceiving me where are you let's see i'm in the twitch chat i'll be right there in the youtube chat hold on one second i'