Crop Rotation - 013 - Meldrum - Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science

A discussion of the book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science by Jeffrey Meldrum.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:02

Let us splash penny too. Times come again. Hard times, hot times come again. Oh, hard times come again.

SPEAKER_05 0:46

Welcome to Crop Rotation, an ad hoc seminar discussing works of art and of intellect. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. This meeting's leader is Josh.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Greetings, everyone. I have been fascinated with the idea of Sasquatch since I was, gosh, in the second grade when I found a book about Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster in my school library. The idea that there was a book that contained photos and information in a library opened my brain up to the idea that this might be a category of information that might be real, which led me to an immediate surprising fact that there was an extremely split reaction from adults in my world about what was real and not real. Now, in St. John's, in our philosophy program, we read a paper, The Upright Posture. We had a lot of conversation about what it means to be a human from this sort of observational perspective and what is a human. And this is an area of science and legend, as Jeffrey Melldrum brings the intersection to light in his book, Sasquatch Legend Meets Science. But we have watched the Patterson Gimlin film and we will discuss how that film and the tracks made by the subject of that film have been critically analyzed by someone who has a PhD in an area of science, whose purview is how apes went from moving one way to another way, as we have established through scientific process using mostly trace evidence of casts put in the ground, fossilized, and kept in the fossil record. There are a lot of scientific methodologies, a lot of processes that he references that he uses to try to build an argument that he has sufficiently demonstrated the existence of an icnotaxonomic member of the real natural order. Now, the question is, are you convinced by this argument? Do you agree to these sorts of terms like an ichnotaxonomic member? You know, are these philosophically substantial categories? Are we looking at a real argument that's been made here? I would be very curious to know if this is actually subject matter that's been covered by Kierkegaard somewhere. I'm sure Matt can tell me. But the crux of my question is given that a scientist has made an argument here, are you convinced that this scientist has made a sufficient argument? And as philosophers, what is your perspective of the reason why we struggle with this question as humans? He he alludes to this that the issue of placing a wild man in the taxonomy is its own particularly difficult task. And so I'd be curious to know from your perspectives as philosophers how he has handled that task from a scientific uh perspective.

SPEAKER_05 3:45

Now, Josh, I think that you're blurring some lines that Jeff Meldrum does not blur. So just because he thinks that it ought to be entered into the ichno taxonomy doesn't mean that it should necessarily be entered into any other taxonomy.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

That's a fair point. That's a fair point.

SPEAKER_05 4:04

So I think he may have sufficient evidence, but all ichno taxonomy is, is we have some tracks.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

We have some kind of thing. Evidence, trace evidence in the environment that it left behind. Mostly tracks. A lot of them are bite marks, some of them are scrapes that have been left, things like that, prints of their body that have been left into soil or something like that, but not the body itself, things like that.

SPEAKER_05 4:33

Yeah. I mean, the the you know, one that I was really interested in for a while was the um the gigantic squid or whatever it's called, Archituthis. And for a while, that only existed in the Ichnotaxonic taxonomic record because they found bite marks and sucker marks on like sperm whales and stuff, unless I'm mistaken. But it was not until pretty recently, or much more recently, when they actually found the body of one that they really they gave it its Latin name, they put it in the textbooks, but before that, it still had this sort of legendary status, and the scientists didn't really give it. I think that Jeff Meldrum in the book is very careful not to overstep what what he can claim accurately as a scientist. But but there is an implicit uh attitudinal payload in him spending so much time on it, and in the way that he talks about it, and in his criticisms of other scientists, etc., that implies that sort of carries this idea that that Sasquatch is much more real than he can actually establish. So he's there's no sentence that he writes where he oversteps, but like there's a lot of you can sort of tell that he believes anyway. And I think you're doing your your introduction, you're doing a sort of similar thing where you're like, you know, this awesome scientist did all this great science and he's got this paper entering these footprints into the taxonomic record. Therefore, do we believe that that you know Bigfoot is somewhere in the in the Pacific Northwest?

SPEAKER_01 6:19

It's like Well, okay, because you've brought us to the crux of the limitation of ichnotaxonomy, is that it can only speak to that thing's existence to the degree to which and in the way in which that particular kind of data emerged in the environment. If it was bumping into some mud, all you can really tell about it is the shape of its butt and maybe the angle at which or how hard it bumped into the butt if you're an incredible scientist. You can't tell a lot, you know, all the other things about it. So it's not proven in the grand sense, but it is specifically proven in the Pacific Northwest, right? If you take that subject in that location to be a sufficient piece of evidence for the thing to be, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

If you assume that it is, then yes, it is enough evidence.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

But you have to assume Is that an assumption, or are you describing like that's just something that you get from the system? If you prove it, this is something that you get, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:22

All of the stuff that he brings together you don't know that it's from the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 7:30

I think you can say there was a footprint here, a footprint here, a footprint here, a footprint here. Probably from something walking. But you weren't there, you didn't see it walk. It could be two different things, and you know, one hopped here and one hopped here. And then you're talking about claw marks from somewhere else. And in Josh, you want it to be connected to the footprints, but why is it connected to the footprints?

SPEAKER_05 8:00

Yeah, I mean, like he he himself gives the example of what he thinks of as a mistaken, mistakenly identified Bigfoot footprint, which was actually a bear running, and just the the speed that that bear was running, its front foot and back foot were hitting the mud in the same place, seeming to make one set of biped bipedal tracks. And he got there and he said, Oh no, actually look at the nails or look at whatever. This is actually just a bear. You guys haven't found Bigfoot. So that's an example of like what Dwight's talking about, where you know, maybe it's it is bears.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

I don't know. Um well, that's not really like it is bears, it is not bears. Surely some of them are bears. That is a empirical fact. You've got to have some amount of bear tracks getting in there because bears do have an odd kind of synchronicity with the human gait in terms of the kind of print that they leave behind. And human beings are basic pattern matchers, so the math says there's going to be bear prints in the set.

SPEAKER_05 9:03

Like that Yeah, and there's probably a bunch of people who say that they saw Susquatch and it was a bear.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

And he is very careful to disentangle what he's trying to say and prove on that point that people are not reliable witnesses. He acknowledges the fact that memory is recreation, not recollection, and that the kind of evidence of testimony that's even relevant is the stuff that comes with a track that has morphological features that are relevant, or you've got a vocalization and a track and some hair, and somebody says something about it. Now you've got things that but on that point, did you agree with him that when you take accounts together and look at them as a data set, that they then have meaning and value and that you can glean meaning from them?

SPEAKER_05 9:53

I have let me tell an anecdote from the book. This was felt really funny to me when I was listening to this book. There's a guy who I'm not I'm gonna forget all the details, Josh. You can probably supply the correct details for this. But there's a guy in California who saw Bigfoot. It might be Patterson Gimlin, right? And somebody else after the fact, no, it was a construction site, and Bigfoot left uh the Sasquatches left a bunch of tracks around this construction site and they took casts of them, right? I think it was before the film was made. And somebody later on claimed that he had been the one to make those tracks with a set of wooden molds that that he had carved like in a wood shop. And his family, that guy passed away, and his family later continued to make these claims and say, we're the we're the great Bigfoot debunkers. It was our relative who made all these tracks, you know, it's all a big hoax. And Jeff Meldrum's extremely correct scientific stance regarding that is if these wooden molds that could make these tracks are real, supply them. Somebody find them in a shed and show them to me, or else I won't believe that they're real, right? That's the correct scientific approach. Now, if Jeff Melldrum felt that way about Sasquatch, he might not have written this book at all.

SPEAKER_01 11:12

Well, I don't think you're making a just barb at him. I think that's an overapplication. He is putting narrative weight on something that he has a lot of evidence for. What you're talking about is how hard you bust somebody's chops over whether or not they're accounting for some guy who's telling a lie, which by the way, there are a num I could rattle off a number of ways to controvert him without even having to deal with his claim. He's got other stuff that keeps him from being the subject in the film. So it doesn't matter what he says about the tracks.

SPEAKER_00 11:43

So was it a separate? I thought I remembered that he got I thought it was those people. He got those people, and they did show the tracks, and they tried to make them and it didn't recreate tracks. Is that was that a separate thing?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

That is a thing that happened at one point. I d I remember watching a little documentary thing about that, but then again, I'm talking about my recollection. So what's that worth? But yes, there are a number of problems, one of them being Jeff Meldrum has gone through a great deal of trouble to demonstrate that there is a coherent and regular biomechanical explanation for the features of the trackway that is described by a uh an Australopithecus to Homo, somewhere in that mix, like using the biomechanical bones and the way that they work, you can make this shape by science, through force, through math, through physics, and we have an entire realm of science dedicated to being good at it that he's trained in.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

It I got the feeling that there are a whole bunch of these tracks. And he pulled out a few and talked about them in particular. But that like, can you like go to the Pacific Northwest now and walk around looking for them and find tracks, make casts of them and send them to Mr. Meldrum, and he'd be like, Oh yes, this is a real one. Yeah, no, he did just uh fake one.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

He did just pass away, but he had been doing that for a long time, and he was actually probably the most he it was him and two other guys, but he was widely recognized as the seminal, real, legitimate scientific expert who was going to be as critical as he could be on everything that came over his desk, but would still give you a fair shake. He was the guy at that. Other people were just as scientific and just as rigorous, but had not put their necks out quite as hard and had not fought against the curve, so to speak. But he actually, this is, and I'll tell this brief story. It's not included in the readings, but it's one of my favorite anecdotes about this body of evidence. A man named Jimmy Chilcutt, who was the head of the Texas Bureau of Investigation's fingerprint analysis department, one of the subject matter expertises that was on his required list of things to be an expert about, was all primate fingerprints. Because, odd as it may sound, you do have to account for the fact that somebody could have an exotic pet and could grab an object and you could have a fingerprint on a scene, and you need to be able to identify what that is, right? So that includes all orangutans, gibbons, great apes. They all have fingerprint scrolls like us, and they all have unique identifiable patterns that immediately allow you to lock it to that species. And Bigfoot footprints have dermal ridging that is unique to its own data set. No other known primate exhibits the patterns that you see in that shape set, and they are consistent to each other. And Jimmy Chilcut found that in the prints that he was looking at and converted himself from a skeptic who was showing up to debunk on purpose to someone who was fully convinced that what he was looking at was a real creature of some kind because he knew what he was looking at and was able to recognize that pattern set. And that was in one. Now he was able to do that in one visit because he had thousands of casts. And the way that that happened was Jimmy Chilcutt sat there for hours and went, ha ha, nothing. Nothing. Wait, huh? Hmm. Okay. And set that aside. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Wow, that pickled my brain. I'm going to put that down and just pretend I didn't look at that. And at the end of it, he had more than a dozen pieces that he himself said, there's something here I'm looking at that constitutes a real critter. And the few of them had pieces of dermal ridging in it that made him completely convinced that a real creature that was the same kind of creature was responsible for all the tracks that he was seeing. So he made that in one pass, but he does have the kind of critical expertise and the training to be able to make that kind of order of observation, in my opinion, I think.

SPEAKER_00 16:14

As as I was reading this book and the selections, I was thinking a lot about how I know things.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

And I followed up and I've looked at some of those casts myself, and I've seen the pictures of the dermal ridging. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

I'm not trying to denigrate what you're doing, but you got it from something, and that person got it maybe directly from Jimmy Chilikoth or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

There were journalists who interviewed him a number of times, and I have read multiple instances of the results of journalists interviewing him because after he gave that first initial testimony about it, you can imagine more people wanted to ask follow-up questions. So I've read both his initial kind of testimony material and subsequent questions that have asked been asked of him. The most of it happened with the first.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

And I'll say again, I'm I'm really trying to avoid uh attacking your position. Sure, sure. I'm trying to represent my position, which does want to withhold belief for the moment. I'm in the middle of the onion and there's layers of onion around me. And the like, you know, in the 70s, a Bigfoot stepped in some mud and left some s ridges. And then somebody came stepped in some sand and left some ridges. And then somebody came along and put plaster of Paris in that and then delivered that to someone else, and then that person stockpiled them, and Jimmy Chilikos came in and looked at them. And all all of this is, you know, there's there are many things which I realize I take as true that are similarly distant from my experience, I would say.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Talking chain of custody.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:43

Well, I mean, chain of custody matters. Yeah. So chain of custody matters absolutely, and I can even point to really exceptionally well documented pieces of evidence that come from groups that are with group accountability following chain of custody procedure, where some of the people in the group are people like nurses and they work for the sheriff's office. Okay, so that kind of chain of custody evidence, I can point to the following kinds of pieces of material evidence that they have produced. Footprint, non-foot other part of the body print into the ground, hair, fingerprint, and face print, as wild as that sounds.

SPEAKER_05 19:34

The fingerprint was that examined by this Jeff whatever guy?

SPEAKER_01 19:39

No, that's a separate case.

SPEAKER_05 19:40

That's the that is a separate set of people using correct chain of custody rules does not have anything to do with the specific that that Dwight is using for his example.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Well, he asked me specifically what kind of chain of custody stuff can you speak to? I was just trying to speak to it at a high level, just to acknowledge it. I'm not trying to get into it.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

I was something slightly less hard science than chain of custody. I'm just talking about literal distance from my experience. Like I've never seen a big foot. So I addressed the wrong thing. I have to talk to you to talk to someone who may have seen a bigfoot.

SPEAKER_01 20:22

I addressed the wrong thing there. I apologize. I should have spoken to this. These two guys that had a camera and filmed the subject that walked across the camera that you guys looked at on the video that was stabilized. That figure was walking across a sandbar. Almost every footfall that it left behind was just a good, clean, solid imprint, right? Which is why they were able to, one after the other, like I think there's like 27 or 37 in a row, just pour plaster of Paris into it. Now, who did this? A group of people who were filming each other, photographing each other. The whole group afterwards got really rigorously taken to town. People were trying to figure out if these people had hoaxed this set of tracks. And no, there was never any kind of foul play or any kind of reasonable suspicion that these group of people had after the film faked the trackway. They're all consistent, they're all clean. There's no, you know, anyway, it is reasonable by chain of custody and the group that did the work to make the track casts as a group, they kind of constitute a sort of chain of custody of the tracks themselves because there's enough people there that you can look at their behavior as a group, cross-reference them afterwards, make sure that the group isn't making it up. And that's a pretty clean thing that you can determine.

SPEAKER_05 21:49

I think Dwight is trying to get to something more philosophical.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Well, sure, but in this case, I'm saying there is still something groundable and something like journalism, right? He reads the news. And cares about it. The news matters to him. The news about things that people say to us are real matters. For some reason, because this is an unproven issue, though, there's this kind of like each individual piece doesn't really land, so to speak, even though there are the same courts kinds of mechanisms of accountability and reliability. That would be my argument.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Yeah, I'm I'm trying to be a little bit more abstract and just try to think of something else. So yeah, let's take the news. I do listen to a news program in the morning and they tell me things. And I would say if I'm not on the ball, I just am like, yeah, whatever, all this stuff is coming in. And it enters my head, and I'm like, sure, whatever. But if they have a topic, you know, if one of the bullet points of the day is something that seems difficult to believe, you know, there is some things I do. One of them is like, consider the source, you know. I picked this news program because I trust them to some extent. But I don't, you know, just assume they said it so it's good. I think it just kind of moves it over towards more likely to believe, you know, an unlikely thing, they said it, I trust them, so I move it over here. But I don't like it's not an on-off switch, it's not like trust, untrust, it's like you know, just scoot it over.

SPEAKER_03 23:35

So the concept you're looking for there is provenance.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Provenance. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

So then do the individual pieces of scientific argument that he makes about the evidence itself that pass all of these scientific tests, do those add up to you recognizing that he's pointing out something real because if it's real, you should be able to make certain claims of it and find that it delivers there. And I believe he does that in this work. Did you not feel that he did that?

SPEAKER_05 24:10

Josh, I can I can give an answer to this. Dwight doesn't want to. I have a metaphor first. Jeff Meldrum himself is unimpeachable. He claims to have footprints, and that's all he claims. He does not claim that Sasquatch definitely exists and should be entered into the scientific record and put in the textbooks. He's very careful, in the book at least. And I looked into what biologists are doing when they taxonomize a new species. They have something called a holotype. And the holotype is a a piece of the body of the creature. And these days, flesh, any c any kind of cells from a creature uh can be used to get the genetic code, sequence the genetic code, and prove that it's a unique species very quickly and cheaply. It's right now that you know people are doing this for their pets, it's it's so easy. Tons of labs can do this for very low cost. So to me, this is not impeaching Jeff Meldrum. This is the culture around Jeff Meldrum, and not what he says explicitly, but his implicit, his implicit stance.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

You were talking about genetics, where you get where you get it.

SPEAKER_05 25:27

So here's it's like imagine a hot dog stand that doesn't have a credit card machine, and a hot dog is a dollar, and somebody comes up to the hot dog stand and wants to buy a hot dog, and they pull out a Visa card, and the guy at the hot dog stand says, I'm sorry, I can't accept that. And then they pull out another Visa card and they say, Look, I've got two of them. Will you accept this? No, I'm sorry, bro. I only take cash. Well, I've got a couple of MasterCards here, and I've got, you know, I've got my bank card for Bank of America. Look, I've got 10 different, I've got a it puts down credit card after credit card after bank card after bank card, and they all are linked to accounts that have tons and tons of of cash in them. The guy at the hot dog stand is like, I'm really glad that you have all this money. But what I need is one American dollar bill. Just go find a cash machine, put one of these cards in it, get out a dollar bill, and bring that to me. So it's the reason I'm using this metaphor is that the the Bigfoot people generally, and Jeff Meldrum is here laying out credit card after credit card after credit card, but he never actually says, I want to buy a hot dog, but he's standing by the hot dog stand putting down a bunch of credit cards. And it's the other Bigfoot people who are saying, who are saying, look at all our credit cards, you should give us a hot dog. And all the other scientists are saying, we would love to give you a hot dog, just bring us cash instead. And cash in this metaphor is actual cells from a Sasquatch's body. Literally, scientist, every scientist would acknowledge the existence of Sasquatch instantly if you had if you sent cells from a Sasquatch to a lab and had them sequenced and put them in a museum.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

They wouldn't. You're wrong. That's not how it works. I completely would.

SPEAKER_05 27:21

They did it for the giant squid. They've done it for other apes. They've done it, they he Jeff Meldrum talks about apes that they did that for recently that people didn't believe in, and then they caught one and they had a holotype, and now they believe in it.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

And then they caught one and they had the holotype. The problem is that what you're dealing with is something. Yeah, well, hang on, but you're now you've you have snuck in a presupposition that I'd like to challenge, and that is that you get to reduce the problem to the issue of dollar versus cash versus plastic. That's fine if you want to say that, like let's talk cash, not plastic. But when you say let's talk cash, what you mean is let's talk DNA, because those cells really what you're talking about is DNA. The problem is we have DNA, and what we don't have is a body type, a specimen type. And right now the tools that we use require kinds of matching that, unless you have the exact specimen, part of the nature of the problem is that this thing is in our general area of DNA. And there are places where they find nests that have been woven into the ground. They take e-DNA samples and the markers that the lab, an independent lab that doesn't know anything about the source, that lab says, hey guys, what you've got is chimpanzees. You've positively registered for ape DNA, right? That match of chimpanzee is not actually specifically chimpanzee. It's just the kinds of base pair matching that they in their particular lab, according to no overarching universal standard, have gotten to a best practice. I'm not saying it's worthless. I'm saying even that is its own set of uncertainty. Now, given that level of technology, what you do see is broadly, repeatedly, when people send DNA to blind labs, what they get back is unknown primate. And then when they say it's a Bigfoot, can you please go deeper? Everybody says, I don't want to do anything with this. That's silly. Stop wasting my time. And that pattern plays out almost a hundred percent, right? Show us that. Send us, send us. I can. I can. Yeah, I can send you that stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The nest stuff with e DNA is very fascinating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:42

I would be interested to see, like, you know, a serious credentialed biologist saying being sent the kind of DNA data that they would accept for any other animal and saying, I won't accept this because you say it's Sasquatch. I don't see that. So show that to me.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Yeah, that's I can spit and find that. Yes. I I will, after the words, I'm happy to find you a number of instances of people who are field researchers trying to work with a lab and being told we don't want to process your sample and we don't want to work with you, we're not interested in working on Sasquatch stuff. That's not what we want to do. I can find a lot of instances of that. I'll send it. Yeah. So but we're trying to get back to something more fundamental, I'm sure. Uh right.

SPEAKER_05 30:27

But well the point of frame. The point of that is that if you want to say, if you're making a catalog of what types of marks get left on the planet, then you are making an icnotaxonic record. You're making an icnotaxonomy. But the biological taxonomy is a catalog of what kinds of animal bodies there are in the world. So in order to make an entry, this is what the Bigfoot people like want is an entry in the textbook for biological taxonomy for Sasquatch. But that is a list of animal bodies that you can go and examine in a museum, and ones that we can infer directly from fossils, but you know, remains of the animals themselves. And so the scientists who are in charge of that catalog quite rightly say, I'm sorry, we need a holotype. We need a body in order to put it in our catalog of bodies. Why, quite rightly, though. Habeas corpus because it's not a list of things that made marks or things that people saw. It's a list of bodies that you can put in museums. And I think this is actually interesting because I think it shows how the science scientific procedures are not really built for individual human beings, but are built to help things like states and universities and corporations and big organizations that have to coordinate lots of people. What science is for is to help them see the world because you have to coordinate a whole lot of people. So your catalog of biological entities has to be full of biological entities that you can go and see in a museum because all these people have to coordinate on it. So anyway, if I saw Bigfoot, I would believe in it, but I haven't.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Well, it gets worse than what you're talking about, Jeff Meldrum.

SPEAKER_05 32:16

No, I sorry, I I think it's completely appropriate for organizations that that mean that people have to coordinate with each other to have a special epistemology that that works for them and helps them coordinate. And it's completely appropriate for scientists and universities to apply that epistemic standard to their work. And when they encounter, you know, Bigfoot stuff that doesn't have the type of evidence that they're looking for, they're quite right to reject it.

SPEAKER_03 32:44

So I'm gonna put your language that you just used, Matt, which I think is probably crossing the Matt Josh barrier with a little bit of inflammation in a slightly more neutral way, which is uh using your hot dog stand, whatever metaphor, which is cool man, lots of money, but hot dog club requires cash. You're saying, and I think I don't think you're wrong to say this, you're saying that it's one thing to have what I'm gonna call second order evidence. That's that's fine. Like that's not a bad thing. But first order only club requires first order because they're a first order only club. And if you have another club that's second order only, they can exclude the first order people saying, I need prints, man. Don't give me bodies. And you can also have one that takes two. I'm I'm seriously, it sounds amusing, but it's because we we classify them in like certainty. But it's if you take it purely, just rationally, they are simply categories of thing. And you can accept or reject whichever categories you like, and that's the club. The appropriateness that Matt's talking about is because of the kinds of things they're doing, which has a certain amount of necessarily consensual measurement for coordination. That's what Matt's saying. They have that as the club constraint.

SPEAKER_05 33:58

They're trying to figure out how apes evolved or something. So they want to do a survey of all the bodies of a certain type. So they need to be able to, on their schedule, go to the various different museums that house examples of those types and access them. And that currently just is not possible for Bigfoot. So those scientists can't, like in good conscience, put Bigfoot in their books because if you wanted to, you know, do your do your survey of all the different ape bodies, there would be no museum to go to to access the Bigfoot specimen.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

But it's worse than that. The ichnotaxonomists have been presented with this evidence, and Jeff Meldrum himself took the evidence to multiple ichnotaxonomic groups, publication journals, what have you, and they to his face said, No, we won't publish your stuff. Bigfoot might be a wet juicy hamburger thing running around, and we only want to have to do with things that are dead and only in the fossil record. Leave us alone, right? They they recognized and admitted that he had satisfied their rules as institutional science knowledge gatekeepers, and they didn't want to do it because it would be silly.

SPEAKER_05 35:17

Because it doesn't match their needs, because they only want fossils. This is fossil club.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Right. But that's the thing. They've decided that it's fossil club because all of them have found fossils so far, and they don't have enough junior wildlife space cadets to go outside.

SPEAKER_03 35:34

That's the literally the only reason. I mean this, and I genuinely mean this, and this is my actual disposition. The following thing. I personally hold this position, so I'm don't take it as me trivializing. Just make a different club. Sure. He did. As one who myself finds that there is not much room in the world anymore for whatever. I'll find a good name for it. I thought of it today earlier, but there's there are heavy institutions and orders and thick lines not to cross. As one who finds that quite uncomfortable, go make your own thing. Good for him that he did. What I'm saying is I really mean actually good for him that he did, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:12

What I'm saying is Don't complain that you're not in the other clubs.

SPEAKER_03 36:16

Yeah. I mean, you can complain if your mission is to get into the other clubs and kind of change them and let women into the citadel or whatever. But just know that what you're doing at that point is club breaking some kind of science. You're just doing your own science, they're doing their thing, and never the plane should be.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

I disagree in this case. What they hung a shingle out and said they were is one thing, and then they just decided arbitrarily, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I we don't want to have anything to do with anything that might be alive.

SPEAKER_03 36:46

Josh, nobody means the words they say.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

Well, sure. Nobody. Sure. But at this point, we're we are talking about scientists, so hopefully holding scientists to all lawyers. Well, I mean, hopefully you mean that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because you know, there has to be some kind of value in scientific process. Like there is a certain amount of science that is real, the science itself.

SPEAKER_03 37:13

I'm just talking about the words themselves. Let me let me say it this way. You know how LLMs hallucinate and they do I'm bringing up LLMs because they're word-based. They're large language models, right? They are just using phrases that are commonly used together in various ways and variations and so forth. It's a math thing, pattern matching, whatever. The reason they're so realistic is because that's what people do too. People are not thinking in your way.

SPEAKER_01 37:39

Are you saying that you do find the idea of Bigfoot convincing and that you're acknowledging that the reason why people don't acknowledge it at large is because they're just out of touch with reality?

SPEAKER_03 37:50

No, I'm that well, I wasn't addressing that. I was saying making a much more strict point, which is there's there's this club issue as I was calling it. And just from a my strict point is these they're separating on these club grounds, like, you know, no Homer's allowed or whatever, nobody named Homer, right? And that's just a fact of things. But then you said they hung a shingle, they said that they're scientists, they whatever. Even the people who say scientists don't know what science is. You talk to them. It doesn't make any sense. So getting lost in the look what society's doing. They're talking about like science and they're believing this one group. Fine, you can object to that, but you're just more or less objecting to all the people running around screeching, aren't screeching the ways you like. Okay, fine. I'm not addressing my belief or not in any of that.

SPEAKER_01 38:40

I'm just saying, well, yeah, but I'm also addressing it because Matthew brought up the proposition of somehow scientists and what they believe are to be considered a standard of reliability and realness and stuff.

SPEAKER_03 38:53

They're their own standard. They're just certifying themselves as with any other large group. That's fine.

SPEAKER_05 38:58

I mean, I think um I'm gonna push back on Sir Robert a little bit here and say that there are scientists and then there is science, and science is a machine, a dead mechanical machine made of words and and also literal machines. And people, scientists, run the machine, and they can run the machine well or poorly, but if the machine is run well and actually works as it's supposed to, it does produce highly reliable objective data of a particular kind with particular limits. And so, and so, like the scientist has this big machine of science, and it has museums and uh and and journals and like procedures and like rules for who can come in the lab and when, and secretaries and email addresses, and all this mechanical stuff, rules that people are supposed to follow, all this stuff. And that machine takes the chaos of the planet Earth and turns it into like highly structured data that we can have a high degree of confidence that nobody's trying to manipulate us with it. But we have to make sure the machine, you know, there have to be guardians to the machine. And what I'm saying is the guardians of the machine seem to have correctly said, I'm sorry, our our biological specimen taxonomy machine only accepts biological specimens.

SPEAKER_03 40:29

I agree with everything you said, and it is one narrow slice of it. That is the people who believe that they should not qualify the word science. They shouldn't say empirical science, it's science. They shouldn't say forensic science, it's science. And in the if you ask the empiricists about the forensics, they're gonna, if you don't if you doubt without naming it, they're gonna talk about them as quacks. And then if you say, no, that's forensic science, they're gonna, well, of course, of course, you can't do empirical, whatever. And then the historians are gonna do their thing and they have a different machine. I'm not disagreeing with any of that. But generally speaking, by and large, the ones I've met, plus you know, what I mostly hear people yammering about, with some very, very excellent exceptions, but most of them are not meaningfully thinking through things. They're they got a nice narrow focus, operating their cogs in the machine. They're doing a kind of, you know, the movie Brazil, kind of filling a niche and doing some junk and grinding the sausage they hope is sausage. So I totally agree with you. I just pushed the metaphor really far, just there, which I it's fine with me, but I totally agree with you, Matt. There is a machine. It's a real machine. It's doing real things, it's ordering part of a slice of the world. And almost everybody in that machine, because they get to wear the really, really big priest robes because you can make certain kinds of machines and stuff. Oh, yeah, almost all of them will smile and ignore you and knife you in a back alley.

SPEAKER_05 41:57

This is why I was careful to distinguish between science and scientists.

SPEAKER_03 42:01

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_05 42:02

I heard very often, like a whole bunch of scientists will get together and wave their scientific credentials to tell you extremely cruel and unreasonable and dangerous things. And they will attempt to use, you know, full scientific authority to do that. And that's why we have to know the machine to be able to say, hey, this letter in the New York Times, these people are scientists, they're wearing the robes and the hats, they have the letters after their names, but the actual machine that they claim to speak for is not saying what they're saying. I totally agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

But it seems to me like things that are real will leave behind a lot of different ways to observe and prove that they're real. They'll be uh concurrent with reality from multiple different angles. Presumably, you should be able to try as many different angles as you want. And as long as there isn't some reason why it doesn't show up in the data set, it should show up there, right? A ball should be able to be hit with a any kind of bullet, whatever. Uh forget it. Uh so if a problem like are there relic hominids has been asked scientifically, you should be able to say, well, that's a hypothesis. They're out there. If they are, they should be leaving evidence. Can I find evidence? Yes. Can I prove that this evidence is not left by any other known species? Yes. Do they all concurrently point to one particular subspecies of animals? Also, yes, there are a number of proofs in there about the orientation of digits, right? In the animal kingdom, we have math and patterns that define all known orientation of digits for known animals. There are a number of orientations to these bones that only things in the Australopithecus to Homo genus exhibit. And these casts have those shapes. They you can with math show that, right?

SPEAKER_03 44:10

To play devil's advocate on that, because I'm this is an area where I like to be really, really strict in my thinking, right? Um, are there these animals? If there are, there's evidence of them. I I'm super glossing what you said at the beginning. That doesn't answer whether there are animals of that kind. It answers where whether there are whether there is evidence of them. Just being very strict, we say, okay, there is evidence of something, looks like something real. Does that mean that the animal that you're thinking of exists? The might be? No, it very well could be. That's what I'm going to call here again a second order deduction. First order deduction is there's a thing that leaves this kind of print. The print didn't come from nothing, it came from something. It leaves this kind of print. That is a real thing. If you have the body, or just as an example, you get to make a first order deduction about there being living versions of it because there's a dead one and they don't spring up. You can make a second order deduction about other things from the body, and you can say things like, they live this way, they do these things, and then they're just, you're just gonna find out most of the time you're you can be pretty right, the machine will do well, sometimes it needs to be calibrated and you'll do wrong. When I was a kid, if you said anything about dinosaurs having feathers, dinosaur scientists, what are they called? Paleontologists? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

Well, it depends on what branch of science, dinosaurology you're studying, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 45:32

Those people would point and laugh at you and try to make sure everyone else did too. And now they'll do the opposite. If you say, no, but they're the scaly dinosaurs. Oh, you frickin' rube, just because they're, you know, they have whatever human effects they have. My point is to say those deductions are second-order deductions. You can't, it's not actually immediately from the evidence. And so all of the impressions, the footprints, the whatever, the first order deduction is here's a print, there's a thing that matches the print. The second order deduction is you start piecing those together and coming up with bigger, more coherent things. That doesn't make it a wrong deduction. Just recognize that it's second order, it's less certain. The provenance I've got to do. I disagree.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

I disagree. There are second-order observations whose nature is not of an observational empirical reliability nature. The content itself has logical, like real framing and structuring and implication to other real things. So multiple different second-order observations that all pertain to second order deductions. Logical, sorry, second-order deductions. Sure. Second order deductions that have content that immediately rationally pertain to a larger network of real things can have a higher order meaning than just a second-order observation, if the nature of the second order deduction is something that can be rationally located in a larger frame.

SPEAKER_03 47:01

The problem is that that precludes discovering new things. So what happens is if the I'm I don't remember the exact thing you said, but the digits of the fingers or whatever is Yeah, digital orientation, yeah. Sure. Yeah. If that's for the HOMO and what was the other one? Australopithecine. So you got, we say those two do. And so we have found some more that do. Our second order deduction is therefore obviously this is something in this vicinity, but what that precludes you from being able to do is find a third category that also has it. You won't be able to find one that's not in there because your second order deduction is telling you we know these two has to be in there. What if there's a third one? What if there's a platypus that makes milk and is not a mammal? What if there's, you know, whatever? It does bar you from doing that if you preclude the other ones.

SPEAKER_01 47:48

But why are you forcing the misapplication of Occam's razor and bringing up in categories and people that don't need to be brought up for the pro like? I just I think that it's possible to observe that those second-order deductions have logical implications that can show you things, and you should recognize that they're only things that you're putting together and something else real could come along and knock you out sideways. That doesn't keep you from also seeing something real, because that's part of the point of all of the math behind all the rigorous, incredibly detailed math that we keep behind the bones in all of these fossils, and how those shapes very, very gradually and very purposefully change over time, and how we can apply mathematical models of force and physics to how those news to move. Fossils change gradually over time. Well, I'm just saying we have examples of lots and lots and lots of different incremental variant ratioed instances of the same sets of bones in different morphologically presented species. Whether they are a species or a subspecies or whatever, it doesn't matter. We have over time the same sets of bones in different ratios. That's all I'm trying to say. Whether they're species or not species or anything.

SPEAKER_05 49:16

I think you might be trying to there's a part where he compares the different ratios of the foot bones in different species of hominids. Is that what you're thinking of? Because the fossil record generally has like one type. Like the fossils don't gradually change.

SPEAKER_01 49:34

Well, what you're describing is the argument around where the label changes. The fact is that we have lots and lots and lots and lots of bones in different shapes, but the essential pieces are clearly the same bones in the same shape, just in slightly different ratios, right? Whatever mechanism of creation or evolution you want to attribute to it.

SPEAKER_05 49:58

You're talking about different species of hominid creatures.

SPEAKER_01 50:01

If a chimpanzee and I hold our hands up to each other, you can articulate, you can go bone for bone, and we have the same bones on our body.

SPEAKER_05 50:09

By lots and lots, you mean like a couple dozen.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

No, like if you go through all the bones in my hand and all the bones in a chimpanzee hand, they are isometric. We have the same bones, they're in different ratios. We can even look genetically and we can see. Right. The sameness is that you have an isometric map of members, and that the only difference is isometric mean that. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay, I've these are my two hands, and you can go digit for digit and you can map the bones in those digits that are the same. If you pulled up a chimpanzee hand, you can break it apart by digit, by whole bone that has a joint to another bone, and you can map those members of this shape digit, digit, subdigit, subdigit, subdigit, tarsal, tarsal, subtarsal aspect, subtarsal aspect.

SPEAKER_03 51:08

Yes, it's a corresponding structure. Different maybe size or shape slightly. Right. But that's the idea. Right.

SPEAKER_01 51:13

Okay. Yes. They all the members correspond and they have slightly different sizes.

SPEAKER_05 51:22

And he says, look, this one is the smallest, and the bones are this, these ratios, and then he goes to the next one, and this one is slightly bigger with the bones in these different ratios, and he goes bop, bub, bup, bup, up over like like six of them. And he says, if there was a Sasquatch, it would be here off to the right at the extreme end of the spectrum of ratios that I've established. What I'm asking you is you seem to be saying that there were like a thousand of these and that it was in the fossil record. So it seems like you're describing something different than what Meldrum was talking about in the book.

SPEAKER_01 51:55

We can prove across multiple different species across a lot of time that the same fundamental bone structure is being maintained by these species that we are putting in this set, right?

SPEAKER_05 52:08

Yeah. So now we have like two dozen species.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Right. Okay, great. And what we have are a lot of different tracks of these things moving in different media. And so we have mathematical information about their weight and biomechanics because of the physical properties of the substrate that they ran in. We can apply that level of scientific rigor to these objects and observe real, coherent physics happening. Right. So what you're saying is Am I taking crazy pills, or isn't that enough to say that something is real?

SPEAKER_05 52:50

Okay, so what you're saying is we have lots of different known species that leave tracks, and you can abstract a law, which is the relationship between the bone structure and the tracks. This is what Jeff Meldrum has a couple of chapters on. He has he has understood the natural law that governs the relationship between bones and tracks. And he has said we have these bones and they leave these tracks. Here's how you can tell what kind of track will be left by what kind of bone. So after having established that natural law with like six different species of apes, do we have actual, you know, who we have seen it? Because the fossils, we have not seen those creatures in motion. Right.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

We didn't see them. Well, we do have for those six species in that we have filled.

SPEAKER_05 53:34

Well, we have like, you know, six or seven species of apes where he can say this type of stride and this type of bone structure produces this kind of track and creates some natural laws. And then once he's established the law, he's inferring from that the existence of the kind of creature that would produce the kind of tracks that he's seeing. I get it. I think am I understanding you correctly? Because before I want I respond, I want to make sure that you think that I've understood you.

SPEAKER_01 54:03

You're representing this. Yes, I agree.

SPEAKER_05 54:04

Okay, great. So I'm gonna make a distinction between my life and my work, right? In my life, I don't do this, but in my work, I have to coordinate with a whole bunch of other people and I have to work with a machine. I'm a computer programmer, so I work with other people and we have to coordinate. And also I work with a big machine that doesn't care how I feel. If I write a bug in the computer code, then the computer doesn't do what I want. Right? Every single I write bugs all the time. I write messed up code that doesn't work, or I encounter other people's bugs, right? Every single time there's a bug, what that means is that I thought I knew the law that the machine would follow because I I write code and that produces output, right? Like how the skeleton produces prints, right? So I think I can go from prints to skeleton, but I'm wrong. And I'm wrong a lot. And so what I have to do if I'm diagnosing bugs and fixing bugs in computer code is I have to ignore what I think the law is because I'm wrong about the law. I get it wrong a lot. And there are new cases, things that I don't know that I because I'm constantly learning new things about the machine. So I have to modify the the law that I think I know, right? And this is what science is doing as well. So I am in my work, which again is a different type of thing than my life. I am married to this epistemology of I don't care. And I think all good computer programmers are, I don't care what I think it should be doing. I need to get the code to actually report what it really is doing. I need to, I need it to spit out its memory at a point in time and tell its story for real. I need the real thing. I can't diagnose the bug on the basis of the laws that I think govern the thing's behavior. I need to see the thing's actual behavior. I'm having to be a scientist about this code because it's a difficult thing. And so I think, I think that if it's me in real life and I'm dealing with problems or whatever, I don't do this. But all those scientists that are rejecting poor Jeff Meldrum, they're at work. They're doing what I'm doing. They don't, they're very skeptical because it's supposed to actually work. See what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_01 56:21

Isn't what I'm talking about exactly what you're talking about? You're trying to get out of the assurance inside of my own personal model space and really deal with actual flows of empirical information that give you real reference to the problem.

SPEAKER_05 56:42

If I was computer programming the forest and the and the Sasquatches and the uh and the footprints, I would refuse to believe in the Sasquatch until you brought me a real Sasquatch.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

But you just cheated and cut to the end. Isn't isn't that statement the ultimate refutation of the premise of the problem?

SPEAKER_05 57:02

I'm saying I'm saying uh Yeah, yeah. I don't reason from output back to code when I'm debugging. Because that's how I make bugs. That's how I make mistakes. Right. Skelet like animals make prints.

SPEAKER_02 57:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 57:18

The scientists are not willing to reason from prints to animals. Jeff Meldrum is not Jeff Meldrum, because he doesn't do it. But but the Bigfoot scholars that are overstepping are trying to, they're instead of taking taking natural, taking specimens and deriving laws from them, they're doing another step, which is they're taking, they're taking, sorry, instead of taking specimens and then tracks and deriving laws from the specimens to the tracks, they're trying to take the tracks and run the laws backwards. And that's a completely different thing. This is what Sir Robert is trying to say. Sure. Running from tracks. Who cares about the specimen?

SPEAKER_01 57:56

Sure. So who cares about procedure? Who cares about them? Who cares about scientists? Forget about scientists. Nobody cares about them. None of us respect them. They should all should be disregarded for the conversation. You three actually read the papers and actually read the book and saw the video of the thing that left the footprints that a lot of science has been done around. And those footprints have a whole bunch of real scientifically verifiable features about them. They're obviously real objects that got made by something real because of the convergence of so very many real things that have to be real about real things that aren't real if they're not real, right? Things are either real or they're not, which means they either hold up to a basic explanation of what they are or they don't. And we don't have a really good handle on what that basic explanation is because we're phenomenal logical beings, right? That's rough. But here we've got multiple convergent types of information, different media, a lot of accountability around all the issues of people because they're you can't, you're either pulled off a hoax or something real happened, and it's too complicated an issue for it to have been hoaxed. None of these people have the anatomical wherewithal to do this. So I'm just trying to say like, is there some am I missing something? You guys are talking about being cautious, but what I've shown you guys is like seven ways from Sunday, a real thing that left real objects that have real scientific properties, which is what makes me think that it's a real object in a real place, is because they have real scientific properties.

SPEAKER_03 59:42

For whatever it's worth, Josh, I haven't committed to being persuaded or not persuaded, believe, not believe. I've only been talking about logic, like the process of logic and how reasoning goes and some sociological factors. Just just to tell you, those are the I've been narrowly focused on those two things.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

Sure. And I'm really curious, do you guys think, as philosophers and scientists, people who have competent minds who know how what is real works and proof works, does this stuff constitute proof that a real thing is leaving real trace evidence?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:21

So uh I will admit that you are way overselling my brain. Um I am a much more lazy thinker than all three of you put together or individually. Yeah. Not put together, because that would I guess unless the I don't know. Uh I am very lazy. I will say uh let me tell you a story. When I was a little kid, whooping cranes, there were like 41 whooping cranes in the 40s or something like that, 15 whooping cranes in the forties. And now there's five hundred and something apparently. When I was a little kid, we went to the beach a lot. And apparently, every summer, no, every winter, we went in the summer, every winter, whooping cranes come like really close to where I went to the beach as a kid. At some point, our family got enough income that we would occasionally go to the beach in the winter, and we started going to this place, and whooping cranes are still pretty rare. Anyway, what I'm trying to get with this is some people said, Hey, go to this place and you'll see you may, they didn't say you will, they said you may see whooping cranes. So I didn't make the decision, I was drug along the first time, yeah, uh uh unwillingly. I was like, okay, cool, let's go see the whooping cranes. We went and we saw whooping cranes. What I read about Sasquatch does not raise to the level of me pre seeing a whooping crane, where I'm like, sure, I'll go on this road trip to see. I I have no desire to like go to the Pacific Northwest and find this stuff. I'm not saying that they, you know, that they don't exist, so that when you know they do find a body, Josh, you can't come to me and say, ha ha! I told you. I'm just saying and and and you're you're talking about these second order things, do they do the bone ratios and everything add up all of that to me, and this is my lazy thinking. I'm just like, I don't know, man, it's very complex, and I don't have enough time in the day to engage in any of that at the level that I would have to be to, you know, to understand it. It's it's you're literally you're I think that there is possibly, because I know you that there is possibly something more to it than this, but to me it is in my brain the same as what's that called argument from authority. There may be more than authority there, but the argument's never gonna break out of that level of argument until something in my soul changes, and I'm like, oh, I want to engage this at a level. So like adding up more and more of the ratios of the bones, and and my brain just over that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:31

You can you can find if you go to the muddy beds in Africa, you can find a smaller version of the exact same shaped foot doing the same thing, making the same ridge in the middle of material that each and every one of those Patterson Gimlin tracks makes. And you can see that it is clearly the same shaped foot, same size foot, same kind of feature happening, and that it is different from us and the same as all the rest. Even if you can observe clean and clear, like it coherently and cleanly just belongs to this set of other things that are real, does that kind of belonging to a set of other things that are real, is that the kind of thing that makes it more reliably real to you? Or does the fact that it belongs to a real set still that's just kind of something that might be one of a number of synchronicities that isn't real?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:29

For me, it's get in a car, drive over there, and there are whooping cranes, and I saw a whooping crane, and I was like, wow, whooping cranes exist.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:38

I will give you my stance, which is um I think there's something that we don't understand, or more than one things that we don't understand that is making marks and causing people to have experiences that we don't understand. That is that is one category of thing. It's like, here are question marks. Like there's something there that I can't see it in the zoo. And then there's another category of thing, which is animals in the zoo or specimens in a museum. And I am unwilling to reason from the mystery side to the specimen side. And I think and I think that's what most of the scientists who reject Sasquatch are doing as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:28

Is that what this is doing? This is arguing from evidence to uh conclusion, not mystery to whatever.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:36

That is that's my stance, is that uh there's there's stuff out there that uh we don't understand, and it leaves traces and it leaves traces in people's memories, and it leaves traces on the physical world. And it doesn't belong in the category of of things in a museum or zoo until you actually get one in the museum or zoo. I want to attach to this stance a further stance. Which is you should get a drone that sees an infrared and can shoot tranquilizer darts and go get one.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:11

I don't want to do that. I think it's a bad idea to get a holotype outcry the day that one shows up, unless it was of old age involuntarily, because I think they have some of them are gonna die of old age.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:23

Go hunting for the bodies.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:25

Like, you know, this is the dead bodies that have to be alive.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:28

I'm not Canadian. I don't have a casual attitude towards harvesting the elderly. This is okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:35

I mean, so here's the so okay, but but you don't don't claim that you want us to have the kind of certainty that would come from having a Bigfoot body in a museum if you don't want to put a Bigfoot body in a museum. You agree with me that this is not the kind of thing that you can see in a museum. So that's the right category for it. Something that's that's out there and mysterious, but it's not the kind of certainty where you could go and see it in a museum or a zoo if you wanted.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

Fair enough. I would be genuinely interested in hashing out the appropriate application of Occam's razor to the issue of whether or not us having a holotype available is a matter of a finger being placed on the scale. Right. Let me present this basic argument. In all the power structures of man, federal government, state government, local county, whoever, sheriff, postman. Please, you tell me who anywhere in there has any reason or desire or motivation to take on the issue of Bigfoot. The way that I see it, if you look at it from a matter of money and power, up at a certain high enough level, someone in government is going to have the unlimited resources and the need to keep the system moving and will therefore keep the system moving in some way that will not involve disclosing Bigfoot. That's the basic premise of the idea.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:02

Josh, Josh, how does that relate to I'm sorry, I'm the names are alluding me for at the moment, so I'll just have to describe who I'm talking about in the book Bigfoot Science, whatever the name is. They were one of the evidence that evidences that they gave that it is not unreasonable that there are as yet undiscovered type specimens. Stuff like us, right? One of the evidences is that there have been discoveries of new ones in the 90s and 2000s. Right? Why would the government not suppress them if the government would suppress this one? What's so special about BigFit?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:43

It's a fair point. Other things are rare. You can use that as a general counter to the need for anything. You really only need to bring it up if you are trying to argue for certain kinds of population densities that some people do want to argue for based on frequency of sighting, but you would have to get to that point. Yeah, that's fair.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:07

I was just asking like a there would there was no subtext. What's that?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:10

No, I agree with you.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:11

No, no, there's nothing to agree with. I'm asking the question. I'm not making a statement.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:15

Well, one of the things that Bigfoot constitutes something that they would actively want to keep from the public, whereas no other species matters at all. Why would they do that? By the nature of the subject. Why if okay, so if you're talking about like, so let's look at the concept of what it is. What about that is good to admit to the country that you have been lying about and suppressing the existence of the city?

SPEAKER_05 1:09:42

What does the government even have to do with it? When did the government get involved?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:46

Well, because there's this because there are a number of what people will call anecdotal and reject them instances of bodies arising, and the bodies get consistently taken away. And that is those explanations get consistently explained away as, hey man, people tell stories. But the problem is that they show up in a consistent way, and they are, I think, a consistent data point within the set. And they do kind of account for stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:17

So just um let me reframe this as an answer to my to try to understand that as an answer to my question and tell me if I'm saying this right. My question is why would they suppress Bigfoot and not whatever other creatures got uh discovered in the 90s or whatever? And I think I think your response is the same as it's it's uh isomorphic.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:42

I'm sorry, hold on. Just Sir Robert, can you pause for one second? I just want to get clear what we mean by suppress. So so in the in the world, the government has very little to do. Yeah, I can give you a 10-second answer.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:55

I can give you a good 10-second answer in Sir Robert. Before you do that.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:58

Before we do that, before you do that, whatever suppress means, the claim is that there's going to be some government wanting to suppress them, and also that some other things were discovered that were not suppressed. So let we'll talk about suppress in a second, but I just mean whatever would be different between the two that makes one a discovery that they were okay, something something. Yeah. And I think your answer, Josh, tell me if this is a correct characterization, is I don't know what the difference is, but they seem to be doing it.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:24

Well, I do know what the difference is. One of them is something that is scary to people, and the other isn't, right? Bigfoot is a cryptid, it's a monster, it's a scary idea. Every other thing is just an animal. Nobody would upon finding out about spotted owls, is going to divert trillions of dollars in money as multiple different economic streams are affected by people sociologically reacting to the disclosure of a cloaked, fast moving, intelligent, at least semi-predatory, bipedal relicominant in North America in non-trivial members.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:09

Can you can you can you talk about this predatory?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:13

Right, sure. So one of the first go ahead. Yeah. So if you want to open up and tomatical and suppression. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So one thing is we've got tons and tons of kills of elk all across North America that have had their necks grabbed and snapped backwards with no claw marks anywhere on the body. There's no bite marks, there's no claw marks, they've just had their necks snapped. We've also found mule deer and whitetail deer with this kind of a predation pattern. That's one of a number of different pieces of empirical evidence that I would point to that shows that North American Sasquatch predate. Now, one of those would be the incredibly common phenomenon throughout all hunters and hunter anecdotes of these things taking the kill. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people who don't want their stories to be told, wish that this hadn't happened to them, give the basic fact of the story of something big and hairy took my animal that I killed. Right. So they're not vegetarians. And you can basically point that out through just raw sociological data. You can also get it through scat. There are a number of researchers who have found their scat and have found bones, hide, remains of deer in their scat. Now, has that scat been DNA proven to be Sasquatch scat? No, you're right, it hasn't, but it does have unique morphological, well, not morphological, it has unique features from bear scat. It does resemble, for all the world, hominid scat, and it is formed by the same obvious basic intestinal apparatus as a hominid, not a bear. And it comes out in the for the shape and the size. And then, like I said, we have a lot of evidence that these things eat animals and not animals. So they're not carnivores, they're omnivores. Now, they're fast as hell, and if they're eating deer, you tell me, man, how are they eating? Running and eating things and walking slowly and eating things seem to be the two basic ways that they eat. That's scary to me. It's not a vegetarian, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:14:31

Josh, so they they put wolves back in Yellowstone.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:35

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:35

Everybody wants to see the wolves. Sure, sure, sure, sure. The ranchers hate the wolves. But those are the ranchers are mad about the wolves. But people, the people who like pay to go to the national parks and who vote to make sure that the funding for the national parks remains, those people really want to see big predators. Yeah. People fly to Africa to see lions and stuff, just to see them. I think, man, if you had a Bigfoot, if you had a Bigfoot in your national park, you're made in the shade. I think you have misunderstood. You are telling us a really weird, unlikely story about how the government would feel about Bigfoot.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:16

A number of researchers have independently gone to Miyaka State Park and interviewed the people there and the rangers there. What you can see consistently is this same phenomenon over and over. People see skunk apes, they see Sasquatch there at the park, they tell the park rangers, the park rangers don't do anything about it, and they say thanks for telling us. And that happens over and over again. That every park ranger who has ever come forward and has talked about their experience of observing something that they can't explain and then trying to account for it in their professional context has been consistent. And they've said, my superiors are not interested in hearing more about this. They're not curious to take up the cause and they just government works this way. People just bear.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:09

This behavior is consistent with there not being sufficient evidence for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:14

Well, just think it's consistent with psychology, not evidence. People don't think about evidence. People think about it the way they think about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:21

Well, by citing evidence. This doesn't sound like people to me. I think if you could be the Bigfoot park, you would want to. I I I don't see why the government would want to want to suppress the existence of Sasquatch.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:36

It's a very cool thing. And you get commensurate local level. Hey, people put a Bigfoot sign on stuff. Call it Bigfoot Week. Nobody's against that. No park is coming out and doing anything about any of this. The best you get is that every now and then you get a weird ranger that actually writes the accounts down and puts them in a folder. That's the most you ever get. And they get in trouble for that. And that folder eventually just gets destroyed. And the wasteback.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:23

And they told this all this story of how terrifying this bear was. And the authorities got scared that this bear would be a man killer. And the bear's famous. And people going to Glacier want to see bears. They want to be at a distance from the bears, right? They don't want to go right up to the bears, but they really want, like, there were websites where they're like, oh, there was a bear spotting on this trail. Everybody go there. And you can maybe get a picture of a bear.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:48

You can reliably say, go over there, you might see a bear. And people do, and they take pictures of it with cameras.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:55

Yeah, and people love this. And bears are super dangerous. Bears are bears kill people sometimes. They kill, they kill pets and cattle sometimes. Like and they think the park system would love to have a Sasquatch if they were real.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:09

Right. But bears allow themselves to be seen because they're casual about being seen sometimes. And we all know when bears don't want to be seen, Faulkner wrote a book about how good bears are at not being seen. That's the whole point of the book. A bear can do the sasquatch thing and sneak past you in brush. So imagine how unoften you would see something that is intelligent, fast, covered in fur, and doesn't want to be seen. Well, here I want to say that the basic premise of the thing, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:18:41

I want to say this because I wanted to say it earlier. This is part of my position as well. This is part of my stance as well, is that I think that Jeff Meldrum has done really good work. I think it's good for him to have put all this stuff together because if somebody ever does get good enough evidence for it, it will all plug in, and you've already got a whole bunch of the research done. But the good enough evidence is just a body together, but there is still a missing piece that needs to be found.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:10

But what is that missing piece that needs to be found? The body corpus. But you just ended the conversation saying, and by the way, I was right at the beginning of the conversation, and I still am, by saying that habeas corpus is the standard for truth. Habeas corpus is just the lazy, guaranteed way to do it, because you've got the body and you can poke it. But there are other scientific ways to prove that things are real. They don't involve habeas corpus, but because this is a relic hominid, not for biological taxonomy.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:46

It seems to me like you're saying without saying, I want everyone to believe this as if there were a body, and I don't want to give a body. You specifically did say I do not, I wouldn't try to get the body.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:03

That's all I mean. I hope one is not killed.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:07

Is I don't understand, but what's your problem with having a body being important?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:14

You know what? Ironically enough, here at the final hour, I will finally flip and reveal my hand. I'm actually ecstatic that this is the case and that all of you feel this way because I hope that it never becomes mainstream knowledge. I hope that no one ever acknowledges the truth in front of their face and that this evidence never amounts to enough to convince this culture or this civilization. It would be utterly, utterly, horrifically terrible should that happen. And for that reason, I'm incredibly glad that this is the case.

SPEAKER_05 1:20:47

Sour grapes. Can I can I bring something up? Please. This is a cherry on top. I want to ask you, Josh. Part of Melldrum's argument about the Patterson Gimlin film was that nobody would be able to stage that film. It's unique. How would your view of it change if it was not unique?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:09

Sure. If it was not unique, that would mean that someone else also managed to make the same video and that second one was proven to be fake? Is that what you're saying? Uh yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_05 1:21:23

If there was another video that did the same thing, but not as well, not as convincingly.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:31

Hmm. Well, then why does that second video have to do with the first? I mean, anybody can make any kind of bad video. How does that affect any other video?

SPEAKER_05 1:21:39

Well, it was made by what if it was made by the same people?

SPEAKER_01 1:21:43

Well, I would then say you've still got to sociologically prove to me that they didn't just make a fake after making a real one, because if you have real success and you want to keep it going, the most natural thing is to make a fake. I mean, it's not like the existence of a fake second film invalidates the first. Plus, what he goes through a lot of trouble with Bill Munn's.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:05

What if it was before, not after?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:08

Now you're talking, right? Now you're bringing the reliability of the witness into question, right? Okay. And so the question becomes now we should probably go through it with a more of a fine-toothed comb, right? Let me read this Wikipedia page. Sure. I'm aware that this guy was trying to make money and was doing things. Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:30

This is a Wikipedia page for a film called Capturing Bigfoot. Capturing Bigfoot is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Mark Evans. The film reports new information about the often-cited 1967 film clip purported to show a walking Bigfoot known as the Patterson Gimlin film and the men who filmed it. Roger Patterson and Robert Bob Gimlin. Capturing Bigfoot is based on new and revealing film footage given to director Mark Evans in 2022, which had been locked away in a safe for decades, as well as interviews with Roger's son Cliff Patterson and people associated with the 1967 film. Background: After the death of her father, Norm Johnson, Olympic College film instructor Teresa Brooks reached out to filmmaker and colleague Mark Evans in June 2022 with a reel of 16mm film she had found in a locked safe of her father's. Norm Johnson had worked in a Boeing film lab during the years that the Patterson Gimlin film was made and connected to Patterson and Gimlin through Johnson's brother Dave. Evans digitized the film and discovered a 40-second clip that had been produced and developed in 1966, a year before the Patterson Gimlin film was shot, which shows a dress rehearsal of a skinnier Bigfoot walking through a wooded area similar to the later film.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:51

Yeah, totally. Yeah. They were trying to make a Bigfoot documentary. That's why they were up there in the area. It's a known Bigfoot area, and that's why they were there. They had made their own suit because they were trying to make a film about Bigfoot, and that's that's why. They weren't trying to fake it. So there's a very perfectly rational explanation for why they were doing a simulation of the very thing that they ended up filming. And interestingly enough, when they did film the creature, they were on horses and the wind was in their favor. So it should be pointed out that there were extraordinary circumstances of luck around this extraordinary footage.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:36

Man, you asked for an explanation. I gave you one. You cannot like it.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:40

I asked you, how would it change your perception of the film if there had been another?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:47

We can go back to the roll back the tape. I would say that it would make me want to go through it with a more fine-toothed comb. Yeah, I would want to go through it with a more fine-toothed comb.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:57

I think you should go through it with a more fine-toothed comb.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:00

Well, I'm already aware of the thing that you just read to me. I'm aware of it. I already knew about it. Yes, I knew about it already. So it is not at all of concern to me because the film subject, when it's not a person in a suit, doesn't have a locked knee and a bouncy head. It has a bent knee and a gait that never achieves the straight locked leg that our fused arch mechanism relies on. You see a figure whose knee remains bent the whole time. And interestingly enough, you see a trailing shin angle of a consistent angle, I forgot what the number is, but humans have a consistent trailing shin angle, and Sasquatch have a very different, much more sharp trailing shin angle. And if you'll notice, when you see footage of a real or hoaxed Bigfoot, you can very quickly tell if it's real or fake just by the trailing shin angle, because it's such a clear mathematical indicator of a real biokinetic thing. It's a real biokinesis indicator, right? Real things move a real way, and math can show that. So just the trailing shin angle alone is a quick indicator. Then you go after and you look and see, is it a baggy, jumpy, furry suit? Is it just standing there in front of blah, blah, blah? That's its own thing. Really, you would want to go look at the footprints that the thing left, and you can then tell if it's a real footprint or not, right? There are real ways, I'm just saying, there are real ways to attack these problems. And because it's a big problem, it's frustrating because it feels like it's just, well, I don't know, man. You still don't have a body and it's a big problem. So until you've got a body, it's just a big problem. But that's assuming that there's no way to have real traction on any of the individual points of the argument.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:57

I mean, that's basically what I think is that there is no way to have traction when you're trying to run the natural laws in reverse like that. You can sort of kinda, but you shouldn't trust it.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:10

I don't know if you want to get into this, but you you sent us another video of an infrared Bigfoot hanging out by the fire.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:19

Yeah, Christopher Nolan. Noelle, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:22

What was that? That that was a green blob.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:25

I I don't get it. It was pretty hard to see it as as a creature. Granted, what you're looking at is about this much of the face, and you can see the fingers flexing clearly. You can sometimes see the outline of the arm as the arm is shifting, but you're right. Most of what you're seeing is the eyes and the fingers. And that was why it's just some little supplementary thing. What I tried to find and couldn't find is considered some of the best infrared footage. It's called the Stacy Brown footage, and it is just bang on clear. The thing runs from one tree to another, and the trailing shin angle is perfectly consecutive, consistent with the figure of the Patterson Gimlin film and any other film that has other indicators that I would think you know add up to it being real. It is got the right proportions and ratios. Bill Muns is a if we wanted to take this further and we really wanted to prove whether this was real, Bill Muns took the time and effort to sit there and get the measurements of the ratios of movement of all the joints of the figure that you're looking at. Within those ratios, you either can or cannot fit a human body. And as it turns out, you cannot. Now, that doesn't mean that a person didn't have some kind of surgery to break their arm and shorten or lengthen their joints. That's possible. But if you want to say that it was a human being in a suit in that film, what you're saying is they either have an incredibly extremely rare genetic abnormality, and they're big and huge and healthy and robust, and have a different gait from people and a bunch of other stuff that we're getting into kind of crazy, absurd, hypothetical to explain it away, or that's just a real biological creature that has the same ratios of proportion of anatomy as other known, established species, right? So how does not not just make it one of a number of known species?

SPEAKER_05 1:29:33

Because I don't believe that guy. The guy who said that you couldn't fit a human body inside of it. Looks to me like you could fit a human body inside of it. You get some stilts.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:42

Well, the other problem is you would chop their forehead off. If this is a human being, the forehead I mean, there's some small human beings, man. Uh well, this thing weighed like 600 pounds.

SPEAKER_05 1:29:54

The head on the mascot suit is not always where the head of the person in the mascot suit is.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:59

Sure, but you can see the eyes blinking and you can see the head turning. So there's a real something face in there, right? And the forehead from here is chopped off. Right? You can't fit a human forehead. Listen, there are some people with extreme forehead angles and stuff like that. So what you could say is that somebody with super crazy, super unique, crazy genetic deformities.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:24

We have eight billion currently, and a whole bunch that died recently. Examples, and humans aren't in this ratio. There's a there's a bell curve, and you know, there's people out here, and there's people out here. And with what you have is some footprints in that video that they spent a lot of time talking about, trying to get the you know, the ratios and everything. And that would be one. It if you even gave it up, that that would be one. And you're you're trying to tell me that, like, oh, you can't have a human that is like it's way easier for me to be like, oh no, there is a weird shaped human than that there's but it doesn't just have sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:09

This is why. Because even with a human, that mutation around the feet, you could have some sort of mutation where you've got the lack of flexing and it's just like a collapsed arch. But what the pressure ridge in the middle of that thing and the footage itself shows is active muscle engagement of the group. You can see in the film the muscle engagement of the midfoot flexion. Like you can see it happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:39

I believe that someone can, maybe, but I cannot. You're you're talking about things that are not clear to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:46

Yeah. So if there's no muscle there to engage it, it can't walk the way that it's walking, period. So it has to have actual muscles in its foot, which means that it has to be actively like it's a real foot, leaving a real, actual foot track that has consistent features to it that require leverage and movement of the foot to generate the feature of the track. And it did it every single track in the trackway. I could see how you would say, hey man, that's one track. You're showing me one track in the woods. I can't tell anything from one track. I'm saying there's 27, 37 tracks in a series. How can you deny that something real made them when there's 27 of them that are consistent? It's non-trivial the way in which they all present this same pressure ridge feature.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:42

So I'm not sure I'm quite doing what you want me to do. But I'll I mean, I'll tell you what my brain engages in that. You're good. You're good. You're good. Is just, I mean, I don't I don't know. These you're talking about these footprints. I've never seen them, you know, and that gets back to the onion that I was talking about at the beginning. Like, I am engaging with an idea that you're trying to communicate to me through your talking and these books and stuff. And that's where my lazy brain comes in. It's just like, I don't I need more than what is being given to want to engage with it enough to like sure, maybe there are some that's fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:30

Let me productively ask of you guys this question. Would it have been more productive or better in some way? And that's a fine yes or no, for me to have just sent you guys each an actual Sasquatch footprint track, an actual plaster track.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:48

I didn't actually weigh in on my position, but I don't know about the cast or not. Matt, Dwight, what do y'all think about the footprint cast?

SPEAKER_00 1:33:55

No.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:56

That would that would have been worse. The the book was good. It presented a bunch of evidence, which to me added up to uh okay, someone else can handle that. I'm not concerned.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:08

Fair enough. Sir Robert?

SPEAKER_03 1:34:10

Um, I think I would say that it would have a little bit more interest to me than a novelty item. When I say novelty, I don't mean to trivialize, I just mean like a souvenir type of thing. It would have more interest to me than that, partially because of it not being like just some random, presumably not mass-produced or something like that, right? Like it's a real actual thing that you're sending me.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:35

Assume that I actually found it and sincerely sent it to you.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:39

Uh-huh. Okay. Well then yeah. Um, and I would keep it for that. If I were telling people, like if I were telling my kids about it, or what, hey, what's this thing you've got sitting on a, you know, hanging on the wall or whatever. I don't know. I would say, this is a cast of a footprint that Josh sent me that he believes is a Bigfoot footprint. And if they followed up with, what do you think? and things like that, I would say something like, I don't know. And I'll tell you this to I want to give you a frame of reference for I'm I I think I'm in a similar place to where Dwight is with regard to the compellingness of the not the quality, but maybe something like the quantity and coherence, maybe something like that. And I have, I've said this before to y'all, I'm not gonna belabor it, but I I have with my own eyes, at least I assume eyes, seen what people would call a ghost, right? A transparent apparition, semi-transparent, that that kind of thing. Multiple of them, actually, sometimes at the same time. So I've seen that kind of thing. I have seen other things, spirits of different things, whatever. I am not a hardened skeptic against whatever, you know, I'm not somebody who's like trying to get past it so I can get onto the real world, like eating a hamburger and making money or something like that. That said, my two favorites, with the amount of stuff and the kind of stuff just happening in my life, kids and whatever, this this isn't compelling to me yet. I'm not talking about whether it's persuasive. I'm talking about I'm saying it's not compelling to me. My experience of actually seeing some other things has been that way. And I don't have a body left over for, you know, some quote-unquote ghost or demon or something. But I've seen them.

SPEAKER_05 1:36:19

Or I would say something like Sir Robert ought to believe in the ghosts that he has seen, but scientists should not. And people who see Bigfoot ought to believe in the Bigfoots that they have seen. But until the citizen scientist community can come up with sufficient evidence, the scientists should not believe. And also, I'm actively skeptical. Unlike Dwight and Sir Robert, who are sort of more passively skeptical, I'm actively skeptical of the mode of reasoning that is used by the the Bigfoot research community because I so frequently mislead myself with that type of reasoning and have to descend to a better type of reasoning in order to solve problems. That may be the my best way of stating my position so far. Sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:07

I agree with you, Matt, that science something like scientists or something science should not believe me in my claims, right? And the the framing of that that I've heard, you've heard me say this before. I think the best framing of that that I've heard is we're talking about things that are consensually measurable. Right. And I have some by having evidence of my seeing it and whatever, I have something that's not consensually measurable, right? It's idiopathically measurable or something like that. That said, though scientists ought not to, general people, like just the people who are not in their role of scientists, maybe, maybe a given scientist, not qua scientist, could believe, but qua scientist, they shouldn't, right? For the reason Matt's saying. But I would implore, if I were giving my account and I cared what other people thought about it, but I would say to them, like, hey, I'm gonna tell you an account and I believe it's true. I can give you the details, I have hypotheses about what it is, which I think is probably not a quote unquote ghost. But I'll tell you what I think is going on with these things that I've seen. And if you find my account credible, but you know, rare, then hold it as something that may be true. Right? That's what I would just tell a random person. I'd say, I think it is true. I had this experience, I think I'm not crazy. I'm gonna tell you something, and your life will be better if you have a worldview that corresponds to reality more. I'm gonna tell you a piece of reality that I believe. Okay. That said, I would certainly not fault anyone, and I and I probably think they it's the same, if they had the clarity of mind, which Matt, I don't think most of them do. If they had the clarity of mind to say this lacks, I don't exactly want to say this word this way, but I'll say corroborative evidence. It is it is about corroborative, but that's not the key element of it, but it's the consensual part. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. I agree with Matt for that for that reason.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:56

So I've seen in my mind what I think is deja vu, and that's the experience of this thing that's going on right now is has happened before. And as I've gotten older, what I think, you know, trying to examine my mind, what I think is happening is not so much something happened to me twice, but instead it is my brain is something like tagging the stream of data as memory as it comes in. And so it feels like I've seen this before. And when that happens, another thing happens, and we're getting we're getting into the mists of Dwight's brain here, so who knows? My brain starts the way I know that I'm in like that mode of thinking, my brain just starts like grabbing ever everything. Oh I'm like, oh, I I think this has happened before. And so, you know, oh yeah, and then I turned my head, you know, after I turned my head, oh yeah, and then LT walked in, oh yeah, and and I was at work. And it's just it's real greedy. It uh and so a lot of the evidence as it's uh that I don't I don't think I'm talking about this is what's happening. I think it's that's a a simile for what's happening. It feels to me similar where the guy who wrote the book and you, Josh, both you'll you'll grab these other things, oh yeah, and this and this and this because there's not a lot of evidence.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:46

And so it it I don't know what I was trying where I was trying to go with that, but that's no, you've made a very, very valid critical analysis of the shape of the way that I find myself moving through the evidence and presenting it with this sense of additional provided uh you know, urgency makes me additionally scaffold with with more, you know, I'm scaffolding. Urgency makes me want to scaffold. And you always have to be careful that you're not just doing the same sort of thing as deja vu, which is have a gestalt mind that is struggling with this way of information comes in, it locks in and it crystallizes. How do you decouple the discrete and continuous nature of observation and decrystallize something from one way and then recrystallize it through second-order deductions, sorts of things like that? To me, I think that the pointing out all the things is a valid basic move because to me, real things have lots of evidence points about them. And who knows what those evidence points are? They're just whatever way you can think of to cross-reference that that thing's real. It also bumps up in all these other ways and ends up actually having real, you know, effects on and observable patterns on all these different ways of looking at life. And that thing pops up there, and that's how you know that it's real. To me, that's what it's feels like, all the different categories of evidence, all the different ways that all this stuff comes in. But like you guys have pointed out, without the body, without the one thing that can't be disproved and can't be argued with, all of the stuff around it is not really compelling. It's just not compelling because there isn't one thing you can't argue with, and that's a body. Anyway. Uh c'est la vie, c'est la guerre. Thank you for finding it out with me.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:55

It's not that there's no one thing you can't argue with. It's that the story story. I don't mean that as fiction. I just mean the overarching thing that requires a lot of coordination of of elements. That's all. It's not it's not that there's look, with all this there, there's n there's nothing that's just rock solid. It's just that it is that there's a lot of things, and maybe you could argue with them, maybe not, but you have to hold a fair bit to make something that's getting towards persuasive. And you don't, it's a much simpler argument to say, you know, look, here's this thumb. So I'm gonna throw that out there. There's a complexity factor that matters to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:43:38

Yeah, and I I think that it's unfortunate but valid that I see that it requires a certain amount of proximity to the science of the particulars of the proofs themselves before it becomes compelling, perhaps. Like maybe what I should have done is get incredibly ridiculously hyper-technical and actually fully proved one piece of evidence to you guys so that it was utterly fully proven. And that was what I was getting at with the track cast, although it got kind of lumped into the same set as other stuff. So maybe my better last minute question would be: suppose I had given you an ideal condition, full chain of custody with full documentation, all the science labs, all of the metacritical analysis, all the empirical data about the actual object for you, and the sufficient argument that put it all together that proved that something about it was real? Would the fact that I had fully proved to you that one piece of evidence had real, scientifically provable substance that upheld as being real trace evidence of a real creature that is some kind of relic hominid, would that matter? Could one piece of evidence fully, completely, ideally rigorously proven, actually make this a compelling matter for you?

SPEAKER_05 1:45:09

I think that my answer is something that Dwight already said, which is you seem to want the kind of ascent that would come from having a Bigfoot body without actually having to produce a Bigfoot body. I think you could possibly convince us of a different kind of foot. Like all as rigorous as you could possibly be, if you have a track, then what you really have is a different kind of foot.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:35

But you have science that proves what kinds of things that foot belongs to.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:42

I'll show you how No, it doesn't prove it. My thinking is. I've read scientific papers that convinced me to some level of a thing, and then years later, I've read scientific papers that said that those papers were bunk, and I'm convinced to a similar level by those. I'm just kind of floating around out here, and there's people in lab coats telling me things, and I'm just like, okay, guys, go on over there and do your thing and let me do other stuff. So, like, it doesn't matter how well crystallized you get it, you're not gonna get it out of that sort of nebulous thing. For me, this is just Dwight, who's a lazy thinker and you know bounces around between ideas and does is not nearly as Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:46:40

And you I asked you for a sincere answer, and you gave me a sincere answer. There's no level at which I would criticize it or rebuff it. You're giving me your sincere posture and position. Yeah. And and for me, that's one of the things that makes this subject matter so tantalizing as a subject, is because there's so much to say about it, and either all of it requires a fake amount of coordination to be held together and conceived of as real and stitched together and all this stuff, or it's either being hoaxed or it's not. And at the end of the day, I think that there's nothing. No, that's not true.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:17

A whole bunch of random stuff, and you're telling me a story about it.

SPEAKER_05 1:47:21

Yeah. You've got a whole world full of tons and tons and tons of stuff, and Jeff Meldrum is out there sorting the storting a thousand, ten thousand things into a hundred things that could fit his story, fit his story that he's telling us.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:39

But there are things that positively place the morphological features of the trace evidence in the Australopithecene to homo range of morphologically present features in the existent record of biological categories of shapes. Like that's how science works. We place the shape in the category with the other species.

SPEAKER_05 1:48:03

No, science works the other way around. You're telling me how science works backwards. Science takes specimens and catalogs them and derives laws from them. Right. But what you have is not a specimen. Right. You're trying to take you're trying to run the laws backwards and they don't work that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:48:21

But we have intermediate specimens. Intermediate specimens exist. Missing link between Bigfoot and Well, missing link is overshooting the mark. I'm saying we have like that the example that you gave of things staying hidden for a while, the my favorite one is the thing that is between a bear and a dog. There is a thing that's between. Forget about how it's there, whether God made a palette of a spectrum of individual species on one day or evolution made them. I don't care. There's a thing that's a bear, there's a thing that's a dog, and morphologically and genetically, there's a thing that's exactly between them in terms of bones and shape and all this kind of stuff. Somebody finally killed one in the 70s and took it to a university and said, Kathunk, mother truckers, analyze that dead body. We've been telling you that we've been seeing these things for years. Nobody believed us, right? And so they got a body.

SPEAKER_05 1:49:20

Got after it, bro.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:21

What is it? But my point is it's a known species. We had fossils of it already. It wasn't a new species. We had fossils, and we just thought that it was extinct, and hunters were saying it wasn't extinct. Like a seal of cat. That's all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Only this is just it's a North American Ice Age mammal. Yeah. So anyway, so the point being, he existed there between those two species the whole time, right? And we've got horses. We've got horses that have one kind of feature and another kind of feature, and one in the middle with a mediary feature of those features. Placing a species. Within a set is a function of comparative placement to the others. Each individually presents one particular data point in a set of real shapes. And the comparison and placement of those things relative to each other is scientific taxonomic grouping empirical placement. And the cross-reference of the morphological feature to the available genetic information is the rigorous way we do it.

SPEAKER_05 1:50:27

That's not what empirical means. Empirical is when you gather the specimen and then analysis.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:33

Empirical is also real. Empirical is also when you take morphology and DNA and you actually tie them to each other. That's a real relationship. Forget about empirical. There's a real relationship between the DNA and the features that present and the genes that determine that. And if you have a body, that's great. You can do the science at a higher level. But even if you don't have the body yet and you have enough trace evidence, you can place a species in the context of another genera, and you can place the species within the genera on trace evidence. But you can't do it for Bigfoot because it blows people's minds. When you do it backwards, they it won't do that. But it's not backwards, though. That's how all of science places an entire category of living beings that are in the process of being discovered. And some of them we consider to be real species without a body.

SPEAKER_06 1:51:28

Send us that.

SPEAKER_01 1:51:29

Well, that's what all of ichnotaxonomy is, right? It's the set, it's the placement of a species in the real world via ichnotaxonomy. Biologically, you can do it that way with like pictures as a nature photographer. You can get some blood and you can do it as a geneticist, and you can place it in the genetic, real set of things that are in the real world that we've studied. But doing it with trace evidence is just as real a way of doing it as genetically. And the only thing that you get by having the body is the addition of all the DNA stuff that gives you all the DNA arguments about giving it a DNA identity that doesn't in any way make it less real. It just makes it less like granularly defined in terms of how real it is.

SPEAKER_05 1:52:17

You can't go to the museum or the zoo and see it if you don't have the body.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:21

But that's because it's evasive. And okay, so you can't see the body. Sure. There are other ways to know that something's real, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:52:30

That may be because it's evasive, or maybe because it doesn't exist, or maybe whatever. I'm not saying that what it does or doesn't. What I'm saying is the person who goes to the museum and doesn't see the body doesn't know whether to attribute that to it being evasive or not existing.

SPEAKER_01 1:52:45

That's fine. That's fine.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:46

Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 1:52:47

But we do have evidence for it, right? You're talking about a thing that might imaginarily be wrong about it, but we do have evidence for it. And I don't know. I I think for me, there's a certain kind of frustration that life and reality works this way, right? That no matter presumably how many individual things that you can say about it, if one thing is missing and you can't provide this, it doesn't matter what you say about it. You can't say this one thing about it, right? There are a lot of things that work that way.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:17

There's a thing that you do in fiction. You want to make your fiction ring true. You do this in sci-fi a lot, where you take like a bunch of real things from the real world and you fit them into your theory, you know. So you have a theory of like, this is how magic works in my world. And so you explain Santa Claus with your theory, and you explain vampires within your theory, right? And it is remarkably easy to do.

SPEAKER_01 1:53:45

Building internal coherence.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:47

Yeah. Like you could, you know, pick and choose real things from the real world, and you can build them into a story that you have decided beforehand is the one you want to tell. It's so easy because people, your mind is like a meaning detection machine. Like we see patterns in the world very, very easily. So this is like like telling me that there's there's a whole bunch of things in the world that you can put together in a constellation that seems like Sasquatch is like telling me a fiction writer has been at work here.

SPEAKER_01 1:54:21

You know, it could it could just be a fiction writer has not a constellation of supposed coherence when you get great eight-level genetic markers that could that show up on tests, when you get great ape simian morphology in the foot, when you get great ape semian morphology in the hair, when you get great ape simian morphology in the face and the hand and the like at some point that's not my mind making coherence out of it. That's just going through an incredibly long list of things that are coherently real.

SPEAKER_05 1:54:58

Is that in Meldrim? Was that in this book? A whole bunch of great ape genetic samples? He said a bunch of stuff about how they had hair, but none of it had none of it had genes in it.

SPEAKER_01 1:55:10

The phenomenon of genetics and Sasquatch is a simple story. Unknown primate. And the reason for that is simple. It's not a conspiracy. It's just, everybody knows it, we don't have a body. We don't have a type specimen. So you're not targeting these DNA matches on a particular target lock of a real species. You're just looking for larger and therefore crude primate-specific base marker indicators. Uh, forget the term, it's not base marker, but there are marker indicators that they have for different species, and they're using those and they're matching on those because they're the closest ones, but you can never positively lock. So you're never getting close, you're never getting true genetic positive lock. But they do all consistently come back unknown primate. So that has to count for something in terms of consistently matching on primate markers, but not being able to lock to a particular one species, right? So even there, that's yet another area where fine, I'm imagining things, I'm putting together coherence. If that's the case, in the genetics area where it has nothing to do with what I see, it should have nothing to do with primates, nothing at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:29

So I remember reading a little bit about the DNA in the in in the book, and it sort of made sense to me that there was this you had to when the book was written, you had to send stuff away, and those people had to do the testing. And because the machines are really expensive and the government controls the labs or something along those lines. But now you can just do that yourself. Just get all that DNA, do it yourself, build the you know, the the stuff, and you don't have to rely on the government who's apparently suppressing all of this stuff. You can just do it yourself because it doesn't cost that much anymore.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:06

Yeah, you can, and it comes back unknown ape because we don't have a base, you know, we don't have like it doesn't matter if you do it yourself, you still don't have a type specimen.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:26

And lists all the known apes and says it's not any of them, and then says it is a primate and it's not a human and it's not a dog or a bear. That would be an interesting document.

SPEAKER_01 1:57:38

Somehow I doubt that that's gonna be. I mean, I can I I've seen a number of them, and I've watched and read a lot of books and watched a lot of documentaries where people have talked about that experience. Maybe every single one of them is lying. I don't think that all of them were. I think that some people have had that valid experience.

SPEAKER_05 1:57:56

But this is a document you could show us that might be more convincing, would be like if a genetics laboratory went through and said, This is definitely an ape because of this genetic marker. It is definitely not a gorilla because of this, it is definitely not a capuchin because of this, it is definitely not a human because of this. Now that would be that would be a very interesting document.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:16

There, I don't know to what degree they're saying it's not all these others. Typically, what they're what they're doing is they're saying, look, you gave us a sample and we're telling you what we matched on. And for environmental DNA, this is a you can go Google this, go look up ground Sasquatch ground nest e DNA, and they hit Pongo Pongoides DNA markers. And that's what the lab report came back. Now, are there chimpanzees making these ground nests in North America? Or do you have a species?

SPEAKER_05 1:58:48

I'll bet there are chimpanzees loose in North America somewhere.

SPEAKER_01 1:58:51

Well, not not up there where there's snow and cold and they they don't, yeah, they're not. Yeah. And whatever made it had a bigger body mass than a chimp. Something really big made it. So and it made it with fingers. Like there's like stuff like twisted and stuff like that. So something with fingers huge that braided a nest and popped positive for primate DNA markers.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:15

There's so many stories about how this could have happened that are not that.

SPEAKER_01 1:59:19

Sure, sure, sure. I mean, I yeah, but the problem is that those are in different corners of the country in remote places on private or federal, you know, just like where nobody who like the people who discovered them were people who were way out of the way where nobody knew that they would be there, and there's a lot of reasonable explanation about how they were found, and it is not reasonable that they're fakes. Like the person, there was somebody with the per like there's a team of people who discovered uh the nests up in the PW.

SPEAKER_05 1:59:51

I just think I just think you've gotta be really close. The genetic testing is so much better than it was when Jeff Meldrum was was doing his thing. It's cheaper. There the drones have such powerful cameras on them now. There are people, you know, the the the world is much more populous. There are roads that go many more places much more easily than in the 70s. Like, if this thing is real, you guys, this is the easiest time it's ever been to to get even better evidence. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:25

And get out there, you know. Drones are cheap. There's known methodology for how to do it from the poop because there's so many African guerrilla researchers that have worked on identifying every single member of the troop from the fecal remains, and that's a primate. So you're already right there in the zone. There's there's a known methodology for it.

SPEAKER_05 2:00:47

But I'm trying to be encouraging, you know, get out there going. I'm ready to believe when you show me like the actual good evidence. Anybody. Anybody's not like super blurry and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 2:00:59

Just kill one man. Just just bury your heart to not be humanity and kill one.

SPEAKER_05 2:01:04

Yeah, trap it and put it in a zoo.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:06

You just said video, but I showed you a video. I showed you a video stabilized with footprints. Good video. That's stabilized with footprints. What's better than footprints with a video? What could make video better than having other external real trace evidence?

SPEAKER_05 2:01:25

Get the footprints too of the one that you get good video of.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:28

What video does, video would convince me is a thousand people on TikTok posting this hairy ape man walking through the woods. And then I would be like, there's this like point. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's an ape, maybe it's a black bear walking on its hind legs, whatever. Maybe all the Bigfoot people will go over there and find out. But like thousands of videos, not one video. One video is from the 70s, means nothing to me.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:55

There are other videos that are good. There's the Freeman footage that's more videos is what I'm looking for.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:00

Thousands.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:01

Video does mean something to me. Here, I put one in the chat. But to Dwight's point, thousands is not feasible from a mathematical perspective because the number of videos that you get is a very real function of a bunch of factors. And the more factors that are real that get tacked on, they drive down the rate at which that video is going to happen. So there's a very real reason why not a lot of video exists. And I will be the first to say most of the video content is hoax content. There's only, I would say, a few dozen, maybe a hundred pieces of video and photographic evidence of Bigfoot that I think are real that are out there at all. Anyway, Sir Robert, you sent a video. If this is a Rick roll, so help me God, it is not.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:51

It's just a good video. It's a good video of a lion.

SPEAKER_01 2:02:55

Wow. So this lady tried to get too close to some lions while they were having intimate time.

SPEAKER_03 2:03:01

Yeah. I it was literally, I typed in lion comes up to car, and it was literally just the first video. And I just so I don't know, I didn't vet it heavily. But that's a pretty good video. I can see what's happening. It makes sense to me. Like it's got reasonable detail. The person filmed me, it wasn't trying to do barrel rolls. It's just like, okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:20

You know, I think if I was I'm sorry, I played too much Star Fox. That really tickled me.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:25

I think if I was very skeptical of lines existing, this video would do a lot to change that. Me too.

SPEAKER_01 2:03:32

Well, I think you're a liar. I think there could be a much better and and you would say it's AI.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:38

Can I tell a story?

SPEAKER_01 2:03:40

You should.

SPEAKER_05 2:03:41

There's a thing they do in Providence called the the bike jam, where like a hundred or two hundred people all ride bikes together through the city, and it's pretty fun. And um, around near Halloween, like three years ago, we stopped in this park and it was it was getting kind of dark. And I was walking through the park where we had stopped to rest and for people to dance and party and stuff. And I walked by this tree, and then the tree moved, and then it was this very strange creature with like uh deer-shaped legs that was like eight feet tall and like moved in this weird gliding way that did not make sense to my brain, and it was covered in branches and leaves and stuff, and then um it kind of scared me a little bit, and then um later on, you know, I saw the guy walking around, and it was a a guy on uh weird stilts, and his body was like connected to the stilts in a weird way that made him look like he had like those weird backwards deer legs, and he was sort of sort of kind of sideways on the thing, like he wasn't truly like upright, and like parts of it were disguised as other parts of the body, and it really did not look like a person.

SPEAKER_01 2:05:03

Anyway, I'm just saying that the magic of Hollywood and costumes is pretty crazy, it is indeed, and again, part of why I wanted us to study this particular film is because it overcomes that entire issue by coupling the film to the trackways. Like you guys get to see a film that has undergone extremely rigorous attempting to be debunked, and the worst that anybody's ever been able to say about it is, I don't know, man, I feel like that's a person in a suit. Nobody's ever given any real, this is a reason why it can't be or should be considered to be not true. And it's tied to a bunch of tracks that have real morphological coherence and consistency with behavior traits that are provable to be the traits of real species by math, right?

SPEAKER_05 2:05:56

It all just sounds like me when I haven't solved the bug yet. You're all science deniers.

SPEAKER_06 2:06:03

Flat earthers, you're all flat earthers. Gotta get new real friends with scientific minds.

SPEAKER_05 2:06:10

I think I know why the bug is happening, but I'm wrong. And so I keep coming up with weird, weird answers that don't make sense.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:17

It's okay. I broke down and called you guys flat earthers. Clearly, things have taken a toxic turn. So we should probably land the plane.

SPEAKER_05 2:06:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:06:26

Anyway, I appreciate you guys reading this with me. I I'm it's it was fun to actually push it that way, but you know, maybe sometime after I can hear from you guys about what, if any of the particular arguments were relevant or interesting. For me, I care about the big picture.

SPEAKER_05 2:06:42

Our next assignment will be chapters one and two of a book called The Schunra and the Schmetterling by Joel Hoffman, and uh a short selection from the Kokinshu, book one, poems one through sixteen. And those are the appetizers. I sent PDFs of those to you. And then the main course is a short story called The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Dennis Johnson, which is freely available on the New Yorker website. I think this is some pretty interesting uh fiction that uh hope you guys will enjoy it, or at least it will make you think. It's uh built around an opening question that I want to ask, a particular thing that I want to investigate, that I think you guys will probably have some good insights on that I'm interested in. Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behowls the moon, whilst the heavy plumin snores, all with weary task foredone, now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night, that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, And we fairies that do run by the triple Hecate's team, from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream, now our frolic. Not a mouse shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before, to sweep the dust behind the door.